A Grave Tree (4 page)

Sylvain’s silvery eyebrows fell. “I’m afraid I can’t speak to the rest of your life, young man, but in the short term, your mother asked me to keep you safe. Out of respect for my friendship with her, I’m going to do my utmost to do so until she returns.”

“And who was the ‘she’ Ian was talking about?” Caleb asked. “The person whose skill is growing and who Ian is looking for? Is that Selena?”

Sylvain pursed his lips and half-rose from the table. “Fresh-cut cantaloupe, anyone?” He reached in through the kitchen pass-through and retrieved a blue and red ceramic bowl.

His beam diminished a bit when there were no takers on the cantaloupe.

“Should we even trust Ian?” Caleb said. “Sandy said a bunch of things about him that night when we used the tunnels under Abbott’s, and he seemed to be pointing a gun at us. How do we know he didn’t shoot Jake? Sandy said he was stalking her.”

Sylvain’s eyes narrowed. “She did, did she?”

Caleb pulled Mark’s untouched plate of eggs over to his place at the table. “Sandy also said that she saved Mom’s life, and that was why she had to go to Nowhere. Shouldn’t someone be protecting Sandy from Ian? Don’t we owe her?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. We believe she may have gone with your mother anyway.”

“Sandy has taken over the aluminum mining operations in the future,” Mark announced through a mouthful of Rice Krispies.

Abbey and Caleb turned to Mark in surprise. The cantaloupe bowl slipped from Sylvain’s hands and fell with a thunk on the table, scattering bits of orange fruit all over their plates.

Mark recoiled from the flying fruit. Several pieces plunked into his bowl and sent milk spattering onto his hand. Abbey braced herself.

“What did you say, Mark?” Sylvain asked. His angular face had grown tight and stormy. Mark was too busy staring in horror at his bowl of cereal to notice.

“I think he said something about Sandy and an aluminum mine,” Abbey said, trying to rescue the situation.

“I heard him, Ms. Sinclair,” Sylvain said. “The question is, how does he know that?”

Mark rose from the table, his fists clenched. He was holding on to his composure, but just. “I do not like fruit in my cereal. I require a new bowl of cereal.”

Sylvain regarded him steadily. “Mark, I’ll get you a new bowl of cereal, but I need to know if you were listening at the door or the wall last night while Ian and I spoke.”

“I require a new bowl of cereal,” Mark repeated.

“Just answer the question, Mark,” Sylvain said.

Mark’s fist slammed hard into the table, making Abbey and all the dishes jump, then his hands flew to his ears. “I require a new bowl of cereal. I was not listening at the door. My head was flying around the room. I require a new bowl of cereal with one teaspoon of sugar and half a cup of milk. Half a cup, not a whole cup, otherwise there is too much milk.”

“I’ll get Mark’s cereal,” Caleb announced, rising from the table and hustling to the kitchen.

“Your head was flying around the room?” Sylvain repeated, his tone only slightly incredulous, given the circumstances.

“Yes,” Mark insisted.

Sylvain cocked his head. “Tell me, Mark, when your head was flying around the room, what did it feel like?”

Mark sagged back down into his chair. “It felt like I was dreaming, like I was in two places at once—in my bed, and in the office, but the words were all garbled, and I can’t remember them.”

“Except you obviously
did
just remember some of them,” Sylvain said.

“I can’t remember anything else,” Mark said quickly. Caleb placed a new bowl of cereal in front of Mark, who hunched over it and resumed shoveling Rice Krispies into his mouth.

“Very interesting,” Sylvain said, more to himself than to any of them.

The sound of a vehicle arriving diverted everyone’s attention, except Mark’s, and Abbey turned to see Russell’s white Volkswagen pulling into the drive. Farley leapt up from his spot by the fireplace and ran to the door, his tail wagging, low growls coming from his throat as if he was prepared for anything.

Sylvain headed to the door. “Listen, I have to be going soon. Russell is going to stay with you while I’m gone. Please don’t try any funny stuff. Remember, this arrangement is for your safety. There are many people who would consider you useful.”

Assets
, Abbey thought grimly.

Russell stood on the stoop in a tracksuit with four bags of groceries, his pale blue eyes intense. As always, they shifted quickly through the room until they found hers. He was alarmingly handsome, and his tracksuit outlined his rangy athletic body. He had tried to kiss Abbey at the Snowflake Dance, but the fact that he was a senior, and clearly involved in a variety of Sylvain’s initiatives, and was so… focused, was more than a little disconcerting. She had no idea whether he wanted to date her or
consume
her. She was pretty sure there was no vampire element to the whole witch thing, but if there was, Russell was a sure candidate. She had managed to mostly avoid him at school after the dance.

After Farley sniffed Russell and scuttled away with an air of wary acceptance, Sylvain assigned Caleb and Mark to put away the groceries while he busied himself with getting ready to depart. Abbey expected Caleb to object, but he got a gleam in his green eyes at the sight of Russell and went promptly into the kitchen with the groceries. Abbey could only imagine what he might be planning.

“I brought your homework,” Russell said to Abbey, as they stood alone in the now-empty front room while Mark and Caleb sifted through the groceries, extracting and sampling the snack-type foods they favored. “I figured you’d want it.”

“How did you get my homework?” Abbey said, stacking the dirty plates on the table to take to the kitchen.

“I told the teachers we were friends. Davison is doing entanglement theory in physics. I thought you’d find it interesting.”

“I didn’t think you were taking physics,” she said sharply. Russell hadn’t been in her physics class for the first two weeks after the recent semester change.

“I switched. I figured quantum physics would be far more useful to me than biology, considering…” He left off, but they both knew he was referring to the fact that he, too, came from witch bloodlines, and that quantum physics, and entanglement in particular, could be the underlying basis for their potential powers, which nobody, other than Ian, seemed interested in explaining to them.

“What do you know about the relevance of entanglement?” Abbey said in a low voice, while Sylvain shuffled things around in his office and cupboard doors opened and closed in the kitchen.

Russell’s face became wolfish, and he took a step closer to her, his lips curved in that dangerous smile that evidently other girls at Coventry High found irresistible. “I know some things. I’d be happy to go over some of the lessons with you after Sylvain leaves… if you like.”

Abbey swallowed and licked her somewhat dry lips. She should jump at this opportunity, but the way Russell said the word “lessons” made her think it was a euphemism for something else, although
what
she was not sure.

“Hey, sis, look alive. That dishwasher won’t load itself.”

Caleb appeared at her side, his hair at a rakish angle, and gave Russell a squinty-eyed assessment. He followed Abbey into the kitchen with a stack of dishes, and as she bent to place some of the cutlery in the dishwasher, he pressed his lips against her ear. “Get Russell’s phone,” he murmured, his lips warm and a bit gross against her ear. “At ten thirty, on the dot. Make sure he’s still signed in.”

Abbey froze and launched back into the upright position, nearly hitting her head against Caleb’s. He was planning something. Probably something not good.
How was she going to get Russell’s phone at ten thirty on the dot?

She finished scraping the dishes and placed them into the dishwasher while Mark polished off his third bowl of Rice Krispies and Caleb and Russell talked soccer in the living room. Sylvain returned to the main room just as Abbey finished up. He wore the long, dark grey overcoat they had first seen him in on Mrs. Forrester’s doorstep, five long months ago when they thought he was the enemy.

And maybe he
was
the enemy. How could they know? Maybe they had been abducted and were being kept away from their parents and lives by means of trickery and witchcraft. Sylvain had definitely endangered Abbey’s life when he forced her to test the docks with Jake. Maybe his sumptuous meals and general fatherly air were a new variety of Stockholm syndrome designed to keep them docile and in place.

But she still had access to Facebook, and could text and email Becca and Kimmie; she was not cut off, except for the two days early on in their stay when the Coventry electrical grid had suffered a massive failure. And yet her nightly texts, emails, and phone calls to both her parents went unanswered. Maybe her
parents
had been abducted. Maybe her parents were the ones cut off.

She hadn’t heard from Sam either, after his text that his research was being funded by Quentin Steinam and that he was coming to see her. He could have turned up at their house and she wouldn’t know. But he hadn’t updated his Facebook page in weeks, and he hadn’t responded to her text indicating that she wouldn’t be home and proposing a Skype meeting. He also hadn’t replied to her email suggesting that he look into boron as a possible component in the Burton process, which she sent after reading an article in
Advances in Chemistry
about the possibilities of boron as a nontoxic catalyst due to its incredible, virtually magical, ability to almost become another atom through modification of its electrons.

Boron: symbol B, atomic number 5, atomic weight 10.811 amu, used as a heat resistant alloy and in Silly Putty,
her brainiac mind-feed automatically rattled off.

Had that been what Mrs. Forrester had been trying to tell her by drawing five sticks? Mrs. Forrester’s drawings were always a curious wild goose chase up a series of wrong trees. But they were always important.

“Collecting Jake shouldn’t take more than an hour,” Sylvain said, pulling on a pair of black leather driving gloves. “I also will need to go to my old house and look for the file folder”—Sylvain paused and focused his gaze intently on Abbey, Caleb, and Mark in turn—“that somehow went missing when the three of you took my car for a little ride. I understand the circumstances that required you to steal the car, but I want you all to think carefully about whether you saw the file anywhere, and whether it may have fallen out on the road or in a parking lot during some of your travels.”

He had pressed them regarding the files several times already, the files that they had in fact removed from the Jag and left in Simon’s group home. The files with the photocopies of ancient texts that Simon was now trying to interpret.

As with the previous times Sylvain had asked, Abbey and Caleb both solemnly shook their heads, and Mark furrowed his brow in confusion. Mark had been so absorbed in his maps that Abbey doubted he’d even seen the files, which was convenient, because Abbey wasn’t sure how good Mark would be at lying. Sylvain scrutinized them each carefully in turn, and Abbey felt the now-familiar tug, an eddy in her brain that made her want to shout out the truth. Was this witchcraft? Was Sylvain somehow partially inside her brain? Or was this just her boring, garden-variety commitment to truth-telling?

She assembled a set of blocks in her mind, walled off the location of the files and the compulsion to tell the truth, and blinked ingenuously at Sylvain. If he could withhold information, so could they.

The tug vanished, and Sylvain crossed over to the door and gave them a wave and another slitty-eyed warning to stay put, and then he was gone, the Jag cruising down the winding dirt road in a torrent of rain.

“So I understand you’re going to give Abbey a physics lesson,” Caleb said brightly to Russell. “Then I was thinking we could all go out and play capture the flag.”

“I’m under strict orders to keep you inside, and not to open the door, except to let Farley out,” Russell said, “and I hardly think I could teach Abbey anything about physics. But I was thinking she and I could discuss some of the finer points of entanglement.” The way Russell said “entanglement” made Abbey shiver a little, and not in a good way.

“Sure thing, bro. You two brainiacs fill your physics boots,” Caleb replied. “Mark and I are going to go play
World of Warcraft
in Sylvain’s office. He has a data projector with a huge screen.”

Mark shifted his face into a big toothy smile, as if he had been coached that this was what he and Caleb would be doing. Abbey had never seen Mark play a video game before.

“Just remember to watch for ghosts,” Caleb added, “and keep your lesson PG. There’s lots of chaperones here today.” He winked and sent what seemed like a meaningful look in Abbey’s direction.

Abbey glared at Caleb and felt her face flush hot. What was he on about
this
time? But before she could say anything, Mark and Caleb scurried out of the room and into the office, and a few seconds later Abbey heard the opening music for the video game. What could they be planning? Caleb was broad and muscular for his age, and Mark had grown increasingly fit, but Russell was taller and broader than both of them. Working together they might be able to take him down—Abbey was not sure about Mark’s effectiveness in a fight, although he had been pretty good with the pointed stick-throwing in Caleb’s treed future—but someone would probably get hurt.

Russell went over to the office door and peeked in. Apparently satisfied that they were indeed playing video games, he closed the door slightly and returned to the main room, where Abbey stood by the dining room table. She flicked her eyes to the alarm panel that hung on the wall by the door to the kitchen. The light indicated that the sensors on the doors and windows were set to beep if opened. Sylvain must have flicked it on using the remote in his car.

“What ghosts is your brother talking about?” Russell said.

Alone together in the room, with the other door partially closed, Russell felt excruciatingly close, even though he wasn’t.