CHAPTER TWO

  The Secret

  I

  The weirdest day of Ez’s life kept getting weirder. She and Wilburn watched in silent awe as Gramma Fark approached the hornet that lay sprawled against the overturned table and prodded it with the tip of her cane. It twitched. Wilburn and Ez both twitched themselves, but Gramma merely grunted. She stumped over to inspect the other hornet—the one that wasn’t squashed beneath the door—and, finding it sufficiently dead, she wrenched the axe free, stumped back to the first one and calmly beheaded it with a stroke.

  “There,” she said. She flicked a glob of gore off her sleeve. Then she rounded on Wilburn. “So,” she said, planting both fists on her portly hips, “what’s your mother let you get up to this time?”

  “I—beg your pardon?” Ez struggled to her feet, shaking as much from indignation as from shock. She fixed Gramma with a glare that could have pickled a rhinoceros. The older woman’s eyebrows arched in scorn, but when she spoke, her tone was simperingly girlish.

  “I brought a pie,” she said. “Lemon meringue. It was Jack’s favorite you know. I just hope I haven’t underdone the crust.” It was the very falsest of false modesties, for Ez knew full well that Gramma’s pie, like everything she cooked, would be a masterpiece with which God Himself could not find fault, whose flavor could not be spoiled even by Ez’s bitterness. Any other evening, Ez would have dutifully paid Gramma the homage that she clearly felt entitled to; right then, however, Ez was in no mood for beating around the bush.

  “I don’t want pie,” she spat. “I want to know what the hell just happened, what these things are and why they broke into our house and tried to kill us!”

  “I want pie,” Wilburn piped up.

  “Of course you do,” Gramma told him, rumpling his hair; she grimaced as her hand came away coated in green slime, “But we mustn't have dessert until we've eaten our supper. I’m sure your mother tried her best with it.”

  Ez opened her mouth to say something she knew she would regret, but the fight suddenly went out of her and she dropped into a chair instead, overwhelmed by weariness. All that cleaning for nothing, she thought dully—as if that were her biggest concern. For a moment, it almost seemed a look of sympathy crossed Gramma’s face, but then it turned into her usual pursed-lipped expression of maternal disapproval.

  “You go on and have a nice sit,” she said. “I know you modern women don’t lose sleep over a dirty house. Me, well, I suppose I’m too old-fashioned to loaf about when work needs doing. You won’t mind if I tidy up, will you?”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Be my guest,” Ez said with a hollow chuckle. Tidy up indeed. The cottage was all but destroyed.

  “I am your guest,” Gramma said reprovingly. But Ez, who’d run plumb out of damns to give, just shrugged. Gramma Fark clucked her tongue and shook her head. Then, clamping her cane under her armpit, she took hold of one of the decapitated hornet’s legs and made a show of trying to drag it toward the doorway. “Wilburn,” she said meekly, “would you please come give your grandmother a hand? These poor old bones ain’t got much strength left.” Wilburn eyed the corpse reluctantly, but Ez got to her feet. Gramma had won, just as she always did, and always would, for it was Gramma’s game. It didn’t matter if Ez didn’t want to play—the game would play her, one way or another.

  With a sigh, Ez grabbed one of the dead bug’s legs; Wilburn followed her lead, and together the three of them hauled the creature outside, where night had fallen extra darkly. The low roof of cloud that had dimmed the sun’s light all day now blotted out the moon and any stars that might have shone. A chill wind whooshed around the trio as they dragged the hornet down the path away from the cottage. A shape suddenly moved in the darkness. If Gramma hadn’t been half-deaf already, Wilburn and Ez’s shrieks would certainly have made her so. Both of them bolted for the cottage.

  “Come on back, you babies,” Gramma called. “It’s only Thoralf. There’s a good chap.” She reached out to pat the darkness where the ink-black stallion must be.

  Thoralf nickered.

  “Oh, thank God,” Ez breathed, clutching her chest. The way her heart was galloping felt like a horse was trapped inside her.

  “Hi Thoralf,” Wilburn said. “Oof—” He’d bumped into the stallion’s hindquarters. Thoralf followed the three of them back and forth to the cottage as they dragged the second hornet out, then scraped up what they could of the squashed one and dumped it with the others.

  “I’ll go fetch the shovel,” Ez said, choking back the bile rising in her gorge.

  “Nah, burying’s no use.” The light from the doorless doorway caught Gramma’s hair, forming a glowing ring around her face, which was a mask of shadow. “We’ve got to burn these,” she went on, “unless you want more turning up. Vexpids are attracted by the smell of their own dead.”

  There was a pause. “Vexpids?” Ez asked. Gramma grunted.

  There was a longer pause. The silence stretched uncomfortably before Ez said, very quietly, “You know what’s going on—don’t you, Nyreen?” She had never used Gramma’s first name before. It had always been Ms. Fark, until Wilburn had come along. Then it was Gramma ever since. And she did not do so now out of friendliness. “Don’t you?” Ez said again, cold fury in her voice.

  Gramma stood stock-still, seeming to consider. Then she said, “Step back a smidgen, both of you.” Then she said something else: a word that resonated as if a bell had been struck. Ez heard it distinctly, but she couldn’t have repeated it a moment later—not one syllable. The word passed straight through her mind without sticking. But she felt it—a great wheel turning, a machine of uncountable pieces clicking into place; the sync, the power. It was everywhere, everything, infinite—yet intimate: closer than her own heart.

  The heap of hornets burst afire. One second: pitch darkness. Next second: blinding light as flames roared high into the air. The flames were green—green as the summer grass in sunshine. Ez staggered. Wilburn whooped. The fire devoured the hornets in a blink and dwindled away to nothing. A few emerald embers floated on the wind. Then all was dark.