How I Live Now

16

When Major McEvoy came home later that night I accosted him the second he stepped through the door, demanding that he say whether Edmond and Isaac had been moved somewhere else and if so where.

At first he just looked stunned like maybe he’d forgotten he had a fifteen-year-old daughter and then he smiled a little and said I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced, I’m Laurence McEvoy and I thought OK, I can play the Let’s Be All Polite Game too and I said very sweetly like the well-brought-up girl I am AND I’M DAISY and I WANT TO KNOW WHERE MY COUSINS ARE.

He smiled a little and looked at me in a searching kind of way for a minute, maybe trying to figure out whether I was planning to overthrow the English government with the information I wheedled out of him, and then, I guess remembering that I was just a kid all on my lonesome caught up in the war and we were more or less on the same side, he relaxed a little and he said They’ve been moved too, to a farm just outside of Kingly which is a Fair Distance East of Here and I’m sure you’ll see them again All in Good Time.

I was kind of taken aback by his willingness to breach the Name, Rank and Serial Number stuff and tell me where they were and after that I didn’t know what to say except possibly How ’bout showing me exactly where on a map and leaving me the car keys in case we decide to go see them in the dead of night and never come back.

I don’t get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

Of course in order to survive Piper and I needed to have a plan, and I was the one who was going to have to make it because Piper’s job was to be a Mystical Creature and mine was to get things done here on earth which was just how the cards were dealt and there was no point thinking of it any other way.

Our major plan, which we didn’t even have to discuss, was to get back together with Edmond and Isaac and Osbert by hook or by crook. So far, I was pretty hazy on the details.

I did, however, get so far as to find a Road Map of the British Isles hanging around the house and look up Kingly and Reston Bridge and what I discovered was that good old Major Laurence McEvoy had told me the truth and Kingly was pretty much straight east of us and not that far from Aunt Penn’s sequestered house, though a little farther away from Reston Bridge than was totally convenient given the current difficulty in securing a taxi.

The extremely good news was that our very own swimming and fishing river near the house was a branch of the same one that the bridge in Reston Bridge went over and I figured navigation-wise that was a big plus.

It’s probably best to say up front that maps are not what I’m good at. So I did what every other sensible New Yorker has been doing for years in the Public Library, I tore the page out and hid it in my underwear. And from then on I always kept it with me Just In Case.

We went to bed early that night and pretty much every other night because without electricity and with even candles getting pretty scarce, there wasn’t much point in sitting around in the dark. I didn’t much like being in this boy’s room with the stupid bimbos on the wall and I know Piper wasn’t wild about it or being away from her brothers either.

Before she fell asleep she said Daisy—

And I said Yes Piper?

And she said, I always wanted a sister and if I had one I would want her to be like you.

She paused.

Though I always thought she would be called Amy.

I laughed a little then and said It’s all right with me, you can call me Amy if you want Piper, but she looked a little hurt and I stopped joking around and said, I practically am your sister now Piper, and that seemed to satisfy her on the subject and she didn’t say anything more about it.

I didn’t tell her that I had never wanted a sister, in actual fact had spent most of my recent life desperately NOT wanting a sister, but that was only because of the circumstances in which I was likely to get one and besides I never imagined how much I could love someone like Piper though having said that there probably isn’t another person anything like Piper this side of Kingdom Come.

She asked me what was going to happen to us and I told her I didn’t really know but that nothing could hurt us when we were together. I asked her Do you know what invincible means? And she nodded because she’s read more books in nine years than most people read in a lifetime and I said Well, as long as we’re together that’s what we are.

Then she said in a croaky voice Mum must be so worried about us, and there was something in the silence that followed that sounded so desolate that I went and sat beside her on the bed and stroked her hair over and over and tried not to think about Aunt Penn’s whereabouts or whether she was dead or alive. But you had to admit Piper had a point because if I were their mother, war or no war, I’d be half dead with worry by now not having any idea how all my children were doing or even if they were still alive.

Eventually Piper got quiet and I figured she was asleep so I went back into my own bed and started thinking my own thoughts for a while.

Now that I was away from Edmond I could think more or less in private about all the changes that were jamming themselves into my life and one of the thoughts I had was how you could love someone more than yourself and any worry about getting stuck in the middle of a war and ending up dead was transferred onto worrying about keeping them alive.

This was all confused by the fact that I loved Piper in a protective kind of way and Edmond in a slightly different way, to put it mildly, and given that I had about as much experience with sex and boyfriends as I did with brothers and sisters, it was pretty strange to find myself suddenly overwhelmed with attention from the world’s biggest warehouse of magical misfits.

And just to complicate matters perfectly, I was starting to feel responsible for their safety and happiness and got panicked at the idea of them being captured or corrupted by the outside world. Now this was a definite shift from where we’d started which was all about them bringing me cups of tea and holding my hand and exactly when the shift occurred I couldn’t tell you.

My head was kind of spinning from trying to clear this up and I wished there was someone I could have asked about it all since I’d never read about any similar kind of situation in all the magazines Leah and I used to buy which I guess either makes me or everyone else on the planet some kind of a freak.

But for once my fate was crystal clear and wedded to Edmond and Piper’s and even Isaac and Osbert’s so that was that, and I just had to get on with whatever it required of me.

This made me not quite as desperate as I had been and if I lay very still I could hear Edmond thinking about me wherever he was and I thought about him back and then the bond between us was complete.

I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn’t love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn’t have to howl all night. Thinking of Edmond like that made the single bed suddenly seem too big so I crept in with Piper who didn’t even stir she was so used to it by now and I could hear Jet breathing quietly under the bed.

And so with all the ducks I had left in a row, I was ready to fall asleep too.