Page 37 of Lion's Share
For a moment or two, I couldn’t think of how to respond. I found it hard to believe that glitchy cell phones and a brownout here and there were enough to constitute anything close to a “danger.”
But then I thought of the older people in town who used oxygen, or the small dialysis clinic attached to Dr. Frank’s practice. What would happen if the electricity cut out on them at the worst possible time and they didn’t have enough backup power to keep things going for more than a few minutes?
“Oh,” I said, then stopped. “This could be bad.”
“Yes,” Ben replied, and as awful as things seemed to be, I was still glad he wasn’t trying to sugarcoat the situation. “The good news, though, is that it sounds as if it could take a while for all this to go through the proper channels. So I think we have some room to maneuver.”
“Except for the part where we don’t even know where we’re maneuvering, or how,” I said. “With the portal so unstable, it’s almost impossible to predict what it’s going to do.” I paused there, knowing I needed to tell him about the unicorn’s visit the night before. “The unicorn came here last night.”
At once, Ben sat up a little straighter. “He did? What happened?”
In answer, I opened one of the drawers in the coffee table and pulled out the note I’d found in the wet grass. “He left me this. But it’s impossible to know for sure what my mother was trying to say.”
By that point, the paper had dried all the way, but the words were as smudged as ever.
“Your mother wrote this?”
I nodded.
Holding the note as carefully as a bit of papyrus he might have dug up in an Egyptian tomb, Ben stared down at the blurry, smeared words. “‘Careful…shadow’?”
“I know,” I said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure she was trying to tell me to be careful, but I have no idea what ‘shadow’ was supposed to mean.”
For a moment longer, he frowned down at the note before he gingerly set it on top of the coffee table. “You’re right…it’s a little cryptic.”
I supposed it had been too much to expect that he would have been able to glean any more meaning from the message my mother sent than I had. “It has to be important.”
“One would assume so, since she had the unicorn deliver it.”
Errand-boy wasn’t a role I would have imagined for one of those elegant, mythical creatures. Not for the first time, I wondered how the unicorn seemed to come and go from that other realm so much more easily and frequently than any of the other beasts who sometimes emerged from the portal and wandered in the woods. Did unicorns have some sort of special ability that allowed them to move between worlds at will, rather than having to wait for a portal to open?
As with so many other things, I had absolutely no idea.
“But we are being careful,” Ben continued. “So I don’t think you should worry too much.”
Lately, it felt as if worrying was all I did. But just having him here helped, as though some part of me recognized that we could accomplish so much more by being together rather than trying to handle this mess in our separate ways.
“Still….” I began, then paused, not sure what I’d meant to say.
He leaned over and pressed a kiss against my hair, his breath warm, comforting. “I know you have a lot you’re doing today. But how about I take you out for lunch? It might help to be out and around other people.”
That did sound like a good idea. I could shake off the cobwebs and try to get a better perspective on things.
“Sure,” I said. “Let me get my purse.”
Lunch at Hog Wild was huge, and I knew I’d only have salad for dinner that night, if even that much. But Ben did a good job of distracting me from the note and my various other troubles, and because I didn’t catch a single glimpse of Agent Morse or her partner while we were walking to and from the house, my spirits were buoyed that much further.
After I was left alone again, though — Ben had some sort of YouTube live thing he was doing with another cryptozoologist later that afternoon — I couldn’t quite keep my thoughts from straying toward the woods. So far, there hadn’t been any hiccups today with either the electricity or my cell phone, and I wondered if we were getting to the tail end of the disruptions, with maybe the appearance of the griffin the crowning point.
Well, a girl could hope, anyway.
If I went into the woods, possibly I’d be able to feel the shift in the energy there. Even a day ago, a thought like that wouldn’t have even entered my head, but after that strange jolt of telepathy with Rebecca Morse, I wasn’t sure what to think anymore.
Besides — even if such a thing wasn’t very likely — if I saw the unicorn, I could tell him that the note he’d left for me was smudged into illegibility, and he needed to either get another one from my mother or try to communicate what “shadow” and “careful” even meant.
Also, the laundry was done and the bills paid, and I didn’t have any other real claims on my time for the rest of the day.
It was late afternoon by the time I left the house, but I still had plenty of daylight left. No way was I going to wander around the forest after dark, especially by myself.
