2. Darius

2

DARIUS

D arius was looking away for all of three seconds when Lucy disappeared.

One moment, she was insisting that the post office couldn’t touch the school, the next, she had simply vanished .

Darius wasn’t an idiot, no matter what his math teacher thought, and he guessed at once that the little girl had shifted, though she hadn’t left her clothing behind. Precocious, indeed. “Lucy?”

He got up with a sigh. It was too much to expect that the generous payment Ian had offered would come without trouble. “Lucy, I need your help finding a place for the train station! Should it go by the library?”

He checked the bathroom first, and then Lucy’s bedroom. The toys she’d collected on her bed were untouched. The doors to the other rooms down the hall were still closed, and Darius guessed that she would have trouble opening them, let alone closing them again without him hearing it. Wherever she’d gone, she’d done it silently, which suggested she was somewhere she knew she shouldn’t be.

Darius went into the kitchen, looking in all the nooks and crannies where a squirrel might be hiding along the way. There were an unusual—but understandable—number of fire extinguishers. Darius paused to look up at the top of the fridge. The coveted cookie jar was still there, and there might be a squirrel in the shadow, higher than he could see. He got a chair to make sure she wasn’t there.

There was a back door in the kitchen, and Darius wondered if it was weird that it was unlocked. There was a chair right next to it that a nimble toddler could climb up on.

“You’re not in trouble, Lucy,” he said coaxingly. “Yet,” he added under his breath.

He searched the house again, looking in all the places he thought a little girl or squirrel might hide, and found a whole lot of nothing. There was a big orange cat drowsing on the back of the couch who looked up at him in lazy interest. He even poked into what was obviously the grownups’ bedroom, took one look at the book stack by the bed, and backed out without touching anything or exploring further.

He returned to the back door and tested the latch. It was an old door, and there were scorch marks around the frame. The latch was easy. A little kid could probably open it with ease, if they could reach it.

Darius went outside.

It was cold out, being early January in Montana, and new snow had recently fallen. It was nearly sunset, and the sky was turning rosy and reflecting off the snowbanks.

Darius went out carefully, hoping to find footprints if Lucy had come this way. Under the eaves of the house, the snow was thoroughly trampled, and crisscrossed with boot prints. Where fresh snow lay on top in the yard, there was no sign of prints - little girl or squirrel. Would a squirrel even leave prints on snow? Darius gave a clear place a test press with his finger and decided it must.

That didn’t really eliminate the fact that she might be out here. She could have skirted around the house where her prints wouldn’t show. She could have scaled the house, Darius thought in despair, remembering Ian’s warning that she could climb anything. Oh, and light things on fire.

Darius should have asked for money.

“Lucy!” he called softly. It was a quiet neighborhood, but he didn’t want to get the attention of anyone and have them report back to Ian that he’d managed to lose Lucy in the first half hour of babysitting. With luck, he could just get her back inside and everything would be fine and no one needed to know better. “Lucy!”

Darius walked the perimeter of the house, staying under the eaves and looking for a place that Lucy might have darted off into the snow. There were places where snow had fallen from tree branches that definitely confused the issue, the driveway had half-melted where the sun hit it, and by the time he got around to the backyard again, he had to admit that he was no kind of tracker at all. Lucy might be anywhere.

He was almost ready to go back inside and hunt for her there again when he heard a squirrel chitter in the alley behind the house.

Score!

Darius took off towards the noise, snow squelching beneath his shoes. “Lucy?”

A small gray squirrel jumped between trees, scattering snow beneath as she taunted him with her fluffy tail.

“Lucy! Get down here!”

She stopped and looked down at him, her tail twitching.

“I’m not kidding, Lucy,” Darius said firmly. “You’re going to be in Big Trouble if you don’t get down here right now .”

Lucy’s head cocked to the side, her dark eyes blinking at him. She gave a curious chitter, but made no motion to obey.

“Lucy!”

Lucy dashed back along her branch and climbed up the trunk another few feet before coming out to stare at him some more, just over his head now.

Darius sighed. He had a lot of pets and knew more about animals than he did about little girls, but maybe some of the same rules would apply. A lot of the tricks that worked on his critters worked on his little brother. He kept his voice even and spoke quietly and calmly. “I’m not mad, Lucy. Don’t you want to go inside with me now? I was going to make noodles for dinner. Your dad says you like noodles. You just have to come down the tree, nice and easy. It’s not too hard. We can play games that you like and I can stop freezing my…parts off out here. Maybe we can read a book. What’s your favorite book, Lucy? Do you want to have some dinner yet?”

He kept a quiet monologue as he circled the tree. He was in good shape and the tree had plenty of branches and handholds. His wrist brace was for show at this point, so that no one would know he’d been magically healed, but he didn’t think he would fit through the branches, and he certainly didn’t relish chasing Lucy up any higher.

He stopped and gazed up at the wary squirrel. “I have some nuts,” he said, when he found a little snack package trying to warm his free hand in his pocket. “Do you want some nuts?”

Did he imagine that she looked interested, her tail flicking behind her?

Darius opened the package and spilled the salted nuts into his unbraced hand. “Delicious nuts, Lucy. Do you want to come down and eat some?”

He stood perfectly still, his hand outstretched. “You know I’m not going to tell your dad that you were bad. It’s okay. All you have to do is come down and eat some nuts. Cashews, Lucy. One of the most expensive nuts, did you know that? I have a friend who’s allergic to peanuts, but he can eat cashews. You want to try one?”

It felt like it took an hour, but it was probably closer to twenty minutes. Darius stood with his arm out so long that he could feel the muscles starting to ache, shivering in the cold because he wasn’t even wearing a coat, and he never dared to stop talking, low and even.

Lucy came down one branch, stared at him suspiciously, and then hopped down another.

She was so close to him, her dark-eyed glance flickering between Darius’s face and his flat hand. Her fluffy gray tail twitched, and she was close enough that Darius could see her whiskers trembling. “Just a little further, sweetie,” he coaxed. “Right here.”

It was everything he could do not to flinch when her little paw touched his hand, and after a moment, she snatched a cashew from his palm and dashed back to safety, so quickly that Darius had no chance to catch her.

He forced himself to remain still, his hand out, absolutely unmoving, as he continued to talk to her. “That’s good, Lucy,” he praised her. “You can have the rest of the nuts, too! You’re a shifter, and you can tell I’m one, too, so you can trust me.”

It wasn’t entirely true, of course, because Darius wasn’t a shifter, but he knew that he felt like one, and he wasn’t sure how else to get Lucy to come to him.

Lucy sat on her hind legs, her tail balanced behind her, and nibbled the nut down to nothing like she was eating an ear of corn. She was an adorable squirrel, Darius had to admit, and she was clearly considering trusting him.

“Come on back,” he said patiently. His voice was getting raspy, and he was tired and shivering now. “It’s time to go inside. You can come with me. Your dad wanted me to take care of you!”

She came down the branch, inch by cautious inch, and this time, when she got a nut, she sat on Darius’s hand to eat it. She weighed almost nothing, but Darius’s arm was starting to cramp. It was torture to bring his hand close to his body slow enough not to alarm her, steadily bringing her up to his chest as he turned with her.

He felt the moment that she started to panic, and got his braced hand over her so that he could pinch the nape of her neck.

She dropped the nut that she was eating and turned into a wild whirlwind of shrieking terror. Cashews went everywhere, and her little teeth snapped into Darius’s brace as her back legs kicked like a rabbit.

Darius hadn’t expected Lucy to be quite so ferocious, but she bit into his brace with all her might as Darius got his hands around her, still speaking as calmly as he could manage. “We’re going to go inside now, Lucy,” he said firmly. “And you’re going to shift back and you’re going to have noodles for dinner and you’re not going to do this again because no part of this is worth twenty dollars an hour. My kid brother can teleport and he’s not even this much trouble.”

By the time he got to the back door of the house, she was no longer kicking and Darius had her in a non-nonsense grip that kept his bare flesh from her teeth and claws. She was still growling and gnawing with determination on Darius’s brace. “That’s better,” he told her, opening the door with his elbow so he didn’t lose his hold on her.

CRASH.

Darius nearly dropped Lucy in surprise as he opened the kitchen door onto a tableau of chaos.

The no-longer-sleepy orange cat from the back of the couch was on top of the refrigerator, looking over the edge in confusion at the cookie jar that had just fallen onto the floor. A bright red squirrel half the size of the one in Darius’s cupped hands was streaking down the wall beside the refrigerator like gravity meant nothing.

“Lucy?”

As Darius’s hands around the gray squirrel (who obviously wasn’t Lucy) went slack, it took advantage of his distraction, gave a squall of protest, and twisted free.

Darius snatched empty air as it launched from his grasp, sailing onto the kitchen table and scrabbling with its claws over the back of a chair that rocked in its wake. Rather than escaping out the door into the yard, it seemed to be concentrating on getting away , but away in this case was into the living room. The orange cat gave a yowl, hurled itself from the top of the refrigerator, parkoured off the counter top, and landed with a heavy thump on the floor to immediately chase after it. The red squirrel—Lucy!!—must have found the excitement too enticing to ignore, and she scampered after them both, chittering in joy.