Carousel Sun (32 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Saturday, June 24

Low Tide 4:39
A.M.

Sunrise 5:01
A.M.
EDT

Fun Country’s gate being locked, Borgan carried me out the back way, over the dunes to the beach.

He kept on carrying me, too, all the way to the surf line, and I kept on letting him.

The waning moon hadn’t risen yet, and the tide was going out. The night was clear; the stars so bright even the lights from the Pier couldn’t take their shine. Neptune’s was open, naturally, with live music, too—one guy accompanying himself loudly on electric guitar. The song was either “Crimson and Clover” or “The Star-Spangled Banner”; I couldn’t really be sure.

I’d almost died
, I thought, and I shivered in Borgan’s arms. If I’d had the energy, I might’ve laughed, too.

Ten weeks ago, I’d been well on my way to dying, and had made my peace with both the reality and the process. Or so I’d thought. Now, I wanted to hold on to life with both hands.

That’s called irony.

“I’m taking you home,” Borgan said, his voice a growl deep in his chest. And he waded into the sea.

“Deep breath,” he commanded, and I managed it, holding the air in my lungs as a wave broke over our heads.

There was a moment, not unpleasant, and not long, where I was just floating, cool, fluid, and bodiless, surrounded by Borgan’s power even though I was not aware of his arms.

Then my body returned, cradled in strong arms. I heard the crash of a wave, looked down to see foam curling ’round booted feet as Borgan strode up the beach.

We were both perfectly dry, and I was still hanging on to his braid like it was a lifeline.

He carried me over the boardwalk, and up the steps to my front door.

“Key,” I muttered.

I raised my free hand, trying for the pocket, and the key in it, but it was too much effort, the pocket light-years away.

“May I enter?” Borgan asked, and his voice had changed again; it almost had a physical weight, and a resonance that brought tears to my eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Please enter and be welcome in my house, Borgan.”

There came a click, distinct and sharp. Then the door—the same door that tended to swell and stick against the frame, and then required a firm kick to open—the door swung open and Borgan carried me into Gran’s—into
my
—house.

The door closed behind him and I heard the snap of the lock engaging.

“Bedroom?” he murmured.

“Porch,” I cleared my throat. “I don’t want—to be locked in.”

He paused, then turned to the right. The french doors swung open before him, and he carried me onto the summer parlor, and there he paused, where we could both overlook the sea.

“How d’you feel, Kate?”

“Like I’ve been poisoned, and had half the life choked out of me,” I said, too exhausted to be anything but completely truthful. “Like I’d fall down if I tried to stand up.”

“Do you need to go uptown?”

To the old Archer homestead, he meant: a place of power and renewal for those of the blood.

“This’ll do fine,” I assured him. “I’ll—I just wish I had a cat.”

“Cat?”

He sounded bemused, and who could blame him?

I made an effort to explain. “To keep the dreams away.”

“Right.”

He dropped smoothly to one knee; then, without jarring me in the least, arranged himself cross-legged on the deck. Carefully, he settled me on his lap. I lay against his chest, fingers twisted in his braid, a boneless thing, almost without will.

“Call the land,” he murmured, his voice a comforting rumble in the ear I had pressed against his chest. “Heal yourself. There’s no dream that’ll get by me.”

“You don’t need to stay here.”

“It’s too late to get you a cat tonight.
Go to sleep
, woman.”

Plainly, there was no arguing with him. I settled my cheek against his sweater, eyelids drooping, opened myself fully to the land . . .

. . . and went to sleep.

I stirred, and half-opened my eyes, seeing Borgan’s face above me in the gray predawn.

His arms withdrew and I realized he had carried me inside to the couch and thrown the old afghan over me.

“Hush,” he said, though I hadn’t said anything. “I’m gonna go fish. You go back to sleep, Kate. And you call me when you wake up, all right?”

“All right,” I said, still two-thirds asleep.

I felt his lips against my forehead, and closed my eyes, the land cuddled close, like a teddy bear.

The last thing I remember hearing was the lock snapping shut.

At 7:30, I woke again, fully this time, and fully healed, to a room overflowing with sunlight from the wide-open French doors, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. I took a deep breath, and for long moment could do nothing but marvel at how
well
I felt, and consider what a precious gift life was.

Then I remembered that I was supposed to call when I woke, and I pitched back the afghan and came to my feet, digging in my pocket for my cell phone . . .

. . . which, despite its dunking in the Atlantic Ocean early this morning, functioned just fine.

“Kate?” His voice was sharper than I was used to; I could feel the tension coming through the airwaves.

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m awake, I’m rested, and I’m starving.”

The sense of tension eased considerably.

“That sounds encouraging. How else do you feel?”

“Perfect,” I told him honestly.

Relief positively flowed through my phone.

“I’m sorry I worried you,” I said truthfully.

Borgan laughed. “I’m thinking that’s going to be the state of things,” he said ruefully. “From how you tell it, I’m not exactly a worry-free proposition. What’re doin’ today?”

“First thing after a shower and breakfast? Buying a lock.”

“Good plan. This is your night off, right? Want to have dinner?”

I smiled. “Sounds great.”

“Good, then. I’ll be by your place around five-thirty.”

“See you then. Be careful.”

“Always.”

The call ended.

I stood there, just holding the phone for a couple of heartbeats before I put it, with the rest of my pocket things, onto the coffee table, and skipped down the hall to take a shower.

Peggy hadn’t come to breakfast. As near as I could tell, she hadn’t come home last night.

While I walked up the hill, I tried to figure out if worrying about that was a sign of a control freak, or just normal concern for a friend who might be getting into something trickier than she knew.

Not to say that Peggy wasn’t competent; she was damn’ competent, and she’d obviously been taking good care of herself for a number of years. Except not in Archers Beach, which had peculiar dangers—not so much for plain vanilla folk, as for those who could hear the music on Midsummer Eve.

So, then: she was a competent woman who could take of herself . . . until she couldn’t. Which pretty much put her on even footing with everybody I’d known, at home and Away, even as far as the Land of the Flowers.

That knotty problem settled, I swung into the hardware store.

Ernie Travis was pulling the shades up on the big front window; I gave him a nod and a brisk “Good morning!” and headed for the back of the store.

A couple minutes later, I met him at the counter, carrying a Mul-T-Lock C padlock.

“Good lock,” Ernie said, aiming the scan gun at the bar code.

“Hope so,” I answered. “Somebody got around the one on the carousel yesterday.”

He frowned, and shot a quick look into my face. “Everything okay?”

“Nothing broken or defaced. Still, it seems like a message from the universe about changing the lock.”

He nodded. “It’s a wonder how communicative the universe can be, sometimes. You’re gonna be wanting extra keys for that?”

“Three, if you could.”

“No trouble, just take a few.” He punched keys on the register. “With the keys, that’s one-thirty-two.”

I offered my credit card, he swiped it and gave it back, then broke open the blister pack, extricated the key and moved to the other end of the counter, where the key machine crouched like a rust-colored tarantula. I broke the lock the rest of the way out of the packaging while Ernie fitted a blank onto the cutting surface, lined up the live key on the tracer, and hit the button.

There came a brief scream of metal; a spark flashed from the edge of the blank, and another. Then Ernie liberated the new key, gave it a quick grind on both sides, and tossed it onto the counter in front of me.

“Give that a minute, then see if it does what it oughta,” he directed, and got busy fitting another blank onto the board.

I tried the new key in the padlock; it turned smoothly, tumblers clicking, and the shackle snapped open.

Excellent.

Keys number two and three speedily appeared; they also performed as they ought.

“Thank you!” I said, tucking them into the pockets of my jeans.

“Say, Kate?” Ernie said, his voice pitched a little lower than it had been.

I looked at him over my shoulder. “Yeah?”

Ernie frowned slightly, glanced down at the counter, then met my eyes.

“I’m wonderin’ if you noticed anything . . .
funny
’round town.”

Let it be said that Ernie Travis is
not
trenvay
; furthermore, he has my vote for the man least likely to hear the music at Midsummer Eve. So it was with considerable care that I repeated, “Funny?”

“Yeah . . .” He looked aside, like he was embarrassed, which he probably was, poor normal.
Funny
didn’t have any place in Ernie’s life. Nerazi in all her opulent nakedness might walk past him of a moonlit night, and the only thing Ernie’d see would be the moon.

“You’re gonna think I’m nuts, maybe, but it’s just—some of these guys—?” He waved a hand toward the front windows, by which I understood him to mean the summer people and tourists.

I nodded.

“Some of these guys ain’t—they ain’t
havin’ fun
. It’s like they’re lookin’ real hard at everything an’ everybody, like—well, hell, like we’re all under suspicion.”

Well, here was something. And I was willing to bet that Ernie was as little inclined to see undercover cops as he was to see selkies. I thought about the heeterskyte’s Man Business, and the three undoubted cops at the Boundary Stone; and I shook my head.

“I didn’t notice anything this morning,” I told Ernie, with perfect truth, “but they might not like merry-go-rounds. I’ll keep an eye peeled. Anybody else notice?”

Ernie nodded.

“Beth up at Play Me. She’s the one brought it to me. I hadn’t noticed, but once you start lookin’, it sorta stands out.” A faint smile. “Like when you get a new car, suddenly the only thing you see on the road is your model.”

So far as I knew, Beth Abernathy was an observant, no-nonsense, down-to-earth woman. Not the kind of person to start seeing boogeymen among the nice tourists.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said again.

“Thanks,” he said, and produced another faint smile. “Like to get a reading on if I’m losing my mind.”

“Sounds reasonable to me.” I hefted the padlock. “I better get down to the carousel.”

“Oh, hell, yeah! Good choice, by the way—nobody’s gonna break that lock.”

If I hadn’t seen what Borgan had done to it last night, I wouldn’t have thought the storm gate had ever been dented, much less sustained an explosive blow that shredded metal, and produced a hole big enough for a big man to leap through.

I wasn’t seeing illusion, either, but a true and lasting repair. I touched the healed steel and received a jumble of signatures: Gaby, Feesila, Carn, and Artie.

Artie
? I thought, and then realized that of course Artie would have to be involved—he was, after all, a backyard mechanic of no small skill, and he’d probably done the giant’s share of the repair work.

So, then, I thought: Good work, team!

The old lock was in place, its shackle seemingly through the loops. That, however, was seeming, only. Borgan’s burst of power must have been the magical equivalent of a solar flare. When I looked at the lock with the land’s eyes, I saw that it was friable, its shattered form stitched together with strands of sea grass and homey land magic; the shackle was gone completely, and the only thing holding the lock near the loops was a dollop of some unmundane substance that reminded me of pine sap, and that bore Gaby’s signature.

I put my hand on the lock. The land magic unraveled with a vibration that I felt at the center of my chest. In my hands was . . . nothing; my fingertips showed dusty red, as if I had touched something rusty. I dusted them off on my jeans.

Then, still entwined in the land’s regard, I pushed the door open.

Nothing happened.

Well,
of course
nothing happened, I scolded myself.

But I stood on the threshold, anyway, and allowed a tendril of
jikinap
to quest before me, while I queried the land regarding any possible presence within the storm gates.

My magical feeler reported Borgan’s curtain—and nothing else. The land discovered no one within the gates, save myself.

I stepped through the door, walked over to the utility pole and threw the switch for the lights.