All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [227]
It seemed like it wanted to sound, as if there was someone trying to contact her, and yet so far off, it had not the strength to quite make the connection.
Audrey tentatively picked up the receiver and listened.
There was a hiss and a crackle, and a voice broke though the white noise.
It was Louis. He was singing off-key: “Six little children to market went: Orpheus and Faustus, the Empress of Kansas, the Spirit of Christmas, Bacchus, and the Governor of Texas—”
“Louis?”
He stopped singing.
“Audrey!” he cried. “Beloved, it is your Louis!” His enthusiasm deflated. “How long have you been listening? No, never mind. There is little time. I’m using Eliot’s phone and a child’s trick with a Klein sphere to make this connection.”60
Audrey’s first impulse was to hang up on Louis, the greatest of all liars. But he was also the Louis she loved.
She held those thoughts balanced in her mind. Tip one way and she would hang up and forever sever their connection on more than one level.
Or listen, and tip the other way: embrace this madness she felt for him still.
Cutting the tie would be easiest. She had done that before with Eliot and Fiona, leaving her maternal duty but severing the irrational love.
But what was easiest often was not best . . . and not without regrets.
“Please,” Louis whispered. There was desperation in his voice.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“This is not about us—well it is in a way, and I know I have made an ultimate mess of things between us, all my fault . . . again, not the point. What I’m trying to say is it’s about the children.”
Audrey glanced at the red and blue pins in its center of the corkboard. So many other pins surrounded her children, so many who would use them or remove them.
“I must be quick,” Louis whispered. “I am down to one pixel on this phone’s battery, and it’s winking red.”
There was a burst of static. Audrey pulled the receiver away until the noise died.
“Louis?”
“Yes . . . still here.” His voice was barely audible. “My relations make their move today. You must save Eliot and Fiona before they make decisions that cannot be undone. Before they are lured—”
A whoosh of screams and crying and the laughter of the mad flooded the connection.
There was a click. Then nothing.
“Louis?” Audrey whispered.
Her heart pounded and she rose. She believed him.
She had to go to battle, fight, protect her children from the others, and somewhere in those feelings was the foolish urge to protect Louis as well.
Audrey looked back to the corkboard and yarn and pins.
She then understood why her subconscious had left those last two pins. She had to make up her mind—deliberately, and accepting all the consequences—where they belonged.
And so she did.
She set both black and white pins together . . . nestled next to the red and blue pins of Eliot and Fiona.
She slammed the receiver to the cradle and then picked it up and dialed the direct line to Lucille Westin’s private and personal office. She’d have Fiona and Eliot pulled from class and kept with Miss Westin until she could get there.
If there was still time.
60. A Klein sphere is a contradiction in terms. In mathematics, a Klein bottle has a single continuous surface in a tube or bottle shape; i.e., there are neither distinct inner or outer surfaces (cf. the Möbius strip). A sphere, however, has distinct inner and outer surfaces. Modern mathematicians continue to puzzle over if this reference is a misnomer or if Infernals have a hitherto unknown understanding of topology. An Introduction to the Mathematics of Myth, Paxington Press LLC, San Francisco.
66
ONE THING ALMOST EVERYONE HAD FORGOTTEN
Cecilia watched Audrey storm out of the house, not even bothering to close the front door.
She followed and eased it shut, spotting Audrey’s Jaguar XKSS through the door’s stained glass windows as the roadster roared out of the driveway. The car smeared into a midnight blue streak of chrome and taillights.
Audrey was gone. Finally.
Cecilia locked the door and meandered upstairs to the dining room. The long-abandoned