Reaping a Whirlwind Page 2
I went to one of the many jumbled junk drawers in the kitchen and opened the one full of reading glasses. Grace had about a hundred pairs, all variously enchanted, and I rummaged through. Sees into the infrared, sees through illusions, tetrachromat vision, protanopia vision, x-ray specs, t-ray specs—ah, there, life-vision. These glasses were diagnostically useful for finding mice or termites or mold, though Grace had probably used them for something more horrible, like stalking people through the desert or something. The glasses were tortoiseshell and cat’s eye and honestly pretty cute. I put them on, and the world became a black-and-gray matrix, with dead matter rendered as wireframe structures, and anything alive glowing green.
I scanned around and saw houseplants, and a few flies, and the shape of headless Kath on the basement stairs—ugh, she was slipping thin vine tendrils under the bottom of the door, and they were crawling toward me. I moved away, turning, looking, scanning in every direction—
I saw a bowling-ball sized orb of glowing green out in the gardening shed in the side yard. I pushed the glasses up on my head and ran outside, then tore open the sagging wooden door to the shed. Inside it was all spiderwebs and shovels and ancient sacks of potting soil, and way in the back, wrapped in canvas, something I dearly hoped was the Seed: the size of a head of lettuce, but smooth, the same green as Flora/Kath/whatever’s skin, and positively brimming with magic. I tucked it under my arm and went back into my kitchen.
There was some real Jumanji shit going on in there: vines crawling from under the door and up the walls and onto the ceiling. I whispered some protective spells just in case and said, “House, open the door.”
The basement door swung open and Kath lurched forward. She’d grown a new head, though a less comely one, more like an angry-looking bulb of garlic with eyes and a mouth. She came toward me, then stopped when she saw the Seed. “Give it to me.” Her voice was no longer breathy and sexy, which was good; the cognitive dissonance would have done me in.
“I found the Seed. There’s no reason you can’t win here. Take your vines outside, summon your tornado, and I’ll give you the Seed. You can go home and tell your people the man who hurt you is dead.” I was really hoping she wouldn’t make me say “Or else....” I could have threatened her, and threatened the Seed, easily, but that was my father’s way, not mine. Then again, my parentage may have made the threat implicit.
For whatever reason, the vines slowly withdrew. Kath wasn’t remotely human-looking anymore, and she shambled past me. I could tell she wanted to grab for the Seed, but she didn’t dare. “If you betray me....” she muttered.
“Yes, yes, I know, shoo.”
Once she was outside, I ducked back into the living room for a moment, then went out onto the back lawn with my laden arms. The tornado was already there, on the edge of the trees, a tight black funnel, but silent now. Magic was so weird.
I walked past the playhouse, the firepit, and the gazebo. Kath waited, squat and vegetative, at the base of the tornado. “Here’s the Seed.” I rolled it across the lawn toward her, and she grabbed it in her vines and pulled it in, until it vanished inside her now mound-shaped body. “And here are the books my father made of your people. You should have them.” I offered the armload of grimoires, which all shivered, except for the blue-bound Book of Grace on top, which had never exhibited that kind of motion or life.
She was silent and still for a moment, and then: “You would give up their power?”
“I’m not my father, Kath. I’m not even a cutting from his branch. I’m something new, and I grew in my own way.”
“I... we... I was mistaken about you. Thank you.” The vines took the books from me and drew them inside, too, and then, a moment later, one vine re-emerged, and deposited the Book of Grace at my feet. “This one is not made of my people.”
I nodded and picked it up. I’d always had my doubts about whether it was a book at all, or just a concentration of magic that happened to look like a book.
“I will tell my people that you are... new growth,” Kath said. “Perhaps someday you can visit our gardens, and see our new growth, born of the Seed.”
“I’d like that.” I suspected, now that the Seed had been returned and the old bargain unraveled, that Summerhome would no longer be struck through in the index.
Kath shambled into the whirlwind my father had reaped, and the funnel pulled her up, into the sky, and away.
I went inside and got my paintbox, a folding stool, my easel, and a freshly stretched canvas, and carried it all into the yard. I looked at the forest for a moment, and began to paint.
When Trey got home two days later, I showed him the finished work: A field of tall grass leading up to green trees blended into a greenish sky, the stormlight I’d managed to capture in oils, and a column of seething darkness dividing the canvas vertically in two.
“That’s amazing, Bekah. What’s it called?”
I told him.
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