Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,15

she can’t fly.

“Hope it’s safer than it looks.”

Green eyes and red hair: Back then, if she wasn’t the Oriental villainess, she would have been the sort of girl he’d have rescued from an airplane crash. Back then, he’d have cradled the plane in a force field, smiled for the cameras, never worried about air traffic controllers or incident reports or finding another identity someplace even farther off the map than the unincorporated townships.

Back then, he wouldn’t have been in the plane. He hates flying.

“So what’s your Talent?” he asks.

“Nothing really.”

He waits.

“Organization.”

He makes a noncommittal noise. Her cheeks go a little rosy.

“You try parking a tour bus outside Rockefeller Center at noon. Organization helps.”

“Helps to kill me?”

“Maybe.”

“You do lots of tour buses?”

He thinks about tour buses parked at the end of the driveway and shudders. See Mr. Green at home. See Mr. Green do his laundry. See Mr. Green tie one on.

She can’t help him. But she could blow his cover. “One thing straight,” he says. “It’s—”

“Only this once,” she says. “Right? You do this one thing, and even if I can’t help you, except I can, I never bother you again. That’s OK. There won’t be any more kids like these.” She reaches into her purse, brings out a compact, powders her nose. He can’t remember the last time he saw a girl do that; no call for powder in the townships. She smiles up at him. “Organization is the ability to foresee the future. Just a little.”

“I foresee they’ll be bored and you’ll be pissed off and I’ll be cheated.”

Her eyes turn from green to the color of smoke over the woods in fire season: dangerous, challenging.

“Do you want a real foreseeing?”

Out of the purse—it’s a little purse—she pulls a wooden flute. An old flute, dark and smooth with fingering, so long and thin and curved it looks like a piece of the edge of the world. Too big to fit in the purse. She puts it to her lips and begins to play. He looks out the scratched green plane window, out at the snowy fields. Barren lines of black. Dark and sparse like her music. The landscape of loneliness.

“Stop that,” he says.

But she keeps playing. The flute song changes, creeps around him like green tendrils.

“Stop.”

She takes the flute away from her lips.

“I won’t cheat you,” she says.

“GIRLS?”

“Young women,” she says.

There are eight of them. Foreigners. Japanese. And five of them are teenaged girls. There are two older men, one tall with a mustache and long hair, one round and dense and lazy. One of the kids is a boy, he guesses, though the kid has a long pigtail down his back. The rest are wearing pink ribbons and plaid skirts, and they’re giggling and nudging each other and pointing at him. They all look alike. Spiked hair. Pointed faces like foxes.

They’re tiny. It’d take two of them to haul in a minnow.

“Talents?” he hisses.

“You’ll see.”

One of the older men comes forward and bows and says a name Mr. Green doesn’t catch and says he’s honored and all that, or something. Languages aren’t one of Mr. Green’s skills. “I am head of dojo ‘Do Anything Martial Arts.’ These my students. Also are my daughters.”

The five girls giggle. High school at best. One of the girls curtsies and begins flailing around with a set of pink ribbons. “Flying Beauty Martial Arts!” she chirps. One of them has a pink backpack with a picture of a white cat and the words Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty Martial Arts? The girl blinks at him with big eyes and twitches her nose speechlessly. The other three try to hide behind each other. The boy preens like the only rooster in the henyard.

“We are very honor for you take us fishing,” says the lazy man. He’s wearing a too-loose Red Sox cap turned backward and a Red Sox jacket much too big for him. The effect is oddly dangerous, as if he’s about to spring back to a much bigger size.

They gaze at him as if he’s supposed to say something. Pointers, he thinks. I’m supposed to give them pointers. Advice. They all have big eyes. It’s like being surrounded by black-velvet pictures of kittens.

They look at him.

He looks back. The only advice he can think of is Don’t eat yellow snow.

He clears his throat. “Come on. You’re going fishing. Don’t fall in.”

They all giggle. Aargh.

“Come get baggage,” the tall man tells the kids, and he and the compressed man trundle off toward the