“Agent Gallagher gave me the number here,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “I’ll call you.”
“Okay, then, it’s all settled,” the grandfather said. “Nigel.”
He held out his hand to Harper, feeling unsure, wanting to kiss her. She looked unsure too but she moved forward, hugging him quickly, squeezing, and then she was turning. Walking away. Gone. Harper. I should have asked her to stay.
“Follow me,” the grandfather said. “I’ll give you a short tour and then we can sit down and talk before my one o’clock appointment.” Tour. Appointment. So many words he didn’t know. His head hurt. Jak followed the grandfather out of the room with all the couches and chairs and blue and gold colors, into a huge, open area that was so tall, Jak had to bend his neck to see the ceiling. Everywhere there was shiny stone, white and gray with streaks and rivers inside it. Jak wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel it under his fingertips—how did rock get that smooth?—but he didn’t, instead holding his hands behind his back the way the grandfather was doing.
There were carpets with whole forests under his feet—birds and trees and flowers in reds, blues, yellows, and starless black.
The grandfather showed him another room with sitting furniture, this time in green and white colors, and then he walked him into a room with shelves so high they reached the ceiling. They were filled with . . . books. Jak’s eyes widened and his heart jumped. So many, many books. More books than he knew were written in the world. “Agent Gallagher said you’re able to read.”
“Yes,” Jak murmured, his eyes unable to move from the shelves to the man speaking to him.
“Well, help yourself to any of these. Lord knows no one around here reads them.”
Jak felt his eyebrows shoot up. “No one reads these?” He couldn’t understand. His heart was jumping and speeding at the news that so many books even existed. He was still in the middle of The Count of Monte Cristo, but he wanted to start looking through these. He wanted to pick his next book, and the one after that. He wanted to stack them into a big pile and start reading right away.
“All too busy, I guess. The young people are always on their phones. Lord only knows what they’re doing. Social media, I guess.”
Jak didn’t know what that was, so he made his face look understanding and nodded. The grandfather led him out of there, but Jak looked around the big hall so he’d make sure he could find his way back.
The grandfather took him to a kitchen so big that Jak stood in the doorway staring. It was bigger than two of his cabins, bigger than five of his baka’s kitchens. It had more of the shiny stone, a bright silver stove and a refrigerator that looked like a small house. Jak swallowed. There was so much food. Right there, for the taking. He turned away, something about it making sadness pinch his chest. He pretended he didn’t feel the way he did. He didn’t even know what he felt anyway.
“Jak, this is Marie. She’s our chef and anything you’d like to eat, you just let her know.” A chef?
The round woman with red cheeks smiled and held her hand out. Jak shook it. “I make the food here,” she said, winking her eye. “Any favorites I should know about, Jak?”
“Uh.” He searched his mind. He knew he’d done the wrong thing when he’d eaten the raw meat at the Gallagher’s. He’d be expected to eat cooked meat from now on, he understood that. Understood that it was uncivilized not to. Except sushi, Harper had told him. He didn’t know what that was, but if it was raw, he figured he would like it. “Sushi.”
Marie’s eyebrows did a funny thing, but she smiled again. “I’ll be sure to add it to the menu then.”
“Very good,” the grandfather said, and then he led Jak out of the kitchen, down another hall. Jak didn’t know how he’d find his way out if he decided he wanted to leave. The grandfather opened a big set of doors with glass at the top and Jak smelled the birds before he heard them. He stopped, confused. The grandfather laughed. “Hear the singing? Lovely, isn’t it? It’s coming from the aviary,” he said. “It’s where my wife, Loni, will be. Come with me.”
Aviary? The bird cries got louder and Jak’s heart stumbled. They weren’t like any bird language he’d ever heard before, and the birds he was listening to weren’t singing . . . they were . . . crying. What’s happening?
He followed the grandfather into another large room with big trees that didn’t grow in the ground, but instead in . . . pots all around the sides. He wondered how they whispered to each other that way when they had no deep-down place to meet. In the middle of the room were three giant cages that almost reached the ceiling. Bird castles made of bars. Inside were hundreds of birds in colors Jak had never seen birds in before. “Flower birds,” Jak murmured, his eyes wide, their cries twisting his heart.
A woman wearing all white glided from behind one of the cages and held her hand out to Jak. Her eyes moved all over him, and he
got that same feeling he used to get when he thought someone was watching him. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Hello,” she purred like a fox when it was eating its kill. “Look at you. You’re just everything I thought you’d be.”
“Spitting image of Hal Junior, isn’t he?”
The woman glanced at the grandfather. “Mmm,” she purred again. “I’m Loni.”
“She’s your step-grandmother,” Hal said, and she gave him a look like she was mad because what he said wasn’t true. She did look a lot younger than the grandfather. She reached her hand out and Jak took it in his, noticing her nails were long and sharp and bright pink. She used one of them to tickle his palm as he was pulling his hand away. Maybe she was trying to make him laugh, to tell him it was all a joke. He hoped so but . . . “Her son, Brett, and daughter, Gabi, live here with us as well. You’ll meet them later tonight.”
“You must be an animal lover, Jak,” Loni said. “We have that in common.” She waved her hand around at the crying birds. “I can’t wait to find out what else we have in common.”
Jak had no idea what to say to the bird woman with the claws, so he simply stared.
“You let me know if you need anything settling in, you hear?” Loni winked at him, but it was different than the wink Marie had given him, and he wasn’t sure how, but it was.
He nodded, wanting to get far away from the woman who enjoyed making beautiful things cry.
He hurried after the grandfather, finally taking a full breath once the bird cries faded. They went into a smaller room with two couches and two chairs. This room was yellow, all different shades. Jak sat in the chair the grandfather pointed to. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Not eggnog, please.”