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"Your mum wants to go home for dinner soon, so how about I help you pack all your stuff, so we can surprise her when she comes up and you're all ready to go?" Octavia suggested.
"Okay. Wystan usually does that, but he's hiding because you're here," Rory said.
Octavia reached for the pencil case. "Who's Wystan?"
"The monster who protects me from the bad monsters."
He sounded like Harlow, too, but it wasn't like Rory to make up names. She usually borrowed them from TV shows, and Octavia couldn't remember anyone by that name. Unless the character's name was actually Winston...
"Does your mum know about Wystan?" Octavia ventured.
"Yup. She lets him sit next to me in the car. Otherwise, he'd have to fly all the way home. He's not allowed in the house, though. He has to keep watch from the roof."
Like a gargoyle.
With Octavia's help, Rory was surprisingly efficient at packing up, so she was already sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting, when Tacey came to get her. She rose to her feet without anyone saying a word. "Come on, Mummy, let's go home. Wystan said he'd meet us in the car." She held out her hand to Tacey, who took it.
"You'll be all right here by yourself?" Tacey asked.
"Sure. I'll close up, and then spend most of the night putting my new toy together," Octavia said. True to her word, she followed them to the door and locked it behind them, before racing back up the stairs to watch them drive off. Was she imagining things, or was there a dark shadow in the back seat beside Rory? It was hard to see in the dark, but...
Tacey's car turned, and vanished from sight.
Octavia sighed, shook her head and got to work.
SIXTEEN
It was past midnight by the time Octavia had finished putting her new computer together, and then she still had to install all the software. Times like this, it would be nice to have someone to talk to.
"Harlow, are you there?" she asked softly.
A moment later, he stepped out of the wall, like it was a doorway and not solid stone. "Yes."
"How did you do that?"
"It is a gargoyle thing. We're made of stone, and can walk through stone, too."
"Weird."
"You wish for my help?" he asked eagerly.
"Actually, I was wondering what you do when you're not here with me," she admitted.
"During the day, I hide in the walls. Here, or in the cottage near your house. But after dark, I like to go up on the roof and look out over what the colony has become. There's so much more to see, and it's so different to what I remember. I feel like I could never look my fill, because there is just so much to see."
"Can you show me?" The words were out of her mouth before she'd really thought them through. No way was she climbing on the roof of the café. There were houses across the street that had gardens on the roof, so there must be a way up over there, but this place wasn't like that. She'd have to find a ladder or climb out the window and scale the downpipe or...
"Sure." Harlow wrapped his arms around her and pulled her over to the wall.
Octavia squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus on the warm strength of Harlow's embrace and not the strangeness of passing through stone, until she felt the breeze on her face. Only then did she dare open her eyes. "Oh, wow."
She hadn't expected the roof to be flat. You could put a table and chairs or a sofa bed up here, and stay up all night, just watching the stars. Or Fremantle, because any way she looked, the view was nothing less than amazing.
"If Tacey knew the view up here was this good, she'd open up a rooftop deck, so people could sit up here. They'd never want to leave."
"This business is your sister's, is it not?" Harlow asked.
"The café is, yes. I pay part of the lease for the premises so I can use the studio upstairs. But now I'm wondering if I'm holding her business back, not letting her use the space for extra seating, or for a way to let her customers come and sit up on the roof..." The clink of glass had her looking straight down, into the courtyard below. A bunch of backpackers sat at an old picnic table, drinking beer. Then one of them used his beer bottle to squash a cockroach on the table.
