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Once again, George is pacing frantically when I arrive. Only this time, he is in his driveway instead of hidden in the foyer, so I see him as soon as I pull up. He is walking back and forth so quickly that I’m worried he’s going to create a dust devil on the dirty paving stones.
As I approach, he stops and places one hand on his hip. The other, he extends toward me with the palm up as if he is holding something important for me to inspect. Only, his hand looks completely empty.
“Do you see this?” he asks impatiently.
I shake my head. He shakes his own, pinches whatever is supposed to be in his hand between two fingers, and holds it at my eye level. He takes two strides to close the distance between us and continues, “Try again.”
I lean in, now seeing a few long auburn strands. My face scrunches up with questions and a little ick factor. “Why are you holding someone’s hair?”
He sighs, and his shoulders fall. “It’s hers. The lady in red I saw at the restaurant, that I dreamed about. It’s her hair! She washere.”
I furrow my brow and look from the hair to my docent. So many questions that I can neither contain nor control spill from me. “What? Why would you think that? Where did it come from? How did you get it? Why are you holding onto it?”
He lets out a long, slow breath and bows his head in relief that I’m listening. “I found it in the woods. It came from her. It must have gotten tangled in a branch.” He resumes pacing and gestures wildly toward the woods while continuing to rant. She was here, Miranda. She washere, in the flesh. She’s what those trolls were so afraid of when they died. She’s why they didn’t escape. She somehow made them just wait for their deaths. I think she thinks of it as a favor to me. To us maybe. I don’t know.”
He sits on the bottom step in front of his door, his face buried in his hands. I try to ignore the fact that random hair is still in his hand, pressing into his face. The thought alone makes me nauseated.
I struggle to form words. My mouth is dry, and my brain hasn’t fully woken up yet; it still is wondering how I managed to drive here without any coffee. “I, what? I don’t understand.”
He pulls his hands down until his cheeks rest on his fingertips. “I’ll explain inside.” He pops up from the step with a grace and energy I don’t think I ever had. I am fairly sure that when I was twenty-five, it would have taken at least a grunt to get up.
When he darts into the house, I force myself to attempt to keep up, although the closest I get is about three steps behind him. We walk straight to the kitchen where he makes me a cup of coffee.
While he fetches mugs from the cupboard and brings them to the counter where the coffee pot lives, he launches into the tale of how he came to be pacing in front of his house, holding a stranger’s hair. “Remember how I was going to take a bath last night and try to meditate? Well, I tried, but I couldn’t relax, so I slipped under the water for a minute.” He pours from the silver pot and then pauses the story to get the half and half. As he lifts the carton to pour it into our cups, he continues, “This voice talked to me, and I just knew it had to be the woman in red. She apologized for distracting me from my date. She said she scared the trolls so they wouldn’t fight your ties. Oh! And she even told me that she somehow was responsible for the dragon turtle being in the museum!”
He plops my full mug down in front of me. I look at it briefly and then nod at the hair he abandoned next to me on the counter. “So how’d you find the hair, and why do you think it’s hers if she was just a voice?”
He takes a long swig of coffee and holds up a finger so I know he heard me. Then he cradles the cup between his hands when he’s done so he can also look at the strands. “I wanted to see if I could find any evidence of her near the trolls so I went out there early this morning. Those were hanging from a branch near the clearing. I think she may have been there the same time we were and watched everything. Maybe I would have noticed her if I hadn’t been spelled…”
“Don’t beat yourself up too much. I can’t think of how that would have been helpful anyway.” I drain my cup and help myself to a second. My brain is thanking me as it starts to wake up. I retake my seat at his counter and swallow a few more big gulps. “So, what does this all mean?”
He shakes his head while staring at the hair. “I don’t know. She’s on land. She’s in water. That doesn’t tell us what she is. We know she scared the trolls and the dragon turtle. But I’ve seen her, and she’s no larger, or scarier, than a normal woman. She must have some kind of power.”
I nod in agreement. “Not to mention showing up as a disembodied voice in your bathtub.” We sit in silence, slurping our respective coffees. “Well, I have to go pee.” I push myself off my counter stool as George chuckles. When I return to the kitchen, he’s leaning against the sink, arms crossed. He appears to be staring at my coffee cup that still sits on the counter, but I can tell he’s not really in the room. I recognize his expressions well enough by now to know that he’s trying to puzzle out where he knows that woman from and why she seems to be involved in all the things we are doing right now.
I wave my hand in front of his face. “Earth to George.”
He blinks rapidly and looks at me. “Hey, sorry. I just, I don’t know if I can start a relationship with Andrew after all this. I really like him, but I don’t want to put him in danger. I was already on the fence before she talked to me last night, but now…”
I swallow hard. He’s hesitant about starting this relationship because of what happened with Jake and the Muses. Another way I’m getting in the way of his love life. Even with the crazy magical stalker lady, I hope he gives his relationship with Andrew an honest try.
I look at my docent, who is usually the one in this relationship who has his shit together, and I see how close he is to coming apart right now. His hair is tangled and sticking up in spots where he’s been tugging it. He has bags under his eyes I have never seen before. And his voice is hoarse and thin. The realization turns my stomach. I think about how consistent George has been the last six months, through my training, through everything with Jake. The Guardian keeps the world safe. Her docent keeps her safe. If my docent is off kilter, I don’t want to think about what that means for my safety.
I need to get us back on track. “Okay. We obviously need to try to figure this out. Let’s go to the library and research.”
I grab the giant book of docent notes and look for mythological humans in red dresses, but the only things I can find are about a jilted lover or prostitute killed in a fit of passion.
George has a table full of all the colognes and perfumes he could find tucked away inside the medicine cabinets around his mansion. He found a couple dozen bottles in all. Apparently, guests over the years have left behind a lot of fragrances.
And it’s hard to concentrate. Rose is mingling with musk under vanilla, and, I think, pine? The fragrances do not go together well and my lungs are burning, longing for fresh air. I’m getting lightheaded and have read the same sentence seven times and still can’t tell what it says. I have to put a stop to this.
“George, you’re giving me a headache.”
“I just need to figure out what she smelled like. It has to matter.”
“Okay, but, Dude, they’re all blending together. I think you need to smell coffee beans between sniffs or something. I think it cleanses the palette, or whatever the palette is for noses.”
He glares at me over the bottle he’s poised to spray. “Miranda, I’m not getting you more coffee.”
