A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (16 page)

42. G.

I had a hard time meeting people’s eyes in the brightness of
the kitchen. Melody’s grandmother was pouring us each a mug of hot chocolate,
and her grandfather, roused from sleep, was wheeling across the kitchen in his
wheelchair with a sack of cookies in his lap. He stopped next to me and
deposited a large handful on the plate in front of me.

“Eat them, even if you don’t want to,” he said. “You
expended a lot of energy and you need it.”

I looked at the cookies, and my stomach lurched in
rebellion. “I don’t think I can.”

“Here, drink this first. It will help more than the
cookies,” said Melody’s grandmother, plunking a sports drink down on the table
next to me.
“Electrolytes.
Very
important for the energy system of your body to be tip-top.
You might
want to consider adding some magnesium and potassium supplements to your
workout regimen.”

I looked at her, my eyes slightly glazed over with fatigue,
and tried to figure out how she knew what I needed. She just smiled at me, and
turned around to grab another couple of mugs of hot chocolate to pass to the
others.

I took a swig of the sports drink, and after a moment or
two, I really did feel a little bit better.

“Hey, Tara, are you okay?” Melody had her phone on speaker
in the middle of the table, and she and Sam were leaning over it.

The sound of Tara rolling over in bed, and her sleepy voice
made me feel a little more solid. She didn’t sound like she was in danger.

“Yeah, I’m asleep. Weird dream though,” she said, slowly
waking up. “What time is it?”

“
It’s
3:46 a.m.”, Sam said. “Sorry,
we just had a sort of collective nightmare thing going on over here and wanted
to make sure you were okay.”

“What was your dream about?” Melody said before Tara could
respond.

There was a long pause before Tara started speaking again.
“It was more like pictures than a dream.
Like I was being
shown something.
A golden crown, an old crossroads, an
arrow in the ground, a heavy metal door opening – like the door on a dungeon.
Like I said, it was weird.”

“Tell her she should write down everything she remembers,”
Melody’s grandfather said, nodding at the phone before he popped a cookie in
his mouth.

“Gramps says you should write it all down,” Melody said.
“Everything that you remember.”

“I’ll do it when I wake up in the morning.”

Gramps made a decisive gesture with his hand and Melody
said, “No, he says
do
it now before you forget.”

There was a rummaging sound on the other end of the phone.
“Okay,” she sounded a little irritated, “I’ve got some paper and a pen. Give me
a second. You guys know it’s going to be impossible for me to get back to sleep
after this, right?”

“Tell me about it,” said Sam.

“Also dear,” said Gram, leaning over the edge of the table,
“we need you to come over tomorrow around lunch time. Can you do that? We have
a group project to do. It’ll be fun. And I’ll make Frito pie for lunch.”

“Okay, got it.
Tomorrow at lunch.
Frito pie.
Dream recorded. Can I go back to sleep now?”

Melody looked at her grandparents for confirmation. “Yeah,
sleep tight. And if you have any more dreams, write them down.”

Tara mumbled and the phone line went dead.

I took another swig of my sports drink and followed Gramps’s
lead by crunching down a few cookies.

Melody’s grandparents shared a long look. “Another Quarrel,”
he said to her.

“I’m afraid so,” she said softly.

I could be mistaken, but I thought I saw the glimmer of
sorrow in her eyes.

“What’s that?” Melody
asked,
who clearly
hadn’t been paying attention.

“Nothing dear.
Drink your cocoa.
Tomorrow’s going to be a big day. And if you think rejecting the idea of magic
as Science is upsetting, then you’re really going to be irritated in a few
hours.”

#

Melody walked us to the door. It was well past four in the
morning, and while the initial jitters and nausea were past, the bone-crushing
fatigue had set in. I needed sleep.

“Thanks for… saving me,” she said, looking at Sam, and then
looking at me for a long moment. She reached out and put a hand on my arm. “I
don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know what you did, but I am pretty
sure it saved me.”

I wasn’t sure what I did either. The whole episode was a
blur of righteous anger, adrenaline, and shadows. I shrugged, not knowing what
to say, so I just filled the silence with meaningless crap. “Sure, see you in a
few hours?”

Melody smiled. She gave Sam a short hug and then,
hesitantly, gave me one, too. I was surprised, but returned it. “See you at
lunchtime,” she said and ushered us out the door.

Sam and I stood on the front stoop for a moment longer
before walking down the sidewalk to the street.

“What you did back there, that was… amazing,” Sam said. The
expression on his face was troubled. “How did you do it?”

“I don’t know, man. I’m not even sure I remember it clearly.
It’s like a blur.”

“You blasted those shadows away.
And you didn’t even touch them.
”

“Really?
Is that what it looked
like, because…” because I wasn’t sure, but I thought I remembered having a
sword… made of light.

“Because what?”

“Nothing.
Like I said, it’s mostly
a blur. See you later, okay? I’m going to jog home. Maybe it will help me sleep
when I get there,
cuz
even though I am dead tired, I
still feel really jumpy.”

Sam nodded and waved and I ran off, but two miles didn’t cut
it, so I ran ten.

43. TARA

The weather was beautiful; sun dappled the shade and a light
breeze wafted over the patio table. The scent of pears sweetened the air and
birds chirped in the trees. Surrounded by friends, bellies full of
frito
pie, how could the day get much better than this?

The mood wasn’t as light as it could have
been,
each of us lost in our own thoughts for the moment. Melody and G. seemed to be
the most unsettled, whereas Sam looked wound as tight as a spring. He was
watching what Gram was doing intently. Since I had missed out on the night’s
events, I just sat back on my heels and watched everyone else. The group was
different than it had been, even last week. We had all changed, and according
to G. and Sam, it wasn’t necessarily a change for the better.

Gram handed out particle respirator masks to each of us, and
we put them on. According to her, making positive orgone generators was a
smelly, sticky job, and if we didn’t want to kill brain cells, the respirator
was a must. I had a pretty acute sense of smell, so I made sure mine was nice
and snug, even though I felt slightly claustrophobic.

“These cupcake pans are what we will use to mold the pucks.
The resin and the metal shavings together slow down the flow of energy and
accumulate it. However, the resin-metal matrix is not particular about what
kind of energy it accumulates – could be positive
or
negative. So to turn this matrix from an accumulator to a
generator, we add a quartz crystal in the center.”

“Why quartz?”
I asked, leaning in
to watch what Gramps was doing. He used silicon spray to coat the cupcake
depressions, added a shallow layer of aluminum pieces across the bottom of each
cup, quartz chunks as big as the first digit of my thumb, more aluminum pieces,
and then a ladle full of resin in each. The resin made big air bubbles that
expanded and popped as they settled down into the depressions; Gramps poked
them with a bamboo skewer to eliminate any smaller bubbles, too.

“Because it produces electricity?”
Sam asked as he sorted through the piles of quartz for pieces of the
appropriate size.

Gramps nodded. “Indeed, quartz is piezo-electric. The resin
matrix compresses the quartz, causing it to pulse. The metal bounces that pulse
of energy around. As the deadly orgone energy encounters the pulses, it is
converted to positive orgone. There’s something else about negative ions and
quantum mechanics... I never did understand everything about why it does what
it does; Matthew was the one who was good at that kind of thing.” He fell
silent as Gram ladled another small dollop. The resin settled in to form a
smooth surface, this time with no bubbles.

Piezo-electric… I wonder if that’s why Melody and I could
feel the buzz of a piece of
quartz?
Speaking of
Melody, I glanced over at her. She was very quiet. The mention of Matthew had
made her forehead wrinkled above her respirator and she looked down at her
hands where they lay clasped in her lap. I moved closer.

“You okay?” I asked her, my voice muffled through my mask.

She looked up at me.
“Yeah.
Maybe.
This is all-- I’m just...” she fluttered her hands.
“You know. It’s just going to take me a little bit to feel normal.”

“Part of that is the energy loss you are experiencing from
last night’s attack,” Gram said. “It was very traumatic for you in more ways
than one. Your batteries are plumb drained, that’s what.”

G. looked up. “Should I get her a sports drink?” he asked,
about ready to get up from the table.

She gave him a small smile. “That wouldn’t hurt, but her
issue is a little deeper than just some missing electrolytes. They were feeding
off of her fear, and the parasites literally bled the emotion from her. It will
be a day or two before she gets some of that back. Sleep will help a lot, as
will spending time outside with her feet in the grass, getting grounded.”

Melody looked down, and I followed her gaze. She was making fists
in the grass with her toes. The frown lines on her forehead smoothed somewhat;
she was feeling the bubbles.

“Now what?” asked Sam, sitting back and looking at the mess
we had made as Gram ladled the last of the resin into the remaining cupcake
reservoirs.

“Now we wait. They will cure in a couple of hours since it
is so warm outside. Then we’ll take them out of the molds, let them air out for
the rest of the day, and this evening I will send some home with each of you.”
Gram smiled. “It will be up to you to bury them.”

“Bury them?” I asked.

“Why did they glow like that?” asked Sam, staring dubiously
at the sticky pans on the table. “I guess I just don’t understand how they
could do what they did.”

“It’s simple, really,” said Gramps, leaning back in his
chair. “The more negative energy around, the faster they can transmute that
negative to positive. With the swarm of parasites in Melody’s room, the pogs
were working overtime. But that isn’t the question you should be asking,” he
said, his voice growing serious.

“What do you mean,” I asked, turning to look at him. “What
is the question we should be asking?”

“What we really need to know,” he said to Gram, whose face
was also serious now, “is how they knew where to find her…”

“And how they got past my wards,” Gram finished.

A cold ball formed in the bottom of my stomach. Until now, I
felt like we were doing some sort of craft project, but looking from one of
them to the other, I could tell that they were serious, that this was a big
deal, and that maybe (even though I didn’t see anything), maybe I should be
scared. “What kind of wards? Like spells?”

Gram nodded toward the house. “Spell is a word I don’t like
to use, since it implies a different connotation: witches and wizards and that
sort of thing. I prefer to think of it as ‘setting an intention.’ If you look
over there, there are pogs already buried at the four corners of the house,
under those rosemary bushes. And not just one layer either. Farther out, you
can see the persimmon bushes. There are pogs buried beneath, and another layer
out past that are the cedars, with pogs buried beneath those as well.” She
shared a long look with Gramps before she scanned the table, making eye contact
with each of us. “That’s three layers. Three levels of intention. And still
they managed to cluster in Melody’s room. If Sam and Gideon hadn’t realized
that their dreams meant something, that Melody was in danger, it could have
been very bad indeed.”

Gideon
? I arched a
brow and filed that away for later. I looked up at G. with a grin on my face,
expecting him to look embarrassed or irritated, but his brow was wrinkled and
there were bags under his eyes. He looked
worried
.

Melody spoke. “What do you mean, very bad?”

Gram looked her straight in the eye. Gone was the soft
cheerfulness that I was used to; instead there was a steely glint in her eye
and a
squareness
to her stance. “I mean Very Bad, as
in: severe fatigue, premature aging, coma, death.”

“Shit,” said G. who moved over to slip my hand in his. “That
could have happened to me?” Instead of just taking his hand, I slid my arm
around his waist and held tight.

“It could have, but not as likely. They only went after you
because you were a threat. What they were really after was Melody. She’s like a
bright light to them—irresistible. They would have drained her dry.”

Like a battery. I felt as if I were trapped in some sort of
surreal TV show, like
The Twilight Zone
or something. We couldn’t really be talking about this, could we?

“Why am I like a bright light? What is special about me?”
Melody asked.

“Your connection to the earth, your
ability to complete the circuit…” said Gramps. “
The four of you are…”

“In over your heads,” said Gram, silencing Gramps with a
look. “This is enough for one day. It’s a lot to take in. Let Melody get back
on her feet before
we
--”

“Margaret, don’t you think it’s been long enough? You had
your way for the first seventeen years and look what’s happened. We’ve got a
new quarrel on our hands—”

Quarrel.
Battery.
Completing the circuit.
I felt a shiver wash over me and
goose bumps formed on my arms. I took my hand from G.’s to wrap my arms around
myself. Some things were starting to click into place.

“Enough, Harold!
I mean it. I am
not going to talk about this now. I am not ready yet. Matthew –”

“Fine, Margaret. Have it your way. But this is going to blow
up in our faces, and you know it.” Gramps backed up his chair and wheeled
angrily away.

Gram watched him go. Then she turned on her heel and strode
off toward the clubhouse.

Melody was looking off after her grandmother, her eyes
unreadable.

“Mel, did you hear what he said?”

“I heard.”

“About what?”
G. asked, taking my
hand again and giving it a squeeze.

“About the quarrel,” Melody said, still staring off after
her grandmother’s retreating figure.

“Why does that sound familiar?” Sam asked.

“Because it’s from my dream,” G. said.

Hello, Othello
.
Mel and I shared a long look, and then we both looked up at G. “Spill it,” I
said,
snaking
my hand back into his again. “And you
better not leave anything out.”