Amigos and Haneb were clearing up the wreckage left by the manticores’ break-in. Lucinda was there too, standing a few yards away from the Desta’s pen. The young dragon was pointedly ignoring her, and Tyler thought his sister looked miserable, like she had a crush on some high school big shot who didn’t even know her name.
The manticores had had caused a great deal of destruction in the huge barn, tearing open metal cabinets and scattering feed bags and canisters everywhere, terrorizing and killing some of the smaller or slower animals (Tyler was glad those remains had already been cleaned up) and generally creating as much havoc as an entire herd of elephants. Tyler could still see one of the stepladders hanging from a beam thirty feet overhead, but couldn’t begin to guess how it had gotten there.
Only two of the manticores had survived that terrible night-the fungus had lured and destroyed two, and a third had apparently come too close to Mesta’s pen, only a bloody stump of tail left behind afterward to show what had happened. After they way the first one had attacked Ragnar and the rest of them at the gate, Tyler didn’t feel sorry for the manticores, but he was happy to know the last pair were back safe in their cage. They were rare, amazing things, there was no question about that-Tyler just didn’t ever want to see one again.
As Tyler surveyed the damage, Lucinda walked over to him, a baby amphisbaena looking around confusedly from the palm of her hand. At least, Tyler thought it was looking around, but it might also be waving its tail in the air: even near the end of their second summer it was hard to tell which end of an amphisbaena was which.
“How are Gideon and Mr. Walkwell this morning?” his sister asked.
“Sarah said Gideon’s better this morning. Eating a little. Talking. Making sense, even.” He reached out and stroked the little creature on its nearest end. It was the front, he could now see, although its implacable stare didn’t give much away. “I think I’m going to bring Grace down to him this afternoon. Mr. Walkwell’s a little better too, she said.”
Lucinda carefully put the lizard back into its cage. “Are you sure? He’s not very well.”
“This will make him feel better. Besides, we’re leaving soon.”
“It is too bad you cannot get advice from Simos first,” said Ragnar from a short distance away. “He is very wise, and he was here before I was-before any of us who came from the Fault Line. In fact, he is the only one of us who knew Gideon’s wife. Perhaps he knows something about the two of them that you do not, young Tyler Jenkins.”
“You know how much Gideon misses her,” Tyler said. “What could be better for him than having her back…?”
He was distracted by a sudden whoop of noise from Kiwa and Jeg. The two of them were chasing a hoop snake, which had got loose from its pen and was bowling across the floor just out of their reach, tail in its mouth as it rolled like a wheel. Alarmed, Zaza leaped from Tyler’s shoulder and flapped up into the upper reaches of the massive barn where she hovered, shrieking indignantly at them all.
“There he goes, over there, under the sprayer! Don’t hurt him!” shouted Ragnar, laughing as he went to help them. “But remember, he can give you a good nip!”
As the third herdsman and Haneb joined in the comic scene became even more frantic, Tyler turned to look for Lucinda. His sister was observing the chaos with all the joy of someone watching homework assignments being written on a blackboard. A moment later she turned and walked out of the barn.
“Luce!” he shouted, but she didn’t acknowledge him.
He didn’t hurry after her-it was too much fun watching everybody trying to catch the swiftly-rolling snake. The chase had excited and upset many of the other residents of the Reptile Barn, the basilisks hissing and the tiny cockatrices spattering the insides of their enclosures with venom, until even Meseret lifted her massive head above the edge of her pen to have a look. Zaza got so excited she peed on one of the Amigos from mid-air, which only added to the shouting.
Wow, thought Tyler, enjoying the chaos-j ust look at this crazy place! Is there anywhere cooler on the entire planet? And me and Lucinda saved it again!
Chapter 42
Colin Needle had walked around for two days with his head full of unpleasant thoughts, but no matter how he had considered things, no matter how he tried to explain them to himself, he couldn’t make the worst one go away.
Tyler Jenkins had been right -Colin’s mother had been the one who had made Gideon sick. And in trying to change Gideon’s will, or whatever she had been up to on the night of the storm (he was still piecing the story together) she had also used her son’s computer and the security system Colin had so painstakingly set up to let the manticores out, bringing deadly danger not only to the other residents of the farm, but to her own son.
But how could she do such a thing? Colin had always known his mother was difficult and temperamental, even knew that she had a cruel streak, but this was different. She had told him so many times that her excesses were on his behalf that he had believed it in the same way he believed rain was good for plants. Now his life seemed to have been twisted into a completely different shape, one that he had never seen before and had no idea of how to use.
As Colin reached the bottom of the stairs he met Caesar coming out of the kitchen with what looked like Gideon’s lunch, a tray with soup and bread and a sparkling white napkin rolled up and held in a silver ring. Colin nodded as Caesar went past, and Caesar nodded politely back, but suddenly Colin felt certain that there was something other than politeness in the old man’s dark brown eyes-contempt? Outright hatred, hidden only by his polished manners?
Little Pema was dusting the furniture in the entry hall, and she too nodded to Colin as he passed, but despite the demure, downward cast of her eyes he fancied he could see her shrink back as if she did not want even his shadow to touch her. He knew the kitchen women did not like him, but he had always supposed it was because of his bad temper or the way he sometimes spoke without thinking, dismissing things he felt were plainly stupid. But was it more? Was their dislike of his mother deeper than what most workers felt for unsympathetic managers-did they really hate and fear her? Did that mean they hated and feared Colin Needle as well?
These were new thoughts, quite new, and Colin didn’t know exactly what to do with them. For most of his life he had known that the other farm residents didn’t like the Needles, but he had managed to convince himself that much of it came from the dislike the weak always felt for the strong-his mother was nothing if not strong. Sometimes her strength even scared her own son. Why shouldn’t it make others nervous?
But one day while Gideon was still missing, Colin had found a few envelopes from the Madagascar crate near the old abandoned greenhouse and had wondered why his normally so-careful mother would bring those foreign seeds and spores to the garden, where the risk of them causing mischief in an entirely new environment was so great. Why wouldn’t she simply raise them under controlled conditions? Later, when Lucinda had been overwhelmed by the spores from the greenhouse, Colin had begun to be suspicious, but still hadn’t been able to make sense of it. When Lucinda told him what kind of spores they were and he thought about Gideon’s mysterious disappearance and return did it all begin to make a kind of terrible sense. It wasn’t her experiments with the exotic plants and fungi his mother had needed to hide away from the house’s inhabitants, it was who she had been experimenting on-Gideon Goldring himself. His mother must have been hiding the old man out in the garden. Somehow his mother, Patience Needle, had knocked Gideon out and dragged him to the greenhouse all by herself, only to have him escape on the Fourth of July.
Witch. It was a word that came up out of the darkest places inside Colin like a belch of foul gas from the bottom of a deep pool. His mother was a witch, and not the good kind. It wasn’t the first time he had heard it, or even the first time he had thought it himself, but it was the first time he had really let himself feel what it meant.
My mother is a witch.
Colin Needle had never felt so alone.
He stood in the shade of the porch, sweat dripping down his face and making his clothes stick to his skin. Although the storms had passed, the sky was just cloudy enough to make the day as close as it was hot. He was
