He sighed. “John Sebbick.”
I smiled sweetly. “Thank you.”
“I don’t understand,” Paul said to him. “What do you need to check?”
Sebbick said, “You must realize, Mr Cabot, we get a great many claims made here. People accuse their co-workers, neighbours—” he smiled, “—lovers all the time.”
“I’m not accusing her,” Paul half shouted. “She’s a Ferocious One.”
“So you say.”
“I told you what she did with that sick man. In the hospital.”
“What you say she did.”
“I don’t believe this,” Paul said. “Why won’t you believe me?”
“Excuse me,” I said, and smiled as big a smile as that goddamn bureaucrat. “Mr. Sebbick, this man has come to you for help. Isn’t that your job? To help him?”
“Young lady,” he said. He looked like he’d pat me on the head if he wasn’t afraid I’d bite him. “The SDA does not need children to tell it its job.”
I wasn’t going to let that one stop me. I said, “What are you going to do for him?”
“We will investigate his story,” he said.
“That’s not good enough,” I told him. He looked at me like I was a Ferocious One. “He needs protection,” I said. “How are you going to protect him?”
Sebbick said, “We will determine who needs protection in this case.”
I took Paul’s arm. “Come on,” I said, “let’s get you some real help.” He looked at me, grateful, as if he thought I could beat down the whole SDA. I felt myself blush and turned Paul around before that bastard Sebbick could see.
Outside, Lisa was waiting. I didn’t need Paul to introduce us, I knew her immediately. She wore a strange triangular-shaped dress, with wide sharp shoulders and hard narrow hips. Her face shone and her golden hair lifted softly in the breeze. She stood back against a black convertible with its top down. She smiled, and for a moment I walked towards that smile, until I realized what I was doing and stopped myself. Next to me, Paul was shaking.
“Poor sweet Paul,” she said. “I told you, you don’t need to be frightened. I have no plans to harm you.”
“Leave him alone,” I blurted. Great. Really effective.
She looked down at me. She seemed suddenly much taller. The points on her padded shoulders gleamed, like knife blades in the sunshine. She said, sweetly, “This must be your little cousin. What a lovely child.” Her mouth opened very wide. “Would you like me to swallow you?”
I felt dizzy, nauseated. My feet slid around, as if I was standing on ice, as if the street would crack open and drop me into freezing water. Somehow, my hand went out and found a parking meter. “Ferocious One,” I said, and gasped as a pain shot into my side. “We beg you—” The pain became unbearable, and I knew it would stop if I just stopped talking. I said, “We beg you to release us.” My side ripped open and I screamed. When I looked down I saw blood and meat pouring out onto the sidewalk. I jerked my eyes away as I forced the final words out. “We know that nothing we have done deserves your Malignant intervention.” And the pain ended. I gasped in relief, and when I looked down my clothes weren’t even torn.
Sometimes the old stuff works better than we know. The Formula comes to us from the Tellers after all, and not the SDA. Lisa pretended not to notice, but she backed away. Laughing, she slid into her open-top car. “I told you,” she said to Paul, “you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’m on your side. Even the SDA will help you if I tell them to.” She laughed again, and then she looked at me. I held on to the parking meter. She said, “Goodbye, Ellen Pierson. I’m sure we will meet again.” And then she drove off.
On the way home, Paul decided to tell my folks. Well, they reacted just the way I knew they would—Mom crying and fluttering her arms, Daddy ranting about the SDA and its “ineffectual posturing”. Only, they added a new twist. They attacked Paul for involving me. “A mere child,” my mother called me. Cute.
I tried to push them onto what really mattered. “The SDA’s not just ineffectual,” I tried to say. “They’re blocking him. That Sebbick”—I stopped myself saying “bastard”—“guy is very effectual. You should have seen the way he smirked at us.” No good. They weren’t listening. The whole thing had scared them too much. They talked about the danger to me, but they really meant the danger to themselves as well. “We’ve got to do something,” I kept saying, and, “How can we get protection?” It was only when they suggested Paul “go home and get some rest” that I realized what was going on. They wanted to get rid of him. They figured if he stayed there in our living room Ferocious Ones would come smashing through the picture window at any moment.
“He’s not going anywhere,” I said. I made my voice so calm, so firm, that my father just stared at me.
My mother said, “But she’ll get all of us if he stays here.” When nobody answered her for a second and she realized how that sounded, she added, “We’ve got to think of you, Ellen.”
“If we send him away,” I said, “we’ll really expose ourselves to danger.”
“What do you mean?” my mother asked.
I was improvising, trying to pull stuff out from what I remembered from school. I said, “The Devoted Ones don’t like it when humans turn against each other. If we lose the support of the Devoted Ones what’ll we do if Lisa decides to attack us just for being Paul’s family?”
I could see them wavering. I pushed on. “At his own place it’s already too late. He’s already invited her in. Here we can put up a wall of protection. We can get help.” I felt like I was explaining things to two year olds. I just prayed that the Guardian of Inappropriate Speech would stop Paul from saying something dumb, like how he didn’t want to make any trouble and maybe he should go home. But he just sat there, bent over, his eyes fixed on the middle of the rug. And finally my folks gave in. Paul could stay, they said, “at least for a few days”.
I added, “While we get some help.”
“Right,” my father said, as if he’d thought of it.
As soon as I knew they weren’t going to change their minds I told them of the enactment I’d already done and suggested maybe we could do it over, all of us together. Daddy said Paul should stay inside. “We don’t want to tempt anything,” he said, but he just likes to take charge. So we went through the routine, mostly Daddy and I, while Mom followed along behind us.
When we got back inside, my father called his lawyer. I was afraid he might not push it hard enough, but he was great. He shouted at the man, told him he had to get the best person and he had to get him right now.
After my father put down the phone, we all said nothing for a while. No one looked at anybody. I don’t know how long we would have stood there like that if we didn’t hear a knock at the door. My mother half shrieked, my father said, “Oh God,” Paul whimpered, and I don’t remember what I did. Because we all knew who it was. None of us moved, and then the knock came again, and then Paul started to get up. Now, Malignant Ones can’t force their way into a house, at least for the first time, unless they’re invited. That much I knew. But Paul was contaminated, and none of us was sure just what that meant.
I ran over to him and grabbed his shoulders and held on. He was sweating or crying or both, because his face was all wet, and I think I was crying too, but I held on to him. Daddy ran up and held him too, and then Mom came and put her arms around all of us and together we said the Formula and then the prayers of protection we’d made up for our enactment. And the knocking stopped.
We stood there a long time, hanging on to each other and shaking like one big animal. And then the phone rang. We all just looked at it, letting it ring on and on, until finally my father picked up the receiver. Before he said anything, he switched on the loudspeakers. “Hello,” he said, and his voice broke.