She turned.
“Lucy, is it?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“How—?”
“It’s a two-way street,” Ophelia said.
“Grampa used to pick up on our thoughts, dreams, particularly loud emotions—eventually it began to rub off on us. Not a whole lot—I only now and again pick up little inklings. Names more than anything, like neon signs sometimes.”
I nodded. She left the kitchen, and I followed. I knew I should hurry, and even though Ophelia had the warmth of a snow bank, I couldn’t just run off. I didn’t want to. So far, her answers were easy, off-hand. And those answers had become everything, hadn’t they? The things Puck couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. To protect me.
Ophelia didn’t want to protect me. Hell, she probably wanted me to take a long walk off a short pier. She led me to a door at the end of a cluttered hallway and shouldered the door open.
“Story time,” Ophelia said, and walked into the room. I followed her inside.
I heard a click. A small green-glass shaded desk lamp burned to life. It illuminated a desk cluttered with leather-bound journals and ancient papers.
She sat down in the creaky leather chair behind the desk. “I don’t come here at night,” she said, and glanced around.
I followed her furtive gaze through the shadows, but I didn’t get a vibe from the room. Well, not a creepy one, anyway. I actually felt sort of comforted, safe. Maybe knowing Puck found some kind of refuge there in his living-life gave me solace. Or maybe I’m just a sentimental weirdo twit.
She hadn’t told me the room was Puck’s study, but she really didn’t have to. This was his real home, I knew. I could almost see it—Puck sitting at his desk, a calabash pipe clamped in his mouth, leaking tendrils of smoke from his lips like a sleeping dragon. Poring over volumes of old…history? Huh.
“Ophelia?” I said, and looked up at her.
She’d already cracked one of the leather journals on the desk, and was flipping absently through the pages.
“I brought you in here for a reason. Now, I don’t know why Grampa sent you—”
“My friends are in trouble—”
“Wait,” she said, and continued. “But there is something you have to understand first. Before anything else happens.”
My eyebrow came up. Couldn’t help myself.
“And you’re not going to want to hear it.”
Oh boy. I could feel her tone. It’s how I imagined a nun would speak to a pregnant teenager. Just a succotash of lost potential and guilt sliced thick. Add a pinch of sage wisdom and serve cold.
I actually…don’t know what succotash is.
“This…thing. This way you’ve chosen to live is a mistake.”
The anger showed up first. A hot swell of it boiled up into my face, and I half-stood from my chair.
“Lucy—”
“Stop. I didn’t choose anything,” I said. “And besides, you don’t know anything about my situation.”
She leaned back in the chair. The vulture voice returned, but icier.
“I know a few things, Ms. Lucy Day. You’re a runaway, right? Twice in as many weeks?”
“Shut up,” I said. The words barely fit through my teeth.
“You’re here tonight,” she said. “So my guess is you fell off the bandwagon of the living…what…last Friday?”
“Stop.”
“Can I take a wild guess? Maybe underage drinking and driving? Raped in an alleyway? Stop me when I get close—”
The base of her chair broke with a thunder-crack, dumping her onto the ground. She flapped her arms comically, but didn’t catch a hold of anything and ate it spectacularly. A live current of raw electricity sparked across the fingertips of my open right hand. I looked down at them, expecting to see lurid blue arcs, but saw nothing. I stood up.
“Feel good about that?” she asked, scowling.
“Yes.”
She made her best effort in collecting her dignity as she got to her feet. Frankly, the amount of guilt I felt about knocking her on her ass could fit underneath a door. Still, I couldn’t help but think I was proving her point. Just another out-of-control freak.
“Well,” she said, and glanced around the room. Finding nothing satisfactory, she scooped up one of the journals and sat on the edge of the desk, her legs dangling off the side. “How much time do we have?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to know what it is you’re going to be doing for me?”
She shrugged. “In a few. How much time?”
“Not much,” I said.
I pictured Morgan and Zack lying in their hospital beds, bristling with tubes. Another vulture, Abraham, floating above them. No, not floating—circling. Then again, he was after me, wasn’t he? Puck said we were yin and yang, two parts of the same whole. He hadn’t even told me how to kill him, if it came down to it—told me I couldn’t. Told me I wouldn’t have to. Forewarned is forearmed, they say, which means I was going in with a rubber band gun.
“Then I’ll be as quick as I can, because the soul you save just might be your own,” she said, her face curling into a wry smirk. That line might have been funny from any other face.
“Hurry,” I said. “I don’t need a lesson. I need help.”
“Too-bad, so-sad,” Ophelia said. “You’re getting both.”
I sighed. I actually made a point of sighing. Not my most mature moment, I admit.
“This, as you might have guessed, is one of the diaries of one Robin Goodman. My grandfather, and your ‘Puck,’” she said. “And this particular volume is of unique interest.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, still all immature anger and snotty tone, I admit.
“Because it’s the only one that talks about his Mors. Drop the tone if you want my help.”
I snorted, crossed my arms, and nodded. Fact was, this was what I needed. What Puck wouldn’t tell me. How he did it. He wanted me to run tonight, to bait Abraham and get away. To hell with that. One of us wasn’t walking away tonight. I bit my lip, clenched my working fist, and tried to steady my jangling nerves.
Ophelia looked up at me, the diary cradled in her hands, her eyes showing something uncharacteristically like sympathy.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I doubt it.”
She cleared her throat and began to read.
Chapter Sixteen
Puck, Revisited
Robin Woodrow Goodman, born in Year-of-Our Lord Eighteen-Eighty-Four, came screaming to life in the back room of a saloon. His mother, Adeline Emelda Goodman, owned the establishment and hadn’t spent a day of her pregnancy in rest. When the time came, little Adeline, who had never tasted the air above Five-Feet-One-inch, put down her bar rag, blew out a long sigh, and motioned for Jamison Curdly, the piano player, to come over to the bar.
She whispered a few words in his ear, turned, and walked calmly into the saloon’s back room. Jamison Curdly swept off his hat, wiped his forehead, and called Doctor William Darwin over to the sideboard. Now, Doctor William Darwin was no doctor, but that wasn’t a secret. And he had no relation to the famed Evolutionary, I assure you. In fact, the only thing he did own was a mortuary and a quick tongue.
When Jamison Curdly whispered in his ear, Dr. William Darwin laughed and slapped his leg. Jamison shook his head. The Doctor explained that he wasn’t a doctor. Jamison said he wasn’t one either. They shook hands and went into the back room.
The procedure was messy, but successful. Luckily Adeline had done her share of research on the topic, and directed her two would-be pioneer gynecologists through every grisly step. She survived the encounter, against all the laws of God, Man, and Irony. Three powerful figures, with the last reigning over the first two. Then again, a baby and his mother dying in a messy birth didn’t even touch spheres with Irony. That was of Reality, an ugly Force of Nature that ought to be done away with.