Jill jumped up to phone.
“I’ve been trying to phone Ran, tell him to come home, but I can’t raise him either. I guessed you’d be at the shelter—but even Clare’s groundphone is out. I’d’ve started worrying about you too if you hadn’t come home soon.” She tried to smile. Usually she was a really good smiler. Not tonight.
“Drink your coffee,” I said. “It’ll get cold.”
“Eat your sandwich,” said Takahiro from the floor. “Or the invasion force will get it.” Majid was (mostly) in Taks’ lap but his eyes were clearly trained on the sandwich on the coffee table.
There was a muffled yell from the kitchen. “What?”
We all turned toward her, but werewolf reflexes are faster even than Majid’s and Takahiro had the plate over his own head before Majid finished his pounce. Majid disappeared. I hoped this wasn’t the end of a beautiful friendship. Majid, foiled, tended to be cranky.
Jill reappeared at the kitchen door. “They took Arnie. They took Arnie.”
“They—?” I said.
“Major Blow-it-out-your-ass-and-set-fire-to-it,” she said violently. “Donnelly. The same bugsucker who took Val.”
“I don’t understand,” said Mom. Neither did I. Arnie sold drain cleaner and soldering irons and barbecues and birdseed. I could see why they took Val—they were wrong, and I wanted to solder their asses to a barbecue, but I could see how their ugly minds were working. But Arnie?
“They say his mother and grandmother were magicians, and he didn’t have his genes chopped off or whatever it is they do because his grandmom figured how to fake it and then his mom did it for him too.”
Mom and I carefully didn’t look at each other, but Jill was staring at the wall. “And they can’t arrest her because she died. But he’s still got the genes.”
“They can’t mean to do it now?” said Mom, and I could hear her being appalled. “They’ll—they could kill him.”
“Or turn him into a vegetable,” said Jill even more violently. “Magdag, what do we do? Mom’s saying to come home, we’re leaving town too, that if I don’t get back there fast she’ll pack my suitcase for me. I—I don’t even like Arnie all that much. I mean, he’s okay, and he keeps my brothers from killing each other, but—” And she burst into tears.
I bounced off the sofa and put my arms around the second wildly crying woman in half an hour. I loved Jill as much as I loved my own mom. And my hatred for Major Blow-it-out-your-ass was getting kind of out of control. “What do we do?” Jill wept into my shoulder. “What do we do?”
“We go after them,” I said suddenly. “I’m sure the gruuaa will show us where.”
“Good,” said Takahiro, and got to his feet. “I’m coming too.”
I looked at him over Jill’s bent head. I wanted him to come—I wanted really, really badly for him to come. I wanted it even more badly as I began to realize that I meant it, about going after them—going after Val and Arnie. We had no idea where they were, or if they were anywhere near each other. Or who else might be with them.
“Don’t be absurd,” said Mom, but she didn’t sound grown-up commonsensical angry, just bewildered.
“I think absurd is what we’ve got,” said Takahiro. “Being a werewolf is pretty absurd. I’m used to it.”
“I really want you to come,” I said. “But—”
“You might be able to use a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf,” said Takahiro. “Think about it.”
“Okay,” I said. We smiled at each other. Absurdly.
Jill was still crying, but she raised her head and looked at me. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” I said, but I was thinking: All very well, the gruuaa might be able to get us—as far as we can get, but then what? Major Blow-it would hardly be holding them somewhere that two teenage girls and a hundred-and-sixty-pound timber wolf could break them out of easily.
There was a knock on the door. Jill and I startled so hard our heads banged together. We stood there clutching each other—nobody’s idea of a courageous rescue party. Mom got up, wiped her face hastily with one hand, and answered the door.
It was Casimir.
“I am sorry,” he said, and looked over Mom’s shoulder at Jill and me standing like incompetently reanimated zombies at the end of the front hall, in the little space between the kitchen table and the back of the sofa. His eyes met mine and he smiled, but it was a worried smile, and it didn’t dazzle me the way it had yesterday. Jill and I moved apart, and Takahiro walked around the end of the sofa to stand beside us. Takahiro and Casimir hadn’t met before; Taks didn’t eat a lot of pizza. They looked at each other. I couldn’t see Takahiro’s face but I could see Casimir’s, and I couldn’t read his expression: it might have been shock. Even if he could read somehow that Taks and I had been kissing, I didn’t think that would qualify for shock. I didn’t like the other possibility.
“I can see I am here at a bad time,” he said, and I waited for him to finish, I’ll come back some other day. And next time, call first, I thought. He’d phoned first yesterday. Maybe the armydar was getting to him too.
But instead what he said was, “May I come in?”
Gods’ engines. We didn’t need any more complications. Even beautiful ones with heart-stopping dimples.
Mom, probably still a little confused by recent events, stood aside, and he walked in with that same wild-animal grace I’d noticed yesterday. He didn’t need trees and daylight; he had it walking down a short narrow hall in a boring little house at the dull end of town. Takahiro, who really was a wild animal, walked like a human boy who thought he was too tall.
Casimir stopped in front of me. “My mother is a magician. She did not like it that I wished to study science. I almost did not accept the scholarship to Runyon, even though I had applied for it, because she disliked it so much. And then they almost did not let me come, because my mother is a magician. But at last they did let me come. I have been in this country only a fortnight. I began the job that my mentor found for me at the beginning of the week. On the third day of my new job, a large cobey opened in a town less than ten miles away from the town I now lived and worked in. I had been told during the two days of induction seminars the trust gives to all its students on arrival that we would not see a cobey here, that big ones were so rare it was not worth wasting time telling us what to do if we did, that if there was one anywhere the army cobey units would have contained it before we knew it existed.
“That night, before the cobey was announced, two young women walked into my new workplace, and one of them called the other one mgdaga. The mgdaga is our great heroine; there have been several mgdaga in the history of my country, although the last one was over two hundred years ago.
“On the fourth day,” Casimir continued, his eyes never wavering from my face, “I met the mgdaga again, and saw her perform a magic I have never heard was within the skill of any magician, and my mother knows a great deal about magicians and what they are capable of, and I have learnt much of what she knows merely by being her son. I discovered that the mgdaga was a friend to gruuaa—and that she was stepdaughter to Valadi Crudon, himself a great magician, who had disappeared from his homeland in some mystery seven years ago. My mother taught me that there is no coincidence, only shortsightedness.”
Most of this had washed over Mom, fortunately, but she reacted to Val’s name. She said sharply, “He did not disappear. He uses his own name. He has always used his own name.”