Ana swallowed the last of her tea and patted the remaining crumbs from the plate with a wet fingertip, and when she turned to go her heart lurched at the sight of a dark figure looming in the entrance to the hall. She gave a squeak of surprise, and then said in a voice that betrayed her attempt at control, "Good evening. Or morning."
"You are aptly named, Ana Wakefield," came the man's voice in return. It was a deep, confident, melodious voice, and as the man moved up the hall toward her, she could see that his body matched it. He was a bear of a man, at least six feet four and broad with it, but he moved with absolute silence.
"Jet lag," she explained as he came closer. "It makes me wake up at strange times and get hungry at weird hours. I hope nobody minds that I helped myself to the cupboards and walked through the house."
"Why should anyone mind?" he said, close now. "Are you not one of us?"
Moving in and out of the patches of blue light pouring through the windows, she had seen his dark hair and thick, dark beard, and although she could not see him well enough to compare with Glen's photograph of Jonas Seraph (né Fairweather), she had no doubt of the bear's identity.
"Are you by any chance Jonas?" she asked.
" 'By any chance' ," he repeated thoughtfully. Ana became aware that she was standing in a shaft of light, although he was at the moment quite invisible in the shadows. She had always been partial to big men; she even liked them slightly scary—Aaron had possessed a little-seen but ferocious temper, and she had once had a mild flirtation with a huge, scarred ex-convict until good sense got the better of her odd psysiological susceptibility to the pheromones given off by dangerous males. Still, this creature approaching was a bit much even for her. She took an involuntary step back, and suppressed an urge to slip back into the dark as he rose up the two steps to the dais and loomed over her. "Yes," he said. "I am Jonas."
"You and Steven have a way of appearing in unexpected places," she told him. "Is that something he learned from you?"
"It is something that comes with Change. A person's awareness expands."
I'll bet, she thought; I wouldn't be surprised if there are motion detectors hidden in the wainscoting. She nodded in a way to show her interest in the possibilities of Change and waited for him to go on, but he just stood there, a large, dark presence in front of her. She could see nothing of his face, although the band of light that she stood in also fell across his shoulder and upper arm. He was wearing a corduroy shirt, bleached colorless by the outside lights. His shoulders were broad, his arm beefy, and she was beginning to feel very uncomfortable even before he stepped forward and grasped her arms with his strong hands.
She jerked, nearly letting her mug and plate fall to the floor although she herself moved not at all in his hold, and she fought down the urge to struggle. He bent his head to peer into hers, inches away, so close she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint astringent odor of his bath soap, an incongruous odor at odds with the heavy carnivore smell that the back of her mind had anticipated. She badly wanted to open her mouth and shout at the top of her lungs, rousing the house and forcing him to let go of her, but the impulse stayed down, even as her head reared away from his, partly because she knew that this was a test of some sort, and in part because she did not feel that he was about to attack her further. Mostly, though, she was afraid that her feeble attempts at self-defense would only make him laugh.
In the end, he let her go—gently, so she did not even stumble back.
"Let me show you what I mean," he said, and walked away. Mean by what? she thought, confused. After a minute, her heart still racing and her breathing ragged, she followed him.
She found him in the marble entrance foyer, where he had stopped to burrow inside a pair of doors under the stairway. He pulled out two coats, tossing one in Ana's direction. It reeked of cigarettes and sweat and was far too large for her, but she found a small table to hold her dishes and pulled the coat on. Jonas continued out the front door, where Ana heard a low growl, immediately cut off when her guide—her abductor?—snapped his meaty fingers. When she got to the door she saw three dogs, awakened from their sleep in the shrubbery, coming up to fawn around his legs. One growled when it saw her step onto the porch, and without hesitation Jonas's hand shot out and delivered a massive slap to the side of the dog's head that sent the animal spinning. It yelped once and picked itself up from the ground to come grovelling back up to them with its tail between its legs, but Jonas had already set off across the weedy gravel drive beneath the harsh lights. The dog did not seem to have reached a state of satori, Ana thought wildly as she hurried after Jonas; still, at least its neck wasn't broken.
They travelled along the drive for perhaps half a mile with Ana in Jonas's footsteps. It was closer to the ridiculously early English dawn than she had realized, because when the floodlights faded behind them she could still make out the shape of the ground, the wall of trees pressing on her left and the rails of a fence on her right.
When they left the road, the stars were fading in the gray firmament overhead, but as soon as she followed Jonas into the narrow gap between the shrubs, she was blind again. She stopped. He firmly gripped her upper arm and began to draw her deeper into the tangle. She held her free hand up in front of her face and allowed herself to be led.
It was the strangest blind walk this child of the sixties had ever been on. She was being taken into this jungle by a man she would not have trusted with a pot of beans, much less her life, yet even as she placed her bones and flesh in his hands, she felt nothing of the panic that the situation would have justified, nor even much fear beyond a nervous awareness of what her disappearance might mean for Jason and Dulcie.
The surface underfoot was thick with decomposed leaves and small twigs, but blessedly soft for someone wearing thin-soled slippers and nearly smooth—an old road, perhaps, overgrown for decades but as yet not completely overtaken. Jonas seemed to know the way well, because he walked without hesitation, pressing on for at least twenty minutes before he halted and let go of Ana's arm.
"There's a bench directly in front of you," he told her. "Sit down on it and listen for a while, tell me what you hear."
She patted her way forward to the light shape that turned out to be a very old stone bench, rough with lichen but sound and dry. She sat, and listened. With all her being she listened, and she heard absolutely nothing, not even a breeze stirring the leaves. The silence was weighty, even oppressive; her own breathing was the only sound to brush her ears, and once a tiny twig giving way beneath Jonas's weight. Finally, she could bear it no longer. She raised her head and spoke to his dim shape where it squatted a few feet away.
"I can't hear a thing other than my own breath," she said loudly. "What did you want me to hear?"
He rose, more twigs crackling under his feet. "Very good," he said enigmatically. "Now come."
He plunged off again down the overgrown road, Ana stumbling along helplessly at his heels, and they entered an area that felt more like Lost World or a dinosaur movie than an estate in southern England. Huge fleshy leaves pawed against her face, massive fans that looked like the leaves of rhubarb plants growing downstream from a nuclear power plant. Overhead, lacy fronds clogged the still-dim sky, the prehistoric tendrils of a stand of magnificent tree ferns that any park in New Zealand would have been proud of. In one place in this jungle, even Jonas had to give way, edging around a stand of timber bamboo with stems as thick as Ana's upper arm. She felt as if she'd been fed through a shrinking mechanism, or a time machine.