THE BLUE BOY
by Lynn K. Hollander
Chapter 11 - Open House
SUNNYDALE
"Good morning," Ann said.
"Hi," Spike said.
"Good morning," Xiuling said, looking up from the stove. "Shall I make enough breakfast for you?"
"No, we had a quick breakfast before I sent Lindsay home. I'm going to bed."
"Jiding wants to talk to you before you sleep, even if you have to wake her."
"And Dawn called yesterday about the open house," Spike said.
"I thought she might. Did you talk to her?"
"Yes. She's a little nervous."
"It will be all right. I can do normal, even if she doesn't believe it. No one wake me before one. Good night." Ann left the kitchen and went upstairs. Jiding was in the red room, and still awake. "Good morning. You have a report?"
"Well, Spike apologized for hurting our feelings."
"Good. Excellent, in fact. And?"
"A searching, yesterday afternoon."
"Right. I didn't seal us off, since I assume Darcy's caretakers or parents will be searching for him and our long range plan is to return him to his home. So. Taste? Feel?"
"Sort of human, but maybe not Earth human."
"Did the searcher notice you?"
"I couldn't tell."
"Get some sleep. I think I want you with us this afternoon."
***
"That car," Mante said.
"That symbol, the one that sticks up on the front, is a Mercedes, and it's the same car we saw yesterday," Baudier said. "And that could be Ingelram."
"Take another look."
"Oh, hell."
***
Ann ported into the Magic Box later that afternoon. Dawn greeted her with relief.
"I thought you'd forgotten," the girl said.
"No, of course not. You look nice."
Dawn did. She was wearing ragged jeans, -- not the low, low kind, but the sort with the knees mostly ripped out -- and a white tube top under a crocheted sweater. The sweater was an irregular mesh, with so many beads strung on the thin black yarn she had used to make it, their weight pulled the neckline down off her shoulder. She was very proud of her creation, which managed display and concealment in a comfortable ratio. "You too," she told Ann generously.
Ann wore black and two shades of green in her usual silk pantsuit and shirt. "Respectable?" she asked.
"Very," Dawn agreed.
"Your teachers will like me, Dawn. Don't worry."
"Where's Spike?" Dawn asked.
"He's still in bed," Ann said. "He is a vampire; they're sort of nocturnal, after all."
"We're going off to the open house," Dawn told Anya.
"Have fun," the ex-demon said. "Although why your school is having an open house before school starts bewilders me. I don't like being bewildered."
"It's mainly for the new kids who don't live in the neighborhood, and their parents," Dawn said.
"You're not going," Anya told Ann.
"We're waiting for Darcy."
"I thought I wouldn't get to see him until tonight. Neat."
"Since we're going up to your school, I thought he could see you and show me where his gate was, if he can remember."
"Oh, customers," Anya said. "In a Mercedes. Rich customers."
"Sorry, Anya, that's who we're waiting for."
"That's not your Mercedes." Anya was definite.
"It's the new one. We needed another car."
Binwen, Jiding and Darcy entered the Magic Box.
"What happened to his hair?" Dawn said.
"Color envy," Ann said. "He likes Jiding's hair a lot."
Dawn and Anya saw an American-Chinese mother and daughter pair: The mother, Binwen, slightly shorter than Jiding, was dressed in an elegant Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit in red linen. She wore a pair of round silver earrings and a single strand of pearls.
Jiding, as the daughter, still had her licorice hair but her skin was as pale as Binwen's. She was wearing a peasant blouse in gold with black accents and a pair of black pants with gold accents. She wore a necklace of many strands of black beads supporting a pendant, a three inch carved silver disk, showing Chinese characters and glyphs in concentric circles around a central boss. She held Darcy's hand. Darcy pulled free and ran to Dawn, who picked him up, hugged him, then put him down and held his hand, stroking his bright purple school-boy cut with approval.
"Your hair is really neat," she said.
"Jiding did it last night," the little boy said. "I wanted it like hers, but then we did it this way. I like this way."
"It's nice. Did they like it at school?"
"Yes. Beth said it was the purplest hair she'd ever seen."
"Who's Beth?"
"One of my teachers. I like her."
Ann introduced the yunü and the Key, then the yunü and the ex-demon.
"I really like your hair," Dawn said to Jiding.
"You should see Yanghao--turquoise knobs. Jingwu says we're young enough to get away with extreme hair styles."
"Do you really look after Darcy? Aren't you like me? About 15?"
"I'm older than I look--sort of like Jingwu."
"Most importantly, they like Darcy and he likes them," Ann said.
"Do they look after you all right, Darcy?"
"Yes," the boy said. "And the human kids at school are nicer."
"Giles says you're like nymphs. Is he right?"
"In what respect?" Jiding asked.
"The yunü do resemble classical western nymphs," Ann said. "They also agree with some Sunnydale definitions of demon. For example, they can shape-shift. The way Jiding and Binwen look right now is their formal terrestrial guise, except for Jiding's hair. Before we start, please display your informal and classic guises for Dawn."
Binwen didn't change much: in her classic guise she was shorter, and her hair was in the elaborate chignon that was the standard style for yunü. In the private, informal guise, she wore her hair in an elegant pleat and looked as if she should be carrying a brief case and firing whole boards of directors.
Jiding shot up a couple of inches, becoming nearly as tall as Spike. Her skin turned to bittersweet chocolate and her hair was entirely black. In the informal guise, her hair was licorice stripped and she wore black leather.
"Wow," Dawn said. "That is so neat. Ann shape shifts, too. I wish I could."
The women and Darcy left the shop. Ann held the back door of the Mercedes for Darcy and Dawn, while Jiding slipped in the other side.
Binwen got behind the wheel and Ann sat in the passenger seat.
"Bad idea," Ann said. "You may not get back to human form, which would upset your friends. Under no circumstances is the Key to apport or to go through a world gate," she told the yunü.
"Gangdao Shaolong warned us. He said she might come apart under simple gravitational stress," Jiding said.
"I bet I could teleport. I'm not really a Key anymore," Dawn said.
"Maybe, maybe not. You might still be a Key, or you might become a Key again. Read this."
"What is it? I don't understand most of it."
"The blood Claire drew the last time she saw you? Remember?"
"Yes," Dawn said, unhappiness plain in her voice. Claire and she had met just after Buffy died.
"What this says," Ann explained, "is that your blood is Summers blood, yes, but only physically. That was what the first vial told her. It's when we move into the realm of metaphysics we run into problems. Claire apported the second vial, moving it from one side of her backyard to the other. That one arrived empty, with the seal still intact. She asked Nancy to carry the last vial from her yard to another place and back. Nancy returned to Claire with plastic shrapnel in her hand, where the vial had exploded."
"Oh. She was hurt?"
"She's fine, don't worry. But." Ann turned in the seat and looked fully at Dawn. "But, you're not totally human. We don't know if you're just not totally human yet, or if you're permanently not human in some ways. We'll run the tests again after the turn of the year, about six months. Until we know otherwise, no gating, no porting. Sorry, Dawn."
"So how do we get to San Francisco?"
"We take my new Jaguar, we spend the night at the condo and we drive back the next day."
"Can we go to the No Mirrors Bar?" Dawn asked.
"No."
MINDO
"You're going to be using the main gate. The Sage is worried about using the same manifestation twice in a row and he can send you there alone, without a guide. You'll come out on the top of a hill. The main town is south, a walk of four lyuds or so." Ressent handed Kailea her pack.
The senior witch nodded and slipped the pack on her back.
The governess handed Kailea a sketch of Ingelram. "This is a good likeness of him, although we don't know what clothes he'll be wearing after all this time."
"Pretty normal looking boy," Kailea said. "For a Ferenckian."
"With silver colored hair."
"Ah."
"And sometimes he looks like a Damasi," the governess said. "But he's only a baby in that form."
HOVE
"What is the delay?" Magal asked.
"Traffic," the gate warden said. "You get too many people using the same or closely neighboring gates, either the starting or the destination gate, and there's a slowdown. That's all. Nothing to worry about. There she goes."
SUNNYDALE
The hills east of town, where Ann's house was, were part of a series of ridges running roughly diagonally to the coast. Ann's house was directly south of the start of Coyote Canyon County Park, which was situated on several ridges and the valleys between them. It ran in a long flat arc from about due east of town to the coast some distance north of the harbor. The park had horse trails, hiking trails, an antique and very famous merry-go-round, and even an artificial lake for freshwater swimming and fishing.
Access was limited, as were the roads, which were narrow and prone to washouts in the rainy season. The crumbling canyons were full of oaks, madrone, poison oak, and eucalyptus, with a few stands of single-needle pine. The canyons and hills regularly burned and threatened the wooden-sided and asphalt-shingled houses that were built as close to the open area as legally possible.
Cerro Reynaldo, while not included in the park, was far enough north of the center of town that several churches, a church school, Dawn's city school and a small city park, including the playground and picnic area, found room to perch atop the hill. About half way down the hill's north-west side was the city limit and one of the entrances to the county park.
Binwen parked in one of the parking lots that had been terraced out of the hill's slope and the five of them walked up towards the playground. With the scarcity of level ground, the school's playgrounds and all the churches' parking lots, rather than being large and always adjacent to the buildings they served, were small and scattered around the top third of Cerro Reynaldo. There were children running around, and even adult pedestrians, far more than one would find in any similar neighborhood on more level ground.
It was not unusual to see hikers coming and going here, and even Ann, Jiding, and Binwen paid no attention to Kailea, dressed in boy's pants and short tunic and carrying a large backpack, come down the hill as Binwen, Ann, Jiding, Dawn and Darcy left the parking lot and walked towards the playground.
Glancing at the walls and the telephone poles, Ann noticed all her posters were gone. So were the graffiti that had been sprayed on the retaining wall. "Did they clean up for the open house?" she asked Dawn.
"Yeah, I was here yesterday, running the pressure sprayer. We did a good job, didn't we?"
"An excellent one," Ann agreed.
*****