Page 14 of The Mage on the Hill
“No. Yes. No.”
“Okay, my fault for the multiple questions, but you can do better than that.”
Darius scrunched his nose as they reached the end of the drive and turned onto the windy back road that led down the hill. “Warning me. If someone tries.” He tossed the hair out of his eyes and cleared his throat, fighting for words. “Magic. Not magic.”
“So the clay tells you if someone tried to get in. Or did get in. And the windows?”
“Bottom edges. First floor.”
“Got it, got it. Missed you doing all that.”
The surviving eye, on Toby’s side, crinkled at the corners. “Busy packing.”
A heap of clothing had been left on Toby’s bed that morning with instructions to “sort and pack.” Since he only had the clothes he’d arrived in, now laundered, and a couple of borrowed sets, the instructions had obviously been to pick extra clothes that would stay on his bony body. “Yeah, I guess I was.”
All the way up Route 52 to Route 1, Toby managed to leave Darius in peace until a stray thought slammed into him. “Wait. How long are we gonna be gone? What about your fish? Your birds? Your garden?”
Darius reached over and patted his arm. “Under control.”
“Really?” Toby pulled out his hardest side-eye. “I don’t think the koi can feed themselves by magic.”
“Emailed someone.”Wait, was that a snicker?“They’ve done it… before.”
“Oh, duh. Of course you’ve had someone come out to take care of stuff when you’ve had to go away before.”
The crinkling vanished abruptly from around Darius’s eye socket, his voice flat and raspy as he said, “Then too.”
Stupid, stupid. We were doing so well. Impossible to miss the subtext there. Darius had needed to arrange for someone to take care of things in the garden when he’d been unable to, and who knew what those times had been? How long had it taken to recover physically from the accident that took his eye? How often had he gone through depressive episodes since then that kept him from doing things?
Wordlessly, Toby offered up the Oreo package, pleasantly surprised when Darius accepted one.
DUNCANNON’S MAINdrag appeared to be Market Street, only a couple blocks over from the river. Of course it was, since the major thoroughfare in every small town on the East Coast was either Market or Main Street. Maybe that was true throughout the country—Toby had no idea.
They drove past the usual mix of little stores, pizza shops, and hair salons, past duplexes and semidetached homes in a variety of colors and levels of upkeep. There might have been a train station, or a building that had been a train station, off to the right near the river. There definitely was an old, probably historic hotel, the Doyle Hotel, with a sign:Welcome Hikers!
“What’s that about?”
Darius, who had been silent for the last hour and a half of the two-hour drive, managed an interrogatory grunt.
“The hikers. The sign about welcoming hikers.”
“Appalachian Trail.”
Toby frowned. He thought he understood what the Appalachian Trail was. Sort of. “It goes through town?”
“Nearby.”
“Is that where we’re going? Somewhere on the trail? Out in the woods with the bugs and snakes?” Toby thumped his head against the window. “I hate mosquitoes.”
The sound from Darius might have been a snort or an aborted laugh. “Too early.”
“Too early for what?”
“Mosquitoes.”
The mixed commercial and residential district gave way to more widely spaced houses on the other side of town, and Darius took a sharp right onto a road that looked more like an alley to Toby, though it still had a name on the map. Here they pulled up in front of a neat two-story house with bushes that were just beginning to flower pink and white on either side of the door. The lace curtains in the front windows and the pastel bunny wreath threw it over the wall from “tidy” to “cute.”
“You have a great-aunt here or something?” Toby waited until Darius made definite moves to leave the car before he followed suit.
