Tortall (38 page)

Jeffries gasped. He always bragged on his family going back to European nobility and did not like her comment about his breeding. Ignoring him, she put two fingers to her
lips and blew a whistle that had everyone clutching their ears. As its echoes faded, I heard sounds in the brush behind me and around me. Dogs trotted down from the rocks and trees. It was then, I think, that a few creeps decided life was better somewhere else. Some of those dogs were really big. They looked like they had Rottweiler or wolfhound in them, but it was all part of a mix. Whatever the full mix was, it was dangerous. They were lean, hard-looking animals, cautious as they came out onto open ground.

The closer they got to Her—by now I understood the truth of Her being—the lighter they were on their feet, until they frisked around Her like puppies, tails wagging. They were glad to see Her. They were strays, their coats tangled, some ribs showing, but they weren’t stray-cautious once they could smell Her.

“Fuck this.” Reed broke the spell. She had her gun out and had pointed it at Her. “I don’t know who—”

Up came the bow. I didn’t even see the hand that took an arrow from the quiver. I glimpsed the arrow on the string, the ripple of muscle as She drew the string to Her ear, and loosed. The arrow went through one of Reed’s beautiful eyes. She fell, the gun still in her hand.

The Goddess looked at Felix and the Pride. “I said,
you are My prey now
. You thought to hunt one who is under My protection. Now meet My price. I give you the chance you gave to her—the trees. Linger but a moment more, and I shall lose My patience.” She looked at the dogs. “My children, see that one?” She pointed to Jeffries. “Tear him to pieces.”

That set the Pride free of Her spell, if She had cast one.
All of them, including Jeffries, bolted for the trees of the old forest. She let them go. Despite Her words, the dogs waited around Her feet, panting, scratching, rolling on the grass. She walked over, collected Reed’s gun, and handed it up to me, along with the bottle of water Reed had carried in a holder at her waist. I took both with shaking hands and would not meet Her eyes. The Goddess did a few runner’s stretches for Her legs, then chirped to the dogs. Running easily, the bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, She headed up into the rocks. The dogs fanned out around Her and caught up, all business now.

It was a long time before I found the nerve to come down and check Reed. She was dead, her skin as cold as marble. The arrow that had killed her had vanished. There wasn’t even a mark where it had struck her.

I looked around. All of the creeps were gone. That was probably a good idea. The Goddess might have decided they were worth hunting next. There was no telling what might offend Her.

For a long time the only sounds I heard were the dogs’ baying, and an occasional shriek, up among those old dark trees. I made myself collect my backpack and everything I had brought. At some point there would be cops. I didn’t want them finding anything of mine and tracking me to my door like they did on television. I knew they wouldn’t believe me, and I didn’t want the psychiatrists, or the medication, or the attention. I just wanted to curl up in my bed and come up with ways to apologize to my mother’s family for past disrespect.

Thinking of them, I checked my cell phone. There were no calls, though it was long past midnight. I wondered if Mom knew who I was running around with so late. The thought made me giggle. The giggle sounded a little strange, so I made myself quit. Then I sat down and waited. It never occurred to me to just go home. I hadn’t been dismissed.

Sometime before dawn the dogs returned one by one. They were tired. After a look around, and a pee at the base of the rocks, they decided I was harmless. They lay down close to me and got to work licking the dark stains from their fur. Last to appear was their mistress, carrying a small terrier I had missed in all the confusion. His muzzle, too, was dark. He was more interested in trying to kiss Her face than in cleaning himself up.

I scrambled to my feet, though my legs were jelly from all my running. She would not catch
me
showing Her disrespect. She stopped in front of me.

“As I thought. They were better prey than hunters,” She said in that chill and distant voice. “Here is my sign, to safeguard you on your way home.” She pressed a blood-smeared thumb to my forehead and drew a crescent there. It felt as cold as Her voice. I swayed and tried not to faint, either from Her touch or from the thought that I now had Pride blood on me. “Tell your family they have served Me well. I am pleased.” She dropped something on the ground between us.

I looked down at Felix’s braid. “I didn’t ask for this,” I whispered. “Or for them to die.”

She smiled. “I answer prayers as I will, maiden. Only remember the others who perished at their hands. Your
enemies would have taken more, in time.” She yawned and pulled the tie out of Her ponytail. Ivory hair cascaded down over her shoulders. “Good night to you, maiden. Or rather, good day.”

I watched as She strolled across the meadow, still carrying Her terrier. A quick whistle called the rest of her pack. They followed Her, panting, tails wagging. Somewhere in the middle of that long expanse of grass, with no trees or rocks to hide them, they vanished.

When I began college, I was in the middle of a five-year case of writer’s block, so I made other career plans. I chose psychology, with an eye to working with kids, structuring most of my work-study jobs to that end as I took courses in education and social work as well as psychology. Just before the start of my junior year, my writing returned to me. After that, I forgot my original goal. I wrote.

After I finished the manuscript of a long, single adult novel titled
The Song of the Lioness
, I drifted until my dad and stepmother invited me to live with them in Idaho. A week following my arrival, I found a job in the only thing I was educated for: I became a housemother in a group home for teenage girls. Many events in “Testing” actually happened to me, though not all in the first week.

My girls were lively, inventive, and well defended. By the time I met them, their trust had been abused so often that it was hard for them to open up. I began a dialogue with them not through photographs, as X-ray does, but through storytelling. My first “serial” for the girls involved retelling my
Song
to them (I wasn’t allowed to let them read my novel, which dealt with adult subjects). A year later, when my agent
suggested that I break it up into four books for teenagers, I realized I already had.

I miss the girls still. They taught me so much, not just about writing for kids, but about the need for a sense of humor. I’ve been trying to pay them back ever since, not directly, since we all fell out of touch, but by writing for other kids who could use some fantasy in their lives.

I never realized how much I needed things to be
steady
. The Smithton Home for Girls wasn’t paradise, but it was solid. Things had been the same ever since I arrived. Every other week we had Renee, who was the best housemother for a crew of ornery girls that you could imagine. She was perky, funny, energetic, knew the current groups and dances, and didn’t yell at us to turn the music down during free time. We liked our other housemother, Shoshana, too, but in the spring of my first year at the Smithton Home for Girls, Shoshana got married and moved to Oregon.

They hired Dumptruck first. She was fortysomething and sloppy, had a voice that would break glass, and feet she always complained about. To go from Renee to her every other week was more than any of us could stand.

Then we found out Dumptruck hated lizards. Hated snakes. And the way she yelled when she found the newt in her bed … She killed the newt with her shoe and quit. Keisha cried about it for days. You wouldn’t think a girl who was there for robbing convenience stores with her thirty-year-old boyfriend would care what happened to a slimy newt, but Keisha was nuts for animals.

Next came Sugar. She was younger, thin like a stick, with dry, straight hair and pale eyes that grabbed a girl and hung on to her. She carried a Bible wherever she went. We called her Sugar, after her strongest curse, “Oh, sugar!”

She told us to walk and talk quietly. She prayed before meals, which majorly chapped Maria Hightower. Maria’s boyfriend taught her Native American religion before he got her pregnant and dumped her at a bus station. When Sugar insisted on prayer even after Maria explained about the Great Spirit, Corn Woman, and Coyote, Maria told us Coyote ought to teach Sugar respect.

By then we were tired of going from Renee, who made us feel good, to Sugar, who told us that the Smithton Home was our road to redemption. It was her not-so-subtle way of telling us that we’d all done stupid things to end up there.

Sugar was a little harder to get rid of than Dumptruck, but we managed. We painted some candles black and switched the King James Bible she kept in her purse for a book Elsie found,
The Satanic Bible
. We wrote “Satan” backward on the covers of our notebooks. Maria told her the baby the state made Maria give up for adoption was really sacrificed to the dark powers. Sugar ran like a rabbit.

I was drawing in my room a few days after Sugar left when Ana came to get me. “You got to hear this,” she said. She led me to the office downstairs—Maria, Keisha, and Alouette were already listening at the closed door.

“—don’t dare tell them they have control over which housemother stays or goes.” That was Dr. Marsden—Dr. M, we called him—who ran the home. “If we ask them to go
easy on new housemothers, they’ll be in the power position, and they’ll use it.”

“Sooner or later we’ll run out of housemothers, Ben.” That was Rowena Washington. Ro was the in-house social worker. She took us to court, medical, and dental appointments, helped the housemothers to chaperone at things like fairs and movies, and helped Dr. M fill in when there was no alternate housemother. “Every time we advertise, we get fewer and fewer applicants.”

“They’ll stop the testing behavior,” we heard Renee tell them. “School’s about to start—pretty soon they’ll be busy with that, and they won’t have time to get rid of the new housemother.”

A chair scraped, and we got out of there. Later, in the smoking corner of the house, we decided “testing behavior” sounded like a most cool term for what we were doing. We would have put any new housemother through the mill, just as the girls the year before me put Renee through it, but “testing behavior” made it sound like an important kind of game. We
had
to play.

Five days later we came home to find a strange girl sitting in the dining room with Renee. “This is Doreen Swanson,” Renee told us. “She’s going to be our new housemother.” The girl—she was just out of college, we found out—smiled shyly as Renee started to introduce us.

I was shaking Doreen’s hand when my throat started to close up. The minute she let go, I ran upstairs to my room and shut the door. I couldn’t breathe. Sweat poured down my face; my knees wobbled so I could hardly stand. I dropped on my bed and covered my eyes with my arm, trying
to get a grip. It was a panic attack, the first one in months. When I arrived at the home, Dr. M—who was a shrink as well as the director—put me on tranquilizers and had personal sessions with me for weeks to help me with them.

Now I did what we’d worked out. I held my breath, then let it out slowly, the way Ana had to when her asthma got rolling. After a while, my throat relaxed some. I’m in my room, I told myself, as Dr. M had suggested. I’m on my bed. My stuffed animals are in a pile in the corner. My picture of my mom is on my desk. My books are on the dresser.

By the time I had named all the things that were mine, that had always been mine, the shakes were fading and I could breathe almost normally. I could think, which was the next step. I was supposed to work out what had given me attacks before. I didn’t even remember what my last ones here at the home were about. Before that, I got them in juvenile hall, in court, in cop cars and bus stations. I had one when the last guy who picked me up showed me his knife. Then it had actually been useful: he’d thought I was dying and dumped me out of his car. Those all made sense.