It was the quarter-moon last night, so we were out late working. I said hello to Manu and Naveen at various times. I smelled Arizona but did not see her - as chilly as it had been, she would be at a disadvantage working at night.
I saw no sign of Alexander but the noise from the Seeress's cottage could be heard all the way down at our end of the row. She and the old woman were shouting at each other. The old woman is also a witch, I think, the Seeress's mother, but her mind is going, from age and ill-use. Or perhaps the Seeress has bound her wits, but if so, she's getting her revenge by making the Seeress's life a misery. She doesn't leave the house much, and most of the time I've peered in the window she's silent and staring, but when she has a good day she makes the most of it. At any rate, the girl must have been recovered from the night before, to be able to shout back at her mother at that volume.
I saw nothing of the bees or their keeper, after she left the cottage with her questions. Bees aren't nighttime creatures either. But I woke from catnappery this morning to a loud, strange buzzing noise overhead.
Jack and Jill were out and about, probably breakfast at the hotel, but Snuff was awake, his ears pricked toward the noise.
"The beekeeper?" I asked him.
"That's no bees I've ever heard," he said. "It sounds almost like one of the Things used to, except--" he stood up and headed for the door at a trot. "Come on!"
I followed him out and into the road, where the trees didn't block the sky as much. The buzzing's source was getting closer, and then we saw something cross the sky overhead, the noise trailing it. "An aeroplane!" I said. Of course. I'd heard aeroplanes a few times before, mostly when the War got a little too close for comfort back in England, but I hadn't expected to find one in Bluff City, Iowa.
"It's landing over in the old Leverette field," Snuff said, and headed off in that direction, cross-country. I have no idea how he knew where it would land - I'll never be the calculator he is - but sure enough, when we got there, there was a rickety-looking two-seater open-cockpit biplane rolling to a bumpy stop next to the mouldering remains of the old carnival wagons.
"A JN-9E Curtiss trainer!" Snuff said, having become interested in aeroplanes during the war. "I wonder if she's going to give joyrides."
Half the town was there, too, with more of them arriving every minute. The plane must have circled for awhile, to build interest. I saw most of the people who'd been at the Shambaughs' party; Alexander was dragging a cranky-looking Seeress along by one wrist.
The pilot climbed down out of the open cockpit and pushed up her flying goggles, revealing a woman with skin a few shades darker than Princess Tiana's and a glint in her eyes. She wore a close-fitting leather cap, a fleece-lined brown jacket, jodhpurs and long boots.
"A new player, do you think?" I asked Snuff.
He narrowed his eyes. "Well, she'd fit the pattern Jack picked up," he said. "But there's a 50% chance anyone would, it's not much of a pattern."
I still didn't know what this pattern was. Jack and Snuff were being cagey, as usual.
The pilot turned to the second seat, which was piled with carefully-tied-down luggage, and opened the small crate on top. A brightly-colored tropical bird flew out, lit momentarily on her shoulder, and then flew to the end of the top blade of the propeller, where it shouted "Come and Fly! See the Sky!"
"I'd say the odds just went up," I muttered to Snuff.
He lay down with his muzzle on his crossed front paws and didn't answer.
"Thank you, Polly," the pilot told the bird with a smile.
The audience was already hanging on her every word, but she ignored them, and unstrapped two large signs that had been tied one to each wing, so that they hung down like banners. One of them said "See the Amazing African Aviatrix! Death-Defying Daredeviltry!" The other one said "Shows at 11 AM and 2 PM daily weather permitting, excluding Sundays, 25 ¢s; admission. Airplane rides 10 ¢/10 minutes, free flying lesson. Ask about Aerial Photography! See your house from above! Rates variable."
Once she had the signs settled to her liking, one to either side of the plane, she finally turned to the crowd and started a patter about the wonders of aviation that was clearly well-practiced. I tuned it out. Dancing on the dark side of the Moon is all well and good, but under Earth's gravity I prefer to limit myself to tree-climbing and the occasional ride on a low-flying broomstick.
"You should try to catch the bird alone," Snuff suggested.
"Teach your grandma to suck eggs," I replied. I'd been cornering birds since I was a tiny street kitten. Polly - if that was its name - was a little larger than my usual prey, but with a bit of extra effort it would be no problem and I could get to work on figuring out whether the newcomer really was a player in the Game, and if so, what that would mean for the rest of us.
"Interesssting," hissed a husky voice behind us. I spun to see Arizona reared up half a foot to peer over my shoulder. "Very interesssting."
I edged away. Snakes are all well and good but venom makes me nervous, and creatures who have it tend to be arrogant with it. Besides, I didn't have a good feel for the Professor and his methods yet.
"How many of them to you ssssupossse," the snake said, with a jerk of its head in the direction of the airplane, "Are there for the game, and how many of them jussst like airplanesss?"
I glanced back at the plane, and saw that among the people gathered around the Aviatrix, excitedly asking questions and fondling the machinery, were Alexander Armstrong, the Viscountess, and the Mad Professor's Beautiful Daughter, who was showing more animation than I'd seen from her before. The Princess was hovering near the back of the crowd, being chatted up by a nattily-dressed North African-looking man. I wondered what Prince Naveen thought of that.
"I can tell you the Professsor'sss daughter isss jussst into the plane," Arizona added, "and that'sss free. She has a death wish, that one. Alwayssss wantssss to climb higher than it'ssss ssssafe."
As we watched, the beekeeper turned up too, in burr-covered tweeds that gave a clue she'd been wandering the fields all day. Probably calculating. When she saw the plane, she made a delighted beeline for it - though the bees who'd been swarming around her head didn't, instead dispersing into a surveillance net over the field.
"Let's take a walk," I said to Snuff, edging away from Arizona. We strolled casually across the field until we were out of earshot.
"It is going to make the calculating interesting, though, she's right," Snuff said.
"How?" I asked. My preliminary calculations had pointed to at least one more player, not yet on my list. This Aviatrix wasn't quite what I'd expected, but if she was the missing player, it would at least be good to know. This was the week when I needed to figure those things out, before the Dark of the Moon finalizes them - who all the Players, who had joined late, who was on which team. Who held the tools. (Where the Opening Wand was!) The field was actually one of my possibles as as a site, given the geometries, though it didn't really have the right energy for it, and one long-laid mummy ghost wasn't much of an anchor.
"Usually, fliers have an advantage visualizing the lines," Snuff said. "But even if she's not a player, if she really is offering plane rides to anyone who can pay--"
"Then anyone can get the lay of the land rom above, flier or not. That is interesting." I'd been planning to schedule a broom ride with Jill for after the dark of the Moon, for that purpose - and there Jill was, dashing up to the plane, looking ready to plague the poor woman with advice from a seasoned flier. But maybe the advantage wouldn't be worth the trouble, and my upset stomach, if all the players would be able to fly. I'd been wondering about the shortage of fliers this time - there was Jill's broom, and I suppose the bees, although they weren't really built for altitude. I'd forgotten that regular people had learned how to fly since last time.
"A seer and a flier, who will both sell their services to any player for money," Snuff said. "A Game in America. Interesting indeed."
"America," I agreed.
Blossom showed up at my place at 10 AM just as I was getting ready to go out and see the air show.
"Good," she said. "You're mostly presentable."
Blossom, I noticed, was dressed up real nice - not in her 'society' clothes, like she'd worn to the party, but in her professional gear - including the yellow satin bloomers. "We're going to go visit Miss Dabney's house and see what's going on."
"You may be going to Miss Dabney's house," I said. "I'm going to the air show."
She rolled her eyes at me. "You can go drool at that... aeroplane anytime, Alexander, she's planning to be here all month."
This was news to me, as it was more information than I'd succeeded in getting from the Aviatrix yesterday. But somehow I wasn't surprised. "I can go to Miss Dabney's anytime, too," I pointed out. "Besides, you're still recovering from the last time you overexerted yourself. Have you never heard that females are delicate?"
She sighed. "I am fine," she said, which was probably true. "And we've put off investigating Miss Dabney's new tenant for long enough. You can play with your airplanes later. It's time for you to start taking your role in this affair seriously. We're going to Miss Dabney's."
I was still unsure as to what my role in this affair honestly was, but Blossom certainly appeared to be sure. She was standing on our front porch. I was in the doorway, because it kind of felt like stepping over the threshhold would be agreeing to something. Sally was watching us from the kitchen with a worrying gleam in her eyes. I stepped out on the porch. We went to Miss Dabney's.
"All right," I said, as we approached the crooked ironwork mailbox at the end of the drive. "You go in and investigate, I'll stay here and keep watch."
"Don't be silly, Alexander. Are you a man or a watchdog? Don't tell me you're scared of a little haunted house."
I wasn't scared of this particular haunted house. Minerva was very well-mannered, as ghosts go, and mostly just wanted to be left to her work. But I was scared of the trouble Blossom would inevitably create. And there were a lot of strange things happening around town.
"Watchdog is fine with me," I said. "I don't want to go poking around somebody's house. That's impolite. And illegal. I'll let you be the one getting arrested for trespassing. Again."
"You make a good argument regarding trespassing," Blossom said thoughtfully. "We'll try knocking on the door."
We didn't manage to knock. The door opened all by itself as soon as we got up on the porch, with a horrible moaning noise. Blossom and I looked at each other. I was pretty sure it hadn't sounded that ominous while Miss Dabney was living there, but I guess ten years empty hadn't done it any favors. Then I felt something touch my ankle, and yelped. There was a thick green tendril, like a vine but the width of a large snake, that had twisted through the half-open door and was winding around my ankles. It squeezed like a snake, too, and before I even had time to yell, it jerked me off my feet and started to drag.
"Alexander!" Blossom shouted. "You get off him, he's mine!" I swear I saw real panic in her face. She grabbed my shoulders and braced.
The plant just threw a few more coils around my ankles, which were almost in the house by then. "Trespassers! Trespassers belong to me!" something said from inside, in a gravelly inhuman voice.
Blossom let go of me to rummage in the bag she was carrying and I grabbed the porch rail, which wobbled alarmingly against the strain. Blossom pulled out a bundle of herbs. I wasn't sure if I was more concerned about being eaten by a plant or whatever it was Blossom thought she was doing.
Before I could find out, a person appeared in the doorway. "Cleo!" she said. "You naughty girl! Let him go immediately - they're guests, not trespassers. You must be Miss Culp and her young man. I've heard a great deal about you." The plant sulkily withdrew into the house and she leaned over to give me hand up. She was tall and very very pale, with dark hair and eyes and a refined New England accent. I don't know as I could say she was young, exactly, but she didn't appear much older than us. Her hand was inhumanly cold. There was a massive black ring on her finger that felt even colder. I let go as soon as I could. I wanted to protest the description of me as Blossom's young man, but somehow it felt like I would be a lot safer right now to let it stand for once.
"Do come in," she said. "I'll have Minerva get you some tea. I do so enjoy visitors."
Something about her seemed oddly familiar. At first I thought it was because she pretty much looked like who Blossom wanted to be when she grew up - not that she could have been more than a few years older than us, but somehow she had an air of mature dignity that Blossom couldn't dream of on her best days. Then I realized it was her dress, which trailed away into tentacular shadows around her feet the same way as the woman's in that painting that Blossom had left in that other world. Except the watercolors had only looked as if they were writhing. These really were.
She sat us down in a couple of black velvet armchairs and Minerva was floating a tea tray in our direction before I could say "boo."
"How much arsenic do you take in your tea?" she asked politely. I looked over at Blossom, to ask "can you believe this?" but Blossom only nodded and said "One lump, thank you."
"Um, none," I added hastily when she turned to me. "I like my tea black. Like midnight on a moonless night and the souls of the sinful dead."
"What a delightfully tenebrific young man," she said to me with an approving glint in her eye, and handed me my tea. I sipped it gingerly, but she and Blossom seemed content to ignore me after that. I didn't see any sign of Cleo, either. I was happy with that state of affairs.
"So, how are you liking Bluff City?" Blossom asked her.
"Oh, it's such a drearful town!" the lady gushed. "So rustic, but with an underlying tang of despair and betrayal. I see why your dear mother likes it here," she said. "We went to school together, did you know?" I mentally revised up my estimate of her age.
"No!" Blossom said, raising her eyebrows. "I had no idea my mother went to school."
"Well, it wasn't for very long," she demurred. "Anyway, I'm only renting this darling old place for a few weeks, it's a bit of a vacation, one last hurrah before I'm married, you know. Haunted houses aren't easy to come by these days! A little excitement before the old ball and chain gets welded on."
"Oh, you're engaged?" Blossom said.
This seemed to be the cue for the lady to go into raptures over her fiance. Apparently he spoke French and had a terribly dashing moustache. It brought back unpleasant memories of my sister's courting days. I mentally revised her age back down again. Although my sister never talked about how good her fiance was with a whip. Or fire. Or feeding small animals to the giant snake in the cellar. Blossom was encouraging her. I'd never known Blossom to have any patience for that kind of girlish talk, less than me, even. But I guess she thought she was gathering important information.
I sort of zoned out after awhile. Everything in the house was dark, darker than it ought to be, except Blossom's bright yellow pantaloons where she was ensconced in her chair, and her sallow face like a candle-flame above them. The lady's hands were white, white, white as she moved the (also black) teapot around, except for the dark ring on her finger that seemed to suck shadow into itself. I found myself staring at it, mesmerised, until she got up to talk to Minerva about cakes.
I jerked myself out of my daze and a gravelly voice said, from somewhere me, "No hard feelings, I hope? All part of the game. And she's too trusting for her own good sometimes."
When I squinted my eyes into the gloom that smothered everything in the house, I could just make out a tall Egyptian-styled urn with a plant in it. Possibly a plant. It seemed to have teeth. "Um, no hard feelings, of course," I said. If a talking plant with giant strangler vines wants to be friends, it makes sense to let it, I figured.
"Who are you talking to?" Blossom asked.
"What do you mean? Cleo," I said. "The plant."
"The plant talks?"
"You can't hear it?"
"You can?" Blossom sat back in her armchair with an air of satisfaction. She looked like she belonged there. "She is a player, then! I knew it! The plant must be her companion!"
"Great," I muttered to myself. "Good to know you put me in the same category as a plant."
Blossom shot me a dark look. Then she got up and poured her full teacup in the plant's pot. "I hate the taste of arsenic in tea," she said. "What's wrong with some old-fashioned bitter almond extract?"
The plant growled at her. She patted it soothingly.
That was pretty much the flavor of how my day went.
I'd made a note to myself to bump the Mad Professor up a bit higher on the list of people to investigate. Arizona's remarks about the daughter had brought to mind the unfortunate situation with the Vicar, last round. Just as well to head off a repeat of that before it got too far.
I walked some lines while I was at it. I'd requested a divination from Jill the day before, but all she could give me was that everything was still very confused, which was something I didn't need witchcraft to figure out. The old Indian mound was one of my potential sites, though. It was a cold, gray, drizzly day, and all the workers seemed to have stayed in. I nosed around in the tarp-covered excavation pits, but if the Mad Professor had found anything more powerful than piles of old dirt, I couldn't sense it. But if it did end up being the site of the Opening we'd all have to watch our steps very carefully. Maybe he was quietly laying booby traps for later in his extensive diggings. That would be clever. There weren't any magical wards up anywhere.
I did discover that the Alhazred icon was no longer in the tent where I'd seen it, or any of the other tents. He must have realized that it wasn't a safe enough place to keep it, with this many Players nosing about. We still didn't know what had become of the Opening Wand - yesterday's divinations had sniffed out nothing there either - and I was feeling itchy about it.
I walked a few more lines and checked in on the other players I knew of. There was no sign of the Viscountess or Manu at the Shambaughs’. But there was something going on at the old empty haunted house. It wasn't empty any more. Whatever was living there reeked. Not to smell, but underneath that. Like someone had taken everything that was right and good and turned it inside out. An Opener for sure, if it was a player, and I couldn't imagine that it wasn't a player. That bore further investigation but I decided to fortify myself first.
The Mad Professor was going through some notes and papers with a couple of his assistants in the hotel's salon. I peered at the papers; they were maps covered in straight lines. He could have been calculating, but I couldn't get a clear enough view to tell if he'd gotten anywhere. Someone had finally put up strong protections around the hotel.
Probably the Princess. They felt like conjure work. She was in the restaurant's kitchen, banging pots around in a towering temper. Naveen nodded at me through the window. I wondered what had happened there.
The Mad Professor's Beautiful Daughter was sleeping late in her room, still looking a bit pale and wan. It was hard to make that match up with the stories of her winning drinking contests. Then again, pale wan-ness could be the well-earned result of winning drinking contests. Jill and Jack don't drink alcohol exactly so I wouldn't know.
The Alhazred Icon was propped on the bedside table next to her like a normal family photo. It couldn't be giving her restful dreams. Next to it, I noted, was the bowl, which had last been seen in the Princess's possession. Arizona was sleeping curled up in it. I left without waking them. That probably helped explain the Princess's temper.
Alexander was prowling around the hayrick of his family's old barn. I thought he was doing Preparations, as the formerly-haunted barn might have the right energy, but when I nosed my way through the door at the top of the stair, he was just sitting on an old trunk and staring morosely out the window. I cleared my throat and he startled.
"Oh! Gray!" he said. "For a moment I thought you were Trixie."
"Trixie?"
"A dog," he said.
"I come for a visit and all I get is insults," I said, shaking the dust off my paws.
"A dead dog," he clarified. "It's a long story. When I met Blossom. Listen, Manu told me to tell you if I saw you that the Beekeeper finished analyzing the punch, and it was poisoned. A rare hallucinogen made from a plant only found high in the Himalayas. She said she probably wouldn't have been able to identify it at all except her husband collected some when he was in Tibet years ago."
"Tibet?" I said, and sat back on my haunches. That didn't tell me anything. "Is there a Yeti secretly playing?"
"Maybe someone was trying to frame her? Everyone knows about the Great Detective going to Tibet."
"That doesn't make any sense. Not if she was the only one who would know what it was. A message for her, perhaps?"
"If it makes you see things and run wild, like Manu did, maybe they were hoping someone would spill secrets."
"Or they were just spreading chaos for the fun of it. That's an opener's trick."
"Is that the kind of thing openers do, poisoning people for the fun of it?" he asked. He looked kind of sick himself.
I thought about that carefully before I answered. "Not always," I said. "Jill and I were openers ourselves, last time. The only things all openers have in common is that they want to let the Old Ones out into the world. Jill and I, we were very bitter." It was hard to remember what we had been thinking, then. Thirty years is a long time, especially for a cat. "I was a starved and bruised stray, just off the street, who was pretending very hard that I knew more than I did. Mostly we wanted to watch the world burn, I think. And then we got a better look at what we were allying ourselves with, and started to think maybe the world was okay as it was, but we'd gone far enough by then that we didn't want to admit we'd been wrong. You go too far down a bad path and it's hard to turn back. We only made it out through luck. And a busybody rat."
I don't know if Alexander listened to most of that. He seemed to be lost in a memory. He shivered down the back of his neck and said, "Yeah, openers can be pretty horrible, can't they?"
I don't know what he'd seen. I didn't think it was the Seeress he was thinking of, but maybe it was. We'd reached the point where people could start doing desperate things in quest of ingredients. But so far, this had been a pretty laid-back game. There hadn't even been any murders that I'd heard about. I was fine with it staying like that. "Not just openers, to be honest. Closers can be just as evil. There was a vampire closer last time I played. Talk about horrible to work with. But openers tend to be more active in their tricks than closers, so things like sowing chaos say opener to me. They're people who very badly want the world to change, I think. Usually they have different ideas about how it will change. Sometimes they really think it will be better. The Old Ones aren't very forthcoming about their plans."
"But we do know better," Alexander muttered. "We were there." I realized he must have been thinking about that other world that he and the Seeress visited in the paintings.
"Then you have knowledge that no other Player has," I said. "It's an advantage. Use it."
I went out to the Leverette house after, getting drizzle all over my fur from the underbrush. The bees were all sleeping cozy in their hive. It looked like the beekeeper was taking her cue from them. The air shows were cancelled due to weather.
I went home and shook the rain off all over Snuff. He growled at me perfunctorily and then went back to sleep by the stove, so I joined him there, and went over what I knew. At least six players, maybe more. Jill was a Closer, and so was the Beekeeper. The Viscountess I was less sure of, but I was leaning toward Closer, since the Beekeeper had helped her with the poison, and she would have deduced alignments by now if anyone could.
The Princess and the Mad Professor I didn't really have a feel for yet. Could go either way.
And Alexander and the Seeress - I wasn't sure they even knew yet. But something would have to give, and soon.
At midnight I climbed up on the bed and sat on Jill's chest and asked her if she thought it was a good idea to keep working on Alexander. We had a rapport and I thought I might be able to get him to commit to Closing. I didn't know about the Seeress, though. And I wasn't sure what would happen if he was a Closer and she was an Opener, especially before the Dark of the Moon. We still had almost a week.
Jill said she thought it was a good idea. And she thought the Seeress might be more amenable to a change than I knew. So that was something to watch.
Snuff opened an eye, waggled an eyebrow at me, and went back to sleep. I could have asked him what would happen if a Player and Companion ended up on different teams before the Dark of the Moon, but I didn't think I'd get a helpful answer.
I didn't sleep well. I was thinking about things until late, and then slept in until I was awakened by a cat walking on my face.
"You shouldn't leave your window open," Graymalk told me.
"I didn't," I answered.
"Interesting," she said.
Being now irrevocably awake, I got dressed and went downstairs. I didn't want to think about why my window might have come opened in the night. I'd done enough thinking recently.
I wanted to finally go down and see the airshow, but instead I got presentable just in time to be presented to a whole parade of visitors in my mother's parlor. First it was my sister and her family who had come for tea. My sister is only tolerable, but my nephew is 11 now and old enough to be fun, so the morning wasn't a complete loss. My brother-in-law Lowell pulled me aside and said, "Have you talked to Blossom much lately? She hasn't turned in her column for the week and that's unusual. Is she sick?"
I thought about this. It had failed to occur to me that Blossom still had her usual work to do on top of whatever else was going on. I was showing up at Dad's office a few times a week same as usual, but that didn't cut into my time much. "She's been very busy," I said. "There's an enormous conjunction of powers happening in town and she had to keep dark forces from taking over." I didn't expect him to believe this for one second even despite our history with ghosts.
"Ah, yes," Lowell said. "The conjunction."
"You knew about this?"
"She's been talking about it in the column for months," he said. "Don't you read the papers? We got more letters about that than about the new school levy. It's been great for readership."
I did but usually I ignored the contents of Blossom's column, since to one who had actual experience with the supernatural, it was clearly mostly Blossom’s imagination.
"I'll run a notice about her being busy fighting the dark forces," Lowell told me. "Thanks, good idea. Her audience will eat it up. If you see her, tell her drop in and say hello, okay?"
"Sure," I said, feeling a little bit ashamed of myself.
It didn't last because before my sister left, the Princess turned up. I don't know why she came to visit, but she sat herself down in the parlor like she planned to stay all afternoon, and my mother didn't know what to do with a princess in her house except keep offering her lemonade and cakes. Unless she was just here to spy around like her frog was doing.
"She's in a snit because she lost the Bowl," Naveen told me, from where I'd grabbed him out from behind the china cabinet when my mother wasn't looking. "At least she can't blame me this time. You don't have it, do you? Didn't think so. Hey, how would your mom react if I jumped up on the tea-table?"
"Poorly," I said firmly.
"That's what I thought," he said, and bobbed his head back and forth to judge the distance.
"I suppose you must be an Opener then," I guessed. He widened his eyes at me, and on a frog that's pretty dramatic.
"What makes you say that?" he said.
"Graymalkin told me that Openers are the ones who like to spread chaos," I told him.
"Heh," he laughed. "Well, it's a thought. Are you really the Seeress's official companion?"
"That's what I'm told," I said.
"And you being like - that," he nodded up and down my standing bipedal height - "Isn't a problem?"
"I'm not as good at sneaking around china cabinets as some of you, I guess," I said. "I'm not really the expert on this stuff. Why?"
"Nothing. I guess none of us are really experts at this, are we? We're learning as we go. Except Jack, maybe. He plays every time." He looked at me like I was expecting an answer.
Jack wasn't playing - we'd established that at the meeting with the Beekeeper. I didn't know if I should tell him this or not. I guess if he was an Opener - and Blossom was too, like Greymalk had been hinting - we were on the same side. Only I wasn't sure which side was which, really. I shrugged and said, "I sure am not an expert, anyway."
That's when Mrs. Shambaugh and Letty showed up. I have no idea why. Perhaps they were attracted to the smell of princess. I stayed just long enough to establish that they had lost track of their Viscountess - "she's had a lot of business to take care of, the nobility are important personages, you know", to which the Princess rolled her eyes a lot at us when they weren't looking and then started grilling Mrs. Shambaugh very politely on everything she knew about the Viscountess.
That was too much propriety in one room for me. I put Naveen down among the tea things and skedaddled before they noticed, and somehow ended up at Blossom's house.
Blossom wouldn't let me in. "I need refuge," I told her, "My house is unlivable right now."
"Well, so is mine," she said, with the door latched behind her. "Look, you can't come in, Mother's having a bad day and I already didn't have enough time for that, I need to be out working."
I remembered Blossom's mother from back before I went off to college: dark eyes and gold earrings and always being too much there for the space she was in. She'd never exactly been a fixture around town but I'd hardly seen her since I came back from college. I'd hardly ever been in Blossom's house, either, at least not beyond the room she had fixed up for her clients.
"Is your mom sick?" I asked, feeling even worse that I hadn't thought to ask.
"She's just not handling the energies very well now that she's older," Blossom said. "And the dark of the moon is coming so everything's draining down. I have to keep an eye on her so she doesn't wander off, that's all."
"I could keep an eye on her," I offered.
"You?" Her lip curled. If I hadn't been feeling guilty I'd've been insulted by that too.
"Look, I'm supposed to be your helper or whatever, right? If you need to go out, I can help."
She looked me up and down, and then sighed, and opened the door and let me in.
"Don't touch anything," she said. "And if she starts acting up, don't provoke her, ok? Just don't let her leave the house."
Blossom's mother was sitting in a chair in the tiny kitchen. She didn't start acting up. She spent all night sitting in the chair, muttering to herself sometimes. When we came in, Blossom told her that I was Alexander who lived across the tracks, she remembered Alexander, right? And she nodded at me, but I think she forgot I was there almost as soon as Blossom left.
I got bored enough that I wanted to read one of the old leatherbound books that was sitting on the table, but when I reached for it, Blossom's mother made a sudden loud noise that scared the crackers out of me, so after that I just sat there too. I did some more thinking. It wasn't real pleasant.
Still better that sitting in the front parlor between my sister and Mrs. Shambaugh, though.
Blossom turned up a few hours after dark with a bag full of something, and I remembered to tell her that Lowell had taken care of the newspaper column for the next few weeks. She stared at me, and then spat out a few words in a language I didn't know. "Thanks," she said. "I can't believe I forgot. Losing that job's the last thing I need."
I shrugged and sidled out. And when I got home I double-checked that my window was latched shut for sure.
Quiet day. I suppose it was usual this time of month, as everybody's power wound down toward the death of the Moon. It had been quiet all along though. I didn't like it. Snuff said that some years, it just was. That once, it was so quiet nobody even bothered showing up on the big night. I still didn't like it.
And there was still no sign of the Opening Wand. It would have to turn up somehow by the Death of the Moon, unless someone was hiding it so well even Jill couldn't find it. Jill didn't think any of the players we knew about so far would be able to hide it from her. And it was already late for a new entry in the Game to turn up.
It was assuredly time to investigate the strange happenings at the haunted house up the hill.
Whoever was there had their protections in place. Well-done and neatly crafted, too, like a net of fine lace around the edge of the property.
Of course, I'm a cat, so I just pawed a few strands aside and walked in.
The place looked abandoned, but I peered in windows, and saw a dark-haired woman tending some kind of bubbling potion. It didn't take much to figure out that she was from one of the Old Families: Not the Innsmouth line, but older and weirder and darker. A Peacock, maybe, or a Frump.
All right. She might be able to hide the Opening Wand from Jill if anyone could. Jill was a great witch but she was all self-taught, and didn't have an extended family to support her, just me and Snuff and Jack.
"Trespasser," something growled at me, wrapped around my chest, and yanked me in through the open sash. I thrashed and hissed and bit, but was getting nowhere. The thing tasted awful, like rotting grass. I realized it was a plant.
"Get off me!" I yowled.
"Trespasser," it said. "Trespassers are mine."
"Now, now, Cleo," the woman said, and I found myself being lifted out of suddenly limp coils. "It's just a little pussy cat."
I hissed and clawed at her, too. "Aren't you a darling morsel," she said, and rubbed me behind the ears. Her hand was corpse-cold, and she smelled unnerving, but she did know how to scratch a cat's ears. I started relaxing despite myself. "Would you like a treat?" she asked, and reached into an old canopic jar on the counter.
I don't know what it was she pulled out to offer me. I don't want to know. However wrong she smelled, that smelled a thousand times more. I levitated out of her arms and headed straight for the open window, a nest of tendrils writing after me.
And that was the Player nobody had been paying attention to, I thought. So much for quiet.
I couldn't sleep last night, so I gave up, got up early and went out around dawn. I went looking for Graymalk. Considering how often she turned up when I didn't want to see her, I didn't think it would be as hard as it was, but I ended up walking all over town in the pale morning. I hadn't been out that early since I came back from school, at least not from that side of the night.
Blossom’s house was still dark. I figured she’d been up late again, although she hadn’t said anything to me about it. I’d seen her creeping home across the tracks in the early morning every day lately. Crazy Jill’s house was also dark, but Snuff the dog was lounging across the doorway, watching me, so I asked him if Graymalkin was about.
“Probably,” he said. “I’d say she’s out burying things. She’s got a lot of burying things to do around now. But you can’t always tell with cats.”
Miss Dabney’s house didn’t have any lights on either. It might have had darks on, if there were such a thing. Even an hour after sunrise, a shadow of night seemed to cling to it. One of the curtains twitched a little and I moved on.
The Shambaughs’ was dark, too, but from what I’d heard the other day, the Viscountess hadn’t been there in several days, although her things were still in the guest room. I headed over to the dig site just to see what was happening. The Mad Professor and his assistants were already waist-deep in the trenches; they must have been trying to make up for the rainy weather we'd been having. One of the tarps that had been covering the trenches was spread over the grass, covered in half-rolled-up survey maps, and the Mad Professor's Beautiful Daughter lounged on a cushion among them. Arizona was curled up against her, probably for the heat. This couldn't be a great climate for rattlesnakes.
"Young Armstrong, is it?" the Professor called out heartily. "Care to help with the dig? I heard you'd been involved in some archaeological investigations yourself, previously! Are you interested in the field?"
I told him all about the Egyptian princess - except the less believable bits. If he was part of Blossom's Game he would probably have believed them anyway, but there was something about him that didn't seem quite trustworthy. He let me help dig a little bit - we found dirt, and also some slightly different dirt. I don't think I'll be going back to school for archaeology.
By then I was starting to get hungry, so I stopped at home for some breakfast and then - finally - got to see the air show, which was amazing.
Greymalk almost tripped me on the way home. She was curled up in a sunbeam in the road, and I was thinking about other things, and she told me to be very grateful I hadn't actually kicked her. She seemed generally out-of-sorts.
"Have you figure out if you're an opener or a closer yet?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "Listen, can you tell me more about this Game? I feel like everybody else knows all sorts of things I don't."
"You mean you still haven't talked it out with your companion?" she said, eyes narrow.
I shrugged.
"Then I'm not going to tell you anything else either," she said, and stalked off into the underbrush.
I was too houses down from Blossom's. The cat was right - I'd known for awhile she was right - but I didn't want to admit it. I'd have to, sooner or later, though. And everybody kept talking like a deadline was coming up. So I steeled myself, and knocked on the door.
Blossom looked like she'd just rolled out of bed. She squinted at me. "Yes?" she said.
"Blossom," I said, "Why don't you tell me anything? Do you really think I'm just a pet you can't trust with the real story?"
"Alexander," she said. "You haven't asked. Come in, won't you?"
I followed her inside and landed in a kitchen chair. "I haven't asked? Since when do you wait for me to ask before babbling all over the place?"
"But that was our deal," she said, dropping some white bread and margarine on the table. "You give me consent to make you my companion, and I wouldn't talk to you about it any more than absolutely necessary."
"What?" I said. So, on recollection that did sound somewhat familiar, but I'd never for a second expected she'd stick to it. "Do you think you're a fairy queen out of a nursery story or something, making riddles out of bargains?"
She made an eloquent face at me and handed me a slice of buttered bread. I decided not to pursue that line of enquiry any farther.
"What was the point of making me your partner in all this if you weren't ever going to tell me enough to be helpful? All the others are working as full partners."
"You didn't seem interested," Blossom said, "and I don't need a partner anyway. But I told you. Making you my Companion put you officially under the Players' truce until the Dark of the Moon, and kept you safe from any interference from the others. Knowing your tendency to get into all kinds of trouble left to yourself, I figured it was the only way to prevent you from ending up a virgin sacrifice or some such."
I gasped at the injustice of this. "My tendency to get up to trouble?" And then I caught up to the rest of what she'd been saying. We were only under truce until the Dark of the Moon. "When is the Dark of the Moon?"
"This Saturday," Blossom said. "But after that, nobody on this Earth is safe."
I had thought she was exaggerating when she'd talked about this all year. I still thought she was exaggerating, maybe. None of the Players I'd met - except maybe the strangle vine - seemed particularly homicidal, or even that much more dangerous than Letty Shambaugh, no matter who people claimed Jill's Jack really was. But I couldn't get our trip to the other world, I couldn't forget that something that lurked around every corner in that world, and I couldn't stop feeling like it was lurking somewhere in the shadowed places here. Especially after I'd met the woman in Miss Dabney's old house.
"Can we make a new deal?" I asked.
"What are the terms?"
"You tell me everything, and I help you stop the world from ending."
She frowned at me, and then said, "Deal."
I knew even before she said it that I was going to regret it. The woman talked for three hours straight. I learned all sorts of details about conjunctions and calculations and conjugations with spirits that I'm not going to repeat here because I have forgotten most of them already. But I learned enough.
She finished up by listing off who she thought the likely Players were, the same people I had on my list, mostly - us, Jill and Graymalk, the Beekeeper, the Viscountess, the Princess, the Aviatrix, the Mad Professor, and the Woman in the House.
"Jill is Closing, or she wouldn't be with Jack and Snuff," she said. "And we know they're allied with the Beekeeper - before the Dark of the Moon, alliance can be unusual and people can still switch alignment, but I'd be shocked if the Beekeeper wasn't a Closer. The Viscountess I don't have much of a read on."
"Nobody's heard much from her for the last couple of days," I said.
"It's early for someone to be out of the game like that. We'll have to keep an eye on her," Blossom said. "The Aviatrix is probably a Closer, as well, and I'd lay odds on the Mad Professor - his type want everything locked away in a museum. The Frump woman is an Opener, but she'll be unpredictable. The Princess is likely an Opener, but could go either way."
"And which are we?" I asked softly.
She took a deep breath. "You know which, Alexander."
"Do you really think the world we found in the painting is a better world than the one you saw in our future?"
"I think it doesn't matter. I'm committed."
"You said yourself that people can still change sides until the Dark of the Moon!"
"People can. I can't," she said. "Alexander, I know what happened to the Opening Wand. I know that I am going to be the person holding it on the Dark of the Moon. It's too late to change that. It was too late already when I first brought you into this. There's no point in me rethinking my decision over and over again. Some things are predestined."
"How do you know what happened to it?" I said, with a rising sense of doom.
"I'm so glad you asked, Alexander," she said, with a far-too-sweet-smile. "And I'm so glad you finally agreed to help me."
Rainy all day. I stayed in, working on calculations. Things were still shifting around a lot, unusually so for this late in the game. I still wasn't entirely sure how many players there were, much less alignments. Jill was upstairs, doing divinations to try to find out, and I went up occasionally to check on her and help out with the more complicated ones. We still had no idea where the Opening Wand was, and from what I could tell, nobody else did either. That was even more unusual.
"Unusual in a way," Snuff told me, from where we were curled up near the fire, keeping warm. "But there is no usual game. And it's unusual for anyone other than me and Jack to know enough about previous rounds to know what's unusual and what isn't, anyway. Could be the wand's sulking from what happened last time and it just won't show up at all."
"Is that possible?" I ask.
"I have no idea," Snuff said.
I took a catnap. No point worrying. And we'd be up late the next two nights, doing last-minute preparations.
I woke up suddenly and found myself staring at the front door. There was nobody there, except there was. Snuff was awake, too, and growling low and steady. All the hair on my back stood up.
I watched as whatever it was that wasn't there crossed the kitchen and paused at the ladder to the loft, then started climbing. I followed it up, and Snuff stood guard at the bottom.
Jill sat crosslegged on the bed, her skirts askew, playing cards and pendulums scattered around the leather mat she'd spread over the quilt. The rain was loud on the attic roof. "Graymalk?" she said. "What's the matter?" and then, trusting my expression, raised the protective circle that was built into the mat.
The whatever-wasn't-there ignored her, which made sense, as it wasn't there and she was. It moved around the bed, and then paused and wasn't by the wall under the window. I crept close, keeping low, but it didn't seem to know I was there either. It went straight to the lockbox under the eaves where we were keeping the Closing Wand, stopped for a moment at the final warding circle, but then crossed it without disturbing it; paused again by the box - a more compact sort of not-thereness, as if it was bending down - and wasn't there for about the amount of time it would take, perhaps, to pick the lock, open the box, pick the second lock, take out, perhaps, a Wand, and then close and lock the boxes again. But it didn't do any of those things. It didn't disturb the boxes at all. After all, it Wasn't There. It very emphatically Wasn't There.
I stared at it very hard - and a witch's cat's hardest stare is not without power - but nothing happened. It remained Not there, and then unfolded again, and moved walked back to the trapdoor. I stared after it.
"Graymalk, what are you watching?" Jill asked me, concerned. "Is there something wrong with the Wand?"
This is when I was quite envious of Alexander being able to talk to his companion whenever he wanted. I had to decide whether to try to mime the problem to Jill and lose the quarry, or follow the quarry and risk that it had done something undetected upstairs. But I decided I could trust Snuff to pick up the trail when the Not There got downstairs - he was a dog, after all. And it would be embarrassing to lose both wands before the Dark of the Moon.
I padded over and nudged the lockbox with one paw.
"There is something wrong with the Wand?" Jill said. "You want me to check on it?"
I twitched my tail impatiently. Obviously.
I stalked around the bed restlessly while Jill opened both the locks, taking a bit less time there than the thing that hadn't been there, and opened the inner lid to find - the Closing Wand. In the same place as it was before, looking untouched.
"It seems fine," Jill muttered. "And all the protections are pristine. I should check it over anyway, I suppose?"
I agreed, and then darted down the stairs to catch up to Snuff.
I found him just inside the outer border of the house's protection. He was wrestling with a Thing that Was There, But Shouldn't Have Been. They were both completely covered in mud from the rainy yard. He seemed to have it well in hand - Snuff has a lot of experience with keeping Things under control, and I wasn't that interested in the mud or being out in the rain - but I took the opportunity to snap a few threads in reality and then stare it back to The Place That Shouldn't Be, which is presumably where it came from.
"Thanks," Snuff said, panting a bit and laying down.
"That wasn't the Thing that Wasn't upstairs in the house," I said.
"No," Snuff said. "That was a Thing that Shouldn't Be, which is an entirely different sort of Thing. I'm not as good at tracking Things that Aren't There as a cat, but I can manage the basics. The Thing That Wasn't There didn't cross the kitchen, didn't go out the front door and across the yard, and then didn't cross at the outer protection. And then it became even more Not There than it had been, but it seemed to be having some trouble with the process, either with being Not There or with crossing the circle, and in the confusion the Thing That Shouldn't Be slipped in through an unguarded corner. I couldn't let it free, and the Thing That Wasn't There got away while I was busy."
"I am annoyed," I said, "But I suppose you made the right choice."
I managed to follow the spoor of Not-There-Ness a bit farther, but lost it somewhere near the trolley tracks. The evidence of something that isn't there not being there doesn't linger very long. We'd have to try something else, later.
Snuff seemed to want to just shrug it off as no harm done, but that's Snuff.
Jill was still sitting on the bed when I got back, but with an even bigger tangle of oracle bones, runestones, herb bundles, dead birds, live crickets and chalk added to the pile of tools on the quilt.
"Greymalk!" she said, excited. "I can't find anything wrong with the Closing Wand - I can't find any psychometry on it more recent than the last time the two of us had it out, there's nothing, it's fine - but you'll never guess!"
I settled down on the bed, half-leaning into her side. "I'll never guess what?" I asked.
"The Opening Wand is back! It showed up again, just a little bit after you left." She smiled, and ran two fingers warmly down the back of my head. "The Culp girl has it now. But where was it all this time? If she was hiding it, there'd be no point in revealing it now. Unless she's in some kind of trouble," she added thoughtfully.
Where was it all this time? I thought to myself. It wasn't there.
But it was the day before the Death of the Moon, which meant lots of last-minute preparations, and a busy night ahead. Jill eventually cleared off the bed and the two of us settled together for one last warm nap before one last night. (Jack and Snuff were banned from the bedroom until Snuff had become significantly less muddy).
After sunset, we ran into the Beekeeper at the Baptist graveyard and the Voodoo Princess at the Methodist one, and the woman from the haunted house very politely shared one of her finds with Jill - it was probably the last night an Opener and a Closer would be that close to allied, and in her case I didn't really mind. The Mad Professor, as usual, was sticking close to his dig. We'd already run into his daughter going for a moonlit walk in a white nightgown - she seemed unclear as to wear she was, or why, so the Beekeeper volunteered to lead her back to the hotel. I wondered if her father had been doing things to her after all, or if it was just spending so much time near the Icon and the Bowl when her nerves were already weak. We even ran into Manu gathering osage-orange fruit in the ravine near the trestle; he wasn't very forthcoming but it was good to know the Viscountess was still in the game.
I was noticing the people who weren't there, though.
The Aviatrix was curled up asleep in her bedroll under the wing of her plane, the parrot in a covered cage in the cockpit - I checked to make sure she was really there. Maybe she was so ahead of the game she hadn't seen the need to come out tonight. She seemed a competent sort. Or maybe she was playing in a new way, that involved more steel and glass than midnight cemeteries. We hadn't run into her working any other nights, either, and she'd been here nearly a week.
Blossom and Alexander weren't out at all.
I slept in until lunchtime.
When Blossom and I got up to that kind of trouble as kids, it never hit me that hard - I could jump right up and carry on as if nothing had happened. I guess I'm getting old.
Or maybe Blossom is right, and the convergence of energies is just making everything harder. Even she didn't expect the Thing that came for us - but I'm getting ahead of myself.
"I knew as soon as Jill told me about the Opening Wand being completely gone from existence," Blossom said yesterday morning. "It had to be us. We went and stole it, and brought it back with us. And in between those two times, it isn't anywhere."
"We went today and stole it from six weeks ago," I clarified, just in case.
"It didn't make sense to try sooner," Blossom said. "Once I have it, all the other players will find out, and I'll have to worry about keeping it. This way we skip two whole weeks of needing to defend our possession."
"Is the opening wand a football?" I asked. "Are tackles allowed?"
"Boys," Blossom sighed. "But we can't put it off much longer, because we have to have it before the Dark of the Moon, when everything must be set for the second half of the Game."
"I'm still stuck on we, to be honest," I said. "I know you can slip through time on your own. You've done it more than I have. This won't even be anything like traveling to ancient Egypt, or the distant future, it's six weeks and down the street."
"I'm out of practice," she said daintily. "I need you with me. Besides, I've never managed to have as much control when I travel alone, and I've never done anything this complicated."
"You're out of practice!" I said. "I haven't done it since ninth grade! I'm already regretting agreeing to help and it's been less than a day; that might be a record even for you."
"Alexander, be serious," she said. "You regretted a minute after you said it."
That was true enough.
We were in the hayloft of the Ghost Barn out behind my house. This was not by my choice, but I wasn't going to go into trance in Blossom's house with her Ma in the corner creepily staring through me, and we certainly weren't going to do it in my house, where my mother could - and would - walk in on us. The hayloft was at least private. And Blossom had put up some protection around it years ago, just in case any of the haunting still lingered, which she said would be easy enough reinforce. And if somebody did walk in on us, they would assume entirely the wrong reasons, which would be embarrassing but survivable. Probably.
The plan was that we slipped back in time to eight weeks ago, just before Jack and Jill had come to Bluff City, which would let us break into the cottage before there were any protections on it. Blossom had a newspaper from that day for us to use as a focus. She also had an anonymous letter she had written to Jill, to leave on the kitchen stove for her to find when she got there, full of portentiously verifiable prognostications about the next two weeks. And then - this was the tricky part - we would have to leave the house, but stay inside the outer warding circle that Jack and Jill would put up as soon as they arrived, and slip through time again, two weeks forward, to the day the wand had disappeared.
That was the tricky part. I'd never slipped in time when I was already slipped, except right back to my regular body in my regular time, somewhere else. Blossom said she'd tested it a few years ago and it ought to be doable to move forward two weeks in the same place, but she'd never tried it under pressure, and also all of the etheric currents were tricky right now.
Anyway, if we pulled that off we'd have to hide until Jack and Jill - and hopefully Snuff and Greymalk, too - left to go to the mysterious meeting that had been set up by the portentious. And then break into the house, go upstairs, and take the wand. Blossom had learned to pick locks some where - why not - and she said she had the combinations for the two lockboxes the wands were in. She'd traded with the Princess for them. I didn't ask what she'd traded.
Anyway, we'd need to stick close the whole time so our "etheric vibrations" kept in sync, whatever that meant, but once we had the Wand, we would just need to reverse the process to go home.
"Why can't we just go right back home once we have the Wand?" I asked. "Why sneak back out?"
"I don't think our astral bodies will be able to cross the guardian circle," Blossom said. "So if we can't shift either forward or backward to a time when it's not there, we'll be stuck. Or we could just break it, but that didn't happen in the version Jill told me, so if we do that we will break the course of history, and the world will be destroyed."
"Oh," I said.
"It's good to know that we must succeed at least well enough to retrieve the Wand," Blossom said thoughtfully, "because I know that happened. Of course, we don't know that we ever made it back to the present."
"Maybe we just lose the wand somewhere past the Veil, and it keeps not being anywhere," I suggested hopefully. "No more Wand, no more Game, everyone goes home."
"If both the Wands are not in existence on the night of the Conjunction, the world ends anyway," Blossom said.
Everything did go just fine until we go the Wand. We slipped back eight weeks to right behind the barn, and it was the smoothest I'd ever done it - I supposed if you don't have to cross an ocean the travel's not as rough - but for the few seconds we were neither here nor there, now nor then, something felt - just plain wrong. I vomited up my breakfast; Blossom barely kept hers. That hadn't ever happened before.
The abandoned cottage was still entirely abandoned, and we crossed into the yard. We decided to slip forward into the old outhouse that was still out back, which was good because Blossom didn't keep it down that time. (I didn't have anything left to bring up.) Luckily Jack and Jill had already left for the we heard them shut the front door behind them and walk to the road with Snuff padding after. Greymalk shot out the kitchen window on some business just a couple minutes later.
This was good, because I'd had enough of being trapped in outhouses for a lifetime.
Getting the wand went smooth as anything, although it felt like we were being stared at the entire time we were in the house, but neither of use could find any reason for it, so we just went on.
By the time we had the wand and were back out the door, it didn't just feel like we were being watched, but like we were being chased, and without saying anything we both went straight to the edge of the circle and held hands to skip back immediately.
It didn't work. We slipped past the Veil and there was something there, something that was so wrong that we both recoiled from it, hit the barrier of the circle, and fell right back into Jack and Jill's yard.
"They didn't stay at the meeting very long," Blossom said, "I didn't bother making it look real. We have to get out of here. And if we break the circle, we break time."
"That thing followed us here, didn't it," I said.
"They must be gathering in advance of the Conjunction," Blossom said, sounding nauseous.
"We'll just have to - go," I said. "Get past it someone. The two of us, powers combined, we'll have no problem, right? We'll be prepared somehow." I felt like I should probably say something manly and stoic here, like "I saw worse in the War," but I'd spent the war working in a mail room in Kansas, so I didn't think that was true.
"Right," Blossom said. "Count of three?"
She counted to three, and we ducked past the Veil, and the Thing was on it. I can't describe it at all. My mind couldn't grasp it. It was worse than the little bit of a glimpse we'd had in the world of the Painting. Our hands couldn't grasp it either, we weren't quite real there at the best of times and it was Something Else. The only thing that saved us was that it didn't quite seem to know how to come to grips with us, either. Finally Blossom pulled the Wand out of her pocket and shoved it into the thing, and at the same time I braced against it and pushed with more than just my hands, and something slipped, and it was gone.
We fell back into eight-weeks-ago as fast as we could, and ran, and made it just past the railroad tracks before we couldn't hold onto it anymore and slipped back to our present, in the hayloft. There wasn't anything waiting for us on the Other Side that time. Thank God, if there still is one.
We both just sort of stared at each other. Blossom still had the Wand in her hand; after a moment she put it back in her pocket. I felt like I had spend a week on a cross-continental train trip without sleeping. Blossom looked worse.
"I'm just going to take a nap," I mumbled, and let myself fall back into the hay. I felt Blossom land half on me a second later. I didn't say anything about it. After that, she could nap on me if she needed to.
We both woke up more than once. I don't think either of us screamed from the dreams. At least not loud enough that anyone came looking - maybe they thought it was just ghosts. Eventually I fell somewhere deep enough in sleep that the dreams stopped, and when I woke up to noon sun through the windows, Blossom was gone, but Greymalk was curled up asleep on my chest.