"But I can't find my son. I haven't seen my son in years. I didn't even know if he was alive. The— he said that I was responsible for my son, but surely you must see . . . I haven't seen him in years."
Lung looked up, gave Edward an analyzing glance, then nodded. "As is, I think we have it all in hand. We know where your son is. We have . . . Some of our employees have got him. In a nearby city. And they're confident he will eventually tell them what he did with the object he stole. We don't know why he thought it necessary to get you, nor why he thought you should be here. But he is not someone whose judgments I'd dream of disputing."
A silence, long and fraught, descended, while Edward tried to figure out what he had just been told, in that convoluted way. "Are you telling me I have to stay here, but you're not sure why?" he asked.
* * *
The back alley wasn't empty, but it was nearly empty. At least compared to the crowd that surrounded the castle garden in the front. Here at the back, there were only half a dozen people looking in, staring at the lush, green garden, spying, presumably, for movement and fur.
There were two boys and a young girl of maybe fifteen, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a ponytail and holding a skateboard under her arm. The other three people looked like transients. Street people. Men, and probably past fifty, though there was no way to tell for sure.
Kyrie, still under cover of thick greenery, wondered at the strange minds of these people who would come and surround a place where they'd seen what they thought was a jungle animal disappear. What kind of idiots, she asked herself, wanted to face a panther, while unarmed and empty-handed? She might be a shape-shifter but at least she wasn't so strange as this.
They were all roughly disposed on either side of a broad gate that seemed to have rusted partly open.
Kyrie could, of course, just walk out and tell them what Rafiel had suggested—that she had felt a sudden and overwhelming desire to look for the panther herself. But she would prefer to find some way past them without having to speak. Remembering a scene from a Western, long ago, she looked at the ground and found a large rock. Picking it up, she weighed it carefully in her hand. Then she pulled back, and flung the rock across greenery, till it fell with a thud at the corner of the property.
Noise like that was bound to make them look. They wouldn't be human if they didn't. In fact, they all turned and stared, and Kyrie took the opportunity to rush forward and out of the enclosure.
They turned back to look at her, when she was in the alley, but she thought none of them would be sure he had seen her in the garden, and started walking away toward the main road and home.
"Hey, miss," a voice said behind her.
Kyrie turned around.
"Are you the one who owns the castle?" one of the homeless men asked.
She shook her head and his friend who stood by him elbowed him on the side. "The woman who owns the castle is much older, Mike."
She didn't stay to hear their argument and instead hurried home as fast as she could. Once out of the immediate vicinity of the castle, everything was normal and no one seemed unduly alarmed by the idea of a panther on the loose. So Kyrie assumed that Rafiel wouldn't have too much of a problem convincing them that it had been a collective hallucination.
Her house looked . . . well, wrecked, the front door open, crooked on its hinges, the door handle and lock missing. Inside, the green powder was everywhere underfoot and, in the hallway, where she had confronted the creature, there was something that looked like sparkling greenish nut shells. Looking closer, she realized they were probably fragments of the beetle—struck off when she'd stabbed it with the umbrella?
The umbrella was still there, leaning against the wall. But the beetles had vanished.
* * *
Lung nodded, then shrugged at Edward Ormson's question. "I don't pretend to know why he wants you here, though I'm sure he has his reasons. However, you don't need to stress too much in search of your son. As I said, he is . . . We have him. And he will talk."
A cold shiver ran up Edward's back at those words. They had Tom? "What do you mean by having him? Do you . . . are you keeping him prisoner?"
Lung seemed puzzled by Edward's question—or perhaps by the disapproval that Edward had tried to keep from his voice, but which was still obvious. "He stole from us," he said. "Some of our men have captured him. They will find out where he put the Pearl of Heaven one way or another."
One way or another. Edward found his hand trembling. And that was stupid. All these years, he'd gone through without knowing if Tom was dead or alive, or how he was doing. He hadn't worried at all about him. Why should the thought that he was being held prisoner by a dragon triad disturb him so much? Why should he care?