He looked at her, all those stalked eyes weaving in a gesture of uncertainty. “There’s no harm in trying,” Dairine said. “Dig your feet in. There are enough of
those to make anybody think twice. Anyway, what’s the worst the family can do?”
“Disown me,” Sker’ret said.
Dairine swallowed. “So what?” she said. “You’ll always be a wizard. You have a bigger family than just your family. And you’ll always have a place to stay: You can sleep in my basement anytime.”
They locked eyes for a few moments. Shortly Dairine said, “You really need to stop moving them around like that. You’re making me seasick.”
Sker’ret laughed. So did Dairine.
They spent half an hour or so swapping music between Spot and Sker’ret’s manual, and after checking the sound quality, they headed upstairs again, where Sker’ret wandered into the living room to see what the others were doing. Dairine got the urge for some milk and opened the fridge, pouring herself a glass. Then, hearing laughter coming from the living room, she leaned in through the door to the dining room to see what was happening in there.
The aliens were watching cartoons. Carmela was still sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth in amusement, while Roshaun sat in Dairine’s dad’s easy chair—That’s probably the closest he can get to a throne, she thought—and was laughing, too. Not as hard as the others, perhaps, but he was plainly enjoying himself. “Someone needs to tell me what mice are,” he was saying to Carmela. “And why do they bang the cats over the head with these hammers so often? Is it class warfare of some kind?”
“I don’t think so,” Carmela said. “It’s one of those cross-species things.”
The cartoons and the laughter went on for a while, and Dairine sat down at the table, scrolling through Spot’s manual functions while listening to the Rirhait music. It was surprisingly symphonic, though written in the key of M, and only occasionally did it become so weird that she had to skip ahead. The music combined strangely but amusingly with the bonks, hoots, and shrieks of the cartoons in the living room, and the metallic, hissing, or humanoid laughter of the room’s living inhabitants. Finally, a little peace came with a station break.
“Enough of that,” Carmela said. “Let’s look at some of the news.” She changed the channels.
“—the Suffolk County Pine Barrens,” said an announcer’s voice suddenly, “recent dry conditions have combined with a passing driver’s carelessness to produce the season’s first brushfire. Some fifty acres south and east of Pilgrim State Hospital, at the edges of Brentwood and Deer Park, were blackened after a—”
There was a sudden terrible rustling in the living room.
“What the—” Dairine’s dad said. He got up, and collided halfway through the living room door with Filif. The effect was much like that of a man trying to catch a falling Christmas tree, except that the tree was still trying to fall after he had caught it.
“No,” Filif said, and the word was mixed with a high, keening whine, entirely like the sound that Dairine had heard green pinewood make in the outdoor fireplace, sometimes, when her dad was burning brush.
“Oh no,” Filif said. And he hastened into the kitchen and leaned against one of the counters there, rustling uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter, son?” Dairine’s dad said, alarmed.
“It’s here,” Filif said, broken voiced. “Death—”
Her father went a little pale. “Death in Its own self,” Filif said. “The Ravager, the Kindler of Wildfires. I thought…” Filif sounded stricken. “I was beginning to think perhaps this was one of the places where the Lone Power hadn’t come. Here and there you do find places like that, worlds or planets or continua It forgot or hasn’t been to yet…places where the Bargain was done differently.” Filif looked around him with all his berries. “It’s so terrible,” he said. “I never knew—I didn’t know It was here, too. I thought this was paradise!”
Her dad looked at Dairine rather helplessly, then did all he could do in such circumstances: He hugged a tree, not to draw strength from it, but the other way around.
“It’s not going to get you here, son,” Dairine’s dad said. “Nothing like that is going to get you here. And as for the powers of darkness, yeah, they’re here, too. But we know they’re here. And we fight as we can.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Filif pulled himself away. “That’s all we can do,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“That’s all,” Dairine’s dad said.
Slowly he went back into the living room, leaving Dairine and her dad gazing after him.
“There are really places like that?” Dairine’s dad said after a few moments. “Places where they just haven’t taken delivery on Death?”
Dairine nodded. “Here and there,” she said, and she turned away. For her, too, the subject was too close for comfort.
She went to rinse out the empty milk glass and put it in the sink. After a little while she wandered outside and looked up at the sky. The Moon was coming up in the east, and as it slid slowly up through the twilight, her dad put his head out the back door and looked at her. “You all right?” he said.
Dairine breathed in, breathed out. “Yeah,” she said. “Are you?”
Her dad let out a long breath. “How do other places get to operate like that,” he said, “when we don’t?”
Dairine shook her head. “It’s a long story,” she said. “But right now I really wish we were one of them…”
Her dad nodded and vanished back inside.
She came back in, thought about another glass of milk, fetched Spot into the kitchen from the dining room, got another glass, and went back into the fridge for more milk. While she was pouring, Sker’ret came back in.
“Ah,” Sker’ret said, “the ‘got’ stuff.”
“Yup,” Dairine said. “Don’t tell me you’re hungry again!”
“Not again,” Sker’ret said. “Still.”
Dairine glanced at her dad. “Daddy,” she said, “have we got any scrap metal…or wood?”
“Or matter of any kind,” Sker’ret said, with the air of someone trying to be helpful.
“Let me see what I can find,” Dairine’s dad said. “Now that you mention it, I’ve been thinking of replacing the old woodshed, but I keep putting it off. If I had to replace it because somebody, uh, ate it…”
Dairine snickered. Her dad got up and came into the kitchen, putting the kettle
on to boil. Then he picked up his cell phone and dialed. After a moment he snorted. “It’s still not working.” He looked over at Sker’ret. “I’m tempted to give this to you as an hors d’oeuvre.”
“No, Daddy,” Dairine said. “It’s probably still just the Sun. The effect can last a day or so, sometimes.”
Roshaun wandered in while Dairine and her dad were looking again at Spot’s display from the SOHO satellite. “Do these people know they’re feeding their data to wizards?” her dad said, as he took the kettle off the stove, put decaf instant coffee into a mug, and made himself one last cup of coffee before bed.
“I don’t think they’d mind,” Dairine said. “It’s more or less a public service.”
“That smells wonderful,” Roshaun said. “What is it?” And then his eye fell on Spot’s display.
Roshaun froze.
“It’s coffee,” Dairine’s father said. “Well, it’s sort of coffee. How much you can really consider something to be coffee when there’s no caffeine in it is a moot point.”
He wandered out of the kitchen, and so entirely missed seeing Roshaun’s ashen expression.