Shadows (26 page)

“I don’t know what way it is, any more,” I said. “But—you said you did have weres in Oldworld.”

“We do,” said Val. “But any not known to the government will be in a great deal of trouble if discovered.” He glanced at me a third time. “It is, as Takahiro said, stress that causes involuntary change. A properly trained and mentored were will not change, even under extreme stress. But the myth lingers that weres are untrustworthy and unpredictable. Therefore the government can do what it likes with you, or your boss or your neighbors will come to learn what you are.”

“That’s—blackmail,” I said, appalled.

“It is,” agreed Val.

When we got to Jebali Lane the soldiers were still there. Still waving their box. The same one strutted over to the corner as Val made the turn. Val stopped and slid the window down again.

“All well, sir?” said the soldier.

“I believe so, zir,” said Val.

The soldier glanced across Val to me. “Glad you’ve got that dog in the back seat,” he said, and patted the roof of the car like giving us permission to live.

“Bugsucker,” I said under my breath as Val slid his window closed and drove on. Val laughed.

Mom was opening the front door before we were out of the car. I thought: Elaine has made my new life worthwhile, whatever I have lost, and looked the other way when he put his arm around her. I slowly clipped Mongo’s lead on and then (quite a lot faster) took him for a walk.

CHAPTER 9

I PICKED MY ALGEBRA BOOK OFF THE KITCHEN table and took it and Mongo upstairs with me again. He threw himself on the floor and then bounced on and off the bed several times.
“Hey,”
I said in my best dog-trainer voice. “Stop that.” Usually he jumped onto the bed immediately and lay flat, trying to look invisible, in case I changed my mind and made him sleep in the kitchen after all. (Note that I wouldn’t
dream
of bringing him upstairs at bedtime and then taking him back to the kitchen. In the first place it’s
totally
unfair and in the second place he has a heartrending poor-sad-dog routine that would make a stone weep. Or possibly General Kleinzweig.)

Mongo looked confused for a moment, standing stiffly, tail up . . . and then I realized
Hix
was caroming around the room, very much like a dog inviting another dog to play chase-me. She was making a tiny half-imaginary sweet-smelling breeze. I had no idea what a
gruuaa
-trainer voice sounded like—or to what extent
gruuaa
would accept “training” from a mere human. “
Stop
that,” I said.

Hix collapsed. I could only see her because I had been looking straight at her when she went from lightning strike to stain on the carpet. “Bedroom rules,” I said to the stain on the carpet. “You lie down and be quiet. Or you sleep in the kitchen.” Like she had a collar and I could drag her downstairs. And she could probably slide under closed doors. The stain on the carpet roused itself and twinkled. “You’re allowed on the bed,” I said, and patted it, “as long as there’s still room for me.”

I didn’t see her move, but I knew she was now behind me—and the (new) stain on the carpet was gone. Mongo fell on the bed with a happy sigh. No one does a happy sigh better than a dog.

Quiet.

I looked at the algebra book. I was supposed to bandage it. Right. Um. I had some really pretty origami paper Jill had given me last Christmas that I was still waiting for the right moment to use. I got it out and started folding a chain. It took a while, but I finally had a long enough chain to wrap once completely around the book and enough left over to tuck in the space where the pages had been torn out, like a bookmark. I made those links extra-thick so when I closed the book the covers were almost parallel again. I laid it gently on the desk.

I got into bed gingerly. It’s one thing to wake up with a semi-visible, mostly intangible
gruuaa
having joined you some time in the night. It’s something else to worry that you’re lying down on top of her. Mongo gave another happy-dog sigh and I thought there was almost an echo to it, like the noise a semi-visible, mostly intangible critter might make. Her smell and the smell of clean dog went rather well together, like chocolate and vanilla. As I drifted to sleep I heard her start to hum.

• • •

When I woke up groggily the next morning to my alarm going NOW NOW NOW NOW my algebra book was on the bed. Mongo had his chin on it. I was
sure
I’d left it on the desk. I was pretty out of it last night but I wasn’t out of it enough to take the textbook from my least favorite subject to bed with me, even if it had saved my life yesterday. Was I? Maybe I was. I stared at it. The paper chain was gone. I blinked, trying to convince myself my eyes would focus before my first cup of coffee. Mongo had been a terrible paper shredder as a puppy (he’d been pretty much a terrible everything shredder as a puppy) but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t stoop now to eating an origami paper chain. Besides, if he’d tried, it should have woken me up.

Could a barely visible, semi-intangible critter have a taste for three-dimensional paper? I wasn’t sure if Hix was still here or not . . . and then a shadow on the wall moved in a way that nothing else in my room could have made a shadow of. Barely visible semi-intangible critters might very well be able to eat a paper chain silently and without making the bed shake. I wondered vaguely if there were any house-training issues with
gruuaa.
I didn’t think there’d been any weird stuff in the corners since Val moved in—well, any more weird stuff. Neither Mom nor I was big on housecleaning, Ran was hopeless and Val fit in with the family pattern very well. If
gruuaa,
uh, excreted, what
was
it? Nobody would notice more dust.

I climbed out of bed awkwardly, carrying my algebra book, and set it on the desk, feeling a bit like a dog trainer taking her dog back to the place she’d put him the last time she’d said “stay.” “Stay,” I murmured, thinking there was something funny about how it looked. Or rather there was something funny about the fact that it didn’t look funny . . . The covers were parallel. The top one didn’t slant down over the empty space in the middle. Okay, maybe that’s where the chain was. It must have got folded up inside somehow.

I opened the book. No chain slid into view. I couldn’t remember exactly where the ripped-out place was, so I fanned the pages, looking. It was toward the back—I thought. It should have been obvious. It had been very obvious last night. I yawned. Maybe I should get the coffee first. No, this was dumb. There was a dreeping great
hole
where I’d torn all those pages out.

No hole. There was, however, about two-thirds of the way through the book, a big clump of some rather odd pages. There was algebra stuff written on them—awful-looking equations with lots of letters and squiggles, but I wasn’t going to think about that now—but the paper was strangely shiny and there were faint patterns printed on it, as well as the textbook stuff. Colored patterns in a range of mostly pastels and some deep violet. Very like the pretty paper Jill had given me for Christmas, which I’d folded into a chain to make a bandage for a wounded algebra book. I flipped the strange pages back and forth. They were (apparently) bound into the spine with the rest of the ordinary pages, although if I ran my fingers over them they were slightly textured, like Jill’s paper had been, but the patterns were much fainter than they’d been on Jill’s paper. I thought, since the entire situation is totally screwloose and doolally, what’s a little more? Who cares?

The new pages were also more flexible than paper—either than algebra-book paper or fancy origami paper. I riffled them again. And while I was having my it’s-all-screwloose-so-who-cares attack, I looked at them waving back and forth and thought that it wasn’t me that was providing all the waving, and the way one of those pages felt between your fingers was almost
muscular.
Well, the book had to have got to my bed somehow. . . .

What was I
saying
?

I had to sit down kind of abruptly. Fortunately my desk chair was right there. I slapped the book shut and stared at it. It lay as still as a dog who knows you mean it this time. I kept staring at it. Of course it lay still. It was a
book.
And the shadows on the wall were just shadows. I kept my eyes averted from where Hix was playing with the pull cord of the curtain. I didn’t want to think about any of it—which included Takahiro’s secret—I wanted everything to be like it had been two weeks ago—two months ago—before Val—before Dad died. Especially before Dad died. I grabbed the edge of the desk and held on hard for a moment.

One of the great things about dogs is they don’t do regrets and what-ifs and all that useless human-thinking stuff. Mongo got off the bed and put his nose under my forearm and gave it a heave. It meant, Hi, I’m here, and, by the way, it’s morning, and I want a pee and breakfast. If Dad hadn’t died it might have taken me a few years longer to convince Mom to let me have a dog. And I’d rather not hate Val. And Hix was a friend. And Casimir. And Takahiro . . .

I got up—maybe a little unsteadily—put my dressing gown on and took Mongo downstairs. There was a faint breeze around my ankles that might have been Hix. I let Mongo out (with or without Hix) and groped my way into the kitchen to make coffee. Mom or I was nearly always the first one up. It was me today. It had seemed to me unfair for years now that it was like this. Ran got up cheerful but you needed a blowtorch or a jackhammer to wake him. Val was the same. Maybe it’s something to do with the Y chromosome.

I poured my first mug and chugged about half of it. I put the rest of the coffee in our big insulated pot, put it on a tray with three more mugs (although Ran was still drinking milk out of his) and brought it to the table.

Where my algebra book was lying.

I may have whimpered. I stared at it. Maybe it stared at me, I don’t know.

Mongo, who was watching through the glass for when I plunked the tray on the table, whined at the kitchen door to be let back in. So I did. Several
gruuaa
came with him; it wasn’t just Hix. They arranged themselves along the baseboards very like long thin shadowy dogs and . . . fell asleep? I don’t know that either. I sat down in my chair. The algebra book had sidled a little closer to where I’d left my mug on the table while I was letting Mongo in. I finished my first mug of coffee and poured my second. My hands were shaking.

Mom came into the kitchen yawning and rubbing her hair. She fell—well, sat—in her chair and started on her first mug of coffee. Halfway through it you could see the possibility of articulate speech returning. “Cramming already?” she said, nodding at the algebra book. “Is your teacher this year that bad? Poor you.”

“I—er—the book’s so huge and such a weird shape it won’t fit in my knapsack, and I’m afraid of leaving it behind,” I said, thinking fast. I was pretty sure I was supposed to have read the introduction, or else why had I hauled it home in the first place? Maybe I could do it at lunch. The introduction should be mostly
words.
I knew what it would say: that algebra was fun and easy and we were going to have a really good time together this year blah blah blah. Dreeping dreeping
dreeping.

“It
is
a weird shape,” said Mom, pulling it toward her. “What on earth were they thinking when they made a textbook half the size of a coffee table?” She lifted the front cover. It opened, it seemed to me, lazily, like a cat stretching; the cover, when she let go of it, didn’t drop inertly to the tabletop the way it should, but subsided gently, and the pages started fanning
themselves.
They fell open, of course, about two-thirds of the way through, where the paper was silky and printed with something besides algebra. I could see
x
² + 6
x
– 8 = 3
x
+ 7 all wound around a flowering vine: the
x
’s were tiny four-petaled flowerets. I didn’t know if the right answer was
“ugh”
or
“awww.”

“How extraordinary,” said Mom, stroking one of the pages (which was stiffly standing straight up, like a cat being petted). “Whatever is the paper made of?”

I had no idea how I was going to answer that one, but fortunately she looked at the clock and said, “Oh, flastic, Ran has got to get up,” finished her coffee and went back upstairs to throw shoes at my brother (I wish. I’ve been known to do that, but it got me in trouble). I took my algebra book (and more coffee) back upstairs with me, got dressed in record time, and brought my knapsack downstairs again
with
the zootronic book, as camouflage. As I snapped Mongo’s lead on I was aware of Hix climbing up my arm from Mongo’s back and arranging herself around my neck in what I guess was becoming her standard position. I straightened up and glared at my algebra book. “You stay
right there,
” I said. “I’ll be back.”