Kingfisher(19)

The restaurant would be closed.

Incredulous, he wondered if the restaurant was closed only to him. Other people entered when his back was turned, ate and drank, were spoken to and served by the long-limbed, rippling-haired beauty with her eyes full of secrets, her air of one moving imperturbably through her tasks while listening for a distant voice. Somehow the chef had seen Pierce’s heart among her possessions; somehow, through the power of his arts, he denied only Pierce entry to his enchantments.

Or maybe, Pierce thought in saner moments, they were just taking a vacation.

He could wait.

He wandered into a scruffy bar along the waterfront one twilight, a place where faces grew blurred on entry since nobody came there to be seen. He would sit and have one beer, he decided, then take the shortest route to the restaurant, just like any other diner expecting to be fed, expecting Stillwater’s to behave like any other restaurant. Maybe if he changed his attitude, stopped slinking through the streets, sending an aura of guilt and confusion ahead of him, the sadistic chef wouldn’t recognize him. He would just step in, sit down as easily as he had taken a stool in this shabby cave where nobody expected him and nobody cared. He—

“It’s not you he wants,” the man beside him said. “That’s why he won’t let you in.”

Pierce froze. The voice seemed something out of a vague, half-forgotten past, which, he realized as his head turned stiffly, reluctantly to face it, had been only a scant few days ago.

“Merle.”

The man’s eyes held only a faint, friendly smile. “Thought you left town.”

“I had car trouble.”

Merle nodded, took a sip from his bottle. The stolen knife hung between them, an unspoken word haunting the air. I wanted it, Pierce explained as silently, so I took it. Now I want a man’s wife. So.

“Is it fixed?”

“Yes.”

“Then you might as well get back on the road. Nothing for you here. Oh.” He reached into a pocket, pulled out a credit card. “You left this behind. You’re family; Tye wouldn’t charge you for anything. You might need this, south. I hear cities can be expensive.”

“How did you know?” Pierce asked helplessly. “Why I’m still here? How could you know something like that?”

Merle shrugged, beads in his hair speaking softly together. “I know Stillwater.” His eyes slid away from Pierce’s face, gazed over his shoulder at the night gathering across the water. “What he wants has nothing to do with you.”

“But Sage—I can’t just walk away from her—”

“He doesn’t think you will. That’s why he bothers tormenting you. It’s just a game.”

Pierce swallowed. “Is it a game to her?” he asked painfully.

“Oh, no.” He gave Pierce’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “No. But you can’t do anything for her. He knows that. He just likes having you around, wanting what he has. Think about this: Maybe you’ll learn something in Severluna that will help you here. But you need to go.” He grimaced slightly, touched his temples, rattling beads again. “And call your mother. She’s been on my mind.”

“Who are you?” Pierce whispered, trying to see into the pale eyes, fathom the mists there. “Who are you?”

Merle lifted his beer. “I go back,” he said simply. “Find your way to Severluna. See what you can do with that knife.”





6


Carrie was ruthlessly and shamelessly ransacking her father’s possessions.

She had seen very little of Merle since he had turned into a wolf. She pursued his human voice through the trees in the bright dawn, in the twilight mists; he lured her but refused to let her find him. She glimpsed him a couple of times through the swinging doors between the bar and the grill, leaning against the mahogany and looking at her, his eyes unreadable. When she hastily dumped the tray of silverware and napkin holders she carried, and went out to find him, he would be gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Wherever he slept, it wasn’t at home.

He was a mystery. She would solve him, she swore, if every other mystery clinging like the old year’s dead wet leaves to the Kingfisher Inn eluded her. This mystery was her father. He had loved her mother once. They had made her, Carrie, with his dark hair, his eyes, and her mother’s urge to run.

“Well, I’m not,” she whispered tersely to the boxes she pulled out of closets, dragging their frayed lacework of cobwebs adorned with desiccated sow bugs into light. “I’m not running yet.”

She opened drawers, photo albums, tool chests, shoeboxes full of letters, rusty tackle boxes, suitcases that had been in the dark since her mother left. Her mother, who had fled as far south as she could go without leaving Wyvernhold, was back home from her brief visit north, and no help whatsoever when Carrie called her.

“Why did I leave your father?” she repeated incredulously. “If you’re asking that question after all these years, then you already know the answer. Why are you still up there? Move down here, where it’s warm and beautiful. We’ll have fun together.”

Zed, whom she’d hardly seen in a couple of days, appeared one morning as a step across the threshold of the farmhouse, making her straighten, turn eagerly toward the sound. After another step or two, she recognized him and drooped a little over the box of photos she had pulled out from under Merle’s bed.