"Ysabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER XIV

Ned felt his mouth fall open. The jaw-drop thing was happening way too often. It was majorly uncool.

“Uncle Dave?” he said.

His voice was up half an octave.

The smile widened. “I like the sound of that, have to say.”

The grey-bearded man looked over at Ned’s father. “Edward Marriner. This would be even more of a pleasure elsewhere. I hope it will be soon.”

Ned glanced at his dad, whose expression would have been hilarious any other time. It made him feel a bit better about his own.

“Dave Martyniuk?”

The other man nodded. “To the rescue, with a really bad landing.”

“I saw that. You okay? I’m afraid the gate was open,” Edward Marriner said. “We picked the lock to get in.”

Ned’s uncle’s face became almost as amusing, hearing that. He swore, concisely.

“It was a dramatic entrance,” Ned’s father said. “Honestly. Bruce Willis would have used a stuntman.”

The two men smiled at each other.

“Your wife’s coming down on Air France 7666 from Paris,” Dave Martyniuk said. “Flight gets her to Marignan around 6 p.m. Then, what…half-an-hour cab ride to your villa?”

“Bit more.” Ned’s father checked his watch. “We might have time to meet her.” Neither of them was even looking at Brys, or the wolves, Ned saw. Edward Marriner hesitated. “How do you know the flight?”

Martyniuk shrugged. “Long story. Mostly to do with computers.”

“I see. I think. You keep an eye on her?”

The other man nodded. He looked awkward, suddenly. “Only when she’s…”

“I know. Kimberly told us. I…I’m very grateful.” He grinned ruefully. “Assuming we get out of here alive, she will try to dismember you, very likely. I’ll do what I can to protect you.”

“I’d appreciate that. Meghan’s formidable.”

“Oh, I know. So’s her sister.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Enough. We can kill four of you as easily as three,” the druid said.

Ned turned to him. So did the others.

Assuming we get out of here alive.

Brys had shifted position so he could look at all of them, left and right.

Aunt Kim’s husband—Ned hadn’t pictured him as being nearly so big—shook his head. “I’m not sure, friend. You don’t know enough about me, and you’re a long day past Beltaine, losing strength. So are the spirits you put in those wolves.”

“How do you know that?” the druid snapped.

“The spirits? Beltaine? Cellphone. Wife. Mentioned her. Knows a lot, trust me.”

Then, abruptly, the exaggeratedly laid-back style altered. When next Dave Martyniuk spoke, it was in that other language again, and the voice was stone-hard. There was authority in it, and anger. Ned understood nothing, except for what sounded like names. He heard Cernunnos and something like Cenwin.

But he saw the impact on the druid. The man actually grew pale, colour leaching from his face. Ned had thought that only happened in stories, but he could see it in Brys.

“Go home,” his uncle added, more gently, speaking French.

“You should have gone last night. This is not the hour or the life for your dreams to be made real. My wife asked me to tell you that.”

Brys was still for a moment, then drew himself up as if shouldering a weight. A small man, standing very straight.

“I do not believe she knows anything for certain. And in any case,” he said, “why hurry back to the dark? I will learn what the boy knows. And he will not interfere any more. I can achieve so much.” He gestured at the branch Ned’s uncle had thrown over the gate and picked up. “You think you can fight eight of us with that?”

Dave Martyniuk, unperturbed, nodded gravely. “I think so, yes. And there is a reason for you to leave. You know there is. Will you risk your soul, and these? If we kill you here you are lost, druid. The three of them can return, but not you.”

“How do you know these things?”

Something anguished in the question.

“Same answer. My wife.”

With a sharp, startling movement, Martyniuk levelled the branch in front of himself and cracked it hard across his good knee, breaking the stick in two.

“Ouch!” he said, and swore again.

Then he threw half of it across the open space.

Ned saw it flying. It was actually beautiful, spinning into light, shadow, light again under the leaves. One of the wolves sprang for it, jaws wide, and missed—it was arced too high.

Ned’s father caught the thrown branch with unexpected competence and then—much more unexpectedly—stepped straight forward and swung it hard, a two-handed grip, sweeping flat. He cracked the leaping wolf in the ribs as it landed. There was an ugly sound. The animal tumbled, to crumple against a grey, tilting stone.

No one moved.

“Nice throw,” Edward Marriner said.

“They need not die here,” Dave Martyniuk said quietly, turning to the druid again. “Send them back. Go with them. It is past the day. You have nothing to gain.”

Brys stared at him. An equally blue gaze. Ned had a sense of suspended time, a long hovering. He felt the breeze, saw it in the rippling leaves.

“Measurement again? Calculation? It is not only about gain,” the druid said. “The world goes deeper than that.”

Then he spoke to the wolves in that other tongue and the battle began.

Ned Marriner learned some truths in the next few moments. The world might be deep, for one thing, but sometimes it was fast, too.

The second truth was that a Swiss Army knife was just about useless against a wolf. He had his blade ready in time—he’d had it open in his pocket not long after the druid appeared—but unless you were good enough to stab a hurtling animal in the eye your knife was a distraction, nothing more.

He wasn’t good enough to stab it in the eye.

He feinted, realized he didn’t have a hope, and rolled urgently away from the animal that came for him. He heard footsteps, a shout, then another thick, dull sound. When he rolled to his knees—ready to twist away again—he saw that his father had clubbed this one, too.

That was the third new thing he learned: that Edward Marriner, celebrated photographer, absent-minded father with chronically misplaced reading glasses and trademark brown moustache, was lethal with a branch when his only son was in danger.

Greg was already engaging another wolf. And the fourth truth was that Greg was actually strong enough to do the punch-it-in-the-throat thing he’d whispered—but not quick enough to do it without being hurt.

From his knees, Ned saw it happen: slash of claws, heavy fist short-stroked to animal neck, the wolf flopping backwards, blood bright at Greg’s raked-open sleeve.

The sudden redness was shocking.

His dad was over there immediately.

Necessary, but with implications: principally, that Ned was now alone without a weapon with three wolves circling him. He scrabbled in the gravel again and threw a handful of pebbles at the eyes of the nearest one. Clever. Meaningless. The animal ignored it.

Then the animal died.

Afterwards, Ned would try to recapture what he’d felt when he saw his uncle hammer that wolf—that was the word that came to him—and then immediately send another one twisting frantically back and away from a second swift, swinging blow.

As the third wolf also retreated, Ned saw the druid lying on the gravel behind it. Brys’s arms were outflung, one leg was bent awkwardly under his body.

He looked at his uncle again. A thought came, inescapably: He’s done this before.

There was a difference between his father’s determined defence of Ned and Greg, Gregory’s own bravery, Ned’s scrambling attempt to do something useful…and Dave Martyniuk’s laying low of chosen targets.

You might possibly be born knowing how to do this, but more likely you learned in the doing. When and where, Ned didn’t know, but he was pretty sure it had to do with the time his aunt’s hair turned white.

The three remaining wolves had backed away from Ned’s uncle, tails low. They didn’t run. Not yet. They were watching.

Martyniuk went over to the druid.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” he said. “I hope I didn’t.”

He knelt on the path. Put fingers to the man’s throat. The two of them were in the shade there, a plane tree in leaf between them and the sun. Ned saw his uncle shake his head.

“Damn it,” he heard him say.

“He was here to kill Ned,” said Edward Marriner quietly, walking over, entering into that shadow as well. “And the rest of us, if he had to.”

Martyniuk didn’t look up. “I know. We…your son got himself into a story.”

Ned wasn’t sure why he felt so much sadness, looking at the small figure of the druid who had summoned Ysabel. Leaves rustled; splinters of sunlight came through as they moved.

There was a world here once. It was torn from us. It is not just about the three of them.

He cleared his throat. “Uncle Dave, if he’s…gone, does that mean Ysabel can’t be summoned again? After this time?”

His uncle looked up. “Is that her name?”

Ned nodded.

Dave Martyniuk stood, wincing a little. He brushed dust from his knees. “I don’t think that’s an issue.” He gestured at the wolves. “These are spirits too. I suspect there are other druids among the ones who come back on Beltaine night. This one…was stronger maybe. Kept his place in the story.”

“He was trying to change the story,” Ned said. “Or that’s what I…” He trailed off.

“No, you’re right. I think so too.” His uncle looked at Gregory.

“Whoever taught you to punch wolves?”

Greg was holding his left arm. Blood was bright through his fingers, but he managed a crooked smile. “It was an option in undergrad. I could have done economics, did wolf boxing instead.”

“Extremely funny. Let’s go,” Edward Marriner said. “We’ll find the hospital here.”

Greg shook his head. “No. Dr. Ford can bandage this at the villa. I’m all right. This looks worse than it is.”

“You’ll need a rabies sequence, Greg.”

“No, he won’t,” Ned said, surprising himself. “These are spirits in a wolf shape, remember? They won’t be rabid.”

Uncle Dave nodded. “He’s almost surely right, Edward. They’d insist on the rabies course and he might be kept there. And we’d have a bit of explaining to do.” He pointed to the druid. “This body…I don’t think he’ll just vanish right away.”

“What do we do?” Ned’s father asked. “With him?”

“Will he disappear later? I mean, go back to being disembodied, or whatever?” Ned asked.

“Maybe. Not sure. I never took that course in undergrad.” Martyniuk smiled ruefully.

“Could we shift that?” Ned’s father pointed to a stone sarcophagus beside the shaded alley. The lid was slightly askew.

Dave Martyniuk looked over. “Maybe,” he said.

Ned watched his father and uncle walk over together. They each grasped an end of the heavy stone top. He felt a weird sensation, a kind of pride, watching them count off three then strain together, grunting, and slide the stone halfway off.

“That’s enough I think,” Greg said, holding his arm. “He’s not that big.”

He wasn’t that big. The wolves watched, oddly passive now, as the two men came back and—quite gently—lifted the druid and carried him to the empty coffin. They laid him inside and, straining again, dragged the stone lid all the way back.

They looked down on it a moment, then Dave Martyniuk walked towards the wolves.

There were four left; the one Greg had punched had recovered and gone over beside the others. They didn’t retreat this time.

Martyniuk said something in that ancient language—Welsh or Gaelic, whichever it was. The animals looked at him. And then, after a moment, they turned and loped away together towards the oldest graves and the church beyond. The four men watched them go past the sunken area, around the church, out of sight.

“What did you say?” Edward Marriner asked quietly.

He was stretching out his back. That stone lid would have been heavy, Ned thought. His father was not a man inclined to lifting and pulling. Or to swinging blows with a branch. He was doing things Ned couldn’t even have imagined a week ago.

“I told them nightfall would likely see them home. I wished them peace on the journey back.”

“That’s it?”

Martyniuk nodded.

He picked up the nearest of the three slain animals and, limping, carried it out of sight behind the trees. He came back for a second one. Edward Marriner picked up the third. He looked surprised when he lifted it, Ned saw, as if it was too easy. He saw his father raise his eyebrows, and follow Uncle Dave among the trees.

“Some animals were harmed in the making of this coffee-table book,” Greg said dryly.

Ned looked at him. “You okay?”

Greg was still holding his shoulder. His second injury in two days. “Been better, man. Could have been worse, I guess. Where are the stuntmen when you need them, eh?”

The other two reappeared. Ned’s father was unbuttoning his shirt. He took it off. Ned fished quickly for his pocket knife again and opened the small scissors. His dad tried it, but the blade wasn’t big enough. Edward Marriner grunted, handed it back, and then tore the shirt from the bottom most of the way to the collar. He ripped off the buttons and wrapped the whole thing around Greg’s arm before tying it.

“That’ll have to do till home,” he said.

“Got a bullet for me to bite?” Greg said.

Edward Marriner, bare-chested, smiled briefly. “Tylenol in the glove compartment.”

“Have to do,” Greg said. “We live in a primitive age. At least you don’t paint your chest, boss.”

Another thin smile. “I may yet,” Ned’s father said.

Dave Martyniuk had a cellphone to his ear. He looked over. “Kim’s in her car. She’ll meet us at your villa. I said an hour?”

Marriner nodded. “About right. You’ll follow me?”

“I’ll follow.”

The four of them walked out, past coffins, past the tomb on their right and the ticket booth, between trees and under leaves, out the gate and into light.

As soon as the villa gate clanged open and they drove through with Dave Martyniuk’s Peugeot behind them, Ned saw the woman with red hair standing alone on the terrace, watching them approach.

His heart started pounding.

His father saw her, too. He pulled the car straight over to the visitor parking pad, not around to the driveway on the far side. He switched off the engine. The three of them sat a moment, looking up at her.

It was late in the day now, the sun over the city, light slanting back along the valley, in their eyes, the shadows of the cypress trees very long. The woman came down the steps onto the grass, then she stopped.

“I’ll go,” Ned said.

He got out and walked across the lawn. In the light, her auburn hair was gleaming. She looked amazingly beautiful to him.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t the crying type. He was taller than she was now. Hugs were awkward. He was fifteen, wasn’t he?

He liked the way she held him, though, and said his name: half reproving, half reassuring. And he liked her known scent. And that she was here. That she wasn’t in a civil-war zone where people were being blown up, or hacked apart with farm tools—even if they wore armbands that marked them as doctors come from far away to help.

He’d gotten her out. But this wasn’t just his way of drawing her from the Sudan. They needed her here. He was almost sure of it.

He was also sure trouble was coming, in a red car not far behind them.

“We didn’t expect you till later,” he said.

“Why, dear?”

A mistake. Already. His first words. Jeez.

“You said evening to Dad, didn’t you? Yesterday?”

“Did I? I must have been guessing. I was able to bump onto an earlier flight from Charles de Gaulle. The only hassle was the taxi driver having no idea how to find this place. I had to call. The woman here gave him directions.”

“Veracook?”

Meghan Marriner smiled. “That what you call her?”

“Have to. There’s a Veraclean, too.”

“That’s fun.” His mother withdrew, looking past him. “Hello, honey. Reporting for duty. Present and accounted for.”

“Meg.”

He watched his father come up. His parents kissed. His mom laid her head on his father’s chest. There was a time when he’d have been embarrassed by that.

“You going native, cher?” His mother stepped back, eyeing his father’s bare torso.

“Last of the Mohicans. It’s a long story. We’ll tell, but it would be good if you had a look at Gregory first. Do you have a kit? We’ve only got basic first-aid stuff.”

“What happened?” Her tone changed.

“We ran into some trouble.”

“Ed. What kind of trouble?”

Ned looked back; Greg was getting out of the car. You could see blood on his arm all the way from here. It had soaked through the shirt bandage.

Uncle Dave had driven his Peugeot around the far side of the house, to the driveway, out of sight. Ned heard a distant car door close, but Martyniuk didn’t appear.

“Greg got clawed by an animal,” Ned heard his father saying.

“I wrapped my shirt around it.”

“A wild animal? He’ll need rabies shots. Where were you? Gregory, come and let me see that!”

Ned took note that his father didn’t answer either question.

Uncle Dave still didn’t appear. He must have entered the house through the main door on the other side, under the hill slope. Leaving us to our reunion, Ned thought.

Then he thought something else.

They hadn’t expected his mom to be here yet. And she’d know him, from Darfur. They’d been there until yesterday. There couldn’t be that many people associated with Doctors Without Borders in the Sudan. And this wasn’t the only time he’d been where she was, either.

She would go, to put it very mildly, ballistic when she figured out what he’d been doing. More trouble. But there was no way around this one, was there? Unless Uncle Dave stayed out of sight all the time. He was doing that now, but there was no…

They heard another car, gearing down for the last upward slope of the road. Ned turned, saw the red Peugeot approach. It stopped, idling in front of the gates.

“I’ll do the code,” he said quickly, and ran back over.

He punched the numbers. The gates swung and clanged. Aunt Kim drove through. Ned saw Steve in the passenger seat. Kate smiled at him from the back. His aunt slid her window down.

“Ned. How’s Greg?”

“He’s okay. Aunt Kim, my mom’s here. She’s checking him out, and—”

But his aunt’s gaze had gone past him. She was looking into the serene, end-of-day light towards her younger sister. Ned turned. His mother was still beside Greg but was looking back this way now, at the woman driving the red car.

They hadn’t seen each other, he thought, in something like twenty-five years. There was an ache in his throat, a rawness. You could think about the endless story they’d stumbled into here and call twenty-five years nothing, a blink. Or you could know that they were a good part of two lifetimes, never to return or be reclaimed.

He thought of Brys. The latest body buried in Les Alyscamps. The druid had spent so long trying to get something back. It couldn’t be done, Ned thought. Even if you thought you’d achieved it, what returned couldn’t be the same as what had been taken away.

“I’ll park the car,” Kimberly said quietly.

Ned stepped back and watched as she drove around the far side. With everything that was happening, this felt like one of the hardest things. He wanted to fix it, but he was feeling like a kid again, and that was hard, too. It occurred to him that, in a way, this was what the druid had been doing: trying to fix something that couldn’t be made right. How did you undo conquered Gauls on a Roman arch?

How did you undo twenty-five years of silence?

He watched his aunt walk back around the side of the house. Kate and Steve were behind her but they stopped. Kim went over the grass towards her sister. The two women looked so much alike—even with the entirely white hair and the dark red—seeing them together just made it obvious.

Ned started back that way. He saw his father’s face, the apprehension there. Greg looked worse, actually, as if he could rattle off a dozen places he’d rather be just now. He made as if to back away, but Ned’s mother, holding an end of the blood-soaked shirt-bandage, said sharply, “Hold still!”

“She needs a good look, Greg,” said Aunt Kim, stopping beside them. “Do we have antibiotics here?”

“I do,” said Meghan Marriner, uncovering the wound. “Hello, Kim.”

“Hello, Meg. How does it look?”

“Fairly shallow. More messy than dangerous. Clean and stitch. But he’ll need rabies shots.”

“Uh-uh,” said Greg. “Dr. Marriner, I don’t, it was a scratch, not a bite. And we don’t have time.”

“I do love it when my patients treat themselves. Makes me wonder why I did seven years of medical training. You can guarantee with mortal certainty no saliva got on those claws, Greg? Really? You’ll bet your life on it?”

Ned knew that tone of his mother’s. He’d grown up with it. Her response to illogic.

Greg didn’t waver, though. He kept on surprising.

“Can’t guarantee that, but I do know, Doc—and the boss and Ned know, too—that it wasn’t a rabid wolf.”

“It was a wolf?” Meghan said, her voice rising.

They hadn’t told her, Ned realized.

“Same ones we saw before, Ned?” Aunt Kim asked quietly.

He swallowed. “Maybe. I’m not so good at telling them apart, and it was dark the other time. They were spirits, though, from Beltaine.”

“Oh, Christ!” his mother snapped. “I absolutely refuse to start in with—”

Ned touched her arm. She stopped. Looked at him. He could see fury in her eyes.

“Mom. Please. You have to start in. You have to listen, or you can’t help. They were coming for me, Mom.”

His mother stared at him. He saw anger slipping, replaced by something trickier to define. “What does that mean?”

Ned looked at his father for help. Edward Marriner said, gravely, “It was pretty clear they were there to kill Ned, honey. And that they were ordered to do so.”

“Ordered? Ed are you—”

“Meg, I’m neither insane nor addled. I’m desperately glad you are here because we need your thinking, and in a hurry. But honey, you have to be thinking, not fighting us.” He hesitated. “Meg, I killed a wolf today in Les Alyscamps. And it was going for our son. It was given orders by a druid, Meg.”

Ned saw his mother’s eyes widen. “Oh, my! A real druid? Did he wave his mistletoe at you?”

A small silence.

“No,” her husband said. “He was killed when they attacked us.”

He didn’t say, yet, who had killed him.

Meghan looked at Ned again, then at Greg, wounded.

Greg shrugged. “I got in the way, ma’am. He’s telling the truth.”

Aunt Kim was still saying nothing. It was hard to read her expression.

Edward Marriner stepped closer. “Meg, this isn’t some grand conspiracy to make you revisit your family history. Something’s going on here, and that may mean that more than you think went on back then…but that isn’t the point now. Please listen when I say this. Please look at me and believe me.”

His wife stared at him. Her body was rigid with tension. Ned had never seen her like this. She turned to her sister.

“What have you done?” she said.

Aunt Kim stared back. It occurred to Ned, after, that if Uncle Dave had been beside them on the grass, she might not have reacted as she did. But he wasn’t.

“Oh, how perfect!” Kimberly snapped. “A flawless question, Meg. What comes next? We revisit how I dyed my hair white to fool everyone? How I got married and ran away just to reject you? Are you still a teenager?”

Meghan Marriner didn’t back down. “I never said me. I said your mother, too. Our mother. And you know it.”

“Our mother did a very good job of keeping close, Meghan, to the end of her life. She visited us, and you know it. We spoke all the time, and wrote, and visited. You know that, too. You made a point of staying away when we did. And she never, ever told me she was hurt by anything I’d done.”

“You’d expect her to say it? Mother? Oh, come on, Kim, you know better than—”

“I knew her as well as you did, Meghan. And she understood me a whole lot better than you did. I left because I couldn’t pick up the life I’d lived. I wanted to, I thought I would. I couldn’t. Too much had happened. You were the only person who mattered who didn’t see that. Want to talk about hurting someone? Meg, I came down here when I realized what had already happened to Ned. I’m trying to protect him. And get Melanie back. This is not about you and me.”

This is not just about the three of them.

The druid had said that, at least twice. He might even have been right. Just as Aunt Kim might be right, or not. Because maybe this was, in some hard way, about the two sisters…and him. Maybe there were places where the past didn’t go away, and maybe there were people for whom it stayed.

Ned looked at his father. Edward Marriner had the posture of a man desperate to say something, but having no idea what words would do more good than harm.

Which was pretty much how Ned felt.

Aunt Kim was still angry. He hadn’t seen her this way yet, either. “Meg, I said goodbye to my own mother in Toronto a full month before she died. I didn’t go to her funeral because she asked me not to. Said it would be too hard for you if I were there. You want to think about that?”

Hearing this, Ned was suddenly even more certain there was nothing he—or anyone—could say. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know any more about it. Greg looked stricken, as if he very badly wanted to get away, over by Kate and Steve at the drive. Way out of earshot.

Ned watched his mother. She looked shaken. “No, I don’t, actually,” Meghan Marriner said. “Not right now. I don’t want to think about that.”

Aunt Kim shrugged. “You thought I just didn’t bother to come. That I didn’t care enough. Of course, I could be lying about this, too. The way I lied about my hair. The way your husband and son are lying now about the wolves. You could decide that, Meg.”

Ned’s mother shook her head. “False choice, Kim. It doesn’t have to be truth or lie for them. People make mistakes, people get misled.”

“Mom!”

“Honey, that isn’t—”

“Meg, why would I mislead them? Listen to yourself!”

A silence as the three overlapping voices subsided.

Meghan Marriner looked from one to the other. “I feel like I’m being ganged up on.”

“You are,” Ned said. “But Mom—”

“Dr. M., can I say one thing?”

They all looked at Greg, with the blood on his arm. “I was clawed by a wolf just now. And it was given orders by a little guy who was a druid. I know that last for sure because of something he did to me last night. And that same guy was killed about an hour ago, and three of the wolves.”

Meghan Marriner looked at Greg for a long time.

“That was more than one thing,” she said.

Greg shrugged. “Sorry.”

Ned was watching his mother struggle with something embedded in herself. This was hard for him. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for her. He said nothing. He really, truly, didn’t know what he could say.

She drew a breath, finally. “All right. Fine.” Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m too old, I guess, for a certain kind of fight. I’m not very good with changes, though. Too old for that, too.”

“None of us are good with changes,” Kimberly said, quietly.

Meghan looked at her. “You’ve grown into the white hair, at least.”

Ned drew a breath. He saw Aunt Kim close her eyes. When she opened them, they were suspiciously bright. One sister might be the crying type.

“I like that red on you,” she said.

His mother made a face. “Once a month. Jean-Luc on Green Avenue. I’d be sad and grey without him.”

She looked around at the others. Something had changed. The rigidity was gone. “Let’s get Greg cleaned up,” she said, “then you’ll tell me what’s going on. I need to know about Melanie.”

“All right,” said Kim, “but there’s a lot to tell. We’ll need wine.”

“I can do that,” Ned’s father said, almost too brightly.

Glancing across the grass, Ned saw Kate Wenger looking awkward and apprehensive, as if she felt she didn’t belong here. He wanted to go reassure her, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Something else, first.

“Can someone please ask Verawhatever to boil water?” Meghan Marriner said.

“I got that,” Ned said.

He took the terrace steps two at a time. Inside, he gave Veracook the request and told her there’d be two more for dinner. Then he went looking for his uncle.

He found him in the main-floor ensuite, off the bedroom Kim and Kate had shared. Melanie’s room.

He was shaving. That was why he hadn’t come out.

Grey and brown hairs were in the sink and on the tiled floor. Martyniuk had laid down his scissors and was lathered up, using a razor on the stubble that remained. He was working too fast and had cut himself a couple of times.

“You really think that’ll do it?” Ned asked from the bathroom doorway.

His uncle glanced at him from behind shaving cream. “We are all doomed if it doesn’t, right?”

“Not me,” said Ned. “You are. I had zip to do with this one.”

“Abandon me to my fate?”

“With my mother? Damn right.”

“What happened out there?” Dave Martyniuk was swooping the razor across his cheeks and neck.

Ned hesitated. “So far, okay. Better than I thought.”

“No explosion is better than I thought. How do I look?”

“Almost as bloody as Greg,” Ned said.

His uncle scowled at his reflection. “I’ll deal with that. But do I look different enough?”

Ned nodded. “I think so.”

“Give me five more minutes.”

“They’re boiling water to clean Greg’s wound. Slow down, you’ll attract sharks.”

His uncle grinned. “I like it. I have a witty nephew.” He suspended the blade a moment. “Only one I’ve got.”

Ned looked at him. “Don’t you…I thought you had a brother and…”

“Two nieces there. Older than you.”

Ned swallowed. “And you and Aunt Kim never…”

Dave Martyniuk shook his head briskly. “No, we never did. Is it too late for me to teach you a post-up move to the hoop?”

Ned tried to smile. He was old enough to know there was more to this. “I’m not tall enough. Perimeter game, defence, that’s my thing.”

His uncle shook his head again. “Uh-uh. The good guards have to know how to post-up when they get a mismatch. We’ll find a basketball net later.”

“I know where there are courts here.”

Martyniuk was shaving too rapidly again. “Good,” he said. Then swore, as the blade nicked his throat. “Go on back, I’ll be there in a few, unrecognizable.”

“OH MY GOD!” Meghan Marriner said.

She had looked up from where she was treating Greg at the dining-room table. “Ivorson? What are you doing here? I don’t—”

She stopped, very abruptly. Ned could see her figuring it out. Already. You could almost chase succeeding thoughts as they crossed her face.

Dave Martyniuk, a dab of Kleenex on each of two cuts that hadn’t stopped bleeding, paused in the doorway to the dining area. Aunt Kim hurried over to him. They hugged each other, hard, then she stepped back.

Ned’s father’s introduction died on his lips.

Greg was in a chair at the table. Meghan had been wrapping a bandage. Pots of boiled water stood on trivets beside clean cloths and white spools of gauze and tubes of antibiotics.

Turning from beside her husband, Kimberly straightened her shoulders and looked at her sister, as if ready for a blow. Ned, with Kate by the glass doors to the terrace, felt a massive surge of anxiety. They were a long way from being out of the woods on this. He looked at his uncle.

Unrecognizable.

Yeah. Sure. You’re, like, six-foot-three, with big shoulders and hands, and blue eyes, and you shave your beard and no one will know you from Danny DeVito?

And Ned’s mother was very, very quick. That’s why they’d wanted her here in the first place. One reason, anyhow. The other reason had to do with machetes and guns and bombs, and they weren’t going to talk about that. Although it was also why his uncle had taken that fake name—Ivanson, or whatever it was—and had been following her for years to places halfway around the world.

Ned waited for the explosion. It didn’t come.

Instead, Meghan Marriner, who never did, began to cry.

“Oh, Meg,” her sister whispered. “Oh, honey…”

Meghan held up a quick hand to stop her. Ned saw Kate Wenger biting her lip beside him, a gesture he knew pretty well by now.

His mother wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. She drew a breath and looked up. She stared at Martyniuk for a long moment.

“Three times?” she said finally.

He nodded.

“Sierra Leone, the Gulf. Darfur? That’s where I saw you?”

He cleared his throat. “Ah, four times, actually, being truthful. I was in Bosnia, but just for a few days…it didn’t end up looking too bad. You may not have spotted me.”

She was still staring, still thinking. “You found out when I signed up for missions and you went there, if you thought they were dangerous?”

He nodded again.

“Dropped everything in your life? Took a false name, false ID? In war zones?”

“That’s about it,” Martyniuk said. “It didn’t happen often, really.”

“Four times, you just said.”

Martyniuk nodded again. He made a face. “Damn. Looks like I just got rid of a beard I liked.”

There was a short silence. “You look better without it,” Meghan Marriner said.

“I tell him that too,” her sister murmured. “Meg, I—”

Again, Ned’s mother held up a hand. “I’m going to cry again if you talk, so don’t, Kim.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes from the big, capable figure of Dave Martyniuk in the doorway. “I need to be really clear on this. You left your work in England, your wife, you put yourself in danger around the world, you certainly broke laws, with computers and a fake identity, and why?”

He leaned on the doorframe, took his time. An unhurried man, Ned thought. “We felt a sense of responsibility.”

Meghan closed her eyes for a second. “You thought I did these things because…?”

Martyniuk’s expression was grave. “Meghan, sister-in-law, I learned a long time ago, the hard way, that people do things for an amazing variety of reasons, some good, some bad. Even heroic things. Sometimes we don’t know all the reasons for what we’re doing.”

“I’d say we usually don’t,” Edward Marriner said.

His wife looked at him.

“You knew about this, Ed? Do I have to kill you, too?”

He shook his head, but the threat, the joke of it, had already changed the mood. Ned could feel himself beginning to breathe properly again. “I heard about it two nights ago, honey.”

From the doorway, Martyniuk murmured, “If you want me dead, just tell me to shave closer. I seem to have lost the knack.”

“You were rushing,” Ned said.

The adults turned to him, all of them.

“Right, Nephew,” his uncle said. “The unchallenged expert of the family. You shave—what? — twice a week to show off?” He was grinning, though.

“Well, I know who isn’t going to teach me his technique, anyhow,” Ned said.

“Listen to the lot of you! Bandage me already,” Greg interjected.

“Is this how doctors treat wounded patients? Family arguments while we die on the table?”

“An under-reported statistic,” Kimberly said soberly.

Ned was opening his mouth to make another joke, out of sheer relief, when he felt a flaring, imperative presence inside himself. Awareness flashed in his aunt’s face in the same moment. He saw her look past him.

He wheeled around. And looking out through the glass doors he saw, in the late-day sunlight, a slender, bald-headed man in a grey leather jacket step onto the terrace and stand there, waiting patiently.