The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere Read online

  “I’ve transferred some money into your account.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I want you to call me every day, do you hear me?”

  “Alright.”

  “I love you. Be safe,” she said. Before she rang off, she added, “The hexagrams were very clear. You have da zhuang - use it wisely.”

  Zach closed his cell just as Lizbeth called, “Eats on the table!”

  He went back into the kitchen to see a table crowded with food. He sat and served himself a slice of toast, two soft-boiled eggs and four pieces of bacon.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to an unfamiliar dish.

  Kevin said, “Twaróg, Polish cheese, and that’s Kielbasa, Polish sausage.”

  “So I take it our cook is Polish?”

  “Her name is Werka. She’s Simon’s wife.”

  Zach’s mouth was already full of egg and toast, so he smiled at Werka, who gave him a jaunty little wave from behind the refrigerator door. She brought a pitcher of milk to the table and said something to Kevin.

  “Oh,” he said. “Fresh from the cows this morning.”

  Zach looked askance at the milk and said, “I’m lactose intolerant.”

  Lizbeth called him a chicken and poured herself a glass. She took a swig and set the glass down with a satisfied, “Ahhh.” A foamy white moustache coated her upper lip.

  Zach took another bite of egg and toast, noticing that her lips were full, but not overly so. He thought she was very pretty. Her features and skin color suggested a mixed heritage. She looked up from her breakfast and caught him staring. He covered himself by saying, “You got a little something,” and pointing to his own upper lip.

  She grinned and didn’t wipe it off. “Who was on the phone?”

  “My mom.”

  “I take it from your tone you don’t get along with her?”

  He took another bite to avoid the question, but Lizbeth looked at him with her big brown eyes, obviously waiting for an answer. He finished chewing and said, “She’s – a character.”

  “Really.” It wasn’t a question. “I doubt she’s worse than my granma.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Lizbeth reached into her shirt and pulled out a leather cord tied to a small cloth bag with a peacock feather sticking out of the top.

  “Granma made this for me. It’s a voodoo wanga, a magical fetish. For protection.”

  Zach laughed. “Voodoo, huh? That’s strange.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Yeah, well, my mom’s into the Chinese occult. Apparently I have da zhuang.”

  “What’s that mean?” Lizbeth asked.

  Zach looked at Kevin, who obliged by answering, “Great power.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  East of England

  Kevin cleared the table and offered to help Werka wash dishes.

  “Thank you, but no,” she said in Polish. “The kitchen is barely big enough for me. Why don’t you and your friends go for a walk? There used to be a church on the other side of the woods, you can still see bits of the foundation. Simon’s grandfather told him it burnt down in the seventeenth century.”

  “Really? Okay, thanks.” Although his major was geology, Kevin was also fascinated by archaeology and paleontology and—anything really—to do with the earth.

  He told the others about the church. They agreed to go, but Zach said, “Nothing better to do until Caitlin gets back.”

  Werka let them out the back door and pointed beyond her well-tended garden and another green meadow to a stand of huge oak trees, whose leaves were just beginning to turn yellow in the cooler autumn weather. Zach, with his long legs, walked ahead, leaving Kevin content to keep Lizbeth company.

  An unseen bird warbled plaintively, and as they got closer to the oaks, a fat grey squirrel shot down a tree trunk on the edge of the wood and scooted up another. Lizbeth took a deep breath of the fresh country air and said, “It’s beautiful out here.”

  In the shade under the thick canopy of leaves, the ankle-length grass thinned out and was replaced by packed dirt criss-crossed by the thick, gnarly roots of the old trees. Kevin’s eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. The air was cooler here and the atmosphere quite gloomy, in stark contrast to the golden day they’d left behind in the meadow. Kevin saw Zach up ahead springing from root to root in long, graceful leaps. When Zach reached the far side of the stand of oaks he turned, his black hair gleaming in the sunshine, and called, “Here it is!”

  “Careful through here.” Kevin grasped Lizbeth’s elbow to help her over a section of roots with black voids underneath, like the extensive warren of some family of wild animals. Once they were back in the light of day, he saw her cast a strange look behind her.

  “It got spooky in there, huh?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  There wasn’t much left of the foundation of the old church, just a flat stretch of ground overgrown with weeds and four weather-worn stones, none higher than Kevin’s knee, marking the structure’s corners.

  “There’s a stream down there,” Zach said, pointing to what would have been the south side of the churchyard. “Hear the frogs?”

  Once again Zach walked ahead, followed by Lizbeth. Kevin dawdled behind, eyeing the closest cornerstone. There was nothing remarkable about the stone, but there was something about this place that made him uneasy. He had that feeling he always got when something was about to happen.

  Reluctantly, he left the foundation of the old church. Up ahead, Zach squatted on the shore of a rocky, fast-flowing stream. Lizbeth stood halfway between the church and the water, staring intently at the ground beneath her feet. Kevin stopped next to her and asked, “What’s up?”

  She met his eyes and shook her head, but he didn’t need to hear the words. He felt it, something in the ground, something buried here.

  “Zach!” he called. Zach looked up from whatever he’d been doing by the stream. Kevin waved him over.

  “Stupid frog,” Zach said when he reached them. He brushed fastidiously at a line of moisture on his jeans. “This is my only pair of pants and he peed all over them.”

  Kevin ignored him. He knelt down and ran his hands over the grass. “There’s a mound here.” He grasped a handful of sod and tugged until the roots let go of the sandy soil. “Help me.”

  Zach found a heavy stick and began digging at the dirt in the areas Kevin uncovered. Lizbeth stepped back and watched, arms crossed. The layer of soil covering the object was only a few inches deep. After several minutes of excavating, Kevin brushed the remaining dirt away and they all stared.

  A flat slab of stone lay flush with the ground. He touched the dark slate and ran his fingers across an ornate inscription.

  “Can you read it?” Lizbeth asked.

  Kevin nodded. “It says, ‘Here lies Mr. Richard Allen, who died the year 1656.’”

  Lizbeth frowned and looked all around her. “This is a graveyard?”

  “Cool,” Zach said.

  From his vantage point kneeling by the gravestone, Kevin picked out several more slight mounds in the grass nearby. In fact, it looked as if they’d trod over quite a few on the way to the creek without even noticing.

  “Don’t you feel it?” he asked Zach.

  “Feel what?”

  Kevin stood up and gestured to the gravestone. “Stand on it.”

  Zach’s eyebrows went up, but he stepped on Mr. Richard Allen’s last resting place and looked at the cracked stone between his feet. After a moment, he raised his head and said, “Feels like Caitlin.”

  “That’s it!” Lizbeth said. “That’s the exact feeling I get around Caitlin. Sort of a hair-sticking-up-on-the-back-of-my-neck sensation.”

  Kevin straightened and brushed the dirt from his pants. “I think you’re right. But if we all have the ‘ancient blood,’ why don’t we feel it when we’re around each other?”

  “Probably because like Caitlin said – it’s diluted in us.” Zach shrugged.

&nbs
p; “So what does that make Richard Allen?” Kevin asked.

  Lizbeth looked down at the dark stone. “He must have been a shapeshifter, too. Like Caitlin.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  East of England

  Looking down at the final resting place of someone who could very well have been one of her ancestors, Lizbeth fought against an unexpected rush of tears. She wasn’t sad for poor Mr. Richard Allen, who’d been gone for centuries and was probably nothing more than dust and bones. It was Caitlin she thought of. Caitlin, who was at least one hundred-years-old. In the ground before them was evidence of a shapeshifter’s mortality. How long had Mr. Richard Allen been alive, and what eventually killed him? Up until now, Caitlin had seemed invincible. Distressed, Lizbeth took a few steps away from Zach and Kevin so they wouldn’t see her blubbering about a woman she didn’t even like. Luckily, they were busy placing the clumps of sod back on the grave so it wouldn’t seem as if they’d desecrated it.

  She looked through the trees towards the house and saw Simon approaching on horseback, his chestnut Clydesdale lifting its large white hooves high in an animated trot. The big beast didn’t seem to be laboring under Simon’s bulk, but the horse-to-rider ratio resembled that of a normal-sized man riding a Mexican burro. The way Simon was waving his arm seemed urgent, so she said, “Hey,” and was pleased when her voice didn’t give away her melancholy. “I think we should go back.”

  They met Simon at the edge of the oaks. He began tossing their luggage from the back of the Clydesdale. Zach intercepted his backpack with the laptop inside before it left Simon’s hand.

  “You must leave, and quickly,” Simon said. “Caitlin has been taken and it won’t be long before they come here. I have no vehicle for you, and everything on my farm has to appear normal, so I won’t risk sending you on horseback. Don’t draw attention to yourselves-”

  “What are you talking about?” Zach interrupted.

  “Go back the way you came,” Simon continued as if Zach hadn’t spoken. “Follow the creek upstream for two kilometers. You’ll see a road. Stay off it! Just keep it in sight and walk downhill into town. The very first building you find will be a tavern. Tell the owner I sent you, but don’t stay long. You’re safest in London where you can hide in plain sight.”

  He turned the Clydesdale back towards the house. Over his shoulder, he called, “Don’t use credit cards. Don’t call home. Go!”

  Lizbeth watched as he urged his horse into a trot and left them standing there, shell-shocked and open-mouthed.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” Zach said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Kevin hefted his knapsack onto his back and picked up one of Lizbeth’s bags. “You heard the big man, let’s go.”

  Lizbeth thanked Kevin. She had the most luggage of any of them and felt bad about it, but if they were to disappear she couldn’t leave anything behind.

  She and Kevin entered the stand of oaks again, leaving Zach spluttering behind them. “What did he mean, Caitlin’s been taken?”

  Lizbeth said, “Stuff it, Zach. Come on. We’ll ask the tavern owner.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but only to hide her fear.

  After walking for a few minutes, Kevin said, “I was just thinking about her when Simon showed up.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Um, you guys,” Zach said from behind them. They’d just reached the part of the woods where the roots were difficult to navigate. Lizbeth didn’t want to take her eyes off the treacherous ground, but she heard the distinct sound of a bird’s wings flapping. She glanced around.

  A raven had perched on Zach’s head. “Little help here?” he said.

  Lizbeth couldn’t help it; he looked so comical she laughed. Kevin started back to help him, and Zach said, “Yeah, laugh it up. This is the only shirt I’ve got and if my feathered friend here decides to crap on me…”

  “Won’t hit your shirt,” Kevin said. “He’s aiming for the part in your hair.”

  Lizbeth pressed her lips together to banish her smile. She cleared her throat and said seriously, “Knock it off. The bird, that is, off his head. We have to get moving.”

  Kevin set the bags down, jumped up and down and waved his hands in front of Zach’s face, yelling, “Augh!”

  The sleek black bird tilted its head and regarded Kevin with one eye.

  “Are its claws tangled in your hair?” he asked.

  “No! I tried to get it off as soon as it landed on me, but it just kept coming back.”

  “Its eyes are blue,” Lizbeth said. “Is that normal for a raven?”

  “How should I know?” Zach bent forward at the waist and shook his head. The bird flapped its wings, but lifted up only a couple of inches and settled on Zach’s bent back.

  She stepped closer. “Go away,” she whispered. The bird looked at her. Then, for no reason she could name, Lizbeth asked, “Did Caitlin send you?”

  She didn’t really expect the bird to respond, and wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t.

  “That’s it,” Zach said. “I didn’t want to hurt you, bird-brain, but – no more Mr. Nice.”

  He spun around so fast that, to Lizbeth, his body seemed to blur. His hand connected with a dull thwap, and the bird let out an outraged “Caw!” and flew awkwardly to a nearby branch. Zach straightened up and said, “And don’t come back.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  East of England

  They’d followed Simon’s directions and found the one-lane road, but hiking through the thick scrub alongside it slowed them considerably. Zach’s laptop seemed to get heavier the further they went, and he’d taken the bag Lizbeth had been carrying as well. The back of his shirt was soaked with sweat and the deodorant he’d borrowed from Kevin that morning had been unable to combat two days with no shower. He took the rear of the procession so the others wouldn’t get a whiff. The raven with a crush on him had followed them the whole way, cawing from the trees, but at least it hadn’t tried to land on him again.

  “No one’s driven by for the last fifteen minutes,” he said. “Let’s walk on the road.”

  Lizbeth turned to him, her brown curls stuck to her forehead in the heat of the day. “Simon said not to.”

  “Oh, and you always do what Simon says,” he muttered.

  “Look!” Kevin pointed up ahead. “There’s a building.”

  The small one-story structure set back from the road had a pink neon sign in its front window that read, “Beer, Wine & Spirits.” A lone car was parked in the gravel out front.

  When Zach walked into the dark establishment and saw the scowl on the face of the man behind the bar, he halfway expected to get challenged for his I.D.

  The scowl wasn’t for them, however. The man was watching a small television on the bar and shaking his head. “Bleedin’ volcanoes going off all along the ring of fire in the Pacific. Brutal.”

  “Are you the proprietor?” Lizbeth asked.

  The man nodded. He switched off the television and reached behind him into a glass-fronted refrigerator. It was hard to tell from the other side of the bar, but it looked to Zach like he was even shorter than Kevin. He had greasy white hair pulled into a ponytail and a long, pointed grey beard. His green flannel shirt was covered by a scarred leather apron. If Santa were a diminutive biker, he might look a little like this guy. “Name’s Len,” he said in an Irish brogue. “Yer late.”

  Zach gratefully took the bottle of soda Len held out to him, noting how small his wizened little hands were. “We had some trouble with a raven, of all things.”

  Len chuckled and then he surprised Zach by stepping down off something behind the bar and disappearing entirely from view. When he walked out from the far end, Zach saw that he was not just shorter than Kevin, who was maybe 5’4” or so, he was a little person.

  “We’re off, now, to London-town,” Len said, with a bit of sing-song. He went to the front window and flipped a switch. The neon sign flickered and went out. He opened the front door, they all trooped out
obediently, and he locked it behind them.

  As soon as he stepped into the sunshine, a black streak left the roof of the building and settled on his shoulder. Len pulled half a bagel from his pocket and gave it to the bird, which immediately flew off with it.

  “This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing,” Len recited. “To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core; Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

  “Edgar Allen Poe,” Kevin said.

  Len nodded. “Caw would’a left you alone if you’d just given him a bit o’ somethin’ to eat.”

  “We’ll remember that next time,” Zach said.

  “In you go.” Len gestured to the parked car, a red Mini Cooper. “Put your things in the boot.”

  The “boot” turned out to be a narrow trunk area at the back of the little car, too small to hold more than Lizbeth’s things. Kevin and Lizbeth got into the back, Kevin with his duffle bag in his lap. Zach bent nearly double and squeezed into the passenger seat, trying not to make a fuss about the fit so he wouldn’t insult Len. Although he couldn’t very well hide the fact that the backpack resting on his knees was only inches from his chin.

  The car was specially fitted with a booster seat, extensions on the gas pedal, brake, gearshift and clutch. Len hopped in and said, “Now you know how they get so many clowns in those little circus cars.”

  Once they’d travelled through the quiet little town and gotten onto the highway, Lizbeth said, “Mr. Len, sir? May I ask you some questions?”

  “For certain, you can. Caitlin’s not much of a talker, is she? Simon’s no better.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Zach said.

  “And you’ve got a bit of a smart mouth on ya,” Len said. “I like it. But you also smell to high heaven, which I don’t like. Roll down yer window.”

  Embarrassed, Zach did as he was told.

  “Now go on with ya, Miss,” Len said.

  “First of all, who’s got Caitlin?” Lizbeth asked.

  “Well, the police, who else?” Len said. “And don’t you believe none of those trumped-up charges, either. Caitlin’s many things, but she’s no international terrorist.”