Page 50 of The Pansy Paradox
But then, most people weren’t like his sister or Pansy Little.
There was one more thing he could try, and he was positive it would work. Well, almost. It had always worked with Ophelia. If he hadn’t been halfway around the world when she’d succumbed that last time, she might not be in a coma now. There was just one problem in using it with Pansy Little.
He didn’t have her consent.
Henry sighed, stretched his legs. The wait had given him a chance to think, to conduct a thorough, if somewhat limited, inspection of her home. Everything was slightly off-kilter. Small oddities, like a discarded length of oxygen tubing beneath the sofa, the lone coffee cup in the sink, the single jacket on the coat tree next to the front door. The house itself felt both lived in and abandoned in a way he couldn’t discern. Or rather, he could. It felt exactly like his father’s home in Seattle.
Then there was that speckling of scars across her skin. Henry could judge a scar, and those were fairly recent.
It’s hard to reach my own back.
The sign of an agent on their own.
That strange insistence of her mother being gone. Gone. Not merely away. Not dead. Just gone.
“And let’s not forget the umbrella,” he murmured.
His own was cowering in its presence, thwarted in its pursuit of the daughter. If things hadn’t been so strange and dire, Henry might have laughed at that. Rose Little had been a formidable agent, and her umbrella was no different.
Had been? Past tense? There were two reasons for an agent to be without their umbrella: excommunication and death. Protocol demanded that when an agent died, the family turned in their umbrella. For Henry, that particular act had been nearly as devastating as his father’s death.
He considered the umbrella stand. There was not much to gain from Rose’s umbrella. He didn’t blame his own for cowering. But Pansy’s? Henry glanced at the camera, held up a finger, and stood.
Upon reaching the stand, he crouched, arms braced on his thighs. His own umbrella was pouting near the back under the shrewd scrutiny of the rose-red one. But Pansy’s fluttered a greeting. It was such a resourceful, effusive little thing, not unlike its owner, he supposed.
“Will you help me?” he asked.
The ruffles fluttered again with what could only be a yes.
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
Back in front of the phone, Henry turned the umbrella’s handle toward the camera’s lens. “I’m setting Agent Little’s umbrella to deliver a shock if at any point I”—he paused, pursed his lips in thought—“inadvertently harm her in any way.”
He tucked the umbrella next to Pansy. A sigh reached him, whether from Pansy, her umbrella, or both, he couldn’t tell. Next came the delicate part of this operation. He sat on the floor and eased the pillow from beneath Pansy’s head and then her head to his thigh.
Technically, he could perform the maneuvers without this contact. In his experience, this posture was more efficient, certainly more effective, if perhaps more intimate. He had always sat this way with Ophelia. The contact produced a feedback loop that let him adjust his technique.
With care, he eased the ponytail holder from her hair, and the chestnut strands fanned out. She looked smaller like this but not doll-like. Even in this state, she had far too much expression in her features. But she appeared vulnerable, perhaps because she was.
The worry hit him like a spike to the chest. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. Still, no second guessing. He’d committed to this course of action, so he might as well see it through.
Then, lightly, carefully, he placed his fingers on her skull, traced the bones along her face, from temple to ear, along her jaw, and then traveled across her brow. Eyes closed, he searched for a connection. He’d just met her, and that was the danger.
This was an intimate technique, one requiring trust. His presence might chase her farther into the Sight, might cause more damage. He might be the reason she never woke up. Henry thought of Ophelia and what might have alarmed her to the point where she couldn’t return.
Pansy’s umbrella rustled slightly, not in warning but in reassurance. So Henry kept his eyes closed, he kept the vigil, and he kept his fingers moving in hopes he could draw Pansy out of the Sight.
Chapter 22
Pansy
Seattle, Washington
Friday, March 3 (four months prior)
I’m at a funeral. And I’m at a funeral because the Sight trades in that sort of irony. It’s a wet, cold day in what smells like the Pacific Northwest: damp pine with a hint of salt. We’re graveside, and the mourners all have umbrellas, which, given the rain, wouldn’t be unusual.
Except the rows are dotted with multicolored canopies, some far too frivolous for a funeral. Several agents stand around the perimeter of the gravesite, strategically positioned. They’re on guard, their gazes canvassing the thick clouds above. They look impossibly young, all of them. Their umbrellas twitch with nervous energy.
