The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,12

make another.”

“Caleb,” Tean said, “she’s upset. Let us talk to her and make sure she gets back safely.”

“And in the meantime,” Jem said, “get your fucking hands off of my best friend.”

“My ears,” Virgie wailed.

“Just a regular friend,” Tean muttered.

His face twisted with anger and helplessness, Caleb released Tean. Jem caught Tean by the elbow, whispered, “Glasses,” and steered Tean toward the door. Tean caught his glasses just before they fell off his nose.

The night was cool, smelling like irrigation water from the sprinklers, spring grass, and the jubilee roses starting to bloom under Hannah’s front windows. Hannah stood at the end of the driveway, hugging herself against the chill, just a silhouette as the last daylight died in the west.

“Come on,” she said when they reached her. “I want to show you something.”

6

Tean and Jem followed Hannah up the block. The streetlights were coming on, shedding pale cones of light. The Craftsman bungalows glowed, the windows warm and yellow against the night. The mountain breeze picked up, carrying the smell of frying onions. In the short time that Tean and Jem had been inside Hannah’s house, the roller-hockey kids had packed up and gone home, and Tean found the silence oppressive. He’d known Caleb and Hannah for a long time, and he’d never seen them fight. Ever. Her parents, from what he had gathered, had always been a difficult factor in Hannah’s life, and with the toxic combination of President Howard Lackey and Sister Virgie Lackey taking sides in Hannah and Caleb’s fight, Tean couldn’t imagine how that encounter could have gone any worse.

Hannah turned north at the end of the block, and at the next intersection, she turned east. The street ended at a split-rail fence with a narrow opening for people to enter on foot. A sign said Wasatch Hollow Preserve, and a trail followed the sloping ground across a manicured lawn, past a playground, to the cottonwoods and oaks along a creek. The water looked high with the spring melt.

“Emigration Creek,” Hannah said as she started down the trail. “I’m not really in any condition to go jogging right now, but I used to run along here. Now I take walks.”

“This is a nice spot,” Jem said. “Did you grow up around here?”

Hannah nodded. “Two streets up from where I live now, in the fine tradition of all Utahns.”

“You said—” Tean began, but he stopped when Jem threw him a look that he didn’t completely understand. He recognized the nonverbal stop in the expression, though. “Um, you said you liked this area.”

“Yeah,” Hannah said, looking around her as though she’d never seen the place before. “I guess I do.”

“One of the foster homes where I lived,” Jem said, “there was an irrigation canal on some undeveloped land. Some of the older kids would swim in it, but I was way too scared.”

“Gosh,” Hannah said, “that’s so dangerous. And nobody said anything?”

“I don’t even think the foster parents knew. They were pretty good people, but they had kids of their own, and four fosters, and they were just pulled in a million directions all the time.”

“I can’t even imagine.” They walked another yard, the only sounds the ripple of the creek and their shoes on the worn asphalt trail. “If it were up to my parents, they’d crawl inside my skin and run me like a puppet.”

“That’s an image,” Jem said, laughing.

“Kind of like the Loa loa,” Tean said. “The African eye worm. It lays eggs in the skin, and the worm can migrate through the human body for ten to fifteen years. Sometimes you can actually see it in the eye as it crosses the sclera, and the dead worm bodies can build up around the brain and—why are both of you laughing?”

Neither of them had the decency to answer him.

After that—since his contributions to the conversation were clearly not required—Tean decided to be an observer. In the weak light that filtered through the new leaves on the oaks and cottonwoods, Hannah’s cheeks were hollow, her eyes dark, her shoulders slumped. Jem, on the other hand, still looked like Jem: his dirty-blond hair in a hard side part; his beard neatly trimmed; not muscular like somebody who hit the gym every day, but with shoulders and arms that said he knew how to do hard work—although, in Tean’s field studies, he’d never seen Jem doing anything even approaching manual labor. Jem was more inclined to sack out on the couch with two Big Macs, an extra-super-double-whatever-they-called-it