Free A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Tobias,” Jasper said. “I have to call Trina and tell her 111 probably be late if I make it at all.”
    “What happened at the college?” Beryl asked.
    “Nobody there when I got there,” Jasper said.
    “Nobody there? But I thought—I mean, even right at the end when we said good-bye, I felt something—” She bit her lip and stared at me. “There’s still something.” She shook her head. “The house masks it.”
    Jasper said, “All I found when I got there was Gyp. All quivering!”
    “Shut up,” I said.
    “The thing showed up when we went to Gyp’s car, though. It was scary. Is Tobias still up?”
    We all glanced up and toward the right, where Tobias’s tower was, its third-story room higher than the rest of the house, the secret fourth story higher still.
    “I don’t know,” said Beryl. Tobias had made new rules since everybody had graduated from basic training. He had his own life, he said, and nobody should bother him after nine at night unless it was an emergency.
    “I think we have an emergency,” Jasper said.
    I found a bag of baby carrots, a banana, and some saltines. I put them all on a plate and poured myself a glass of milk while Jasper made a phone call to his girlfriend.
    All three of us went up the stairs. On the way, we passed the TV alcove in the great hall again, and I still didn’t stop to greet my parents. Why hadn’t I told them about the Follower? From the start I had asked my siblings for help, and hadn’t even thought about my parents. There
    wasn’t much Dad could do in supernatural matters, but Mama was strong in every direction.
    Strong, but she gave you hell if you asked for help and didn’t really need it. I was pretty well trained not to ask her if I only suspected I had a problem. Well, I was home, and safe, and I only owed Jasper some cookies, and maybe a dinner sometime. Problem somewhat solved.
    I munched crackers as we went. We reached the top of the stairs, turned right, went down the hall, traversed the sitting room outside our bedrooms. I knocked on the narrow black door that opened onto the spiral staircase that led up to Tobias’s tower. I heard muttering and thumping. A couple minutes later Tobias opened the door. His thick hair stood up in a ruffle on his head, and he wore a blue terry bathrobe and slippers. I’d never seen him in such informal dress before.
    “Something important?” he asked in a dry voice.
    “Something followed me.”
    His eyes narrowed. He fished some half-glasses out of his robe’s pocket and put them on, studied me. Three times his tongue ticked against the roof of his mouth. “Come up,” he said at last. He turned and led the way upstairs.
    Jasper and Beryl and I followed. I was mesmerized by the sight of Tobias’s bare legs, which were pale and muscular and forested with white hair. I had never even seen my great-great-uncle in a bathing suit; somehow I had imagined that he spent his life inside of clothes. I wasn’t sure I was ready to learn that he had hair on his legs.
    In the lower tower room was the school room, with a round table in its center where we had had our lessons before Tobias graduated us, and where Tobias now studied and did workings. The air smelled faintly of nag champa incense and book dust. Tobias’s bedroom was in the room above, right under the pointed tower roof. None of us had ever seen it.
    He turned on his hotplate and put a tea kettle on. “Go on.”
    We went to our usual places at the table and sat. I set my plate and milk on the black velvet tablecloth. “It waited outside my work at school. I was afraid to leave. Jasper came to get me, and it disappeared, but it came back down by my car.”
    “Jasper?”
    “I was prepared for it to be some creepy stalker guy. I don’t know what
    it was.”
    “Any intuitions?”
    “It’s supernatural,” Jasper said.
    Beryl said, “There’s atmospherics, even now.”
    Tobias smiled at her. “Good observation.”
    “Do you know what it is, Uncle?”