Instead of Michael, Sophie answered the phone. From the abundance of background noise I could tell that she was sitting in traffic, probably in my uncle’s old Chevy truck, since he let the boys borrow it on occasion.
“Can you hear me?” I said. “It’s Nola.”
“Oh, hi, Nola!” she said. “Mike and I are just sort of cruising around.” Her voice dimmed. “It’s your sister.”
“Ask Mike,” I said, “if you guys can come over here to my place. I’ve got something to show him.”
“Sure,” she said. “He’s been thinking he should call you anyway. He says it’s mental overlap.”
“That’s the family name for it, yeah. See you in a few.”
I clicked off and returned to contemplating the array of brightly colored boxes. In about five minutes, Ari came back upstairs.
“That car was reported stolen,” he said. “The officer’s sent for the city tow truck to take it away. Someone will call the owner tomorrow.”
“Why not have the poor guy just come get it now?”
“It’s not proper procedure. He’ll have to pay the towing fees and the like.”
“Yeah, but if he just came and got it, there’d be no towing fees.”
Ari considered this, then shrugged. “There needs to be a procedure,” he said, “and it needs to be followed.”
The principle of Order on the hoof, that’s my Ari. I didn’t bother arguing any further.
I kept watch out the front window for Michael, though I heard the ancient red truck grumbling along before I saw it. I went downstairs and reached them just as he was parking across the street. Sophie hopped down from the passenger seat, a pretty blonde girl in tight jeans and an oversized blue sweater. She was wearing a pair of black orthopedic shoes, one especially made for her clubfoot, and on her normal foot, a thick-soled version to compensate for the height difference. Stylish, no, but she could walk without lurching like a drunken sailor.
“It’s great to see you,” she said. “I hope we get a chance to, y’know, talk.”
“Is something wrong?”
She glanced in Michael’s direction. “I don’t know.”
Something between them, maybe, I thought. I arranged a sympathetic expression, and we let it go at that.
Jingling the keys, Michael led the way across the street. I happened to glance at the apartment house that stood next to our building. The neighbors both upstairs and down were lurking at the corner windows that gave them a good view of our building’s front. I waved. None of them waved back. I was beginning to get the feeling we weren’t real popular in the neighborhood.
“Before we go inside, bro,” I said, “I’d like you to take a look at something.” I pointed to the place on the sidewalk where the break-in artist had thrown his device. “See that little nick in the concrete?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “What about it—oh! Jeez.” He took a few steps toward it. “This is seriously weird. There was a gate here, but it’s gone.”
“It was a temporary arrangement only.”
He frowned and stretched out a hand toward the place where I’d seen the yellow light. “I can almost see something, a kind of fog, and then someone moving, but it’s blurry and faded. Y’know?”
“Yep. That’s called a scar on the time stream. We’ll see how long it lasts. Come upstairs, and I’ll tell you more. I think it concerns something that Dad kept in his desk.”
As soon as we walked into the living room, Michael spotted the carton that held the array of boxes. He had just started to say hello to Ari when he let his voice trail away and stared at the papers and other clutter on the floor.
“What is that?” Mike’s voice was nearly a whisper.
“Papers from Dad’s desk,” I said.
“Don’t mean those.” He walked over and squatted down by the open cartoon. “What are these?”
“I don’t know. We were hoping you’d have some ideas.”
“Not ideas. Just a feeling.” Michael reached into the carton. “God, they’re hella beautiful.”
When he laid a finger on a yellow box, it sang one pure note, starting out loud, then fading away. Sophie caught her breath with a gasp. Ari and I exchanged a look.
“They didn’t sing for you,” Ari said.
“Nola’s not a world-walker,” Michael said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, we just saw someone throw a blue-violet sphere onto the sidewalk. It created light and smoke, and when he ran into the smoke, he disappeared. Gone. Totally gone.”
“Whoa!” Michael whistled under his breath. “Stinky nasty!”
“Is that good or bad?” Ari said.
“Good.” Michael grinned at him. “Real good.”
“What I wonder is, are there spheres inside those boxes?” I said. “I’m afraid to just cut one open to look.”
Michael picked up the blue-violet box and hefted it in one hand. His expression turned dreamy, distant, as if he focused on some other view.
“I think they’re spheres, all right,” he said. “Orbs. That’s the name they like. Orbs.”
A cold frisson rippled down my back. I walked over to the carton and looked down as Michael put the blue-violet box back in its place. Each box appeared to be a little taller than before, as if they were straining upward toward my brother’s hands. At moments I saw a flicker of glow from one or the other of them.
“Mike,” I said, “move away from the carton for a minute.
I want to see what happens when you’re some distance away.”
Michael stood up and walked out of the living room to the head of the stairs. The boxes seemed to shrink. The flickers of glow disappeared, only to reappear when Michael returned.
“I don’t suppose you’d let me have these,” Michael said. “Looks like a complete set.”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t. No unauthorized experiments, buster.”
“Yeah, I figured. You’d better put them somewhere, like, y’know, you can lock. Seriously.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” For one thing, not that I said this aloud, I wondered if they were the female apparition’s stolen property. If so, I didn’t want her taking them back again before we figured out what they were—and who she was.
Ari had bought and installed a sizable wall safe in our bedroom as part of the upper flat’s security system. I’d hung a framed print over the door, one of Monet’s water lilies sequence. Inside, we kept extra items from Ari’s weapons collection as well as some of his gadgets. I’d packed up the flash card containing Belial’s consciousness in a special antistatic wrap and put it inside as well.
To this peculiar collection we added my father’s boxes. Since the carton was too large to fit, I let Michael take them out and place them on the floor of the safe. No matter which box he placed next to which, the colors rippled and changed to preserve the spectral order. As they did so, they sang to him.
“I gotta wonder if the colors stay the same inside.” Michael looked at me with begging eyes. “Could we open just one?”
“It isn’t Christmas Eve.”
We shared a smile. As kids, we’d all been allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve, which gave our parents some extra sleep on Christmas morning.
“Yeah, I figured,” Michael said. “But I had to try.”
I shut the safe door with a click and spun the combination lock to scramble the numbers. As I was putting the
print back in place, I heard a faint whisper of music from inside, a fragment of a sad melody in some minor key.
“Did you hear that?” Michael said. “I don’t know what it is, but I bet it came from those boxes.”
“So do I. Let’s hope they’re still there the next time we look for them.”
“They will be. They’ve been waiting for Dad to come back all these years, haven’t they?”
“If you say so, they probably have.” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
With his hand on the doorjamb, Michael paused and looked back at me. “I do know,” he said. “They’ve been waiting, and they know I’m his son, too. Y’know, this is all hella strange. Seriously.”
If understatements could get the Nobel Prize, that remark would have won him a medal.
For our late lunch, Ari and Michael decided to go fetch take-out food from a nearby deli, which gave me a chance to talk privately with Sophie. In the time that she’d been living at Aunt Eileen’s, she’d put on a few much needed pounds, though her thin little face still showed her history. She’d been born on Interchange, then been abandoned by her mother. As a child she’d starved on and off for years. We sat down together on the couch.
“So what’s the problem?” I said.
“I dunno, and that’s part of the problem.” She gave me a weak smile. “Last month, I started feeling really weird, and it wasn’t female stuff, y’know?”
“Okay. Weird, how?”
“I wanted to go up the hill to the big park and run around through the grass and trees.” Her face colored a delicate pink. “Naked.”
“Uh-oh. I’ve heard that symptom before. When was this, right before the full moon?”
“Yeah. Mike was teasing me about it. He howled, kind of like a dog.”
“He’s heard the symptom before, too.” I remembered a detail from Dad’s letter. “Can I take a look at the palm of your hand?”
Sophie held out her right hand. I took it and looked at
the pattern of lines. In the center of the palm, where a lot of people have Ms and Ws, she had a deep letter F. Otherwise her hand looked perfectly normal to me. I let go of it.
“Well, I guess that doesn’t mean much,” I said. “Unless—” The CDS came to my assistance. “Fenris. Odin’s wolf.”
Sophie began to tremble.
“Do you ever dream about wolves?” I said.
“Yeah.” Her voice was barely audible. “I did last month, anyway.”
“At the full moon?”
She nodded. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I think you know what I’m working up to,” I said.
She nodded again. “I don’t want to be a werewolf,” she whispered. “Not here, not where everyone’s so nice to me. I’d have to go back to Interchange.”
“Why? Even if it’s true, you don’t have to go around biting people. That’s a choice some lycanthropes make. Others fight against the tendency and live reasonably normal lives. Father Keith can help you. You can trust him on that.”
“But I’m so scared,” Sophie’s voice stayed at the whisper level. “If I lost Michael, I’d just die.”
I could remember feeling the same about my first real love. Fortunately, her relationship with my brother had a much better chance of lasting than my first affair had.
“You won’t lose him,” I said. “Sophie, haven’t you figured out just how weird our family is? If you do have lycanthropy, it means you’ll fit right in. Our brother Pat had it. It’s nothing new to the O’Gradys.”
She covered her face with her hands and wept in an overflow of relief. I got up and hunted down a box of tissues in the bedroom. I brought them back and set the box down next to her on the couch.
“You might not have it, anyway,” I said. “It usually manifests much earlier than this. You’re what, sixteen?”
“Yeah, as far as I know.” She grabbed a couple of tissues and snuffled into them before she continued. “I don’t know when my birthday is, so I might be seventeen already.”
“Then you should have started making the change a couple of years earlier. Unless the radiation on Interchange
has an effect on lycanthropes, but you’d think that if anything it would make them more common.”
“There were some around. Not many, and when the cops found one, they took them away somewhere. Poof! and the person was gone. I dunno if they shot them, but I bet they did.”
“Well, nobody’s going to shoot you here. Ari won’t let them.”
She managed a weak smile at that.
“Let me think about this,” I went on. “I’ll see if I can come up with an answer for you.”
But Sophie provided the answer herself, when Mike and Ari returned with bags of deli food. Although the two men would have eaten right out of the cartons, I insisted on putting the meal out on proper plates. I brought out utensils, too. Fingers are not good enough for potato salad, no matter what some males of our species think.
Sophie came into the kitchen to help me carry the food out to the living room. When she saw the platter of pastrami and corned beef, her big dark eyes grew wide.
“Look at all that meat,” she said. “I guess I’m still not used to it, yet, all the stuff there is to eat here.”
“You didn’t get much meat back on Interchange, huh?” I said.
“Almost never, yeah. It was so expensive there, but Aunt Eileen cooks some almost every day.”
My mind poked me. “I bet that’s why you’re developing your talent late,” I said. “And furthermore, I bet it’s why I keep seeing more and more lycanthropes around here, too. The amount of meat we all pack away must trigger the gene or activate the virus.”
We decided to reveal Sophie’s secret right away. I figured that the family needed to know before her first change. Pat’s lycanthropy had taken us all by surprise. The uproar that followed had injured him psychologically even beyond the normal stress of discovering that he had werewolf genes. Sophie sat down next to Michael on the couch.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. “Nola figured it out. When I felt so weird, y’know? You were right to howl.”
Michael turned to her and grinned. “Are you telling me that you’re—”
“Yeah.” Sophie’s voice returned to her near-whisper. “Nola thinks I might be. I’m just getting it late.” She was staring at Michael in honest fear, waiting for his reaction.
Michael grinned at her. “That’s so cool,” he said. “I mean, like, it’s just so cool!”
“It is?” Her voice became steadier by the word. “You like it?”
“Sure. Y’know, I wanted to be a werewolf once myself.” He held out his arms. “That’s great!”
Sophie nestled against him and began to snuffle once again.
“You’re a werewolf?” Ari sounded utterly confused.
Sophie nodded and wiped her eyes on a tissue.
“Oh,” Ari said. “For a bit there I thought you were going to say you were pregnant.”
Everyone laughed, even Sophie. Michael looked as if he was struggling against the impulse to kiss her right in front of us.
Ari and I retreated to the kitchen on the pretense of bringing in the rest of the food only to find that someone had gotten there ahead of us, a little blue smelly meerkat-like being. Or-Something, Michael’s tame Chaos critter, was standing on the counter by the sink and chowing down in the cardboard container of coleslaw. When I yelped, it raised its wedge-shaped head. Strands of cabbage hung from its snaggly teeth. When I snapped my fingers, it disappeared.