The Angel Stone

CHAPTER THIRTY

Frank told me later that as soon as I killed Duncan, it was as if the strings holding the gargoyles up in the air were cut. The monstrous creatures tumbled out of the air, slack and dead-eyed. A few were killed in this passive state, but once Soheila realized what had happened, she ordered a cease-fire, organizing the trows to form a cordon around the gargoyles. A few, coming to their senses, took wing and escaped, flying into the Catskills, but the rest seemed resigned to being prisoners. From the window above, I stood watching Duncan’s ashes scatter in the wind until the last speck of him vanished. By then the sun had risen high over the mountains and bathed the village of Fairwick in a rose-gold glow. Smoke still wafted from Main Street and the woods, but the fires had all been extinguished, and already the townspeople were out putting the town to rights and helping one another. Fairwick and Fairwick College would survive and, with the nephilim banished, prosper again. As long as I lived, I could serve as the door between Faerie and Fairwick and so the fey would be free to come and go, bringing the balm of Aelvesgold into this world to heal the wounds we had suffered.

But not all wounds. As I walked out of Main Hall, I felt a tug in my chest. It was as if I’d wrapped the magic thread around my own heart and pulled until I cut off the flow of blood, leaving a lifeless stone in my chest instead of a living, pumping organ. That weight grew heavier as I saw the devastation wrought by the battle. The trows, spurred by the death of their comrade, had rushed headlong into battle and suffered the worst casualties. The survivors stood around their fallen comrades, singing haunting dirges. Brownies and witches, gnomes and Fairwick students sang with them. Scott Wilder stood arm in arm with two trows, swaying as they sang. I searched the crowds for the rest of my students: I spotted Nicky and Flonia administering first aid to a wounded gnome, and Ruby Day and two other girls I recognized from the fairy-tales class were helping Ann and Jessica Chase set up a triage center. I felt a lightening of the weight in my chest when I saw that all my students had survived, and I began to look for my friends. I spotted Frank, Soheila, and Diana crouching on the ground beneath the four red maples that marked the center of the quad. As I approached, I saw that Liz was there, too, as well as Brock, Dory, Phoenix, and Jen. I put my hand over my heart and told myself that all these people were alive because William had sacrificed himself. I was lucky, I told myself, but then Soheila lifted her head and met my gaze and I felt a sirocco of grief pour off her. I hurried toward the four maples, scared to see who was at the center of the circle.

It was my grandmother. She lay on the ground on a blanket of red, which at first I thought were the leaves of the Japanese maples but then realized was her blood. Her head was cradled in Jen Davies’s lap. Liz, Diana, and Dory had spread their arms over her, forming a triangle of Aelvesgold that poured over the wound in her chest, but the color of Adelaide’s face told me that the Aelvesgold wasn’t penetrating her skin. As I knelt beside her, Adelaide’s pale-gray eyes fastened on mine, and her hand fluttered weakly in the air. I took it, alarmed at how cold she was.

“What happened?” I cried.

“A gargoyle was headed straight for Nicky Ballard,” Frank answered. “Adelaide threw a repulsion spell at him, but it wasn’t strong enough. She took the blow that would have killed Nicky.”

A garbled sound came from Adelaide’s lips. I leaned closer to hear her better.

“… make up … curse …” she gasped.

“You were making up for the curse you put on the Ballards?” I asked.

She nodded and I squeezed her hand. “Thank you,” I said, and then, turning to Diana, “Can’t you help her?”

Diana lifted her doe eyes to me and shook her head. “She isn’t absorbing the Aelvesgold. It sometimes happens when a witch has used too much Aelvesgold in her lifetime.”

Adelaide squeezed my hand and made a sound. I leaned my ear down to her lips again and heard her say, “It’s my time. I’m so glad you’re here and all … right.” Her eyes scanned the faces surrounding her—all my friends who had rushed to Adelaide’s aid, even though she had once been their enemy, because she was my grandmother. She mouthed two more words, and then her eyes fluttered closed and her hand went slack in mine. I held on to her hand while my friends, one by one, got up, touching my back and murmuring soft words of condolence, then leaving me alone with Adelaide under the red maples. I sat, looking at her face, red leaves falling over her broken body like a gentle blanket. My grandmother had shown me little kindness in the years when I had needed it the most, but she had taken me in, and I was glad that we had patched up our differences before she died. Still, I wished I could feel more. Her last words, I thought, had been meant as a consolation for leaving me.

Good neighbors, she had said, meaning the family I’d found in Fairwick.

She had also meant to say, I was sure, that she had put away the anger she’d felt when my mother fell in love with one of the fey. Looking at her face, I watched the years of anger and resentment falling away, leaving her far more peaceful and younger than I’d ever known her. Most powerfully, more than I’d ever known, she resembled my mother. For a moment the likeness was so strong that I thought my mother was here with me. I felt her presence as strongly as I had the time I went on a spirit quest and met her inside the spiral labyrinth. My mother’s features were momentarily laid over Adelaide’s, like a thin, gauzy cloth. Like a benediction. I felt tears well in my eyes and cried for both of them. Together now.

In the coming weeks, as autumn turned toward winter, I saw what good neighbors the townspeople of Fairwick—human and fey—truly were. Although Honeysuckle House had been spared from the fire, others were not so lucky. The Lindisfarnes’ house was badly damaged, and the Goodnoughs’ animal clinic had burned to the ground. Luckily, Nicky Ballard’s mother had noticed the fire in the animal clinic as she was coming home from an A.A. meeting. She’d run back to the church, where half a dozen participants were still chatting over coffee and donuts, and organized them into a rescue team and saved all the animals. The Goodnoughs were so grateful that they gave her a job at the clinic, and she had enrolled in the vet tech program at the community college. In the weeks following the fire, I heard a lot of stories that reconfirmed my faith in the resilience of the community. Newly returned from Faerie, the Esta family reopened their pizzeria and organized a Meals On Wheels for people who had lost their homes. While Shady Pines was being rebuilt, families volunteered to take in residents. I heard that Mrs. Goldstein was staying with the Chases and that she and Jessica played cards every afternoon.

I was most heartened by how active my students were in helping the town. I’d been worried that the sudden revelation that their college was inhabited by witches and fairies would be too much for them, but they seemed to adjust almost effortlessly. Scott Wilder and Ruby Day started a student–fey liaison club called Students for a More United and Reintegrated Fairwick—SMURF—and asked me to be the faculty sponsor. At the first meeting, they invited Dean Book and lobbied for classes on magic and fairy history. The dean informed them she’d long been thinking of doing just that.

“Mightn’t that be dangerous?” I asked Liz after the meeting.

“We’ll have to go slow and make sure that only students who are responsible enough learn the higher levels of magic. We’ll get Soheila to vet students for emotional stability. But I think it’s a good idea. I’ve often thought that Fairwick could have a wider mission in this world. We’ve focused so long on mere survival, hiding out here in our secluded valley, but look at where that got us. The evils of this world sought us out. There are real evils in the world—fey and human—and real suffering. We should be doing more to train our students to relieve suffering and uproot evil. It’s a troubled world out there. Fairwick can be a beacon of hope. I hope you’ll be involved, Callie.”

I told her I would be. Besides, I needed a mission—something on which to focus my attention. It wasn’t that my classes weren’t going well. In fact, they were going so well they practically taught themselves. My students eagerly prepared oral reports and group presentations on the assigned readings and engaged in animated discussions that filled up the entire class period. Having learned that fairies and monsters were real, they read the fairy tales with a new urgency. They debated and argued about them as though Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast contained the secrets of the universe—and perhaps they did. Appearances are deceiving. Trust in yourself. Be kind to the old and the weak. Follow your heart. As valid a set of precepts for leading a good life as you would find anywhere. But what if you did all that and you defeated the evil monster, but at the end Prince Charming was dead and the evil queen had pulled your heart out of your chest? Those were the questions that I itched to scrawl across my students’ papers.

Instead, I corrected their faulty grammar and misspellings but not their hopeful illusions. Even if I no longer believed in happy endings, I wanted them to. But when I put down my red pen, Honeysuckle House loomed around me like a haunted house. Floorboards creaked, windowpanes rattled, cold drafts stalked the hallways, and shadows lurked in corners. With Ralph curled in my sweater pocket as he continued to recuperate from his attack, I paced the halls, trying to pin down the fleeting shadows, listening to the rustle and murmur of the old house settling on its foundation, watching for a glimpse of its ghost. But the house wasn’t haunted by a ghost; it was haunted by time. Something in its walls had made itself into a home for the incubus and still retained the impression of his incarnations. The pebbles and bits of wood that Liam used to bring home in his pockets migrated along the window ledges and shelves. I heard Bill’s hammer in the pound of branches on the roof, and I smelled William’s heather in the roving pockets of cold air. Each of them had left an impression on the house—even William, who had never been inside it.

Or had he? When he returned to Faerie, he said it was to become the man I would someday fall in love with. So William had become Liam and then Bill … but when I tried to sort that out, I tied myself into a knot that further tightened around my heart. What did any of it matter? I had lost all three of them, and I didn’t need to be a scholar of fairy tales to know that was all the chances I would get.

I kept busy. I joined the curriculum committee charged with creating the new classes to teach students magic and volunteered for Meals On Wheels. I delivered two dozen turkey dinners on Thanksgiving—the last one to Nan Stewart in the hospital. She’d been one of the Shady Pines residents too ill to go into a private residence. Mac had told me she’d asked to see me, but I’d shamefully put off the visit, afraid it would be too painful to be reminded of Ballydoon and William. On Thanksgiving, though, after seeing the faces of the old people light up when Dory and I delivered their turkey, I decided that was a poor reason for not visiting an old woman who might not have much time left. So I went home and made a special plate for her. I found her sitting up in her bed, a plaid shawl around her shoulders, refusing the tray of hospital food the nurse was pushing on her.

“I thought you might come,” Nan said, gratefully accepting the plate of hot buttered bannocks I’d baked. “Ah, I see you learned how to make them properly on your trip.”

I was about to ask her what trip she meant, but then I realized by the mischievous gleam in her eye that she knew exactly where I’d been. I looked at her more closely. She didn’t just resemble the seventeenth-century Nan Stewart—she was identical.

“It was you.”

“I ken what ye mean, lass, and, aye, I’m the same Nan you first met in Ballydoon.”

“First met? But didn’t we meet first here in Fairwick this fall?”

“First for you, but not for me,” she said, dunking a bag of the PG Tips tea I’d brought into a mug of hot water. “I met ye first in the Ballydoon market square the morning after All Hallows’ Eve, 1659, when ye brought my nephew William back from Faerie.”

“But I hadn’t done that yet when I met you here this fall. I hadn’t gone back yet.”

“Aye, but ye had. I know it’s confusing.” Nan patted my hand kindly. I looked down at her hand and saw the deep scars around her wrists where the witch hunters’ manacles had bit into her skin. “Everything about ye was a bit blurry when ye came to visit me, but after Halloween it all came clear—or most of it. I remember now your coming to Ballydoon and the time you spent there, how ye showed me to use the tartan—”

“That makes no sense,” I objected. “I saw the Stewarts use the tartan before I went back. How can I be the one who taught them how to use it?”

Nan shrugged and bit into her bannock. “Sense or no, that’s how I remember it. Just as I remember ye defeating the nephilim at Castle Coldclough.”

“And what happened after that?” I asked.

“Why, the village went back to normal, except that then we had a group of young men who could protect us from harm with the tartan. I taught new ones to use it over the years. Eventually they became known as the Stewarts instead of the Stewards. I discovered that I aged slowly and never died—an effect of the tartan, mayhap—and so I became the Stewarts’ ancient granny.” She leaned back in her hospital bed and plucked a corner of her plaid shawl over her shoulders. “But last year I began to feel a bit tired of looking after generation after generation of great clod-heided boys. I began to feel my time was finally coming on me, so I came to Shady Pines and then here. I think that I’ve been waiting all these years to meet ye again, to send you back. And now that I have …” She smiled, but wistfully. “Well, I think it might finally be my time.”

I started to object, but Nan squeezed my hand. “Dinna fash yerself, lass. I can rest easy knowing those monsters are well and truly gone. Since you came to see me, I’ve found myself half-living in those auld days, and I have an inkling that when I go, I’ll go back to those sweet-smelling hills …”

Her voice trailed off, and her eyes fluttered. I thought she might be going right now, but she was only falling asleep.

“She drops off like that these days after her tea,” the nurse said, coming quietly into the room on her rubber-soled shoes and tucking the shawl around Nan. “She always smiles like that, too. I wonder what’s she’s dreaming of.”

Heather-covered hills, I thought, and violet skies.

I got up to go, more confused than when I came, and bent down to give Nan a kiss on her weathered cheek. Her eyes flickered open. “I saw him one more time,” she said.

“Who?” I asked, although I knew who she meant.

“William. He came to me in the Greenwood and told me a story. I told it to Mairi—you remember Mairi, don’t you? The lass you saved from the pest … She married a fellow from Edinburgh …”

“Yes,” I told Nan, trying not to sound impatient but wanting to hear William’s story more than whom Mairi married. “What was the story?”

“It was about—” Nan began to cough. I poured a glass of water and held it up to her lips. “It was about a lad taken by the Fairy Queen. He’s saved by his true love but then must sacrifice himself to save her.” I sighed.

“I know that story.”

“Do you know the part where the lad makes a deal with the Fairy Queen?” Nan asked anxiously, her voice weak and fretful.

“Yes,” I told her, patting her hand and tucking her shawl around her shoulders again. “I know that part.”

“Ah,” Nan sighed. “That’s all right, then. That was the part I was meant to tell ye …” Her eyes closed and she fell asleep.

I left, feeling sadder than ever as I walked home. William had appeared to Nan to tell her why he had vanished. Even if I went back in time to Ballydoon, he wouldn’t be there. I now realized I’d been considering that as a possibility. Surely I wouldn’t have gone back, leaving my friends and the life I’d made in Fairwick, even if he had been waiting for me. But knowing that it wasn’t a possibility made me feel as though one more of the threads that bound us had been broken.