He looked doubtful, but nodded anyway. `Okay: He glanced down again at the real estate papers. Are you going to sell the house?'
`Robert!
'Well, that's what it looks like:
`I don't care what it looks like, it's none of your business!' Irritated at herself for being so abrupt, she added, `Look, I haven't decided anything yet'
He put his coffee cup in the exact centre of the papers, making a ring. `I don't think you should sell'
She snatched the cup away. `Robert. .''
`Well, I don't. I think you should let some time pass before you do anything: He held up his hands in a placating gesture. `Wait, let me finish. My dad says you should never make any big changes right after someone you love dies. You should wait at least a year. You should give yourself time to grieve, to let everything settle so you know what you really want. I don't thinly he's right about much, but I think he might be right about this'
She pictured Robert's father in her mind, a spectacled, gentle man who was employed as a chemical engineer but spent all his free time engaged in gardening and lawn care. Robert used to call him Mr. Green Jeans and swore that his father would have been happier if his son had been born a plant.
`Robert; she said gently, `that's very good advice'
He stared at her in surprise.
`I mean it. I'll give it some thought'
She put the coffee cups aside. Robert was annoying, but she liked him anyway. He was funny and smart and fearless. Maybe more to the point, she could depend on him. He had stood up for her five years earlier when her father had come back into her life. If not for Robert, her grandfather would never have found her trussed up in the caves below the Sinnissippi Park cliffs. It was Robert who had come after her on the night she had confronted her father, when it seemed she was all alone. She had knocked the pins out from under him for his trouble, leaving him senseless on the ground while she went on alone. But he had cared enough to follow.
She felt a momentary pang at the memory. Robert was the only real friend she had left from those days.
`I have to go back to school tonight; she said. `How long do you have?'
He shrugged. 'Day after tomorrow:
'You came all the way home from California for the weekend?'
He looked uncomfortable. 'Well..
`To visit your parents?'
`Nest..'
`You cant say it, can you?'
He shook his head and blushed. `No'
She nodded. `Just so you don't think I can't see through you like glass. You just watch yourself, buster'
He looked down at his feet,Eight centuries ago the first Knight of the Word was commissioned to combat the demonic evil of the Void. Now that daunting legacy has passed to John Ross—along with powerful magic and the knowledge that his actions are all that stand between a living hell and humanity’s future.Then, after decades of service to the Word, an unspeakable act of violence shatters John Ross’s weary faith. Haunted by guilt, he turns his back on his dread gift, settling down to build a normal life, untroubled by demons and nightmares.But a fallen Knight makes a tempting prize for the Void, which could bend the Knight’s magic to its own evil ends. And once the demons on Ross’s trail track him to Seattle, neither he nor anyone close to him will be safe. His only hope is Nest Freemark, a college student who wields an extraordinary magic all her own. Five years earlier, Ross had aided Nest when the future of humanity rested upon her choice between Word and Void. Now Nest must return the favor. She must restore Ross’s faith, or his life—and hers—will be forfeit… embarrassed. She liked him like this–sweet and vulnerable. `You want to walk over to Gran and Grandpa's graves with me, put some flowers in their urns?'
He brightened at once. `Sure'
She was already heading for the hall closet. `Let me get my coat, Mr. Smooth'
`Jeez' he said.
CHAPTER 2
They went out the porch door, down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedgerow that marked the back end of the Freemark property, then struck out into Sinissippi Park. Nest carried a large bundle of flowers she had purchased the night before and left sitting overnight in a bucket of water on the porch. It was not yet nine, and the air was still cool and the grass slick with damp in the pale morning light. The park stretched away before them, broad expanses of lush, new–mown grass fading into distant, shadowy woods and ragged curtains of mist that rose off the Rock River. The bare earth of the base paths, pitcher's mounds, and batting boxes of the ball diamonds cornering the central open space were dark and hard with moisture and the night's chill. The big shade trees had shed most of their leaves, the fall colours carpeting the areas beneath them in a patchwork mix of red, gold, orange, and brown. Park toys dotted the landscape like weird sculpture, and the wooden trestle and chute for the toboggan slide glimmered with a thin coating of frost. The crossbar at the entrance was lowered, the fall hours in effect so that there was no vehicle access to the park until after ten. In the distance, a solitary walker was towed in the wake of a hard–charging Irish setter that bounded through the haze of soft light and mist in a brilliant flash of rust.
The cemetery lay at the west end of the park on the other side of a chain–link fence. Having grown up in the park, they had been climbing that fence since they were kids-Robert and Cass Minter and Brianna Brown and Jared Scott and herself. Best friends for years, they had shared adventures and discoveries and hopes and dreams. Everything but the truth about who Nest was.
Robert shoved his bare hands in his pockets and exhaled a plume of white moisture. 'We should have driven,' he declared.
He was striding out ahead of her, taking the lead in typical Robert fashion, not in the least intimidated by the fact that she was taller and stronger and far more familiar with where she was going than he was.
She smiled in spite of herself. Robert would lead even if he were blindfolded.
She remembered telling him her deepest secret once, long ago, on the day after she had eluded him on her way to the deadly confrontation with her father. She had done something to him, he insisted, and he wanted to know what it was. That was the price he was demanding for his help in getting into the hospital to see Jared. She told him the truth, that she had used magic. She told him in a way that was meant to leave him in doubt. He could not quite believe her, but not quite ignore her, either. He had never been able to resolve his confusion, and that was a part of what attracted him to her, she supposed.
But there were distances between them that Robert could not even begin to understand. Between her and everyone she knew, now that Gran was gone, because Nest was the only one who could do magic, the only one who would ever be able to do magic, the only one who would probably ever even know that magic was out there. She was the one who had been born to it, a legacy passed down through generations of the Freemark women, but through her demon father, as well. Magic that could come to her in the blink of an eye, could come unbidden at tithes. Magic that lived within her heart and mind, a part of her life that she must forever keep secret, because the danger that came from others knowing far outweighed the burden of clandestine management. Magic to heal and magic to destroy. She was still struggling to understand it. She could still feel it developing within her.
She looked off into the shadows of the woods that flanked the cliffs and cemetery ahead, where the night still lingered in dark patches and the feeders lurked. She did not see them, but she could sense that they were there. As she had always been able to when others could not. Unseen and unknown, the feeders existed on the fringes of human consciousness. Sylvans like Pick helped to keep them in check by working to maintain a balance in the magic that was invested in and determinative of the behaviour of all living things. But humans were prone to adversely affect that balance, tilting it mostly without even knowing, changing it with their behaviour and their feelings, altering it in the careless, unseeing way that mudslides altered landscapes.