Death’s Excellent Vacation (Sookie Stackhouse #9.5)(11)
Author: Charlaine Harris

HE and Lan have sent the kids back to the cabin to bathe, and they stand outside to give the kids privacy. Lan says they want privacy. Lan’s changed her clothes, but she’s still shivering. He warms the air around her, moving it gently. Protector. They watch through the windows. Through the steamy glass he sees them, bedraggled, silt-smeared animals filing into his shower, little girls coming out wrapped in his towels. A kittenish girl, a round brown girl with a tilted chin and pointed nose. The bear has the lazy man’s lumbering, rolling walk, the boy has a girl’s shy smile. "Cold water makes them–change. They change their shape. Hot water turns them back into human, " Lan says, her teeth chattering still. "How did you do that to them?" "I don’t know! As if I knew!" "There’s got to be some way to undo it. " "There was another spring. It’s gone. " It’s another kind of Talent from anything he knows. "I don’t believe in this. It’s magic. " "But you can fly, " she says, half laughing and half shivering. "I don’t have to believe in myself. " She watches the kids through the window. "Maybe all kinds of magic exist. Somewhere, in a cave, a family of werewolves is reading old Green Force comics and saying, ‘Of course he isn’t real. ‘ Ghosts are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and saying what you’re a metaphor for. And the bats sleep through the day and dream of all of us. "

He thinks of the Bat in his Cave. "And we’d all rather be human. " "I thought you could make them human again. Or at least give them time. You don’t get old–" "No, " he says sharply. "No. " When his parents began to get old, he thought about fixing their aging bodies. "There are stories about things I did. Humans getting old but not able to die. People turning into trees. They weren’t trees. You don’t want me messing with those kids. " I want to die. I want to get old and older and oldest and die, and turn into a tree, into a rock. I’ve been a man. She shudders, cold or dispirited. "What can you do, then?" "When my wife got old, I did nothing. That’s what I could do for her. I did nothing. " "No. " She turns toward him. In the half dark where they are watching, her eyes have turned dark as prophecy. "What can you do?" "I don’t understand. " "Move the light, " she says. "Move the light from the window. Can you do that?" He moves it an inch to the right. Parlor trick. "You can move light. But you got the kids to cover up the igloo because you were worried about satellites. You moved the water out of my lungs, but you didn’t move the fog off the lake. You heated the air for me, but you didn’t cool it for them. Here we are standing out in the cold. What can you do? I mean, have you ever thought about it? In an organized way?" She’s shouting at him. I can get old, he thinks. I can be old like a bitter old man. I can be bitter. But I can’t be an old man. I can’t be a man at all. The kids are looking out the window at him, adoring, hoping for miracles. "Who are you?" he says. "What right have you to ask me to do anything? You and they will be dead by the time I’ve had my lunch. You want me to do anything for you? You want me to care about you? That’s going to hurt me, and it won’t help you or them. " "You have no idea what you can do, do you?" He knows what he can’t do. "Then I’ve given you your wish, Green Man, " she says. "You are dead. You care about nothing. You are a rock. A stone. An old man fishing until the end of the world. " I can’t, he thinks. I don’t have the talent for that either. "Then let’s try something else, " she says.

SHE could book a flight on her magic phone, but she doesn’t. She makes him zip them across the Atlantic in a glowing green saucer a hundred feet long. She tells him he can make it invisible to radar and infrared and light, can’t he? The kids scream and giggle and bounce around the inside of the flying saucer and ask him to turn off the gravity inside, which he does. The kids fly. He’s a terrified protector, afraid of the villagers, helping them from a distance, a watchdog and not a man. He is bony ribs around the kids’ beating hearts. He feels like someone in an airplane, speeding along too fast, cradled by something he can’t control.

They land on the Mars-rocky shore of the loch, between the pines and the peaty water, Lan and Green and a luminous flying saucer full of giggling, flying teenage Japanese shape- changers. "Make it a submarine now, " the kids tell him. He thinks about recirculators, scrubbers; he pushes molecules around. They sink into the brown darkness like into moving loam. "Can you–" Lan says. But he holds up his hand. He has been here. Ice fishing: the seldom-seen, magical moment when the water under the ice is clear, when the fish can see light from a distance. When they gather. When, in the light, the fisherman sees muscular dark bodies turning. When the fish looks at the fisherman, curious, and the fisherman looks at the fish. What can you do? Who are you? He does like he did with the dirt on the floor, like at Lake Musky seining for the kids, but tinier, tiny. He sends out into the water nets that are no stronger than metaphors, trawling for the smallest pieces of drowned bark and leaf, gathering them together, dodging around any fish or eel or water snake. He thinks about Brownian motion. Why did they need Atom’s light? The water clears. The water clears, leaving worms and little fish wriggling, surprised. The darkness recedes around them; a bigger fish bullets by, mouth open, and the small fry streak for safety in the blackness below them. Green globes light around the kids, and around them the fish gather, as if they are all in one great dark place under the ice together, with one flashlight to draw them. The kitten-girl gives a little breathy scream. Out of the blackness, out of the depths, She comes. She strikes at the glow, but Green thinks slipperiness and the ball that holds them spins past her teeth. She mouths a man-sized fish and flips her body round, whirls around them, thrashing, stretching out her neck, trying to catch them. She is too big to see whole. Riffles of gills, a great round flat eye like a target, scarred scales. He plays her. Green is the worm; Green is the net, the line, the hook. The great She-Fish worries at the green ball- light, her teeth an inch away from them, and he and Lan and the kids bounce away from her. She wraps her long neck and tail around them. He feints and slides away. And then suddenly it is a dance. He knows what she wants. He morphs the ball in which they all float into a mirror-monster of her, a ghost monster of green and light. She rears back. He shapes the green fish to match her motion. And for a moment the two of them hang there, in the water clear as glass, a monster fish like ebony and a monster fish like emerald, and she is still, still, still, and she reaches out her long neck, sniffing, opening her mouth to taste the water with her tongue, tilting her head so she sees him out of one enormous eye. Are you like me, her outstretched neck says, her tongue licks, and Green’s heart beats loud in his ears, Are you like me? But she throws her head back with a cry of loneliness and disappears into the deep. When they are back on dry land, the kids say nothing. They stand on the rocky shore, each of them alone for a minute. Then the boy goes from one to the other, touching them on the shoulder, bringing them together into a protective hug. They reach out for the two older men, for Lan. She reaches out for him. Green stands with them, embracing them and embraced. Tonight he has done new things. Of all of them, that silent lonely hug is the hardest, and it’s what he will remember, that and Nessie’s tongue tasting the green monster made of force and silt, hoping she could find something like herself.