I made a judgmental sound.
“I know. Too convenient, too good to be true. I did what I could to verify the person was who they said they were. I should have known better. I do know better.”
“Where were you?”
“Out in Oregon. Small town tucked between the toes of the Wallowa Mountains.” He nodded to my raised eyebrows. “A little off my normal haunts. But the dryads there were gathering, and I thought I’d find…” He looked down at his tea.
“Thistal?”
He nodded, then drank.
I knew he’d been looking for his sister for years. Ever since she’d lost her tree, and had left to the winds. Most dryads could survive without a home tree for some time, but she’d been unseen and unfelt for all the years I’d known Card.
News traveled quickly between dryads and trees, forests, roots, and ecosystems. Most dryads thought Card’s search was never going to bring him good news.
But he hadn’t given up.
I respected his mule-headed loyalty, and his ability to hold onto hope, no matter how thin.
“There’s a diner there,” he said. “Not much of a place, but clean. It’s been in operation for a long time. Has good roots.”
The house hummed around him.
Card always was most comfortable in a place that had been lived in, worked in, rained on, baked beneath the sun, and occupied by emotions, lives, and the flow of time and magic.
New structures made him jumpy. He’d once told me they felt unmoored, like an ice floe. He’d said new places felt like they’d simply lose gravity and drift off into space.
He needed old things. Things that had been touched. Things that had been anchored to this earth by more than one life.
“This woman said she was afraid to go to the diner. She asked me to pick up an envelope for her. I know.” He held up one hand, then placed it back around the mug like the tea held safety in its warmth. “I didn’t ask enough questions.
“The story she told was that her ex didn’t want to talk to her, and she didn’t want to see him. So he agreed to leave an envelope with the deed to their house at the diner. She agreed to meet me in the parking lot, pay me, and collect the envelope.”
“That didn’t sound suspicious to you? Really, Card?”
“Oh, it did.” He shrugged. “But when have I cared about people doing shady things to other people?”
I almost opened my mouth to say “Always. You have always cared about people, that’s what made your leaving with no contact so painful, because you left me. You left me like you didn’t care about me,” but I had the brains to keep my big mouth shut.
He rubbed his hand over his hair, and I noted the circles under his eyes. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I think… Well, it doesn’t matter. I took the job. Easy money. Bus fare, food.”
It surprised me that he needed money for those things. He was a wizard. He could use magic for all those things if he wanted.
“You opened the envelope, didn’t you?”
He looked up at the ceiling and groaned. “I did. I had to. It was magic. So very clearly magic. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have. I would have just given it to the woman and collected the money.”
I gave him a look.
“Yeah, I would have opened it even if the envelope wasn’t magic, because I’m not a complete moron. I mean there’s stupid and there’s dead. And while I dislike being one, I’d hate to be the other.”
He swigged tea, maybe enjoying telling me this story, maybe just wanting to get through a full mug of tea before I kicked him out.
“So you picked up the envelope and opened it and what, got caught red-handed by the cops?”
“Not the cops.”
“The gods? Some supernatural?”
