The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere (14 page)

The Isle of Wight

Lizbeth stood frozen in disbelief.  Caitlin left them behind.  They were supposed to help her save the world.  How important could they be if she kept treating them like a liability to be protected?

She glanced over at Kevin, who stared morosely into his tea, and to Zach, who’d already turned to the familiar comfort of the computer monitor.  Suddenly, she desperately wanted to feel her mother’s arms around her.  She couldn’t call her on her cell, since she’d lost her satchel in the ocean after being swept off
The Gossamer
.

“Felicity?” she asked, hating the warble in her voice.  “Does your phone work?”

“Connection’s spotty, but you can try.  Oh, wait, is it long distance?  Of course it is.  I’m afraid not, then.”

Lizbeth nodded.  To hide the tears that threatened, she shuffled over to the sliding glass window that overlooked a flourishing garden.  The view was beautiful, but she may as well have been staring at a parking lot for all the pleasure she got out of it. 

This whole impossibly far-fetched quest had taken her on such a thrill-ride – one she hadn’t signed up for in the first place.  They’d encountered so many wonders and so many setbacks, and they seemed no closer to finding the crown than when they set out.  Had it been only a few days ago?  Conflicting emotions welled up and sent wetness spilling down her cheeks.  She missed her mother and grandmother so much.  If Granma were here, she’d chide Lizbeth out of this funk with one of her nonsensical sayings.  When Lizbeth had realized there wasn’t enough money for her to attend even the local community college, Granma said, “Spit in one hand and cry in the other.  Which hand helps you solve the problem?”

She lifted her hands as if the solution would be in one of them.  Instead of searching her palms, she placed them on the cool glass.  The garden blurred as her eyes refocused on her own faint reflection.  To one side she saw Kevin’s worried image, and on the other, Zach’s.  She hadn’t heard them, but she knew when they’d arrived to stand beside her.

Before either of them spoke, Lizbeth caught a glimpse of something beyond the garden, past the low picket fence and behind a length of tall, unruly bushes.

“Did you see that?” she asked.

She felt Zach’s hand settle lightly on her shoulder.  “Looked like some guy.”

Felicity’s voice came from behind them.  “I’ve got neighbors neither near enough, nor rude enough to traipse through my garden.”

“There!” Kevin pointed further down from where Lizbeth had spotted the flash of something dark, but Lizbeth didn’t see anything.  Whatever they’d seen was either gone or hiding.  She heard the slight swish-swish of Felicity’s velour stretch pants and looked around to see the old woman pull a shotgun out of a cabinet.

“Step back from the door.”  Felicity held the gun confidently in her left hand and had just reached out for the sliding glass door handle, when over the far fence bounded Wolfdogge.  The hound ran straight for the back door, his tongue flopping out of his mouth in a silly doggie grin.

“Och, I forgot to put you back in the kennel with your brothers, didn’t I?”  Felicity opened the slider and the dog rushed in, wagging his tail.  Instead of shoving his snuffling wet nose at the visitors as Lizbeth expected, he took a turn around the big room and settled on a floor cushion across the room near the arched opening to the foyer. 

“Well,” Felicity said with a smile, “at least we know there wasn’t anybody out there fool enough to take on Wolfie here.  Musta been the dog you seen.”

“Is he good protection?”  Lizbeth asked, eyeing the dog, which sat alert and still, looking back at her with bright, intelligent eyes.

Felicity placed the shotgun back in the cabinet.  “The best.  Me dogs are the last of a dyin’ breed.  Not your average canine.  Very special talents, you might say.”

So far Lizbeth had encountered a giant, a little person who was the closest to a leprechaun she’d ever seen, and an eerily clever raven.  Not to mention the shapeshifters, but she wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be fairies or elves or what.  At this point, she wouldn’t be surprised if Wolfdogge stood on his hind legs and danced a jig.

“Something’s not right,” Kevin said, voice low and serious. 

Lizbeth expected Zach to launch one of his Kevin-bashing quips, but he must have finally learned to trust Kevin’s intuition, because he asked, “What is it?”

Kevin slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out the nugget of iridium.  “I didn’t feel it when we saw Wolfdogge before, but it’s there now.  Felicity, you may want to ask your dog if he knows who Victor is.”

The Isle of Wight

Zach had no idea what Kevin was talking about.  Ask the dog about some guy named Victor?  He must have missed something while he was on the computer and they were talking in the kitchen.  The old lady said it was a special mutt, but Zach doubted it could talk.

Kevin, Lizbeth and Felicity were all staring at the dog as if they were waiting for it to do just that, however, so Zach said, “Hey Wolfdogge.  You know Victor?  Yeah, me neither.”

He started to laugh, but Lizbeth jabbed a sharp elbow into his ribs.  “Can’t you feel it?”

That’s when the dog changed into a man.

Zach had about half a dozen questions about the whole shapeshifting process, but after watching the fascinating full-body morph of Wolfdogge to Brian Griffey, one question at least had been answered.  A shapeshifter turning back into a human apparently
did
have to run around naked.  Griffey shifted from furry dog to naked man in under ten seconds.  As he changed, he rose from all fours clutching the big pillow he’d been laying on in front of him.  Zach didn’t let the ridiculousness of the situation lower his guard.

Griffey began to walk over, but quick as a whip, Felicity had the shotgun back in her hand.  She braced the butt against her shoulder and pointed it at him.  He stopped in the middle of the room, eyes on the hand Kevin still held out.

“That’s a piece of the crown, isn’t it?” he asked.  “I can feel it from here.”

Zach tried to recall the conversation between Griffey and Bill Masters on board
The Gossamer. 
He didn’t think Bill really said anything about the core sample other than that it existed, but he was also pretty sure Griffey had attempted to pick Bill’s mind apart.  He must not have learned much if he thought Kevin’s iridium nugget was part of the crown.

“Except…” Griffey trailed off.  “Bill did say the deaths weren’t caused by the crown.”

He took a step closer, but Felicity made a sharp sound like she was correcting one of her dogs, “
Eh!”
 

He stopped, held one palm out in a placating gesture and seemed to reconsider his tactics.  Since intimidation wasn’t going to work while the old lady had a bead on him, Zach expected him to try the friendly approach.  He wasn’t disappointed.

“Last night was pretty wild, wasn’t it?” Griffey asked, lips stretching in a smile.

“Do you think we’re stupid?” Lizbeth snapped.  “Trying to sneak in here disguised as a dog.  As if we couldn’t sense you.”

Griffey’s eyes widened.  For the first time, it occurred to Zach that he really had no idea who they were.

“Of course,” Griffey said, voice full of wonder, speaking directly to Kevin.  “I get it now.  That hunk of metal in your hand is from Masters’ core sample.  All those scientists died because it’s the same stuff the crown is
made
out of.”

To forestall Lizbeth from any more bursts of information Griffey could potentially use against them, Zach said, “You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

Griffey laughed.  “But this is marvelous.  She’s rounded up a bunch of initiates, hasn’t she?  And you can
sense
me.  Only the strongest of us can sense each other. You kids are the next generation.  Caitlin’s goals appear to be closer to my own than I ever dreamed.”

“And what goals would those happen to be?” Felicity asked.  She waved the barrel of the gun through the air as if to remind him he was still in her sights.

Griffey’s delighted smile faded and his usual sly expression returned. 

“If she were here, we could discuss them.  The plates on the car out front are hers and the engine’s warm, so I clearly just missed her.  Where did she go?”

Zach saw Griffey’s eyes go all swirly-sparkly again.

“
Pizza
!” he shouted, hoping the noise would somehow drown out the answer that had to be right there on top of Felicity’s mind for Griffey to pluck.  His diversion attempt backfired as Kevin, Lizbeth and Felicity looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

Griffey’s laugh held ridicule this time.  “You’ve got a lot to learn.  Caitlin must want to keep you well in hand if she hasn’t told you the things you need to know.  I’d like nothing more than to offer you fledglings some guidance, but I’ve got to hurry if I’m going to catch Caitlin at the ferry.”

“You’ll be crossing the Solent with buckshot in your arse if you take one more step,” Felicity said.

“No I won’t, my dear,” Griffey said with a dismissive wave of his hand.  “You see, I know the gun’s not loaded.”

He turned quite deliberately to leave, dropping the pillow carelessly.  Lizbeth averted her eyes, but there was no way Zach was going to stand still and let this psycho get to Caitlin, naked or not.  He cleared his mind of all the myriad distractions in the room and calculated how many steps it would take to cross it.  Before Griffey disappeared under the foyer arch, he leapt into action.

Zach had no idea what Griffey’s training might be, but he wouldn’t underestimate it, nor would he assume the shapeshifter would fight fair.  For all Zach knew, Griffey could throw lightning bolts out of his fingers, so he decided to disable him rapidly and efficiently.  He caught up to him and bent to grab one of his ankles.  When Griffey stopped to frown down at him, he grabbed the other.  A swift jerk backward and Griffey toppled like a tree.  He threw his hands out in front of himself to break his fall, leaving Zach free to enclose his neck in a choke-hold with his forearms.

Under normal circumstances, the unimaginative wrestling hold was very effective, but not, as Zach discovered, when your victim changed into a snake.  Zach was almost relieved at first that he was no longer grappling with a buck-naked guy, but he was soon too busy fighting to worry about it one way or the other.  He still had a good grip on Griffey, and kept applying pressure to his now scaly neck, but the 180-pound python flipped him around on the floor until it had Zach’s torso and legs tightly in its coils.  Zach quickly realized that in a wrestling match, the snake would win.  Griffey had Zach’s face pressed against the wood floor and his entire lower half was rapidly taken out of commission.  Despite the steady pressure Zach continued to apply just below its head, the snake didn’t seem to be in danger of passing out any time soon.  If he released his hold, there was no guarantee that Griffey the Snake wouldn’t simply continue squeezing him to death.

Griffey’s reptilian eyes were mere inches from Zach’s mouth. Just when Zach came to the conclusion that his teeth were his weapon of last resort, he heard Lizbeth scream, “Have some of
this
!”

Zach didn’t know what she’d done, but the python writhed violently, partially releasing him from its hold.  In seconds, Griffey had changed again, this time back into the Wolfdogge visage.  He slipped out of Zach’s grasp and bolted past the others, who were all standing over Zach.  Lizbeth held an old ornamental dagger in one hand.

At the sliding glass door, Griffey became himself again.  Zach struggled to his feet and started to go after him, but Felicity stopped him.

“He’s missed her!  By the time he finds his clothes and gets there, the ferry will have gone.”

With one hand pressed against his bleeding side, Griffey left without a parting word.

Zach looked at Lizbeth, who still held the dagger in a trembling hand.  There wasn’t a lot of blood, so she probably hadn’t done Griffey much damage, but her attack had certainly distracted him and saved Zach.  He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Lizbeth handed the dagger to Felicity.  “I saw it earlier hanging on the wall.  I figured with the rust on the blade it was probably iron.”

The Isle of Wight

Less than a minute after Griffey left, an earthquake rocked the old house.  Kevin followed Felicity’s advice and crawled under the kitchen table with Lizbeth.  The rhythmic back and forth movements quickly brought back his nausea, and the flashes of zigzagging rainbow light from all those hanging crystals didn’t help.  When it finally stopped, Felicity called out from wherever she’d taken shelter, “Everyone okay?”

After Kevin crawled miserably out from under the table, Lizbeth popped up and like a chirping bird said, “Just like any other day in Alaska.”

Zach climbed out from under the desk and checked Felicity’s computer.  “Wow!  Internet’s still up.”

“Amazing,” Kevin said, trying to sound sarcastic, but he was afraid it came out sounding as weak and shaky as his knees felt.

Felicity gave the walls and foundation a cursory once-over and said, “It’ll take a lot more than that to topple this old house.  I’d best check on the dogs.”

She took a moment to load the shotgun, and took it with her into the back yard.  Kevin found his mug of tea and downed it, hoping the concoction would settle his stomach.

 “You okay?” Lizbeth asked.

“Fine,” he muttered.

“Hey you guys,” Zach said casually, as if the fight and the earthquake hadn’t happened.  “Come look at this.”

He showed them a YouTube video he’d made a few days before he met Caitlin.  Kevin was kind of embarrassed watching the normally composed Zach appeal to his fellow San Franciscans to prepare for the big one.  The video was definitely cheesy, but he understood why Zach had felt compelled to make it.  Things had gotten pretty weird for Kevin, too, before Caitlin showed up and offered an explanation – of sorts.

“So, yeah, I know, it was a dumb idea,” Zach said, “but look how many hits it got.”

The video had over two-hundred million views.  There were over seven million comments.  Zach chose one at random and said, “Everybody thought I was crazy before the big one really did hit, and now look.  Most of these people want me to tell them what’s going on.  Like they’d believe me.”

“What’s this?” Lizbeth asked.

“That’s the Video Responses.”

“I know, but this one looks like a news report.”

Zach clicked on it.  It began with a heavily made up female reporter from a Sacramento channel sitting behind a news desk.  On the video display behind her head was a photo of Zach from his doomsday YouTube video.  The reporter said, “They are the subject of ridicule in cities across America, mentally ill people standing on street corners trumpeting their paranoid message:  the world is coming to an end.  So what happens when the world really does seem to be coming to an end?  Were the crazy predictions coincidence, or was there a grain of truth?  Cynthia Perkins has the story.”

The scene changed to a ten-second sound bite from Zach’s video, one that made him seem particularly unbalanced.  Kevin glanced over and saw him wince.  Then a blonde reporter standing outside a large two-story house said, “Zach Wong lives in this quiet, upper-class neighborhood in San Francisco.  He’s been described by family and friends as a normal, if slightly off-beat eighteen-year-old.  So what would prompt an otherwise apparently mentally-healthy young man to post such an inflammatory video on the popular site YouTube?  And how, in less than a week, did it become one of the most-watched, highest-rated Internet videos of all time?”

The story showed brief clips of the reporter interviewing a few of Zach’s friends, one of the scientists he’d called attempting to discuss the electromagnetic pulses, and finally, a clip of his mother claiming he had da zhuang.

“I can’t watch this,” Zach said.  He reached for the mouse, but Lizbeth stopped him.

“Hush!  This is good reporting.”

“How would you like it if your grandmother got on there and started chanting voodoo curses?”

Felicity announced from the far side of the room, “Annette Moreau would never curse anyone.”

Lizbeth spun around, looking astonished.  “You know Granma?”

Kevin noticed Zach take advantage of the distraction by closing the YouTube page.  He didn’t blame him.

“We met at your parents’ weddin’.”

“That’s right, they did get married in Ireland.  Was Caitlin there?  She used to help my dad with his magic act.”

“Of course she was there.”

Zach said, “If Caitlin is your great-grandmother that means you’re like us, right?”

“No, we’re not related at all, actually.  She was Victor’s second wife, after me great-grandmother died of the cholera, you see.  Back then, a young woman, even if she just
looks
young, had to have the protection of an ‘usband.  My grandfather was Victor’s first-born, and Caitlin, well, she only ever had the one son – who survived, that is.”

“What does that mean?” Kevin asked.

Felicity hesitated before answering, as if mulling over her words.  “The legends say that fae folk switched their sickly babes with healthy human ones.  That may have a basis in fact, I’m afraid.  Those who touched the crown couldn’t have children together.  Even if the father or mother was normal, the babes seldom survived.”

Kevin thought about the iridium nugget in his pocket.  His own mother had abandoned him.  Every time he’d considered having kids, sometime way in the future, of course, it was with the conviction that he’d be a good dad.  Now it sounded like that was no longer an option.

“That’s horrible,” Lizbeth said, placing a hand on her abdomen.

“It was the price they paid,” Felicity replied.  “As you can imagine, Caitlin never talks about it.”

She sat in the middle of the sofa and patted the cushion.  “Come sit with me.”

Kevin and Lizbeth complied, but Zach stayed where he was near the monitor.  Felicity opened a chest that doubled as a coffee table, removed a thick, leather bound volume and set it in her lap. 

 “Caitlin came to visit me a few months ago so we could reminisce.  Mind you, she didn’t bother to tell
me
what was about to happen with the world, but I know now, don’t I? 

“At any rate.”  She opened the book to reveal pages filled with neatly labeled pictures.  The first few pages had color photos.  She flipped further into the book where the photos became black and white, and even further to show copies of painted portraits from another era.  Beyond that were just handwritten names, staggered like in a family tree.  “She kept this book to try and keep track of, well…these are your ancestors.  Other than yourselves, everyone in her book of memories has passed on.”

Stunned, Kevin asked, “She knows who my parents were?” but Zach waved his hand in the air and said loudly, “Uh –
Chinese
here.  I still don’t see how my family was supposed to be descended from a bunch of red-headed Irish druids.”

Felicity turned the pages of the album until she reached one that had a grainy photo of a man with distinctively Chinese features.  She gave Zach a crafty little grin and he finally seemed interested enough to make his way over to the sofa.  “Your father’s family came from a long line of warriors, did you know that?”

Zach’s eyebrows lifted and he shook his head.  “I don’t know anything about my father’s family.  Don’t really know much about
him
, either.  All I know is he was born in China, became a U.S. citizen and died in the Gulf War when I was a baby.”

Kevin sat back to wait impatiently for Felicity to explain Zach’s lineage so he could ask again about his own.

“Caitlin, in her long life, has travelled the world.  As the story goes, she and Victor were in China just after the Second Opium War broke out.  Qing soldiers arrested and imprisoned them, and confiscated all their belongings, but the entire garrison died of some mysterious illness.  All but one soldier.”

Felicity tapped the photo and Zach leaned in to get a closer look.  “Wong Ming, 1863,” he read.  “So this guy is my however-many-greats grandfather?”

“Actually, he
was
your grandfather.  You know that Caitlin is very old.  Legend says that when a human steps into the fae world, they stay for what feels like a day but when they go home, their children have all grown up and died.  The reality is simply that the folk live longer, maybe forever if they aren’t killed.  He married your grandmother and when she grew old and passed on, he couldn’t bear it.  That’s how so many of them went, with broken hearts.

“This,” she turned to the front page of the album and pointed to a handsome, unsmiling Asian man in a U.S. Marines uniform, “is Ming’s only child, your father.”

“Yeah, that’s him.  I mean, Mom has plenty of pictures.  Okay, so I get it that these soldiers all died because they took the crown from Caitlin.  What I don’t understand is how my grandfather survived if he was Chinese.”

Felicity smiled.  “That’s the irony.  Caitlin and Ming traced his ancestry and you really were descended from a red-headed Irish druid.  Well, maybe he wasn’t red-headed, but he fled the Roman Empire and ended up in China.  Caitlin kept track of all the folk she could in this book, but there were more who went out into the world and blended in.  Their children and their children’s children could be anywhere.”

Kevin thought about the nugget again.  “And what about the children’s children?  How closely related to the shapeshifter does a person have to be to survive the crown?”

Felicity bit her lip.  “All I know is the initiates who were most likely to survive were the progeny of the fae and a normal person.  Caitlin herself was one such.  I don’t know how many generations removed a person can be and still be safe.”

“Hey, there’s my dad!” Lizbeth said, jabbing her finger at a postcard with a magician on it.

Kevin opened his mouth yet again to ask about his parents, but Lizbeth was apparently more anxious to find out about her roots because she demanded, “Show me
my
grandparents.”

“Why would Caitlin put a picture of herself in the book?” Felicity asked.

The silence that followed was so profound, Kevin finally understood the phrase, “You could hear a pin drop.”