Storm Born Page 0,90

left his eyes, replaced by something sober and sad. "I don't know. I mean, I guess half of it's being fourteen, you know? Not that she ever seemed all that impressionable. I guess she could have been brainwashed. There's lots of documentation on that; the government does it all the time. I imagine even fairies have conditioning techniques..."

He started going off on that, and I felt Kiyo's hand rest on my thigh under the table and give a slight squeeze. It was less of a sexual thing and more of a What the hell have you gotten us into?

Keeping my expression blank, I finally interrupted Wil's lecture. "Can you give us any information about her? Like...what she was into? Likes? Dislikes? If we could just get some idea about that, it might help us understand her better."

"Well," he said doubtfully, "I could show you her room."

He took us farther into the house, which was just as dark as the kitchen, and into a small room that smelled of dust and disuse. Probably making a great sacrifice to his values, he flipped on the lights. For half a second, I was relieved that Jasmine's room did not mirror the rest of Wil's crazed existence. It looked like a normal teenage girl's room.

At first.

Then I saw the fairy posters.

They were interspersed with other airbrushed fantasy pictures - unicorns and dreamscapes - but fairies definitely made up the dominant theme splashed against the room's rose-pink walls. These images weren't accurate representations of the very humanlike gentry but depicted more of what pop culture perceived fairies to be like: small and winged, playing with flowers and fireflies. Those sorts of beings did exist in the Otherworld, though technically they were pixies.

"You didn't think this was relevant?" I breathed, gazing around.

"This is fluff," said Wil dismissively. "Stuff girls are into. She's liked this stuff since she was little."

I walked farther into the room and knelt in front of a small bookcase. J. R. R. Tolkien. C. S. Lewis. J. K. Rowling. More and more fantasy titles. A shrine to escapism.

Glancing around, Kiyo seemed to be thinking along the same lines I was. "Are there any photos? Any friends of hers?"

Wil shook his head. "She didn't have a lot of friends." He sat down on the ruffled pink bed and found a small album on the floor. "Here are a few pictures."

Kiyo and I sat next to him. The album was sort of a record of Jasmine's childhood. There were some baby pictures and some shots of her as a little girl. Wil figured into a lot of the pictures, but we saw little of their parents. I recalled his bitter comments about their chronic absence. We did find a few pictures of her with other children, but as she grew older, those became more rare. Mostly these seemed to be candid shots that someone - Wil, most likely - had snapped while she was busy with something. One showed her curled up with a book, another found her lying in a backyard hammock while bright sunshine lit up her strawberry-blond hair. She had noticed the photographer in that latter one and regarded the camera with a sad, sweet smile.

"What did she do for fun?" I asked when Wil closed the album. "Hobbies? Sports?"

He gestured to the shelves. "She liked to read, obviously. And she liked being outside. She went for walks, sometimes planted flowers. Wasn't really into sports or anything like that."

"She must have hung out with some people," I pointed out. "Didn't you say she was at a party when she was taken?"

"Yeah...kind of surprising, actually. But she went to things like that once in awhile. Not often. But sometimes. I mean, she did things with me sometimes too. We went to Disneyland once. Saw movies. But mostly she was alone."

"Do you know why?"

"No. I think...I think she just had trouble relating to kids her age. She was smart, always sort of ahead of her time."

His voice was wistful, and I realized no matter how unstable he might be in some ways, he did truly love and miss his sister.

"Was she this reclusive before your parents died?" asked Kiyo gently.

"Yeah. She was always kind of this way."

After a bit more investigating around the room, we finally left. Wil pushed me hard on what I was going to do about Jasmine, but I had no answers to give him.

"Well," Kiyo said after a few quiet minutes on the road, "that was depressing."

I didn't answer right