A.k.a. Goddess

“Could we just call it the Sangreal?” I asked. Sangreal is a classic term for the Holy Grail. To some it comes from the term sang graal—blood grail or blood cup. To a few it has an even more complex meaning about mythical royal bloodlines…but that really didn’t apply here.

It’s still about blood. Always about blood.

“The goddess chalices may not be of your particular faith,” I said, with what I felt was admirable reason, “but let’s assume that if they exist, they’re also real. And holy.”

“This is fair enough,” he said. “But do you mean to imply that these…people…think the Sangreal is in Poitou?”

“No.” I hated to tear down his hopes, but like he’d said, what were the chances? There was plenty of Sangreal research out there far more exhaustive than the research Aunt Bridge and I had been compiling on Melusine. “I don’t think the men who chased us last night, and who hurt Aunt Bridge, and who stole our notes… I don’t think they’re after the Sangreal at all. I think they want to suppress the goddess grails.”

“Why is that?” His gaze was unsettling. “Are they magic?”

My inner academic resisted that explanation, even as my Grail Keeper side hoped it was true. “Even if the cups have no supernatural powers, their existence could rewrite early history, reveal a more powerful feminine past. That’s important.”

“Again I say, high-speed auto chases and gunfire?”

He had a point. “Okay, so I don’t know their motivation. All I’m saying is, there are enough of them to worry me. Unless they’re racking up unbelievable frequent-flyer miles, the men who broke into Aunt Bridge’s office aren’t the same ones who broke into mine. They’re educated enough to know about our research. And they managed to break into the museum in New Delhi—the National Museum of India—to destroy the Kali Cup.”

“You’re talking a widespread network of very powerful people,” said Rhys. “Willing to go to great lengths to stop us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And on our side we’ve got…”

“You, me and a nursery rhyme that’s been in my family for generations.”

Rhys stared at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Uffach cols.”

Lex Stuart and I become friends just in time for me to watch him die. Even his willpower can’t hide it. His eyelids swell. His coordination fails him. He throws up in class.

Then he vanishes altogether.

I send get-well cards and hear nothing. The normalcy of volleyball and final exams surges back as if he’d never been there. Then, over summer break, his mother calls me.

She talks about BMTs and isolation periods and platelet production resuming—I’m thirteen now, but all I really grasp is how relieved she sounds. Then she asks me to visit him.

She’ll send a car. That’s my first clue that I’m about to enter a whole different world. Fairyland.

The Stuarts live outside of town, with tended woods and high-gated drives. Their lawn looks like a golf course. Their house looks like a palace. Lex’s mom looks like a movie star.

Only once she leads me to Lex’s room and I see him, do I truly believe that he’s alive.

He stands to say hello, despite his mother’s protests.

Once she leaves to “arrange a snack,” I fold my arms and say, “Way to keep in touch.”

“I’ve been preoccupied,” he says seriously. Not busy. Preoccupied. “Thank you for the cards.”

He looks weak, but good. He’s gone from wraithlike to skinny, from ashen to merely pale. His hair is growing in, a darker brown but still with ginger overtones.

“Are you back?” I ask.

He says, “I think so.”

So I take over the sofa beside his chair, so that he’ll sit, and demand that he tell me what it was like.

Even with his matter-of-fact presentation, without the uglier details, it sounds awful. His cousin was a match for a bone marrow transplant, which is why he got such serious chemotherapy. His mother cried. Some days he wanted to die.

“But now…” He searches for the right words.

“Now you don’t?” I prompt him.

He nods, with a ghost of a smile. But it’s a friendly ghost. My smile is more free; I feel that comfortable with him. I have the oddest sensation that our spirits are also conversing, and better, if only we could listen in.

The maid arrives with a huge platter full of crackers and cheese and fruits—and candy bars with the wrapper ends cut neatly off. Almost everything tastes as wonderful as it looks.

Lex tells me he’ll be coming back to class in the fall, at least until Christmas, maybe the full year. Recovery seems to be a slower process than I had imagined.

“There will be a dance, when school starts,” he says, still matter-of-fact…except for a certain intensity in his hazel gaze, a catch in his breath. Except for whatever our spirits are saying behind our backs. “I would very much like it if you would attend with me. If you don’t mind not dancing a lot.”

I’ve never been asked out before. “But that’s not for another month.”

“I wanted to beat anybody else asking,” he says.

I’m in braces, and I’m by no means slim. I’m not ugly; even I know that. But…he thinks there could be competition for me?

Lex Stuart, I decide, is wonderful.

“It will be years before we know how I’ll turn out,” he says, as if warning me. “Even if the cancer doesn’t reoccur, I could end up not growing or getting cataracts or getting really fat. Or…other stuff.”

If I think about it too hard, the warning won’t make sense. I deliberately don’t think about it, and it feels exactly right.

“I would love to go with you.” It is an understatement.

When I get home, I can’t stop talking about Lex and the Stuart mansion and the food and the fresh flowers.

“It’s like fairyland there!” I tell my parents.

They exchange worried glances.

Mom says, “Just remember your fairy tales, Maggi. Fairyland always has a catch.”

Chapter 6

I was expecting Lex to call—heck, I’d half expected it the day before. This was probably his version of giving me space.

I just hadn’t planned to be marinating in the destruction that powerful men so often wreak when he did.