10.
Jabar has put a wooden plank in front of the window. Of course none of us can get some sleep, so we take a seat in the living room. Diedie fills a glass of cognac for each of us.
‘Will you now take a burglar alarm for the house?’ I go ahead, nipping from my glass.
‘No,’ Jabar says in a neutral tone.
‘No?’ I cry out. ‘Come on, Jabar. You’ve seen what could happen.’
‘Do you really think some electronic wires can hold burglars?’
‘It makes it more fucking difficult for them, yes!’
‘I can put a magical burglar alarm around the house,’ Diedie suggests in a soothing voice.
‘I don’t know,’ Jabar says.
‘Why haven’t we ever done that before?’ I raise my hands outraged.
‘Because it’s perceptible,’ Diedie answers. ‘Even humans sense something isn’t right if they pass a magic shield. And because we didn’t need it before.’
‘Besides, Diedie has to think about it to restore it regularly.’
‘So what?’ I take a big gulp from the cognac.
‘It would be useful right now.’ Diedie patiently looks at Jabar.
‘Yes, okay, until this entire affair is over. If it goes by.’ Jabar heaves a deep sigh and fills a second glass of cognac. ‘If those two people leak out the existence of otherkinds…’
‘Than most of the people won’t even believe it,’ I interrupt.
‘They would start to investigate things. Some would believe it.’
‘But you said it yourself that Selena will probably behead them.’
Diedie sets up a soft cry and puts her hand over her mouth. ‘You really think so, Jabar?’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Seems logical to me. Vampires aren’t known to be peaceful and trifle with death more easily.’
‘Than we should have helped that poor man!’ Diedie pushes out enraged.
‘It’s his own fault,’ I sulk.
‘Manon!’ Diedie looks at me in shock.
‘What? It is so, isn’t it?’
It becomes a discussion without ending, so I change the subject. ‘Say, what kind of book was it, Jabar?’
He guzzles down the second glass of cognac and refills it with shaking hands. I have never seen Jabar drink so much in a short time. And I have never seen him looking so frantically. His self-control seems to hovering on the verge of disaster and I don’t want to see a steady rock like him tumbling down.
That book needs to be very valuable or special.
‘That book,’ Jabar begins.
I can tell by Diedie’s curious look she knows as little as I do and that’s, at the least, strange. They’ve known each other for almost fifty years and they share, as far as I know, everything with each other, except the bed.
‘It’s about one hundred years old now,’ Jabar continues. ‘I began to write it…’
‘You wrote it?’ I interrupt.
‘Yes, Manon, a little more patience.’
‘Sorry.’ I grin sheepishly and burry my face in the glass.
‘I began to write it because I wanted to have an overview of the different kinds. A reference work. The book is called ‘Lexicon of Species’’.
‘The book is about otherkinds?’ I start to feel some tiredness and lean back in the pillows on the couch.
‘Yes. Looking back it’s stupid maybe, but I found it useful back then. I decided to investigate the kinds in a detailed way; the behavior, the gifts, the weaknesses, everything. A reference work thus that I wanted to use for my own purpose only.’
‘Why?’ It’s Diedie who asks it. ‘Isn’t it enough when it’s in your head?’
‘Mainly for myself, because the memory isn’t always reliable. Beside that, for Manon. If something would happen to me, she would have that book in which the different kinds are listed and described in great detail. Also the humans.’
‘It was a heavy book,’ I say foolishly.
‘The cover is made of thick leather and it’s locked with a metal lock, which can be easily forced. It’s entirely handwritten by myself.’
‘What does Selena want from it? Or the so-called great client, if he exists,’ Diedie wonders.
‘It doesn’t predict much good. I think she wants to blackmail me.’
‘For money?’ I ask.
‘I can’t think of something else, yes,’ Jabar answers.
Jabar is very rich, no doubt about that. He owns a heritage that’s passed on in the family for centuries and can never be spent entirely. Even if he would lead an exorbitant life, which he doesn’t, still several families could live on it forever.
‘Well, what is it that makes the world go round,’ I say resigned.
‘I’m going to take a walk around the house,’ Diedie says and stands up.
She’s going to construct a magic alarm system of course.
‘Shall I walk with you?’ Jabar proposes.
‘No, I can’t imagine they would burgle twice on the same night. Besides, they’ve got what they came for.’
Jabar nods. Diedie opens a window towards the garden and walks outside.
‘Do you have enemies? From the past, or so?’ I ask.
Jabar thinks about it for a while and then shakes his head. ‘I wouldn’t know who. My family led, just like me, a life in the shadows. We never explicitly stepped in the limelight and we’ve never done anything to insult someone. The properties are obtained legally and were paid plentifully every time.’
‘Just what I thought. Sorry for asking.’
‘You did great, Manon,’ he says.
‘Thanks. But maybe I shouldn’t have transformed.’
‘It helped and I didn’t stop you. Only one remark.’
I sigh. He’s a strict teacher.
‘The next time I wouldn’t transform into something that consists of so many different parts. That’s too vulnerable.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve once heard about a transformer that changed in thousands of bees. The bees stayed close together, but this way he could spy on a bigger area. The problem was that a few hundred bees got crushed. I don’t exactly know why, but that isn’t the point. When he transformed back into his human shape, his leg was shattered in a way it couldn’t be repaired anymore. The more parts you use to turn into, the more vulnerable you are.’
‘I understand.’
Still it hurts. I know he’s only warning me, but it happens to be that I’m sensitive to criticism, no matter in which form. It wasn’t that smart after all to change myself into Arthropoda.
‘How can Selena or the big boss know anything about the book?’ I suddenly think of it. ‘Who still knows about the book?’
‘Only my sister and I and she knew better than to talk about it to anyone. I suspect Selena kept an eye on us for a while already. Maybe she saw me taking the book out of the safe and writing in it. Because it’s in a safe, she probably thought it was important.’
‘She’ll be shouting with joy right now.’
‘Yes.’
We take a nip form our cognac. I see Diedie, with one arm raised in the air, walking past the big round windows at the front of the house. Even in the pitch-black night her purple eyes are clearly visible.
We should learn how to protect our privacy more. Because there’s a giant garden surrounding the house and above that live in a quiet neighborhood with only mastodons of houses, we never close the curtains. No surprise Selena or whoever it was can keep an eye on us easily.
‘So that’s why you didn’t want to call the police,’ I say.
‘They would want to know what kind of book it was and if they got behind it and would find it…’
Diedie comes inside through the backdoor and takes a seat. Her eyes have an average grey-blue color again. ‘It must at least hold until the day after tomorrow.’
I stand up and close all the curtains in the living room. ‘Let’s do that every evening from now on, don’t we?’
Jabar stands up with slow gestures. The tiredness hangs as an aura around him. ‘I’m going to take a look on the attic if there are still some new messages. Maybe from Ben.’
Diedie and I decide that it has been enough and go to bed.