CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TWITCHES

“I’VE BEEN THINKING,” Steptoe ventured, his hands wrapped around each other as though chilled beyond measure.

Normally, one of us would have teased him, but I was the only one still in the house, and neither of us felt quite like laughing just yet. “Of what?”

“Time to test the old twitches out again.”

It had been weeks since we’d tried. At a certain point, there seemed to be no reason to. I poked in a small piece of kindling while I considered it before asking, “What’s changed?”

“Outside of a broken latch and a few switched boxes? Nothing. But we won’t know for sure unless we go looking.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “Got an itch?”

Steptoe frowned. “My tail is not to be a subject of your skepticism.”

Attitude much? But he seemed to be genuinely upset, and I decided not to rile him up further. “How do you want to go about it, then?”

“Drive around a bit. Circle the city, I’m thinking.”

“In case he’s here somewhere.”

Steptoe nodded. “I can’t rightly think he wouldn’t come back. He had his roots here for quite a while. And you’ve got trouble, Tessa. You need him.”

I checked my watch. “Well, Mom’s at meetings till after six. I’ve got the time.”

We bundled up, or rather I bundled up, Steptoe was always mostly in his suit although he did add a natty red muffler about his neck before he got in my car. It had begun snowing and then stopped although wind still rippled through all the trees. Clouds had boiled in, turning late afternoon almost as dark as night. I would have to drive cautiously and slowly, which helped the search actually, as long as we had room on the road and didn’t stop traffic.

As we pulled out of the neighborhood, I suggested, “Let’s start at the church.”

“St. John’s?”

“That’s where it all started, right?”

“A lot of things started there, including bits of the Revolution, but you make a point.”

I watched him, side-eye a bit, to see how uneasy it made him. The historic Episcopalian church, famous for Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech was also where the professor had cornered Steptoe and bound him. For decades he’d thought that was where Brandard had also hidden his stolen tail, but that proved not to be true. After the fire that hit the professor’s house, while sifting through the ruins, it became clear that the tail had been stored there in his massive desk, in a hidden compartment, until someone else stole it from the ruins. We finally identified it in the hands of dark elves and liberated it after a number of misadventures. But we hadn’t been able to break the bond, not even with the professor disappearing.

Our partially redeemed lesser demon was also only partially free. Not an easy state to try and exist in, I knew. He seemed a bit uneasy on the drive to Broad Street, but that could have been alertness for ice on the streets and cars that couldn’t maneuver on it. The statues we passed held a gleam of frost on their metallic structures, looking even colder than usual.

Steptoe considered a couple of them as well. “Not nice people,” he finally stated. “Don’t deserve a memorial.”

“Did you know any of them?”

“A few. None of them knew what I was, but they thought me a villain and tried to hire me, now and then, to create a spot of trouble.”

That was news to me. “Trouble?”

“Theft, robbery, disruption behind the lines. General mischief. I wouldn’t do it, but enough humans answered the call anyway.” He gave a sniff. “War is not a noble profession.”

I nodded as the stark shadows arrowing across the road worked on my mind as if it tried to remember and couldn’t.

We got to the parking lot of the plain white-painted church. It didn’t soar like Notre Dame had or rear itself in stone majesty like Westminster Abbey or St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Wooden and relatively simply structured, it looked practical and sustaining. Whatever magnificence it carried was on the inside.

I’d been there a few times, school field trips to instill history in us, successfully in the church’s case. I’d always been able to feel the weight and importance of a relatively small building in comparison with its place in the scheme of things. I’d also been here once, very quickly, with Steptoe. I didn’t expect that today would be any different.

Except that it was. My companion tensed in his seat, both feet pressed downward as if they rode a secondary brake and attempted to push it through the floorboards.

“Steptoe?”

I waited for him to relax or melt or at least acknowledge me before reaching over and putting my hand on his arm. Muscles felt like steel under my touch, but he did turn to me.

“Leave, Tessa. Turn the car around and get out while you can.”

“What is it?”

“I’m . . . not sure. But it has nothing to do with our mission. It is far bigger and more dangerous.” He moved then, all of him, rocking forward a bit as if he might leap out of the car.

“Drive!”

It seemed best not to argue with him. I put the car in gear, backed up, and sped out of the parking lot. “Where to?”

“Somewhere far from here.” He looked over his shoulder, as if transfixed in horror, and unable to look away from whatever caught his attention.

I drove to the Dairy Queen not far from my old high school, almost diagonally away from the Broad Street church. It was closed for the season and maybe due for some fresh paint before it reopened, but it seemed relatively harmless. More than harmless, it seemed a little forlorn on a wintry day. I shrugged that off as I turned to Steptoe.

“Better now?”

“Too right.” He shrugged a bit, as if getting his composure back together. An uneasy ripple followed along his coat, as if it might be echoing his movement or maybe heaving a silent sigh of its own. I often wondered if the coat was like his tail, an extension of whatever his actual form might be.

“What happened?”

“Can’t rightly tell you. Creeped out of my gourd, I was.” His face closed up a bit in concentration. After a long moment, he faced me. “There’s something rotten in Denmark.”

“But do you think that’s what’s been watching the house? Broke our door latch?”

“No way of telling until we run into it.” He sniffed. “But it’s bad, Tessa, something dark and ugly, hiding, and getting ready to emerge. It’s been there since I’ve been here in the States, but now it’s creeping into the open. To pounce, as it were.”

“Well, let’s hope you’re wrong on that score. Still up for cruising the city?”

He reached behind him and curled his tail across one thigh, regarding it sadly. “No use. It’s gone dead. Not a twitch in it.”

I eyed him dubiously. “You can still move it, right? I mean, it’s not really dead.”

His tail lashed across his legs. “Affirmative. And yet, it seems to be entirely numb when I think of our crusty old wizard.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that he’s dead and gone, not by any reasoning. I’m bound. I won’t lose that feeling until he is deceased or he destroys the bond.”

“I guess that reassures me.”

“It’s about the only good news either of us is going to get,” Steptoe added glumly. He put a hand on the dashboard. “Home is probably best.”

He’d lost the ruddy color in his cheeks, so whatever it was that struck at him from St. John’s hadn’t left him untouched. I could maybe pry some explanation out of him, but it didn’t seem fair. He’d tell me when he was ready about whatever bothered him in addition to what we already had going on. Home did, indeed, seem best.

Or it did until I pulled into the driveway and saw that the kitchen door was once more flapping in the wind.