“Maybe this, maybe that! Maybe it doesn’t matter, now! She told me when I asked her, even though she didn’t want to! She told me, but it would have been easier if it had come from you!” Nest shook her head, and her voice quieted. “She told me about the demon, too. Is it the same one that’s here now?”
Pick threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to answer that when I haven’t even seen him?”
Nest studied him doubtfully for a moment. “He probably wouldn’t look the same anyway, would he?”
“Hard to say. Demons don’t change much once they’re demons.” He blinked. “Wait a minute. You haven’t seen him, have you?”
Nest told him then about the encounter in church, about the appearance of the feeders and Wraith, about poor Mrs. Browning, and about John Ross. When she was done, Pick sat down heavily hi her palm and shook his head.
“What’s going on here?” he asked softly, not so much of her as of himself.
She looked off into the park again, thinking it over, searching for an answer that refused to be found. Then she stood up, put him back on her shoulder, and began to walk once more along the edge of the service road toward the east end of the park. “Tell me about my grandmother,” she asked him after a moment.
Pick looked at her. “Don’t start with me. I’ve said all I have to say about that.”
“Just tell me what she was doing with the feeders, running with them, being part of them.” Nest felt her voice catch as the ugly vision played itself through again in her mind.
Pick shrugged. “I don’t know what she was doing. She was young and wild, your grandmother, and she did a lot of things I didn’t much agree with. Running with the feeders was one of them. She did it because she felt like it, I guess. She was different from you.”
Nest looked at him. “Different how?”
“She was the first to have the magic in your family when there was no one to guide her in its use,” he replied. “She didn’t know what to do with it. There wasn’t any balance in her life like there is in yours. Not then, at least. She’s given you that balance, you know. She’s been there to warn you about the magic right from the first. No one was there for her. Opal, the last before her, was dead by the time she was eight. So there was only me, and she didn’t want to listen to me. She thought I was out for myself, that what I said didn’t mean anything.” He pursed his lips. “Like I said, she was headstrong.”
“She said she was in love with the demon.”
“She was, for a time.”
“Until she found out the truth about him.”
“Yep, until then.”
“What did she do to keep him away from her?”
Pick looked at her. “Didn’t she tell you?”
Nest shook her head. “Will you?”
Pick sighed. “Here we go again.”
“All right, forget it.”
They walked on in silence, passing the east ball diamond and turning up toward the parking lot that fronted the toboggan slide. Ahead, the trees shimmered hotly in the midday sun and the river reflected silver and gold. In the backyards of the houses bordering the park, people were working in their flower beds and mowing the grass. The smell of hamburgers cooking on an open grill wafted heavily on the humid air.
“I shouldn’t tell you,” Pick insisted quietly.
“Then don’t.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“All right.”
Pick hunched his shoulders. “Your grandmother,” he said wearily, staring straight ahead. For a minute he didn’t say anything else. “The demon underestimated her, too bad for him. See, she understood him better than he thought. She’d learned a few things running with him, being part of his life, those nights in the park. She knew it was her magic that attracted him to her. She knew the magic was everything to him. He wanted her because she had it. She was very powerful in those days, Nest. Maybe as powerful as he was. So she told him that if he stayed in the park, if he kept after her, she’d use it against him. She’d use it up, every last bit of it. She’d kill him or herself or both of them. She didn’t care which.”