The care and feeding of.., p.1
The Care and Feeding of Griffins, page 1
part #1 of Lords of Arcadia Series
Here’s what readers are saying about R. LEE SMITH and
HEAT
“Smart, funny, scary and sexy as hell!...I was hooked from the first page!”
—T. Banks
“Nobody out there is writing erotica like this!...A solid plot, real characters, and sex that just sizzles off the page!”
—Valerie Webster
“Here’s something I never thought I’d say:
A masterpiece of erotic literature!”
—Su Chen
“Send the kids to Grandma’s and the hubby straight to bed—as the title suggests, this book is HOT!”
—Marn S.
“…Extremely stimulating and imaginative…I could go on and on…”
—S. Belfiore
Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
Olivia
The Scholomance
COMING SOON!
Cottonwood
Lords of Arcadia
Book I
THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GRIFFINS
R. Lee Smith
This book is dedicated to the Redmond library.
The real one.
Copyright © 2006 by Robin Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
Purplhouse@yahoo.com
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:
“You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmie Davis. Copyright 1940 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.
Cover designed by Sarah-Jane Lehoux
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT CHILDREN…
Children are strange and complicated creatures. They are uniquely amazing in that they lack the capacity to be amazed. Grown-ups, and parents in particular, simply cannot comprehend this quality and so they cling to the idea of ‘childlike wonder’, stubbornly oblivious to every child’s utter lack of same. Grown-ups believe that imagination is a child’s way of world-building, a means of blurring a reality which strikes them at every corner with wonder and amazement. It isn’t, and they don’t. Children actually imagine very little. What they do is every bit as strange, though.
They accept. Without reservation. Without question. Without limitation.
A child accepts the idea of Mom and Dad and Santa Claus and God and dinosaurs and dragons and electricity and the internet and Harry Potter and Captain Crunch and Kermit the Frog and electric cars and little biting dogs and butterflies and tadpoles that turn into frogs with legs and oceans and deserts and space and stars and, yes, even the octopus. A child accepts all these things and what adults perceive as amazement and imagination is really just a child’s boundless ability to believe in everything.
This, incidentally, is the reason why a child can have just as much fun with a cardboard box as with the toy that came in it. In a child’s mind, there is no fundamental difference. The reality of a walking robot dog is really, on that very basic level of pure belief, no more or less fantastic than the reality of the box itself.
This is, as previously stated, incomprehensible to the adult mind. Incomprehensible and vaguely offensive. And so adults force amazement down in great, steaming double-handfuls on the heads of their offspring, bombarding them with Barney and Little Einstein and Mr. Wizard and all those other pastel-colored, singing and dancing idols that can be collectively summed up as “Whimsy, dammit!” And children, who are very small and yet very wise, and who are also not a bit amazed, obediently pretend to be, because children are quite good in their own small way at guessing what adults want.
All of which is necessary for you to know in order to understand that although Taryn MacTavish was surprised and interested and delighted by the great events that set the wheels of her future life in motion, she was not amazed. In her adult life, she would not understand that. And, if you are reading this while you are a grown-up, you probably won’t either.
But that’s all right. Read on.
1. The Library
Taryn was six the day she got her very own library card. Specifically, she was six and sixteen days, but it was really a birthday present, and in Taryn’s opinion, it was the best one. Not to knock the crayons (sixty-four different colors! Plus metallics!) or her new stuffed stegosaurus, and certainly not to knock the ice cream sundaes at SugarPie’s, but come on, a library card!
There were so many cool things about a library trip, beginning with getting to go to the grocery store and the fabric store and the post-office first because Mom was congenitally incapable of going to just one place a day. (Taryn’s Dad had recently remarked that his new boss was congenitally incapable of using complete sentences and therefore went around sounding like an epileptic macaw most of the time, a phrase which had impressed the eavesdropping Taryn so much that she went out of her way to use it herself, although she wasn’t quite brave enough to say it out loud yet.)
And Mom was in a really good mood today, after about a week of being unexpectedly nervous and fidgety. Not cross or snappy, just…jittery. Like she thought Christmas was coming or something. But whatever had been making her excited, it appeared to be over now and happily resolved, so much so that Mom had even bought Taryn a Snickers bar at the grocery store and a bag of beads at the fabric store. And now the library, the pointy tip of a perfect-day pyramid.
The library in Redmond was a huge, grey building with great panes of black-tinted glass framed by massive slabs of concrete. There were concrete stairs—two sets of them, in fact, forming a great L up to the dungeon-heavy doors—and a concrete wheelchair ramp running up the side. There were concrete ledges and cubby holes and overhangs and grooves and just all sorts of places for a six-year-old Taryn-shaped body to slither in and out of.
But the outside was for later. When Mom finally came up from the car and opened the heavy doors (still too heavy for her to budge on her own, but just wait until she was seven!), Taryn was able to get in on the good stuff inside. First, the little fountain. It was just Taryn’s height, but with stairs (concrete, of course) for the even littler little kids to climb up if they wanted a drink. Then a slow walk past the long glass case that the library-lady filled with the weirdest stuff. This time, it was books on fish, together with some Indian paintings and carvings of salmon, a Billy Big-Mouth singing bass, a whole bunch of tiny fishy knick-knacks, and what Taryn determined after several minutes to be a real live fish in a real fishbowl. After that, Taryn took a quick glance through the tinted glass window next to the ‘little room’, a place Mom called a ‘conference room’. Sometimes there were puppet shows or Madeleine movies or mask-making in there, but not today. There was still lots of stuff in there, half-glimpsed and shadowy things she could only sort of make out through the dark glass. It was always fun to try, though, and it gave Taryn something to do while her mom looked at all the boring stuff on the library calendar.
Taryn had picked out the puppet theater and two stacks of kiddie chairs from all the other black shapes in the Little Room, and was trying to puzzle out what looked like a giant box of French fries when her mom called her name. She decided swiftly and with authority that she must be looking at a box of wrapping paper tubes or rolled-up posters, and with that mystery solved, Taryn ran over to join her mom. They both went through the second set of hugely heavy wooden doors and into the ‘real’ library together.
This was the second-best part of going to the library: getting to look through all the different shelves and pick up all the books she wanted. There were books she’d never read or even heard of, books they didn’t even have in the dinky old school library. There were books with pictures, books with photographs, and even some books with photographs of pictures, which Taryn privately thought was a little pointless. There were books with nothing but words, books with enough words for chapters, and books with so many chapters that Taryn couldn’t even count all the way up to how many there were. There were books about ghosts and dogs and what to be when you grew up, and if she walked just a few aisles this way, there were books with murders and naked people and brains and all sorts of bizarre and forbidden things. Books books books books books.
Taryn did not limit herself when it came to books. She got as many as she could carry and labored them to a plastic table where she sat and read. She was determined to read as much as she could while she was here so that she could check out other books before she left, and she applied herself grimly, giving each illustration a stern looking-over before turning each page. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was searching for the cure to some horrible disease she had just contracted, but despite her outward appearance, Taryn was in a state of sublime bliss.
By the time her mom came over to the kiddie section to get her, Taryn had read four books and was mostly through with a fifth. Her mom let her finish and went to browse the kiddie shelves herself, a thing Taryn noticed, found inexplicable, and t
In the end, Taryn selected five whole books to take home: a chapter book about two kids who discover they can talk to animals, another chapter book about a baby bear who saves his circus, a book about different kinds of dinosaurs and how people dig them up, and two Jenny Fletcher Girl-Genius mysteries. Taryn wanted to be a girl-genius someday. She’d get a business card and everything, and grown-ups would come from all over to give her a dollar to solve mysteries. Taryn could guess almost all the Jenny Fletcher stories without having to look in the back of the book for the answer, and she figured that was pretty good practice.
Taryn carried her books over to the high checkout counter and laid them out one at a time, taking a deep sense of pride in the delivery of the chapter books, and topped the whole stack off with her brand new library card.
Her mom got books too, and Taryn looked them over idly while Mom and the library-lady talked. There were two kiddie books about babies and a very big chapter book that had a picture of a skull and a church window on the cover, and that looked way cool, but her mom read books like that all time and Taryn already knew it wouldn’t have any pictures in it. She’d tried to read her mom’s books before and they were too hard. Someday, she’d be grown enough to try again. Privately, Taryn had always been really impressed that her mom read books about skulls.
But now, now came the very best part about trips to the library.
Taryn left her mom at the counter with the books and went outside to play (it was so much easier to push the heavy doors open than it was to pull them). Concrete stairs and concrete flowerboxes, concrete corners and concrete pillars. It was like a castle, dark and undiscovered, and Taryn explored it thoroughly for the hundredth time, returning to the stairs to discover she was no longer alone out here anymore. There was a lady sitting on the library steps.
2. The Lady On the Steps
Taryn knew better than to talk to strangers. She also knew not to play with matches, cross the street without holding hands, or pet baby lions. The fact that her parents apparently expected Taryn to come face to face with baby lions at some point in her life was a great source of pleasure and trepidation for her, and she was very determined not to pet them when it happened and thereby justify their confidence in her. Anyway, that day was not today. Today was ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’ day, and Taryn already had plenty of experience not doing that. She was about to swing out around the side of the nearest concrete pillar and run back to wait beside the library doors until her mom came, but some strange urge came on her to keep still and watch.
For a long time nothing happened, but oddly enough, Taryn didn’t feel fidgety at all. She hid in her shadowed place and did not move or speak. She watched.
The lady on the steps was dressed in what Taryn’s six years of life experience could only see as a Halloween costume. Her white blouse was open at the neck and closed down at the sleeves and very loose and billowy everywhere else. She had another shirt on over that, like the tube top that Mom wouldn’t let Taryn buy last summer, only very tight and stiff, like it was made of plastic. This second shirt was black and shiny, and covered in scribbles sewn on with colorful threads so that it almost looked like a sunset, right there on her shirt. She had a shawl over her shoulders made of dark red netting, and there were leaves and feathers and what looked like bits of bones and funny coins tied to it all over to keep it close against her body even when the breeze was blowing. Her skirt was a deep twilight blue but it sparkled everywhere like it was almost made of glass or water, and there was so much of it that nothing of the woman’s legs or feet could be seen or even clearly made out. The edges were tattered and stained with earth. If it was a Halloween costume, it was one the lady wore every day.
Suddenly, the lady on the stairs shifted, and a whole cloud of small, glittery things rose up from her curly black hair and shawl-covered shoulders. They made a rustling, feathery sound as they circled and resettled, and Taryn leaned out to stare.
The lady on the stairs was wearing dragons. Lots and lots of tiny dragons, each one no bigger than the palm of Taryn’s hand. There were all kinds of colors, every color in Taryn’s new box of crayons, even the metallic ones. The lady shifted again, and the dragons took off in a tiny tornado of hissing and flapping before they took up their positions back in her hair and clinging to her clothes.
Taryn hopped down from the concrete flowerbox and went to get a better look. She was entranced (not amazed, they were just dragons after all. Sure, she’d never seen one in real life before, but she’d never seen a baby lion either) and she wanted to see them close up. She was not unmindful of the rule concerning strangers and talking, but surely it was all right to just look. Now she could see their little snouts, their tiny tongues, and glints of itty bitty teeth as the dragons preened their paper-thin wings. She could see their eyes, like little dots of wet ink gleaming hugely on each side of their scaly heads. She could see claws, no more than slivers of white detailing each miniature paw. And she could see part of one of the lady’s eyes, looking back at Taryn with a winky sort of look.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Taryn announced, just to let the lady know how things stood. “Mom said.”
“Thy mother is very wise.” The lady rocked back and forth once, briefly stirring up her dragons (they buzzed and flickered all around Taryn a sound like beetles and bats all combined, dazzling her eyes and her ears at once), and revealing for the first time a lap filled with squares of colored paper. The lady’s fingers were busy folding. “Every world is filled with dangers. But thee is safe with me. Aye. Thee is very safe.”
“Do they like to be petted?” Taryn asked, glancing wistfully at the dragons, all the little dragons. “Can I pet them?”
“Aye, they do. Aye, thee may.”
Taryn started to extend a hand. “Do they bite?”
“Nay. But they taste, aye, that much they do.”
True. One of the dark blue ones lunged out and gripped Taryn’s fingertip, chewing all up and down the nail in a frenzy before letting go. The teeth were pointy, but not sharp, like hairbrush bristles, and its tongue was like a wet eraser prodding her. It was startling, but not scary, and Taryn giggled as more and more dragons began to climb over themselves to come and taste her. They nibbled and groomed each other as they struggled to hoard her fingers, clutching her in their tiny claws. Then, without warning, all of them just jumped into the air, rattled around in a brilliant funnel of color and then settled on the other side of the lady’s hair, snubbing Taryn the way a cat snubs a new kind of food.
Taryn giggled again, clenching and unclenching her hand, still feeling the tingly scratch of dragons between her fingers. She sat down beside the lady, but not too close. She was still a stranger.
The lady hummed, rocked once more as though in welcome, and then resumed her work. The paper squares in her swift, skilled hands were being worked into dragon-shapes; paper twisted into dragon-tongues, folded into dragon wings, tucked and rolled and bent out into dragon tails with dragon-spikes all down the back. They looked a little like the dragons on the lady’s shoulder. A little. The way that anything paper can look like something real.
“Where did you get them?” Taryn asked. She’d never seen any before. Not camping. Not even at the zoo. And only in the cartoons on TV, never on the nature channel.
“They came to me, aye, long ago, and they’ve stayed. One day, perhaps, they will find a place they like better and leave me, mmm. But ‘tis a pretty wind that blows, whether in or out, and so I am contented. And thee? Would thee try to keep them if they meant no more to stay?”
“No.” Taryn thought about it, watching the lady twist and shape her paper. “Dad says if you touch a butterfly’s wings, it’ll die. I think it’s like that for everything, it’s just the wings can be different things or in different places.”
