Ysabel Read online

From inside the house, just then, as the sun was going down at the end of a day, the telephone rang.

  Ned looked quickly at his watch. So did his father.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” said Edward Marriner, with feeling.

  Listening to the ring, Ned corrected his earlier thought. One person could—probably would—find it extremely easy to yell at Aunt Kim, and disbelieve her, too.

  He and his father exchanged a glance. Ned, feeling an emotion he couldn’t immediately identify, said, “I’ll get this one.” His father, halfway to his feet, subsided into his chair again. In a way, that was a surprise. In another way, it wasn’t: this wouldn’t be a conversation he’d rush to have.

  His heart beating fast again, Ned went in, crossed to the dining room, and picked up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, sweetie, it’s me!”

  The connection to Africa was really good again. It was weird somehow; you expected a war zone to have crackly, broken-up phone lines.

  Ned took a breath. “Hi, Mom. Listen. You have to listen carefully. We need you here. Fast as you can. Melanie’s disappeared. Some totally weird things are happening. I can’t even explain on the phone. Aunt Kim’s come to help, but we need you. Please, Mom, will you come?”

  It poured out in pretty much one breathless rush. In retrospect, he probably could have found a smarter way of telling her, but he was really scared, and wound up, and there wasn’t an easy way to do any of this. And he hadn’t expected to ask for her, not in that way, like a child.

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, not surprisingly.

  He heard her intake of breath. “Ned, did you just tell me that your aunt is there?”

  He said, “Mom, what I said was that I need you. Did you hear that part?” Now that he’d said it, he realized he really wanted her here.

  “Edward, where’s your father?” She called him Edward only when it was really serious.

  “On the terrace. We’re trying to figure out what to do. Mom, I told you, Melanie’s gone.”

  “Do I have this right? Kimberly, my sister, is with you? In France?”

  She sounded a bit in shock, actually.

  “Yes, Mom. We need her, too. With what’s happening.”

  His mother swore. It was pretty remarkable. “Get me your father, please. Right away.”

  He took a breath again. “No,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Not till you say you heard me, Mom.”

  “I’m hearing you just fine. I heard that—”

  “Mom. I’m fifteen. I’m not a kid, and I’m asking for my mother to come help me. Think about that. Please.”

  Another silence. A release of breath from far away.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, sweetie. Forgive me. I’m . . . pretty stunned. But all right, I’m on my way. Fast as I can get there. Soon as I’m off the phone I’ll set it up.”

  For like the fifth time today or something he felt like crying. Maybe he was still a kid. “Jeez. Thanks, Mom. Really. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Now will you get your father, please?”

  “I think he’s scared to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  He knew that tone. “I’ll go get him. See you soon.”

  “Soon, honey.”

  He went back out. His father looked up, so did Aunt Kim. Both looked remarkably nervous.

  “She wants to talk to Dad.”

  His father stood up.

  “She knows I’m here?” his aunt asked.

  Ned nodded. “I asked her to come.”

  They stared at him. Neither spoke for a moment.

  “Is she?” his father said finally.

  “She says so, yeah.”

  “How nice,” Aunt Kim said, in a voice that was kind of hard to read.

  His father went inside. Ned looked at his aunt. She was fishing a cellphone from her bag. “Uncle Dave?” he asked.

  “God, yes,” she said, nodding her head. “You have no idea how much I want him here right now.”

  Ned hesitated. “I might. You said so the other night. He wouldn’t come if my mom had stayed there, right? He’d have stayed with her?”

  Aunt Kim held her phone and looked thoughtfully at him.

  “Ned Marriner, is that why you asked Meghan to—”

  “No! I really want her. She’s good, my mom, when things need figuring out. But I also thought, from what you said, that Uncle Dave . . . that we might need . . .”

  He trailed off.

  His aunt was staring at him. So were Steve and Greg. And Kate, he realized.

  Aunt Kim smiled suddenly. She looked really pretty when she did, he thought. You could see what she might have been like when she was younger. She shook her head a little, seemed about to say something else, but didn’t.

  She took her phone and walked along the terrace towards the sunset. They heard her greet someone, then she went around the corner of the house and they couldn’t hear any more.

  There was a silence around the table. It was chillier now, with the day ending. Steve was bare-chested, wrapped in his towel. He had to be cold. Ned looked at the eastern trees beyond the driveway and the red car and the green wire fence. The moon would rise soon. For the second time.

  “Do we tell her parents?”

  It was Greg, and after a moment Ned realized the question was addressed to him, as if he was the one who should know, or decide. Steve was looking at him, as well, waiting for an answer. That was pretty tough to deal with. So was the worry on their faces. You had to call it fear, really. He didn’t know the exact relationships among his father’s team, but Melanie would be someone they cared about. A lot.

  “Um, we’ll see what Aunt Kim says, but I think—”

  “I think we have to wait three days,” Kate said, unexpectedly. “If we can.”

  “Three, because . . . ?” Steve asked.

  Kate looked pale and anxious, but determined. “Three, because what are you going to say to them? And because that’s how long she gave the men to find her.”

  “And why does that decide it?”

  It was difficult, knowing this, but he did seem to know it. He had been there, on the plateau. “Because if we have any hope of getting Melanie back, it’s by finding her before either of them does.”

  “Christ!” snapped Steve, standing up in his towel and bathing suit. “Is this hide-and-seek or James Bond? What do we do if we find her? Ask her pretty please to change back, and don’t forget the green streak in her hair?”

  Ned glared at him. “How the hell do I know? What do you want me to say?”

  Greg looked from one to the other of them. He held up his hands in a “T” for time out. “We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it,” he said.

  Ned managed a shrug, but he was still mad. Really. What did they expect from him?

  Steve was looking at him. “Sorry,” he said, sitting down again. “My bad. I’m freaked. I have no idea how to act.”

  “None of us do,” Kate said. “Unless maybe Ned’s aunt?”

  “It’s like going to war,” Greg murmured. He scratched his beard. “How can you know how you’ll behave, or anything like that?”

  They heard a footfall. Ned’s father was in the doorway to the kitchen. He stood there, shaking his head. “I have no idea what you said,” he murmured to Ned, “but she is coming. And she didn’t explode.”

  “Not on the phone,” Ned said.

  His father considered that. “Right. Not on the phone.”

  “How’s she getting here?” Ned asked.

  “She thinks she can get to Khartoum tonight on a UN food plane, then to Paris in the morning. Then down here.”

  “So, like, late afternoon? Evening?”

  “That’s right,” his father said. “She’ll phone.”

  “I’m missing something,” Greg said. “Why would Dr. Marriner explode? That’s not her style.”

  Another footfall, from the far end of the terrace. Aunt
Kim walked back. They all turned that way. The sun was behind her, almost down.

  “Dave’s coming,” she said. “He’s going to try for a military flight to anywhere in Europe tonight. Then connect.” She stopped as she saw them staring at her.

  “Ah,” she said. “And Meghan’s on her way?”

  Edward Marriner nodded.

  “How nice,” said Kim, again.

  CHAPTER XI

  Ned had forgotten about the van. They had to go back for it. Greg had a second set of keys, Aunt Kim had her car.

  Ned said he’d go with them.

  His father looked as if he wanted to veto that, but Ned was the one who knew where the van was, and it was getting dark. The approach of night made them decide to take off right away.

  “Please come straight back. Would you like to sleep here tonight?” Edward Marriner asked his sister-in-law.

  Kim nodded. “I think I should. Kate, do you want to stay with us? Or have you had enough of this?”

  Kate hesitated, then shook her head. “I’ll stay. If there’s room for me? I can call and say I’m overnighting with a friend.” She gave Ned a look, and shrugged. “Marie-Chantal does it all the time.”

  “She’ll be jealous,” he said, half-heartedly. He was thinking that it was Beltaine eve now.

  “Only if I say it’s with a guy,” she said.

  “It definitely isn’t with a guy,” Edward Marriner said firmly. “You and Kimberly can have Melanie’s room on the ground floor, if you don’t mind sharing?”

  Aunt Kim smiled. “’Course not. It’ll make me feel young.”

  “And maybe we’ll have her back tomorrow,” Ned’s father added.

  Kimberly looked at him, seemed about to say something, but didn’t. Ned realized that she’d been doing that a lot.

  “Let’s get your van,” she said.

  SHE DROVE QUICKLY and well. Traffic had thinned out. It didn’t take long to get there. Ned found that unsettling.

  You were sitting where you could grab a Coke from the fridge and listen to U2 on your headphones, and then you were in a place where a bull had just been sacrificed and a man had drunk its blood and summoned a woman to life, between fires. No transition space between those things.

  He’d thought about distance and speed and the modern world a couple of days ago, on the way to the mountain. He’d even had a notion to write a school essay about it, saying clever things.

  The memory felt absurd now, another existence entirely. He looked at Kim in the glow of the dashboard lights. He wondered if that had been the feeling that had driven her from home after whatever had happened to her. Could you be drawn so far into this other kind of world that your own—the one you’d known all your life—felt alien and impossible?

  “Just ahead on the right,” he said, as the headlights picked out the brown sign for Entremont.

  She saw it, and turned, a little too fast, the wheels skidding briefly.

  “Sorry,” she said, downshifting as they climbed.

  “That’s how I drive,” Greg said.

  He’d been quiet, had taken the back seat so Ned could navigate. Ned was impressed with him, and grateful: Greg had been a lot easier than Steve about accepting their story. He wondered about that, too. What made some people inclined to believe you and others to react with anger or shock? He realized he didn’t know a whole lot about Greg or Steve. Or Melanie, for that matter.

  The headlight beams, on bright, picked out the closed gates and the parking lot to the left of them. Kim swung into the lot. The van was alone there.

  They all got out. Greg punched his remote and the doors of the van unlocked. Kim opened the passenger side.

  “Her bag’s here.”

  “Figured. Okay, let’s go,” Greg said, going around to the driver’s side. “I’ve got the creeps here, big time.”

  Ned heard him, but he found himself walking the other way, towards the gates. They were locked, but could be climbed pretty easily. Kate had said the security guy came just to open them and lock up. Ned looked through, saw the wide path that led east to the entrance.

  Trees mostly hid the northern wall of the site from here, but he knew it was there, and what was on the other side. The wind had pretty much died down now.

  “Ned, come on!” Greg called.

  He heard his aunt’s footsteps coming over.

  “They’re probably still in there,” he said, not looking back. “She told them to give her all night. Not to start looking till morning.”

  She sighed. “If I had any real power, dear, I’d go in with you, see what we could do. But I don’t, Ned. We won’t get her back by getting killed there on Beltaine.”

  “Would they do that?”

  She sighed again. He looked at her.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said. “I wasn’t here. If they thought we were going to interfere, from what you’ve told us . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “If they thought that, some of them might.”

  “And we are,” Aunt Kim said. “We are going to try to interfere.”

  “How?”

  He saw her shake her head. “No idea.”

  “Come on!” Greg shouted again. They heard him start the engine.

  “He’s right. We don’t want to see them tonight. Or have them see us. You two head straight home,” Kimberly said. “I’ll meet you there. I’m just going to stop at the hotel for my things.”

  Ned was still looking through the gates towards that other world beyond. Greg honked the horn. It sounded shockingly loud, intrusive. Ned turned and walked back and got in the van and they drove away.

  He and Greg didn’t say much to each other. Aunt Kim was ahead of them on the way back to Aix and halfway around the ring road before she pulled into a hotel driveway. Greg stopped by the side of the road until a doorman opened the car door for her and she went into the lobby. Then—still not speaking—he pulled back into traffic and continued around the ring to the road east.

  He took the now-familiar left after the bakery and grocery store and the small aqueduct, and then swung right onto their upward-slanting lane. Ned had his window down, for the cool air. Country road, a mild night, the risen moon ahead of them above the trees.

  Greg swore violently and slammed on the brakes. The van skidded, throwing Ned against his shoulder belt. They stopped.

  Ned saw the boar in the road, facing them.

  We don’t want to see them tonight.

  We don’t always have a choice, he thought.

  “Melanie will kill me if I hit an animal,” Greg said. “Maybe it’ll scoot if I go slow, or honk.”

  “It won’t,” Ned said quietly. “Hold on, Greg.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen this one.”

  “Ned, what the hell . . . ?”

  “Look at it.”

  Scoot wasn’t a word you would ever really apply to what they were looking at. The boar was enormous, even more obviously so than before, seen this close. It was standing—waiting—with arrogant, unnatural confidence squarely in the middle of the roadway. There were a few high, widely spaced streetlights along the lane, half hidden by leaves, and the van’s headlights were on it. The rough, pale grey coat showed as nearly white, the tusks gleamed. It was looking straight at them.

  They really weren’t supposed to have good eyesight.

  Someone parted the bushes to the right and stepped into the road.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Greg said. “Ned, do I gun it?”

  “No,” said Ned.

  He unlocked his door and got out.

  He wasn’t sure why, but he did know he didn’t want to run, and he didn’t want to face this sitting down inside the van.

  He’d also recognized who had come. He swung the door closed, heard the chunk sound. Loud, because there were no other noises, really. No birdsong after darkfall. Barely a rustle in the leaves, with the wind almost gone. He shoved his hands in his pockets and stood beside the van, waiting.

  The
druid, he saw, was still wearing white—as he had been among the ruins when he’d caught the bull’s blood in a stone bowl.

  Ned knew it was a druid. He remembered Kate asking Phelan if his enemy—Cadell—was one, and Phelan’s horror at the very thought. Druids were the magic-wielders. This was the one, he was almost sure, who’d shaped the summons that had claimed Melanie, turned her into Ysabel. Cadell had been waiting for tonight, for this man to perform the rite. So had Phelan, for that matter.

  It was necessary to remind himself that he was looking at a spirit, someone almost certainly dead a really long time, taking shape now only because it was Beltaine.

  He was also pretty certain this particular spirit could kill him if it decided to. He wondered how far behind them his aunt was, if she’d taken the time to check out of the hotel or just grabbed her stuff and followed.

  The druid was a small figure, not young, stooped a little, salt-and-pepper beard, seamed face, long grey hair, a woven belt around the ankle-length robe. He wore sandals, no jewellery. No obvious weapon. Ned thought they were supposed to carry a sickle or something and hunt for mistletoe . . . but he might have gotten that from an Asterix comic book, and he wasn’t too sure how much to rely on that source.

  You could laugh at that, if you wanted to.

  He said, in French, “Is the boar yours? Watching us?”

  “Where has the woman gone?”

  A thin, edgy voice, angry, controlling, accustomed to being obeyed.

  Ned heard the other van door open and slam shut.

  “That’s a real good question,” he heard Greg say. “Way I get this, you answer it for us. Where the hell is Melanie? Tell, then you can crawl back into your dumpster.”

  “Easy, Greg,” he murmured, more afraid by the minute.

  “There is no person of such a name any more,” the druid said. “Not since she walked between needfires. I require you to say where Ysabel has gone. You will not be harmed if you do.”

  Ned lifted a hand quickly, before Greg could speak again.

  “Couple of things,” he said, working really hard to stay calm. “One, I heard her say you were to stay up there tonight and that the two guys were to search alone. Any comments?”

  The man looked almost comically startled. “You were there? During the rite?”