Karsten Knight - Afterglow

“Listen.” He held up his hand. “I already told you people where you could find him. If he’s not at the observatory, that’s not my fault. I’m not his keeper.”

“I’m not here to hurt you. I just have a few questions.” Ash took a step forward, into the path of the light streaming through the window.

The boy visibly relaxed a little when the afternoon sun lit her face. “Your hair is longer than hers,” he said. “But you two must be related.”

“You saw my sister?” Ash asked. Must have been Eve, too, since Rose had longer hair than all of them. “And they were asking for someone?”

“I take it you’re not with them, then.” He sounded relieved and took off his Red Sox cap to wipe his brow. The hair over his ears turned up in wingtips from where the cap had probably made a home since his last haircut . . . whenever that was.

“Hell no,” Ash said. “When were they here?”

The boy swept aside the heavy ropes and threw down his backpack in the corner. “The two of them came in before I left for lunch,” he said. “The Native American guy and your sister, apparently.”

So Rose hadn’t been here . . . which explained why the church was still intact and not a pile of brick and wooden rubble down on Salem Street. Colt must have put Proteus, the shape-shifter, in charge of babysitting her somewhere—a weird image, since six-year-old Rose was now in the body of a sixteen-year-old.

The guy seemed to have decided that Ash wasn’t a threat, because he popped a squat on the wooden stool that his pizza box had landed next to. The top had flipped open, but the pizza inside remained magically unscathed. “I’m Tom, by the way.” The aroma of greasy cheese seemed to have distracted him, and he took a moment to inhale with his eyes closed. “Nobody makes pizza like the Italians do.”

“Dude,” Ash said. “I didn’t come here for a Food Network episode.”

Tom took a huge bite of pizza. “Sorry,” he said, his voice muffled through cheese and crust. “Anyway, they were looking for my friend.”

“What friend?”

“My classmate. At MIT.” He kicked his backpack, which was so overstuffed with textbooks that it probably weighed as much as the bells above them. “We’re both biomedical engineering majors—and Bellringers, too.”

She pointed to his blue T-shirt that, sure enough, read “Bellringer” across the front. “I just thought that was the name of some band I’d never heard of.”

Tom laughed through another mouthful of pizza. “It sort of is. We’re the guild in charge of making music with those things.” He jabbed the slice of pizza crust up toward the rafters, then to the ropes. “Eight men, each to a rope, in charge of one bell, one note.”

“Riveting,” Ash muttered. “I bet all the girls throw their panties into the belfry when you guys give concerts.”

“That’s why I’m going to med school. Chicks dig doctors. Anyway, the Native American dude and your sister somehow found out that Modo and I do all our homework up here during the week—it’s quieter than the library, you know?—but he’s off preparing for his performance tonight.”

Ash raised her eyebrow. “His name is Modo? My sister and her friend were looking for a guy named Modo ?”

“You know, like short for Quasimodo?” For the first time since his arrival Tom actually looked a little embarrassed. “The guy has a crippled leg, walks with a limp, and hangs out in a bell tower. It would be a travesty of literary justice if we didn’t nickname him that.”

“You named your friend,” Ash said slowly, “after the Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

“Oh come on. Even he calls himself Modo now.”

Ash held up a hand to shut him up. “I just want to know where to find . . . Modo. Where did you send my sister and the douche bag with her?”

A slow grin trickled across Tom’s face. “Where you’ll find Modo and where I said he is are two different things.”

“You lied to them?” A peal of relieved laughter burst out of Ash. “Tom, I could kiss you right now!” When he lowered the slice of pizza in his hand and leaned in hopefully, Ash shook her head. “It’s just an expression.”

Tom shrugged and bit into the slice. “I sent them to an observatory on the other side of the state where Modo likes to go stargazing sometimes. . . . Only they won’t find him there. He’s working the fair tonight.” Before Ash could ask, “Fair?” he reached into his backpack and pulled out a flier.

The one-page handbill was printed to look like it was on old, beige parchment, to match the headline across the top:

King Edward’s Feast

It was an advertisement for a freaking Renaissance fair.

The pictures showed women in corsets and men in chain mail, with jousting and court jesters and medieval magic shows.

Tom leaned in, and at first Ash thought he was making another pass at her. Instead he put his greasy fingertip on a picture toward the bottom, of a boy with olive skin dressed in medieval garb. Ash guessed he was of Mediterranean descent, possibly Greek. His curly black hair fell to his shoulders, which were covered in chain mail. It wasn’t that his face was unattractive, but there was something grizzled and timeworn about his skin that made him look much older than a college student. He sat on top of a horse, with a lance under one arm and a metal helmet cradled in the other.

“So that’s Modo, huh?” Ash said. “How can I get to this dorky little festival?” Since she had arrived, she’d barely had time to drop the bag of clothes she’d thrown together at a cheap hotel, and she wasn’t old enough to rent a car.

“It has a small fan base among the MIT kids, so they charter a bus to the fair. If you hustle to campus, you might make the four o’clock shuttle.”

Ash stood up, already programming the engineering school into her cell phone’s GPS. “I won’t need a student ID to board the bus?”

“Nah, they don’t check it.” Tom smirked. “And even if they did, you could easily pass for an engineering student.”

“Why’s that?” When Ash realized what he was implying, she crossed her arms. “Do we need to have a discussion about cultural stereotypes? I’m Polynesian.”

“Maybe we can discuss my ignorance over dinner?” he asked hopefully.

But Ash was already on her way out the door, heading for the subway. The fourteenth-century lords and ladies of the Renaissance fair were about to get a special visit from a twenty-first-century goddess.

Ash slept most of the bus ride, having pulled an all-nighter to catch her early morning flight out of Miami. The next thing she knew, her seat was being jostled as the students behind her stood up. She blinked away the thin veil of sleep and stepped down into the dirt parking lot with the others.

After paying the entry fee to get in, Ash’s first thought as she entered the fairgrounds was: I am completely under-dressed.

She knew she’d been the only one on the bus wearing jeans, but this was ridiculous. As far as the eye could see across the wooded marketplace, people were dressed in tunics and trousers and dresses. Some of the women rocked elaborate braids, while the men donned feather-tipped caps and leather helmets.

So much for looking inconspicuous , Ash thought.

She wasn’t quite ready to go flashing a picture of Modo around to random strangers, playing the “Have you seen this knight?” game, so she decided to take a walk around the compound. The fair basically consisted of a series of wooden storefronts and huts, each containing some type of medieval craftsman. Weaver. Corset maker. Even an artist painting the profile of a squirming schoolgirl who wouldn’t stop giggling.