“Ghosts?” Sam asked, hefting the sleeping toddler onto her shoulder to rebalance her uneven stride. “Are you sure they aren’t fairies?”
Soraia’s face remained serious as she shook her head. She was tired, scared, and had barely escaped from a terrifying ordeal. Talking seemed to drain her.
We made our way out of the kitchen and up the stairs in a ragged parade with Quinton and me in front only because we knew where the bedrooms were. Soraia, Sam, and Martim came behind as one lumpy unit moving steadily slower and slower.
There was only one bed made up in the room that the caretaker had arranged for me originally, but it was a large one and Sam assured us that they’d be able to manage just fine. I suspected that they’d all have ended up in one bed to ward off the terrors anyhow. Sam looked worn to a thread, but we didn’t linger to see if she needed anything more. She was capable of letting us know if she wanted help—and I doubted she needed anything more than to hug her children in privacy.
Quinton barely had the energy to make it through a bath and into bed. I would have skipped the bath, but the stink of rot and burning clinging to us was unbearable and our clothes were probably a loss. I thought I might have to drag him to the bed, but he made it on his own and I fell in next to him.
“I feel like I unswallowed a porcupine,” he muttered as I curled up next to him and pulled him close. “What was that thing I chucked up?”
“I’d say it was a physical manifestation of whatever spell residue remained on you after you got out from under Griffin’s work.”
“She wasn’t incompetent.”
“What?”
“Carlos made her mad, teasing her about being a crummy mage, but she wasn’t. He was messing with her head to make her screw up.”
“Yeah, well . . . He thought that spell would have killed you, given time.”
He nodded, barely awake. “What was that stuff you gave me?”
“Sort of a magical emetic, I’d guess, but it seems to work.”
He made a sleepy noise of assent. Now his body didn’t feel warm enough, so I snuggled closer to him.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Why?”
“Too tired to do anything but sleep. Been months . . . dreaming of getting you into bed . . .”
“I’ve been dreaming of you, too. I love you and it’s enough to just be like this. Go to sleep, superhero.”
He made a noise, but it turned into a gentle snore and the tension in his limbs drained away. I was tired enough to fall asleep, too, but I couldn’t, and as I lay beside him, his snoring died away. After a while, he seemed to grow colder, his skin feeling like wet newspaper and his breathing so shallow that I had a moment’s panic until I forced myself to look at him through the Grey before jumping to any conclusions. He seemed barely alive and any normal person might not have realized he wasn’t dead, except for the rapid movement of his eyes beneath closed lids. I considered going to Carlos again, but I doubted he would appreciate the intrusion. So long as I could see Quinton was still alive, I didn’t want to leave him alone.
In a few hours, his body began to warm again and his sleep became more normal. Relieved, I must have fallen asleep myself, because Soraia woke me at six a.m.
FIFTEEN
There was a presence looming at the bedside. I opened my gummy, gritty eyes and looked up. Soraia offered a trembling smile.
Children have such piercing voices, especially when I’ve had only two hours of sleep. I had to say something before she could stab me with her fluting tones. “I’m awake now, Soraia, but your uncle Jay isn’t. He’s still sick.”
She replied in a serious whisper, “Will he be all right?” Soraia was hesitant and I had the impression that wasn’t normal for her. Everything about her seemed withdrawn, unnaturally restrained—even the energetic colors around her lay tighter to her body than they should have and there were none of the vagrant sparks or bubbles I usually saw around kids. She was shutting herself down and I wanted to inflict an equal measure of brutality on Purlis and his bone mages for that. Children shouldn’t be terrified and used like commodities.
Soraia shied a little and I struggled to push my anger aside. I offered her a small smile and said, “I think so—when he’s had some more sleep. We’re going to meet my friends today.” I started to get out of bed but thought better of flashing the six-year-old. “Um . . . sweetie, could you go downstairs and wait for me in the kitchen or something? I need to get dressed.”
Soraia gave me a big-eyed stare and started to run out of the room. Then she turned back around and looked at me from under her eyebrows, shaking with effort. “Thank you for coming to save me, Auntie Harper. And Uncle Jay and Senhor Carlos, too.”
I didn’t laugh. She was deadly serious and still frightened. I respected the effort her gratitude required. “You are very welcome.”
I waited in the bed for her to leave, but she didn’t. She stood, trembling, halfway between the bed and the door. Then she blurted, “What’s an ‘odd duck’?”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Mamãe says you’re an odd duck. Why are you a duck?”
Now I laughed. “I’m not a duck. She just means I’m hard for her to understand. I’m strange.”
“Oh,” she said, her left hand fluttering up to touch her chest and then dropping back to her side.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I—I’m strange, too.”
“Oh, honey. A lot of people are strange and hard to understand. But they’re like anyone else—some of them are nice and some of them aren’t, and being strange isn’t what makes them that way.”
She looked thoughtful and the energy around her began to brighten through several shades of blue with a tiny eruption of gold sparks. “Your strange . . . is different from Senhor Carlos’s strange? And from the bad wizards’?”
“A lot different.”
“Why isn’t Uncle Jay strange, too?”
“He is, but it’s not the same kind of strange. And that’s all right.”
She chewed on her lips and considered. “Will I—will I be like them?”
Uh-oh . . . Looking at her, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t an ordinary little girl. Aside from being smart and articulate for a six-year-old and coming through a terrible situation, she displayed all the energetic markers of someone in touch with the Grey. It was a weak and rough attachment right now that could have been destroyed without much effort by the wrong sort of people, but it was there. “Soraia,” I started, “some things are complex and hard to explain. You’re special—”
She made a face.
“Yes, I know . . . People say that when they mean that you’re weird or you frighten them. Well, in this case, I’m going to say the same thing for a different reason. Sometimes it’s not a good idea to tell people about the things you can see or the ghosts and fairies you can talk to. They don’t understand and it scares them.”
She shivered. “Even Mamãe.”
“Yeah, even your mother. But it’s not because she’s afraid or doesn’t love you. She doesn’t mean to upset you. She’s not as strange as you and sometimes she doesn’t know what to do for you, but she loves you very much and she doesn’t want other people to hurt you.”
“You mean . . . like the bad wizards . . . ?”
“Not the same way—not usually—but other ways, little ways, mean ways. You shouldn’t stop being strange or special because of those people, but sometimes you might want to let them think you’re . . . not an odd duck.”
Soraia’s serious look curled up into a small, uncertain smile. “I don’t want to be a duck. I want to be all white and sparkly, like you.”
“Oh,” I started, uncomfortable and not sure what to say, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. . . .”
Soraia looked crushed.
I felt terribly constrained by being stuck in the bed. I turned my hands up, imploring her to listen. “Sweetheart, sometimes we don’t get to choose. It just happens the way it happens.”
“The bad wizards are bad because they are . . . bad? What if they want to be good? Senhor Carlos is bad, but he was good.” She started crying. “I don’t want to be bad. . . .”