Phantom of the Library - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,24
the sofa.
“Hide the Way of Paths,” Jake said. “You three go to the basement and try to summon help. We’ll handle this.”
It couldn’t be the council, not that quickly, I thought. Unless they were already in the neighborhood, watching us. But maybe it’s just an advance guard of their familiars. I can handle that.
Thankfully, my broken leg was almost back to normal by now.
But if it is the council, and if they somehow do know what we’re doing…we’re mincemeat. Byron was just being realistic when he said we only had to hold the place down for a few minutes. We’d be lucky to survive that long.
But Jake and I had each other. If we went down together avenging all of our ancestors who were kept down by generations of smug wizards, I was okay with that. I loved living, but I’d never been afraid to die either. I looked at it like, where was I before I was born? Somewhere just as wonderful. I had always felt that. Maybe it was the sort of hubris you had when you shared your birth with a twin, but I didn’t feel like I was ever alone in the world.
I opened the front door, my reflexes braced to turn wolf instantly if needed.
It was an older man, although probably one of the neighborhood youngsters, as I would guess he was about seventy, with unruly white hair, dark glasses frames and a tweed jacket. “Oh, hello,” he said. “So you’re the ones who are working on Sam’s house, then? Which one of you is Graham Capello?”
We all let out our breath at the same time, and hopefully he didn’t notice. It was just another nosy neighbor.
“I’m Graham.”
“I couldn’t tell. You all look Italian.”
“Irish,” Jake said.
“And you’re a Red Sox guy. Boston? You from Boston? Brooklyn Dodgers over here. I’m Isaac. So Sam and I were pretty good friends—well, pretty good. He always kept to himself. And I’m a lot younger than him, though you kids probably can’t tell. So I had him over at holidays and I wanted to talk to you because I always helped him with the garden. Sam had this garden but he didn’t know gardens from a pile of concrete. Sorry excuse for a wizard if you ask me, and I say this as a city warlock, but I think that’s why I appreciate it so much. I heard you were…”
My heart was still beating stupidly fast considering the obvious lack of threat here. We were all glancing behind us. After a second, Jake broke away to go tell Byron and Hel that it was a false alarm, as the old man went on,
“…I could help you get the garden going again, and if you need to know anything about the medicinal plants of California, because I know, the east coast wizards don’t know anything about the plants we got out here, and—are you wizards? You’re not wizards. I just realized that I already sensed that. You’re shifters or something. By the way, I wanted to ask you about that light that came blazing out of the house a little bit ago. I don’t mind it but it felt pretty strong. We have an ordinance against summoning anything without permission.”
“Nah, we didn’t summon anything,” I said. “We were just trying to get the undine to move out of the pool.”
The old man was angered now. “What would you do that for?”
“We can’t use the pool without getting seduced!” I said.
“To have your problems… Well, I heard she was a lovely little sprite. I thought he might marry her and give her a soul. Too bad. But I never met her. Sam never invited the neighbors to his house. He was a snob for a while, we thought. He had all these hot shots out here and didn’t invite us. But I hate parties anyway, so I forgave him. In his later years he was just alone except for that little gal who was the nurse, and I don’t like to see anyone alone. Do you need any help taking care of the situation?”
“We’ll let you know if we do,” I said.
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Graham said. “We’re in the middle of moving some furniture around before bed, so we’ll have to cut it short, but I’m sure we’ll see more of you when we’re settled in.”
“Oh, I see. Lots of you here, huh? Well, I’ll come by tomorrow and take a look at the yard. You kids, don’t