The Shape Stealer (23 page)

She glared at me with a distinctly un–Betty Crockerish look, but then crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. I reached into the circle and unwound the chains from her striped stocking and purple Croc–clad feet. I drew the chain out of the circle and dropped it close by my side so I could throw it over her if she tried to escape.

“Hello, Fen,” I said, sitting back down outside the circle. “Sorry about the trap. I had to make sure you’d stay long enough to talk to me.”

“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, pouting as she rubbed her ankles.

I waved my hand at the studio. “I’ve been gone two months and there’s not a speck of dust anywhere. Everything’s been polished except for the box of iron chain links. And Becky told me you’d been visiting the town house and cleaning her apartment.”

Fen sniffed. “Your friend has the personality of a boggart—but a loyal one.”

“Yeah, that about sums Becky up,” I replied, grinning. “She said you told her that I was going to need her.”

“And you do, don’t you? You and your time-hopping friends are heading off to San Francisco without the slightest notion of how to open the portal and what to do if Dee or Marduk or the Malefactors attack you.”

“How can Becky and Jay help us against Dee and Marduk or the Malefactors?”

“With their music of course!” Fen replied.

“Music can defeat the Malefactors?”

“Not just any music—it needs to have the right frequency. The right music can disrupt the wavelengths on which the Malefactors travel. Wavelength travel is just one method in their arsenal, but they’ve been using it more and more recently. That’s why we sent you to a concert.”

“You left those tickets at Père Lachaise?”

“Well, not me, per se,” she replied with a sniff. “I have not set foot in Paris since before the Terror, when an impertinent French baker insulted my scones.” She muttered a string of Welsh invectives under her breath. “But one of O—” She clamped her hand to her mouth suddenly.

“One of Oberon’s crew? I should have known he was behind this.” The last time I’d seen Oberon had been last winter when we’d escaped from our final encounter with John Dee in the High Bridge Tower. Oberon had left me unconscious and burnt in Van Cortlandt Park. When I’d gone to look for him, I had found that the SRO hotel where he had lived had been turned into a boutique hotel, and he’d vanished. “Has he been following me?”

“We’ve kept abreast of your activities through our French friends—Monsieur Lutin in the Jardin des Plantes, the lumignon, and Madame La Pieuvre. A professor you may or may not be familiar with, Dr. Lichtenstein. And of course, Lol has kept watch over you.”

“Yes, I saw Lol but I didn’t realize she was working for Oberon.” I didn’t mention that she had been giving Will news of my welfare as well, or that I had indeed met Dr. Lichtenstein and observed what had happened to Cosimo Ruggieri’s corpse in his presence. “The last time I saw them together, Oberon swatted her.”

Lol had been trying to save me from Oberon at the time. The memory reminded me that Oberon had put a paralysis spell on me and left me. I would have died if Will hadn’t saved me. Oberon had claimed later that he’d known Will would reach me in time, but still … “Why is Oberon watching me? And don’t tell me it’s because he’s concerned about me. He tried to me kill me once.”

Fen fidgeted. I knew that the fey couldn’t tell an outright lie, but they could dissemble. I picked up the iron chain and rattled it at her.

Fen cringed. “Because if you don’t open the San Francisco portal and defeat the Malefactors, all of mega-time will be destroyed, and without mega-time…” A single tear appeared at the corner of Fen’s eye, magnified by her glasses. “… without mega-time, the fey will vanish from the human world entirely. We use mega-time to travel between the Summer Country and the human world. That’s why there’s always a shift in time whenever we travel between the worlds.”

“That’s why I went back to 1602 when I traveled through the Summer Country in the Val sans Retour?”

“Yes, and it’s why human visitors to the Summer Country come back years after they left.”

“Like Rip Van Winkle.”

Fen giggled. “I told that one to Washington Irving over a pint of ale one day, but yes, that’s why Rip came back twenty years after he’d left, and Oisín came back to Ireland hundreds of years after his visit to Tír Na nÓg, or King Herla left his Briton kingdom only to return two hundred years later to a land taken over by the Saxons. Time is a river and we fey know how to navigate it. But if the Malefactors have their way, they’ll dam the river and flood both worlds. We have to stop them, and Oberon knows you are the only one who can.”

“So why didn’t Oberon just come to me and explain this?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly part with you on the best terms,” Fen said, blushing. “He was afraid you might be angry with him.”

I laughed. “Yeah, well, he did paralyze me and almost kill me. But afraid of me? He’s the frickin’ king of the fairies!”

“And you’re the Watchtower, Garet,” Fen replied soberly. “Have you forgotten that?”

I stared at Fen, thinking over the last few days of fleeing from Dee and Marduk and the Malefactors. I
had
forgotten it. It was time to stop running and face my fears. “Thank you for reminding me,” I said. I stood up and broke the circle of salt with one foot. “Now, as Watchtower, I order you to take me to your king.”

29

The Grange

We crept out of the town house and walked to the subway station at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, where we caught the uptown 1 train. Ordinarily I would have worried about taking the subway at four in the morning, but considering all the supernatural perils I was facing, such concerns seemed fairly pedestrian. Besides, I was sitting next to a brownie. A pissed-off brownie. When a crowd of obnoxious teenagers got on at Twenty-Third Street, Fen glared them into orderly silence. She herself maintained a huffy quiet until the drunk boys got off at Penn Station. Then, somewhere between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Second Streets, she remarked, “I see you found Will.”

“That’s not my Will,” I snapped automatically. “But the real Will is around. He’s tracking down Dee and Marduk to stop their killing.”

“Oh,” Fen said. “I wondered about that.”

I glanced at Fen and noticed that her round cheeks were pink and her glasses had fogged over. I recalled that she was Will’s friend—Marguerite had asked her to look after him—but perhaps she had more than just friendly feelings toward him.

“The Will who showed up with you at the town house yesterday did smell right,” she went on.

“Smell?”

Fen crinkled her nose, making her look like a rabbit. “I can always tell a friend by his or her smell. This Will smelled like my friend.”

“He’s young Will Hughes from 1602,” I explained. “Will—
my
Will—sent him back to the future in his place out of some harebrained notion that I would prefer his younger innocent self.”

“That’s just like Will,” Fen said with a wistful sigh. “So noble.”

“Stupid, if you ask me. And now, having both of them in the same time line is causing all sorts of problems. He—young Will—is weakening. Annick, one of the
chronologistes
, thinks he’ll vanish into the time stream if we don’t do something.”

“How horrible! We must think of something to save him.”

“Maybe Oberon will have an idea.”

Fen shook her head. “Oh no! Oberon hates Will Hughes. Better not to ask him. Can’t one of the
chronologistes
save him?”

“Maybe. If we can find the San Francisco institute.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then,” Fen said with a decisive nod, as the train pulled into Seventy-Second Street. “Don’t worry.” She squeezed my hand, all animosity over my recent treatment of her forgotten. “We’ll find a way to save both our Wills.”

*   *   *

We rode the 1 on up to the City College station at 137th Street and Broadway. I had been wondering where Oberon had settled since leaving the Jane Street hotel. The fey seemed to pick eccentric locations to inhabit—abandoned subway stations, tea shops that vanished overnight, the water tunnels beneath the city … perhaps Oberon was somewhere on the City College campus, living in some bell tower like Quasimodo.

But we didn’t walk into the campus. We did walk east to Convent Avenue but then turned north to 141st Street. Even with a brownie at my side, I felt uneasy in this neighborhood. It was a section of Manhattan I hadn’t spent much time in—Hamilton Heights, I recalled. The old brownstones we passed were lovely, but some showed signs of disrepair and neglect. Others were being renovated. Did Oberon live in one of those?

Near 141st Street we entered Saint Nicholas Park. We passed a man sleeping on a bench. Fen removed a scone from her pocket and tucked it into the man’s pocket. We continued on the path toward a faded yellow house perched atop a hill: a lovely Federal-style house with bay windows and a colonnaded front porch. It looked out of place in the city park. In fact, from the torn-up ground around the house, it was clear that the house had been moved to its current location not too long ago. Something pricked at my memory about a landmark being moved in this part of the city.

“Is this—?” I began, but Fen hushed me with a finger to her mouth.

“Better let me go ahead and tell Oberon you’re—”

“There is no need for sneaking about, Fenodoree.” The deep male voice came from the front porch of the house where a lantern now glowed. “I’ve been expecting the Watchtower.”

I squinted into the light of the lantern and made out the outline of a tall man with long dreadlocks. I blinked and realized that the light came not from a lantern but from the man himself. His eyes glowed green, and he was surrounded by a nimbus of sparkling gold lights that took the shape of enormous semitransparent green and gold wings. Oberon, king of the fairies, bowed to me. “Welcome, Watchtower, to the Grange.”

He swept his arm toward the front door, the lights from his wings reflecting in the windows. I walked up the steps, studying the house. “The Grange? Do you mean Alexander Hamilton’s Grange?”

I now recalled reading that the home of Alexander Hamilton had been moved to a park and was being restored. As I walked through the door I saw that the house was empty of furniture and was still in the process of restoration. You could see, though, that the bones of the house were lovely. The proportions of the entrance hall and the octagonal room beyond it were perfect. There was a restful feeling in the lines of the rooms, though also a hint of sadness in the air.

“Yes,” Oberon said, following me into the octagonal room. “My esteemed friend, Mr. Hamilton, called it ‘my sweet project.’ We talked over its planning many times.”

I glanced at Oberon. His face was wistful as he glanced around the empty room. “You were friends with Alexander Hamilton?” I asked. I don’t know why I should have been surprised. Oberon had been friends with William Shakespeare. When I’d visited him at his apartment on Jane Street, I’d seen his likeness in paintings by artists from Leonardo to David Hockney. He had inspired countless poets, musicians, and artists. Why not one of our founding fathers?

“Yes, we met on his home island of Nevis. I proudly watched his progress here in New York when he joined the New York Manumission Society and defended runaway slaves for free, and when he founded the
New York Evening Post
. I like to think I inspired some of his writing in the Federalist Papers. He was a fine man, but one in whom the forces of passion and reason forever warred. Unfortunately, his passion was his downfall. He only lived here two years before he died in that tragic duel.”

“Why didn’t you save him?” I asked.

Oberon flexed his wings, his green eyes flashing angrily. “If we fey could always save the ones we loved, the world would be a different place. Alas, there are evil forces at work, often foiling our good intentions. You should know that by now, Watchtower.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I do. That’s why I’m here. I need your help.” Oberon bowed his head and indicated that I should precede him into another room, which I found had been rudimentarily furnished with two chairs and a table in a small windowed alcove. “Come sit,” Oberon said. “Mr. Hamilton and I often sat here and discussed our visions for the new republic. In fact, it has been a long-held dream among many in the fey community, including myself, to see one of our own installed in the White House. Secretary Hamilton shared that dream because he believed that, loosed from the strictures of mortality and the sort of ambition that leads to a desire to have eternal life through reputation, a fey president might provide more balanced, impartial, higher-quality leadership. And the secretary, who had an African grandparent, also identified with the fey as a fellow minority group member.

“For the longest time the US presidency has been restricted, given political realities, to white Protestant males. But in the last century barriers have fallen: disability with FDR, Catholicism with JFK, and now, most dramatically, race with Barack Obama. National ticket and serious primary candidates have included Mormons, women, Italian Americans, and Jews. So ambitious murmurs have arisen among the fey again recently, though if we get a groundbreaking candidate he or she may have to employ the same sort of discretion FDR did, concealing certain things from the public. After all, many ordinary citizens do not even believe in the existence of our group, let alone display any willingness to vote for a member of it. But our day will come!”

Oberon’s eyes started to glisten. “And when it does, we will locate Mr. Hamilton wherever he is now, and I hope we—the new president, that is—can regularly receive advice from him. He was a crucial adviser to George Washington and can be to the first fey president as well!” He rubbed his eyes dry with the back of one powerful hand.

I waited for him to regain his composure—I understood how he could be so moved, having felt similar emotions myself regarding Obama although I was not a minority—then asked, “Why are you here now?” I sat down in the heart-backed chair, which I was pretty sure was an original Hepplewhite.