The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [125]
“No. But you can tell her. It isn’t a secret.”
“And what are you planning to say to Anise? I suppose, as part of your shuttle diplomacy, you’re seeing her as well.”
“We are,” Clary admitted. “And we are going to ask her to do nothing without your involvement.”
“She won’t agree to that.”
“You weren’t there the first time we tried,” Clary said. “It was horrible. Everything went wrong. Just … everything. That wouldn’t happen this time.”
“Besides, it wasn’t Anise’s fault,” Sage continued. “It was Tansy’s.”
Reseda watched a block of sun on Baphomet and strolled into the center of the pentagon. She closed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the greenhouse for a long moment, savoring the feel of the warmth on her skin. “Have you decided which twin?” she asked, opening her eyes.
“No,” Sage told her. “But Anise is enjoying her afternoons with the girls and getting to know them.”
“I am, too,” Reseda said. “And I like their mother a great deal. Don’t you?”
“She’s very nice. But I can’t say for sure if she’ll ever be one of us.”
“Move too fast and she won’t be. I think it was a mistake to try and start calling her Verbena so soon. Same with the girls.”
“The problem is that Anise doesn’t think she has all that much time. And we have even less. I had given up before the Lintons came into our lives. I had absolutely given up. The first tincture is long gone. And then, magically, they appeared.”
“I would not read too much into the idea that Emily contacted Sheldon Carter in the autumn and wanted to see a house. This was neither some cosmic plan nor one of mine.”
“You don’t have as much interest in the second volume, that’s the problem,” Clary told her, raising her voice slightly in her excitement. “You don’t care as much for the blood potions. But the fact is, the tincture worked. Yes, the child died. But the tincture worked.”
Reseda was struck by how old the pair seemed, how physically decrepit. They weren’t, not really; the truth was, they were in absolutely remarkable shape for their age. But they were aging rapidly now, and that was what Reseda was sensing: their panic that, for them, time was running out. The tincture had worked forty years ago, but now they needed more. One of the Linton twins probably represented their last chance. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t care much for those potions. Those, in my opinion, are witchcraft.”
“We know more now than we did with the Dunmore child. And we have you. This time nothing would go wrong,” Sage said, pleading.
Reseda looked back and forth between the women. “I am more interested in their father.”
“For a tincture?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why?” Clary asked, her puzzlement evident in the way she drew out that one short sentence.
“Something is going on inside him. I don’t know what precisely. But I don’t believe he’s the man he was before he came here.”
“Of course, he isn’t!” Sage said, seemingly nonplussed by Reseda’s uncharacteristic denseness. “He was the captain of a plane that crashed. It must be horrible.”
“It’s more than that.”
“More than PTSD?” asked Clary.
“Perhaps.”
“Well, John and Valerian and Anise have that under control,” Sage told her, and then busied herself by inhaling the rosemary. “Valerian is having lunch with Emily tomorrow. I am very confident that Chip Linton won’t have any effect on what we want.”
“Please, Sage: Be judicious with your use of the word we.”
“Does that mean you won’t help us?” Sage asked.
Reseda noticed the woman’s jaw working as she tried to control her annoyance. Her earrings were bunches of green grapes. “I’ll speak to Anise,” she said finally, and she watched as both older women relaxed, their shoulders sagging a little forward, and their minds focusing more on the possibilities held by the future than on what they had witnessed that night long ago when Sawyer Dunmore died. Reseda was glad for them—and for herself. That vision was, she decided, among the most disturbing things she had ever seen in someone else’s mind.
You feel Ethan Stearns putting his cold,