He shrugged.
“A desire for privacy?” I suggested.
“Wasn’t locked.”
“That’s true, but you could have knocked. What if I had been dressing?”
“You weren’t.”
“No, but—”
“So what’s the problem?”
I gave up. One day I would have to write a book:Etiquette Lessons for Gobgoyles.
“What’s in the suitcase?” Oscar persisted, and once again I was reminded of how intelligent he was. He didn’t fall for my attempt at diversion.
Keeping things to myself was a lifelong habit, and a hard one to break. It wasn’t my default to be open and trusting with others, like Bronwyn was. But I was trying to change.
Besides, the little guy and I had been through numerous adventures together, and he had saved my life more than once. And the truth was, Oscar was probably more likely than I to figure out whether somethingin the suitcase might be what Tristan Dupree was looking for.
So despite my misgivings, I opened the suitcase. Oscar perched on the bed and leaned in.
“Ooooh! What’s this? What’s that?” he asked excitedly, poking at one object after another. “What’sthis?”
“Tea from Sri Lanka... seashells from a beach in Peru... lava rocks from a volcano in the Philippines... a handful of wool from Iceland.”
“How ’bout this?” His knobby index finger landed on a bundle of postcards.
“Those are postcards I wrote to my mom.”
“But you didn’t send them?”
I shook my head. Oscar’s face was covered in scales and didn’t express much emotion, but his big green eyes were another story. At the moment they were filled with sympathy.
He nodded and let out a long sigh. “Mother issues. Those are the worst.”
Oscar had been searching for his own mother for years. She suffered under a spell that turned her into a stone gargoyle most of the time. I didn’t know many details—I didn’t know much at all about my familiar’s life before he met me—but I did know Oscar would never stop searching for her. Gargoyles lived alongtime, he’d informed me.
“What’s with all the newspaper?” he asked.
“Those are articles about a fire in Germany a while back,” I said.
“What is it with you and fire?” Oscar asked, shaking his head. “’Member what happened at the wax museum?”
Did I ever. I still had vivid memories—and the occasional nightmare—of the wax figures melting, turning into hot molten puddles on the floor, swirling and pooling and streaming as if reaching out to capture usas we tried to escape the inferno. I shivered. I wasnotlooking forward to going back there to visit Aidan in his newly renovated digs.
“And what’s this?” Oscar asked again, poking a little leather pouch that looked a lot like the medicine bag I kept tied at my waist.
I picked it up, weighed it in my hand for a moment, felt for vibrations.
“This is my land bag. I put a little earth from each place I spent more than a few nights.”
He held his hand out and I set it on his palm. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Cool, you went all over. What was Madagascar like?”
“You can sense that?”
He snickered as though I were making a joke. I had known my familiar for quite a while now, but still wasn’t clear on the extent of his abilities.
