Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

I was most heartened by how active my students were in helping the town. I’d been worried that the sudden revelation that their college was inhabited by witches and fairies would be too much for them, but they seemed to adjust almost effortlessly. Scott Wilder and Ruby Day started a student–fey liaison club called Students for a More United and Reintegrated Fairwick—SMURF—and asked me to be the faculty sponsor. At the first meeting, they invited Dean Book and lobbied for classes on magic and fairy history. The dean informed them she’d long been thinking of doing just that.

“Mightn’t that be dangerous?” I asked Liz after the meeting.

“We’ll have to go slow and make sure that only students who are responsible enough learn the higher levels of magic. We’ll get Soheila to vet students for emotional stability. But I think it’s a good idea. I’ve often thought that Fairwick could have a wider mission in this world. We’ve focused so long on mere survival, hiding out here in our secluded valley, but look at where that got us. The evils of this world sought us out. There are real evils in the world—fey and human—and real suffering. We should be doing more to train our students to relieve suffering and uproot evil. It’s a troubled world out there. Fairwick can be a beacon of hope. I hope you’ll be involved, Callie.”

I told her I would be. Besides, I needed a mission—something on which to focus my attention. It wasn’t that my classes weren’t going well. In fact, they were going so well they practically taught themselves. My students eagerly prepared oral reports and group presentations on the assigned readings and engaged in animated discussions that filled up the entire class period. Having learned that fairies and monsters were real, they read the fairy tales with a new urgency. They debated and argued about them as though Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast contained the secrets of the universe—and perhaps they did. Appearances are deceiving. Trust in yourself. Be kind to the old and the weak. Follow your heart. As valid a set of precepts for leading a good life as you would find anywhere. But what if you did all that and you defeated the evil monster, but at the end Prince Charming was dead and the evil queen had pulled your heart out of your chest? Those were the questions that I itched to scrawl across my students’ papers.

Instead, I corrected their faulty grammar and misspellings but not their hopeful illusions. Even if I no longer believed in happy endings, I wanted them to. But when I put down my red pen, Honeysuckle House loomed around me like a haunted house. Floorboards creaked, windowpanes rattled, cold drafts stalked the hallways, and shadows lurked in corners. With Ralph curled in my sweater pocket as he continued to recuperate from his attack, I paced the halls, trying to pin down the fleeting shadows, listening to the rustle and murmur of the old house settling on its foundation, watching for a glimpse of its ghost. But the house wasn’t haunted by a ghost; it was haunted by time . Something in its walls had made itself into a home for the incubus and still retained the impression of his incarnations. The pebbles and bits of wood that Liam used to bring home in his pockets migrated along the window ledges and shelves. I heard Bill’s hammer in the pound of branches on the roof, and I smelled William’s heather in the roving pockets of cold air. Each of them had left an impression on the house—even William, who had never been inside it.

Or had he? When he returned to Faerie, he said it was to become the man I would someday fall in love with. So William had become Liam and then Bill … but when I tried to sort that out, I tied myself into a knot that further tightened around my heart. What did any of it matter? I had lost all three of them, and I didn’t need to be a scholar of fairy tales to know that was all the chances I would get.

I kept busy. I joined the curriculum committee charged with creating the new classes to teach students magic and volunteered for Meals On Wheels. I delivered two dozen turkey dinners on Thanksgiving—the last one to Nan Stewart in the hospital. She’d been one of the Shady Pines residents too ill to go into a private residence. Mac had told me she’d asked to see me, but I’d shamefully put off the visit, afraid it would be too painful to be reminded of Ballydoon and William. On Thanksgiving, though, after seeing the faces of the old people light up when Dory and I delivered their turkey, I decided that was a poor reason for not visiting an old woman who might not have much time left. So I went home and made a special plate for her. I found her sitting up in her bed, a plaid shawl around her shoulders, refusing the tray of hospital food the nurse was pushing on her.

“I thought you might come,” Nan said, gratefully accepting the plate of hot buttered bannocks I’d baked. “Ah, I see you learned how to make them properly on your trip.”

I was about to ask her what trip she meant, but then I realized by the mischievous gleam in her eye that she knew exactly where I’d been. I looked at her more closely. She didn’t just resemble the seventeenth-century Nan Stewart—she was identical.

“It was you.”

“I ken what ye mean, lass, and, aye, I’m the same Nan you first met in Ballydoon.”

“First met? But didn’t we meet first here in Fairwick this fall?”

“First for you, but not for me,” she said, dunking a bag of the PG Tips tea I’d brought into a mug of hot water. “I met ye first in the Ballydoon market square the morning after All Hallows’ Eve, 1659, when ye brought my nephew William back from Faerie.”

“But I hadn’t done that yet when I met you here this fall. I hadn’t gone back yet.”

“Aye, but ye had. I know it’s confusing.” Nan patted my hand kindly. I looked down at her hand and saw the deep scars around her wrists where the witch hunters’ manacles had bit into her skin. “Everything about ye was a bit blurry when ye came to visit me, but after Halloween it all came clear—or most of it. I remember now your coming to Ballydoon and the time you spent there, how ye showed me to use the tartan—”

“That makes no sense,” I objected. “I saw the Stewarts use the tartan before I went back. How can I be the one who taught them how to use it?”

Nan shrugged and bit into her bannock. “Sense or no, that’s how I remember it. Just as I remember ye defeating the nephilim at Castle Coldclough.”

“And what happened after that?” I asked.

“Why, the village went back to normal, except that then we had a group of young men who could protect us from harm with the tartan. I taught new ones to use it over the years. Eventually they became known as the Stewarts instead of the Stewards. I discovered that I aged slowly and never died—an effect of the tartan, mayhap—and so I became the Stewarts’ ancient granny.” She leaned back in her hospital bed and plucked a corner of her plaid shawl over her shoulders. “But last year I began to feel a bit tired of looking after generation after generation of great clod-heided boys. I began to feel my time was finally coming on me, so I came to Shady Pines and then here. I think that I’ve been waiting all these years to meet ye again, to send you back. And now that I have …” She smiled, but wistfully. “Well, I think it might finally be my time.”

I started to object, but Nan squeezed my hand. “Dinna fash yerself, lass. I can rest easy knowing those monsters are well and truly gone. Since you came to see me, I’ve found myself half-living in those auld days, and I have an inkling that when I go, I’ll go back to those sweet-smelling hills …”

Her voice trailed off, and her eyes fluttered. I thought she might be going right now, but she was only falling asleep.