Chapter 27

The official word was that Mom's house had fallen into a sinkhole. The insurance company muttered something about there not being any sinkholes in the area, but they paid up anyway. It was hard to argue with the fact that the house was sitting in a big-ass hole in the ground, after all.

Mr. Pressley had been watching the house, he said, when the house was suddenly pulled underground. "Like a duckling yanked down by a snapping turtle," was his exact description. "Swimming along and then boom! Just like that." He called the police, who ignored him as a known crank, and when they didn't show up, he walked over to the Goldbergs' and demanded that Mrs. Goldberg call the police. They listened to her and finally sent somebody.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pressley took one of Phil's ladders, tied a rope to his waist and handed the other end to Mr. Goldberg, and went looking for us himself. He had all four of us out by the time the police arrived and called the fire department, which was just as well, because the dirt cavern collapsed shortly afterward.

Our injuries were attributed to the house having fallen into the sinkhole. Nobody batted an eye at Gail's arm or Mom's ankle. My hands were a little bit trickier, but I said that I'd been cooking on the stove when the house fell and something burning must have hit my hands. The doctor looked like he might press the matter, but by then the painkillers had started to take effect and I just muttered something about having to crawl out through the rosebush and a nurse shooed him away and went back to picking thorns out of my battered hands. About all I remember after that was Phil and I looking at each other and giggling hysterically. They must have given him the good painkillers too.

And that was pretty much that. Mom and I stayed with Gail once we were discharged from the hospital. Hermes was given many dead mice and almost an entire raw liver and told that he was a good and beautiful vulture. He preened. I called Brad and didn't even try to tell him the truth. He insisted on flying out immediately. Mom and Gail and I talked together long enough to get our stories straight, and then we went to bed and didn't wake up until Brad banged on the door eighteen hours later.

Very little was salvageable from the house. It wasn't safe to go in and get anything out. All Mom had was a change of clothes that she'd left in her car, and, ironically, the hellgrammite print, which had been at the framers'.

Mom insisted on buying me a new laptop out of the insurance money. I wasn't looking forward to re-setting up all my software, but since I was strictly forbidden to type with my bandaged hands, that was Future Sam's problem. Brad demanded that Mom move to Arizona again, and this time she surprised him by saying yes. So he ran around taking care of all the important paperwork and whatnot when one is preparing to move a couple states away, and I sat in Gail's garden, drinking lemonade through a straw.

Phil dropped by a couple of times to check on us. "How's your grandad?" I asked him.

"Completely insufferable. They ran an article about him in the Chatham County Line. ‘Local Hero Saves Family from Collapsing Sinkhole.' I'm getting it framed for him for his birthday."

I lifted my lemonade in salute. Mr. Pressley really had been the hero of the hour, and I didn't begrudge him the attention. Of course, I also didn't have to live with him afterward.

Phil rocked on the balls of his feet, looking across the garden. Bombus impatiens worked their way through the flowers, practically purring as the pollen coated their legs.

"So I hear Mrs. M is moving to Arizona with you," he said finally.

"Yeah. I know she'll miss you." I fidgeted with my straw. I'll miss him too. No, don't be ridiculous, you don't know him well enough to miss him.

Even if he does look pretty good in a wet T-shirt.

Phil rubbed the back of his neck, then pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket. "Well, if you find yourself in need of a handyman out there…" He held the scrap out to me. It had a number scrawled on it.

"It's my phone number," he said helpfully.

"Yes, I'd figured that much out." I glanced up at him and he flushed and looked away.

That was interesting. When I typed it into my phone and sent him a text, it took a few minutes to send, which meant that we sat in awkward silence for a bit, and then his phone dinged and he looked down at it and smiled.

"Well," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"I guess… uh… safe travels."

I got up. He stuck out his hand as I went for a hug, and then I backpedaled and tried to shake his hand instead and he went for the hug and we ended up in a one-armed embrace with our hands wedged between us.

"Anyway," he said when we disentangled, "don't be a stranger. And take care of Mrs. M."

I promised faithfully to do so, and he left the garden with the bumblebees buzzing in his wake.

"So what were they?" I asked Gail, the day before we were set to leave. "The underground children?"

Gail shook her head. "If you want a scientific explanation, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I can't give you a Latin name to pin to a card."

"I'll take any explanation you can give me."

Hermes crept toward me, insomuch as a vulture can creep. It was more of a stealthy bounce. His eyes were fixed on my shoe.

"Hybrids of some sort, as far as I can tell. I read those letters you sent me the link to." She nodded to me. "Elgar wasn't particularly original. Most of the old alchemists dabbled with creating life. It's all blood and semen incubated in dunghills and the like. I imagine he thought that he could do it better. And he was right, so far as that went. He actually did create something. If I had to guess, he found something elemental in the earth and bred it with his… ah… essence."

I held up a hand. "Are you suggesting that he… err… with a…?"

"Ritual magicians can get weird," said Gail. "Look at Crowley. Or Parsons."

Well. Probably I should just be grateful that it hadn't involved mescaline.

Hermes reached out very cautiously and touched his beak to my shoelace. I contemplated how far I had come since I had sat in this same chair and arrogantly told Gail that I didn't believe in ghosts.

"So he made the children somehow. Did they rebel against him, then?" I asked. "Like he wrote?"

"It's certainly possible. Although they went to cannibalism very quickly at your mom's house, so possibly they were simply hungry. At any rate, he seems to have spent most of his declining years trying to keep them out. And then your grandmother did the same."

"After she fed him to them."

"After that, yes."

Hermes gripped the end of the shoelace and tugged. The neat bow I'd tied unraveled and he bounced backward, pulling the lace with him, clearly delighted.

I frowned, remembering Gran Mae pressing my tiny fingers to the rose stem when I was a child. I would have sworn that magic would not have been nice and normal enough for her, but then again… "I wonder if she was planning on showing me how to keep it going."

"Could be. Maybe it skipped a generation."

I stared at my lemonade. Gran Mae had believed in Family, with a capital F. She had believed in us all as a reflection on her, not as the people we actually were. I could believe that she would have wanted us to be safe from the underground children, mostly because it would have been hard to have a coming-out party or join sororities or vacuum the house in pearls if we were all dead.

She might have planned to teach me, but she hadn't felt any qualms about letting us all get devoured when Mom and Gail had banished her. Family, like roses, were something she had planted and something she'd yank out again when it didn't do what she wanted.

"If you ever find yourself with a house," Gail added thoughtfully, "you might try growing a garden. I think you'd be surprisingly good at it."

"As long as I don't grow roses?"

"Mmm." She frowned. "I don't know. Maybe you should. They answered to you in the end."

I shuddered at the memory of the feeling that had coursed through me, Gran Mae's soul distilled down to nothing but power and rage and loneliness. It was nothing I ever wanted to feel again.

"Your grandmother was… not a good woman. But you're nothing like her. And all that power that she poured into those roses did keep you and your family safe for many years."

"Safe from monsters that her father created."

"I would suggest you avoid creating monsters," she said dryly.

I snorted. Outside the screen, a fat bumblebee found a flower. Bombus griseocollis, I think. Brown-belted bumblebee.

Gail snapped her fingers at Hermes and he abandoned his war with my shoelace and hopped up onto his perch.

"Do you think they're gone?" I asked. "The underground children?"

Gail set down her lemonade and took a deep breath. "I think," she said, very carefully, "that it's a good thing your mother is going back to Arizona with you."

I stared at her.

"Most of them are dead," she said. "You were very effective. Maybe you got all of them. I hope it's all of them. But I would be a great deal happier if there were a few rivers and a mountain range between this soil and anyone with Elgar Mills's blood."

"Oh." I rubbed my forehead, feeling the rasp of bandages against my face. "But if they can do that, how were they not grabbing us whenever we left the house?"

Gail shook her head. "I can only guess, but I think that maybe their senses aren't very sharp. The house smelled strongly of your grandmother because it was her place, so it attracted them. You smell much less strongly, so they wouldn't bother you—not when the house was there. Like setting a lure for Japanese beetles using concentrated pheromones. There's plenty of other smells nearby that they could chase, but the lure is so much stronger that it overwhelms everything else."

"Oh," I said again. "And now that the house is gone…?"

"They're slow," said Gail. "And like I said, they may be entirely gone, or at least mostly dead. But I don't think any of you should gamble on that."

Hermes shifted on his perch and settled himself into a more comfortable loaf shape. I eyed him thoughtfully, wondering if he remembered his brief time as an archangel. "Is Hermes your familiar?"

Gail looked at him fondly. "He's my friend."

I suspected that was all the answer that I was going to get. I took another sip through the straw. "You'll look out for Phil, won't you?"

"Of course. I try to look out for everybody on Lammergeier Lane."

She smiled a little as she said it, and I remembered the beaked shadow I had seen on the wall behind her. Just a small thing, really, compared to all the strangeness that followed, but I was certain I hadn't imagined it.

Strange, the powers you find sometimes, in a garden at the end of the road.

Gail sighed. "I'll miss Edie terribly, you know."

I nodded. "Maybe you can come visit sometime. If you can find a vulture-sitter."

She chuckled. I stared into my glass and thought about the underground children slowly crawling westward, inch by inch, burrowing through stone and earth, blindly following the scent of our shared blood.

Oh, what the hell am I worried about?I thought. It'll take centuries for the little bastards to get across Texas. I drained my glass and stood up and went to go find Mom. Behind me, I heard Hermes make a small, tragic vulture noise, and Gail laughed and tossed him another mouse.