“Hello, Charlie,” Damia said as she approached, her hands in full view, her sword and guns banging against her hips, still sheathed. Charlie could be skittish.
He watched her guns warily. There were very few guns in Euphrasia. They were the sort of thing the Veil tended to screen out, somehow. From all she had heard of the ordinary world, Damia had long since figured out that there were a lot of things the Veil kept out, even when Lost Ones wandered in.
“Charlie?” she ventured.
The fleet-flooted boy gave a low toot on his whistle. That instrument-carved of bone-was the only method of communication she had ever heard him use. She didn’t know if he could talk, but no one she had ever asked had heard his voice.
“Is he there?” she asked.
The boy nodded.
“Waiting for me?”
Charlie gave the tiniest blow of his whistle, looking out of the corner of his eye as though he was afraid the forest itself would come creeping after him.
“All right,” Damia said, glancing up to study the darkness of the road through the Oldwood and the thickness of the forest on either side. The master of the forest had answered her summons. Now she had to go and speak with him. “Go and wait with-”
A breeze rustled her black cloak.
Commander Beck blinked when she realized that Charlie Grant was gone. Arching an eyebrow she turned to see the boy already standing with Lieutenant Fee, running a hand along the flank of her horse.
Taking a deep breath, Damia entered the Oldwood, wondering if she would ever come out.
CHAPTER 5
M usic played low on the radio in Jackson Norris’s car. Sara had ridden with the sheriff several times since coming back to Maine, and she’d never gotten used to that. Sure, his police radio squawked, but there was nearly always music playing as well. In the movies and on TV, the cops never had their regular radios on.
Sting’s song “Fields of Gold,” began. The irony was there, in the back of her mind, but she had to concentrate for a second before she dredged it up. Right-Sting had been the front man for the classic rock group the Police. There you go. Irony.
Sara earned strange looks whenever she got out of the car with its cop paint job and the light bar on the top, never mind the Wessex County Sheriff’s Department logo on the doors. But at least she wasn’t riding in the back in cuffs.
Not that she gave a shit what people in Kitteridge, Maine, thought.
She didn’t care about much, these days.
“You know you don’t have to go back to Atlanta,” Sheriff Norris told her, his tone gentle.
“You know I do, Jackson.”
A burst of static came from the police radio.
“I can’t just hibernate in that little house, waiting for my father to come back. I’ll go insane. How long do I wait? What if he never-”
Sara couldn’t finish. Her throat closed up and she felt her face flush. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sheriff looking at her. After a moment he returned his focus to the road. It had been warm the week before-unseasonably warm for Maine, though it was late winter. Today the sun still shone, but the cold was back. The snow had all melted, but somehow that made it worse, icy wind whipping across frozen tundra. It got down into her bones.
Atlanta would be beautiful by now. Soon, the whole city would blossom.
She had to go home.
“You could be a photographer up here, you know,” the sheriff said.
“For who, Downeast magazine? I don’t think they’re looking for a fashion photographer.”
Sheriff Norris smiled. “Who knows? You could meet a guy…”
He let the words trail off, having brought the topic up several times over the past few months, the way an uncle might. Sheriff Norris had always been a sort of uncle to her. A sweet man, but he had never been that quick on the uptake. Since subtlety didn’t work, she decided it was time for the direct approach.
“Jackson?”
The sheriff glanced at her. “Yeah?”
Sara waved at him. “See me? Over here? Gay. I like girls.”
He blinked. To his credit, he hid his astonishment well. The thought had never even occurred to him.
“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Well, then, you’ve got a hell of a lot better chance of meeting someone nice in Atlanta than up here.”
With a laugh, she drew herself across the front seat and kissed his slightly stubbled cheek.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For being a good friend to me and to my father.”
A sadness came over the sheriff then. He felt at least partially responsible for Ted Halliwell’s disappearance and it weighed on him.
“You really have to go, huh?”
“I really do.”
They rode in silence for a while, tires crunching on sand left over from the snowmelt.
After years away from Maine, she had come home when word had reached her of her father’s disappearance. Yet months had passed without any sign of his fate or clue as to how he’d vanished in the first place. She had flown to Bangor just before Christmas, her schedule clear until after the first of the year. When she called her clients-most of them advertising and fashion people-during the first week of January and explained her situation, they had all been understanding. They didn’t want to use another photographer, but they would make do until she was back in town.
Now it was the middle of March, and her phone had been ringing for weeks. It wouldn’t do to abandon her clients so long that some fell so much in love with her replacements that they abandoned her. That was pretty much what had happened in all of her relationships-she’d gone off on some assignment and come home to find her latest girlfriend had moved on.
But she had to earn money to live, and maybe a return to Atlanta and her friends and her routine would help to stave off her sorrow.
Before she went, however, she had asked Sheriff Norris to arrange a meeting for her.
He signaled for a left and then took the turn, following driving regulations without even thinking about it. The heater whirred, though it wasn’t very effective, and Sara huddled deeper into her thick winter coat. The trip to Freeport had been one of many distractions she had engineered in the past two months. None of them had been terribly effective.
Sting stopped singing and an ad for the local television news came on. The DJ hadn’t identified the song. Sara could remember when they had always told you what song you had heard and never could understand why they stopped doing that. If you liked it and wanted to go buy the CD-or if you wanted to download it-how were you supposed to know what it was called?
Sheriff Norris pulled into the driveway of a beautiful home, the kind of place she always wished she could live but knew she never would. Sara made an excellent living as a photographer. Maybe one day she’d even have enough money to think she was rich. But she didn’t think she was destined for a place like this.
The car went silent. She blinked and looked over to see the sheriff taking the key from the ignition.
“You all right?” he asked.
Sara smiled. “If we wait for that, I’ll be sitting in this car the rest of my life.”
She popped open the door, shut it behind her, and led the way up the walk toward the front door. The sheriff had to hurry to catch up. On the steps, Sara reached out to ring the doorbell, but before she could, the door opened.
The woman who stood inside had been beautiful once. In some ways, she still was. But despite the elegance of her clothes-a counterpoint to the blue jeans, boots, and bone-white turtleneck Sara wore under her coat-she looked faded, like dried flowers or antique furniture. Her lips were folded in a tight line, so that when she blinked and smiled, she looked as though the act pained her.
“You must be Sara,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Please, come in. You too, Jackson. It’s freezing out there, and I’ve made hot cocoa.”