“Quicker this way,” Margot snapped, scowling as she pulled him along, her cold fingers tight around his wrist. His arm hurt, but he was afraid to say anything.
They walked roughly parallel with the creek for a short time, eventually emerging behind a few low hills to the east of the monolithic Administration building. There was a cluster of homes surrounded by low fences in the small valley there, notched between the hillsides, one of which looked familiar. It took Alex a moment to place it. The wind must have been playing tricks with him, because more than once, he could sworn that he saw someone following them, a figure he couldn’t make out through the trees. Margot’s pace was too demanding for him to stop and take a good look, and he quickly forgot about it, focusing instead on not tripping over roots and tree trunks in the waning light.
“Isn’t that Anastasia’s house?”
“We are neighbors,” Margot acknowledged. “The little one on the end, that’s Eerie, Sebastian, and myself.”
“Who’s Sebastian?”
“He’s a pyrokine, like Xia, maybe more so. A bit touchy about strangers. Might try to burn you alive if he sees you skulking around. Fortunately, he’s only ten, and he’ll be so absorbed watching TV downstairs that he’ll never even notice you are here. He kinda latched on to Eerie a few years ago and he’s lived with us ever since,” Margot said, tossing her shoulders indifferently. “Don’t worry about it. You probably won’t get set on fire. Follow me.”
“I hate it when you say stuff like that, you know,” Alex complained, following her with a heavier heart than when he had started.
“I do.”
They wound around the buildings and the hillocks in an abstract path that seemed utterly haphazard at first. It wasn’t until they were almost halfway to the house that Alex realized she was intent on keeping them out of view of the bulk of the Administrative building. She stopped one house past Anastasia’s, just short of their destination.
“Here’s my ID card,” Margot said, handing him her pass card. “Give me yours.”
“Why?” Alex said, digging it out of his pocket.
“When you open the door, it will record me going in the house, rather than you, dumbass,” Margot said, snatching his card. “I’m going to read in your room. I’m not going to see anything gross in there, right?”
“I don’t even know what you mean by that, but no,” Alex said, trying to remember if that was true or not. “Nothing gross. But I didn’t make the bed.”
“Fine. Eerie’s room is upstairs, second door. You have till midnight, and then we meet back here and switch cards. Don’t leave me standing out here, or you’ll be sorry.”
Margot didn’t wait for a response. She just walked off, leaving him standing there, staring at the pass card in his hand, though it looked no different from his own. Eventually he walked over to the little cottage, like the ones in some of the older neighborhoods in Bakersfield, wood and white stucco and ivy on the walls, and opened the door with a swipe of the card. The stairs were to his right inside. He could hear a TV in the front room, but no one reacted to his coming in. He went up to the second floor, past an unmarked door that he assumed was Margot’s. Part of him wondered what her room would be like, what she would keep there, if there was anything up on the walls, but mostly he was simply nervous.
He knocked as quietly as possibly, but she must have been waiting, because she heard him, and called out musically for him to come inside.
Anastasia waited for Donner to find the right bush to relieve himself on. It wasn’t glamorous, but that was dog ownership, even if the dog was actually a wolf that could transform into something that looked human. She stood by a ditch on the side of the road while Timor hovered at a discreet distance and Renton at a less discreet one.
“Well, hello,” Renton said unexpectedly, his hands suddenly on her shoulders, steering her in the direction of a figure moving quietly and deliberately through the failing light. “Is that Margot? Where do you think she’s going at this hour?”
She shrugged out of his grip and kept a firm leash on her temper, which threatened to explode. Ever since she had brought Timor in, Renton had been this way. She knew perfectly well why, of course, and it vexed her to no end.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you fix that,” Anastasia suggested coolly.
“Follow a girl through the woods at night? I’m your man…”
Renton smiled creepily and padded off in Margot’s direction. Anastasia knew perfectly well what she was up to, obviously, but she had planned to have hot cocoa and watch the Neverwhere DVD set her little sister had given her, on her bed with Donner and Blitzen, and if Renton saw that, he would snicker. She liked the idea of him hanging around outside Alex’s room, cold and getting the wrong idea about Margot, a great deal more. Besides, Timor was her favorite among the cousins, but so recalcitrant when Renton was around that she hardly had the opportunity to talk to him. She double-checked that Renton had actually left, glanced at the still occupied Weir, and then wandered over in his direction.
“You can relax,” Anastasia said generously. “Renton will remain occupied for the rest of the evening.”
“Good,” Timor said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I’m not sure that I’ll get used to all this subterfuge, Anastasia. Are you certain you want to pursue this course of action?”
“I have to,” she responded airily, swirling her skirt with one hand. “Are you sure you can handle it, when the time comes?”
“Oh, yes,” Timor said, with his charming and utterly matter-of-fact confidence. “That won’t be a problem. Have you picked a time yet?”
“No,” Anastasia said, watching the last sliver of the sun disappear and feeling the same sadness that she always felt when she had to throw something away that she’d gotten used to having around. “But it will be soon, I’m certain. Be ready.”
“Of course,” Timor said smoothly, giving her a smile that rather made her wish that they weren’t cousins. Then again, being her cousin made it alright for her to take his arm to stroll along the darkened road, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. “Do you think that Katya will have to do her half of the job?”
“That is still up in the air,” she said, sighing and looking up at the emerging stars. “I am nowhere even close to deciding. We will all go back to the island, and then we will see what happens. If everything goes according to plan, then we have nothing to worry about. If not, we still get Emily to cook for us on vacation. She is really quite a talented chef, you see.”
“Yeah,” Timor said, nodding. “Dinner was good. You do realize there’s no way she’s the girl to back, right? You have to know that. You always know everything. So, why are you helping her?”
Anastasia pulled his arm closer because she could, because he didn’t think anything of it, and because Renton wasn’t here, and lately that had started to make Anastasia feel a little bit giddy.
“Because I like her, I suppose,” Anastasia said, feeling as if she was confessing something. “And also because she has something I want. Her older sister. Therese Muir is an effective Operator, and if I can’t recruit her, I am going to have to kill her, because she is an endless pain for me as things stand. Anyway,” she added thoughtfully, “you shouldn’t underestimate a desperate woman, and Emily is desperate. You really like Eerie that much more, then? I wouldn’t have thought it.”
It was too dark to be sure, but Timor looked like he was thinking about it. She didn’t pester him, and they wandered a bit off the path, into the shadows of the woods and the smell of moss, the wolves trailing behind them. She clutched at his arm, unable to see, but he walked confidently through the sound of crunching leaves. Even when he had been a rough and clumsy teenager, she remembered, he had been this way, she couldn’t help but rely on him, and he practically encouraged the whole world to do the same. She wondered, not for the first time, what it was that made him and his sister so profoundly different.