But then Taks grew about two-and-a-half feet, discovered geekery, and periodically forgot how to talk again. I think he’d always been like this, it’s just we only started noticing after he was talking sometimes. And you never knew what was going to set him off. You’d think you were having a conversation and then you’d ask him something like what he thought about the movie the other night and he’d go silent and then just walk away. If this happened to you (as it happened to me) in the middle of the corridor at school with a lot of other people seeing it happen you felt like a total dead battery. But you know that thing about how a friend is someone you could call at three o’clock in the morning if you needed to? I could call Taks at three a.m. if I was in trouble. It was the day-to-day “hi, how are you” stuff that wasn’t so good.
Mom was writing down the sizes Takahiro gave her and then said, “Wait a minute,” went away, and came back with Val’s dressing gown. “Come along, Maggie,” she said. “Leave the boys to cope.” Mongo, after what was evidently a terrible struggle, came with me, after wildly licking Takahiro’s wrist one last time.
“Are you okay?” Mom said softly to me. “Er—it’s been a rather harrowing day. Again. And I don’t even know what happened to you at the park.”
“I think I could sleep for a week,” I said. “But I’m okay.”
“How do you—you and Jill—know Casimir?” she said, trying not to sound like a mother and failing. I knew she didn’t approve of college kids hanging out with kids still in high schooclass="underline" imbalance of power, she called it. And Casimir was terrifyingly good-looking. What did a nineteen- or twenty-year-old who looked like Casimir want with a seventeen-year-old who looked like me? I didn’t think I could tell her about the mgdaga stuff; even to mention it was dinglebrained and woopy. And he had come in with me and talked to my mother. That would rate with her.
“He works at P&P,” I said, trying not to sound like a teenager being asked personal questions by her mother, and also failing. “We met, um, today at the park.”
There was a little silence as we went through the kitchen door. Casimir hadn’t remotely hinted anything to her about the new cobey or she’d have been all over me with panicky-mom questions. I owed him for that. She thought we were having a standard mother-daughter conversation. It was still better than Hey, who would have guessed Takahiro was a werewolf?
“Casimir told me he’s from Ukovia,” Mom said finally. “His English is very good. He sounds a lot like Val.”
“He’s heard of Val,” I blurted out. “He said ‘Valadi Crudon?’ like it was some big deal.”
Mom turned and looked at me. The day before yesterday I’d’ve said it like an accusation. Today I was just frightened. Her husband was an ex-magician who had killed his best friend because his government had told him to. Except that he wasn’t ex-. One of my best friends was a werewolf. I had an invisible humming creature with too many legs and eyes wrapped around my throat. There had been a cobey in the park—the park less than two miles from where we lived. A cobey that Casimir, who had heard of Val, recognized as a cobey. A cobey that I . . . I . . . I looked at my poor algebra book, lying on the kitchen table. You could see the gap the missing pages made, a little black hole against the spine, and the closed cover lay at a slight angle. Mom hadn’t noticed, or she’d’ve gone ballistic—textbooks are expensive. But she wouldn’t expect me to be a book mutilator. And how was I going to explain?
Two days ago Mom would have heard the accusation in my voice and shut me out. Two days ago we hadn’t met Hix or seen a werewolf in Val’s shed. Or heard why Val had been exiled. Today she said, “I knew there were things Val hadn’t told me. But there were things I hadn’t told him too; why should he tell me everything? I had even guessed—before last night—that Val was more important in his old life than he wanted to talk about. And I can’t imagine anyone who has moved so far away, and to a new country, wouldn’t have some mixed feelings about what they’ve left behind. Until last night it hadn’t occurred to me that anything he hadn’t told me might be dangerous.”
Mongo, not getting the response he wanted merely leaning against me, was licking my hand. I sat down abruptly on the floor and started petting him fiercely with both hands. He lay down and stretched out to make this easier. His feathering—the long stuff on his neck and belly and legs and tail—needed brushing. His feathering always needed brushing. His eyes said, Don’t stop. Hix flowed down one arm and across Mongo’s ribs. His eyes moved—I guess he could see her better than I could. She curled up under his chin, and he raised his head not only as if he knew exactly where she was, but as if she took up space, which I still wasn’t clear about.
Mom said carefully, “Casimir seemed to think you were a bit special too.” I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. Mom waited and then added, “Something a little unusual. About a prophecy.”
I exhaled. I reminded myself that us Newworlders did believe in coincidence. And that he hadn’t mentioned the cobey so I still owed him. But maybe a little less. “That’s just some dumb folk tale. It’s a joke.”
“I don’t think . . .” Mom began, and stopped. I was thinking about my grandmother turning green and scaly. I was thinking about magic winning over science. I was thinking about Takahiro. I had a headache.
“Oh—a thousand dead batteries,” I said. “Clare was expecting me—”
“No, she’s not,” said Mom. “I phoned her while I was waiting for you to come home. Whatever happened with Takahiro, I didn’t think you’d make it to the shelter this afternoon.”
“Oh, poor Clare,” I said. “I wonder who—”
“She told me to tell you that she wasn’t surprised, that everything was a hot wire this afternoon, and that she’d already called her brother.”
Clare’s brother was still pretending to be a farmer with a few acres at the other end of what had used to be their family farm, but he earned his living as a legal aide for a family law practice specializing in abused children. They both had the rescue-things gene, speaking of genes. He and Clare shouted at each other a lot but he always came when she needed him. I relaxed as much as I could relax. Which wasn’t very much. I’d much rather have spent the afternoon cleaning kennels because nothing else was happening.
The default position in this household was that you boiled water and made a hot drink. Mom filled the kettle and put it on the stove. She took four mugs out of the cupboard and lined them up on the counter. The kettle began to make that faint far-off hissing noise that means it will produce hot water before you die of thirst (probably). Mom stood staring at the cupboard. There is a long time for thinking thoughts you don’t want to think while you’re waiting for a kettle to boil. She got the milk out of the refrigerator and put a lot of it into a pan. It was going to be hot chocolate then. That meant it was serious.
Well, it was serious.
CHAPTER 8
WE HEARD THE SHED DOOR OPEN, FOOTSTEPS—one pair with shoes, one pair without—and then a hand turn the kitchen door handle. Val’s dressing gown went nearly twice around Takahiro but didn’t quite reach his knees. He’d wrapped the belt round and round and tied it in front, like a samurai’s obi. He looked almost as unhappy as he had as a wolf: all curled in on himself like he used to be eight years ago, and it made my heart ache. I wanted to believe that it didn’t make any difference that he might turn into a wolf any time he was stressed out—but it did, you know? It meant he was in danger all the time. Which meant that his friends were also in danger all the time. There was no way the niddles wouldn’t believe we all knew. I said I didn’t know Takahiro at all. But I did in some ways. I knew that was one of the things he was thinking about right now. Because now some of us did know. No wonder he’d never really finished becoming one of us. We just thought it was because he was half Japanese, and lived in a huge house on the other side of town with a dad who was never home and who none of our parents had ever met. And possibly because he was an arrogant moody stuck-on-himself creepazoid. And here he wasn’t even a real gizmohead. He was just a grind. And a werewolf.