Guy Kay - Ysabel

“She needs a good look, Greg,” said Aunt Kim, stopping beside them. “Do we have antibiotics here?”

“I do,” said Meghan Marriner, uncovering the wound. “Hello, Kim.”

“Hello, Meg. How does it look?”

“Fairly shallow. More messy than dangerous. Clean and stitch. But he’ll need rabies shots.”

“Uh-uh,” said Greg. “Dr. Marriner, I don’t, it was a scratch, not a bite. And we don’t have time.”

“I do love it when my patients treat themselves. Makes me wonder why I did seven years of medical training. You can guarantee with mortal certainty no saliva got on those claws, Greg? Really? You’ll bet your life on it?”

Ned knew that tone of his mother’s. He’d grown up with it. Her response to illogic.

Greg didn’t waver, though. He kept on surprising.

“Can’t guarantee that, but I do know, Doc—and the boss and Ned know, too—that it wasn’t a rabid wolf.”

“It was a wolf?” Meghan said, her voice rising.

They hadn’t told her, Ned realized.

“Same ones we saw before, Ned?” Aunt Kim asked quietly.

He swallowed. “Maybe. I’m not so good at telling them apart, and it was dark the other time. They were spirits, though, from Beltaine.”

“Oh, Christ!” his mother snapped. “I absolutely refuse to start in with—”

Ned touched her arm. She stopped. Looked at him. He could see fury in her eyes.

“Mom. Please. You have to start in. You have to listen, or you can’t help. They were coming for me, Mom.”

His mother stared at him. He saw anger slipping, replaced by something trickier to define. “What does that mean?”

Ned looked at his father for help. Edward Marriner said, gravely, “It was pretty clear they were there to kill Ned, honey. And that they were ordered to do so.”

“Ordered? Ed are you—”

“Meg, I’m neither insane nor addled. I’m desperately glad you are here because we need your thinking, and in a hurry. But honey, you have to be thinking, not fighting us.” He hesitated. “Meg, I killed a wolf today in Les Alyscamps. And it was going for our son. It was given orders by a druid, Meg.”

Ned saw his mother’s eyes widen. “Oh, my! A real druid? Did he wave his mistletoe at you?”

A small silence.

“No,” her husband said. “He was killed when they attacked us.”

He didn’t say, yet, who had killed him.

Meghan looked at Ned again, then at Greg, wounded.

Greg shrugged. “I got in the way, ma’am. He’s telling the truth.”

Aunt Kim was still saying nothing. It was hard to read her expression.

Edward Marriner stepped closer. “Meg, this isn’t some grand conspiracy to make you revisit your family history. Something’s going on here, and that may mean that more than you think went on back then…but that isn’t the point now. Please listen when I say this. Please look at me and believe me.”

His wife stared at him. Her body was rigid with tension. Ned had never seen her like this. She turned to her sister.

“What have you done?” she said.

Aunt Kim stared back. It occurred to Ned, after, that if Uncle Dave had been beside them on the grass, she might not have reacted as she did. But he wasn’t.

“Oh, how perfect!” Kimberly snapped. “A flawless question, Meg. What comes next? We revisit how I dyed my hair white to fool everyone? How I got married and ran away just to reject you? Are you still a teenager?”

Meghan Marriner didn’t back down. “I never said me. I said your mother, too. Our mother. And you know it.”

“Our mother did a very good job of keeping close, Meghan, to the end of her life. She visited us, and you know it. We spoke all the time, and wrote, and visited. You know that, too. You made a point of staying away when we did. And she never, ever told me she was hurt by anything I’d done.”

“You’d expect her to say it? Mother? Oh, come on, Kim, you know better than—”

“I knew her as well as you did, Meghan. And she understood me a whole lot better than you did. I left because I couldn’t pick up the life I’d lived. I wanted to, I thought I would. I couldn’t. Too much had happened. You were the only person who mattered who didn’t see that. Want to talk about hurting someone? Meg, I came down here when I realized what had already happened to Ned. I’m trying to protect him. And get Melanie back. This is not about you and me.”

This is not just about the three of them.

The druid had said that, at least twice. He might even have been right. Just as Aunt Kim might be right, or not. Because maybe this was, in some hard way, about the two sisters…and him. Maybe there were places where the past didn’t go away, and maybe there were people for whom it stayed.

Ned looked at his father. Edward Marriner had the posture of a man desperate to say something, but having no idea what words would do more good than harm.

Which was pretty much how Ned felt.

Aunt Kim was still angry. He hadn’t seen her this way yet, either. “Meg, I said goodbye to my own mother in Toronto a full month before she died. I didn’t go to her funeral because she asked me not to. Said it would be too hard for you if I were there. You want to think about that?”

Hearing this, Ned was suddenly even more certain there was nothing he—or anyone—could say. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know any more about it. Greg looked stricken, as if he very badly wanted to get away, over by Kate and Steve at the drive. Way out of earshot.

Ned watched his mother. She looked shaken. “No, I don’t, actually,” Meghan Marriner said. “Not right now. I don’t want to think about that.”

Aunt Kim shrugged. “You thought I just didn’t bother to come. That I didn’t care enough. Of course, I could be lying about this, too. The way I lied about my hair. The way your husband and son are lying now about the wolves. You could decide that, Meg.”

Ned’s mother shook her head. “False choice, Kim. It doesn’t have to be truth or lie for them. People make mistakes, people get misled.”

“Mom!”

“Honey, that isn’t—”

“Meg, why would I mislead them? Listen to yourself!”

A silence as the three overlapping voices subsided.

Meghan Marriner looked from one to the other. “I feel like I’m being ganged up on.”

“You are,” Ned said. “But Mom—”

“Dr. M., can I say one thing?”

They all looked at Greg, with the blood on his arm. “I was clawed by a wolf just now. And it was given orders by a little guy who was a druid. I know that last for sure because of something he did to me last night. And that same guy was killed about an hour ago, and three of the wolves.”

Meghan Marriner looked at Greg for a long time.

“That was more than one thing,” she said.

Greg shrugged. “Sorry.”

Ned was watching his mother struggle with something embedded in herself. This was hard for him. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for her. He said nothing. He really, truly, didn’t know what he could say.

She drew a breath, finally. “All right. Fine.” Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m too old, I guess, for a certain kind of fight. I’m not very good with changes, though. Too old for that, too.”

“None of us are good with changes,” Kimberly said, quietly.

Meghan looked at her. “You’ve grown into the white hair, at least.”

Ned drew a breath. He saw Aunt Kim close her eyes. When she opened them, they were suspiciously bright. One sister might be the crying type.

“I like that red on you,” she said.

His mother made a face. “Once a month. Jean-Luc on Green Avenue. I’d be sad and grey without him.”

She looked around at the others. Something had changed. The rigidity was gone. “Let’s get Greg cleaned up,” she said, “then you’ll tell me what’s going on. I need to know about Melanie.”