The Indifferent Children of the Earth

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 37, Thursday 29 September

  The sharp whine of a siren made me jump. The police were here, and it was time for me to go. And now, staring out at Mr. Green’s house, sitting with its perfectly manicured lawn between Olivia’s house and Melanie’s, I knew where to go. I fed a sliver of energy into my copper traveler. Static grey for an instant, and then I found myself in darkness again.

  I slammed energy into my ground, lighting up the front room of Mr. Green’s house. I’d never been here before, not inside, but for traveling, that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The blue-white light flooded the living room, bright enough to banish any shadow. The police would see the light from the street, but they had little reason to come to Mr. Green’s house.

  A sofa patterned in a 70s-era brown check sat against one wall, under a row of hanging pictures. Family portraits, a quick glance told me—Mr. Green, pasty-white accountant type, along with a woman I assumed was his wife, and a boy. They seemed to be arranged chronologically; in the earliest the boy was an infant, and in the last two pictures, Mr. Green stood side by side with a teenager, the woman missing. Knitted doilies sat under the lamps on the side tables, and a cross stitched, ‘Bless this Mess’ sat on the top of a piano with cracked varnish. Signs of a woman’s touch, of a feminine sense for decorating. But dust was thick on the side tables, and stacks of gardening magazines and old newspapers cluttered the sofa and the floor. The disparity was obvious, the signs of an unwanted change preserved in the disorder that lay over the neatly decorated room like a new stratum.

  As I moved through the house, I found more evidence of something different. Papers and dirty planters covered the dining room table, staining a rose-colored runner. Dishes covered the counters in the kitchen, although the sink was meticulously clean, and several cabinet doors hung open to reveal bare shelves. The master bedroom was in equal disarray, with clothes strewn across the floor, shirts and ties in heaps, pants crumpled at the base of the bed. Signs of a teenager living without parents. Or, in Mr. Green’s case, of a man in total despair.

  When I reached the other bedroom of the small house, I realized why. The door opened to reveal a well ordered room. A twin bed made up with a navy-blue comforter, the creases in the fabric still neat in spite of the light layer of dust across it. On top of the dresser, three pictures: a man—a much younger Mr. Green, I realized—and a young boy holding up a football jersey, a stadium in the background; the same boy, but older, kneeling on a football field, wearing football gear; and the third was of the teenage boy, with Mr. Green and the woman I assumed was his wife. I opened the door of the closet to find clothes pressed and hung. The dresser held more folded clothes. Everything in its place, as though waiting for its owner to walk through the door at any moment.

  Mr. Green’s son, whose name I could not remember. Who had died just a few months ago, killed in that terrible accident with Olivia’s brother. A part of me wondered if Mr. Green wanted revenge on Olivia’s family, if that was why he had taken them—although that didn’t explain why he had taken Melanie’s family too. But standing in that room, with those carefully folded clothes, with that made-up bed, with all the heartbreak that can be poured into the terrible weight of everyday life that follows, mercilessly, on the heels of tragedy, I just felt sorry for Mr. Green. His wife gone, or dead, and then losing his son too. It made me realize that, in some ways, my coma had been a bit of a mercy—it had blunted the immediacy of what I had lost. I had never had to go home to familiar walls and find myself a stranger in my own house. The hospital had given me a time to transition, to adjust. Staring at that snapshot of a life that was lost, I had a glimmer of what my parents had faced when Isaac had died. In spite of myself, I felt bad for Mr. Green.

  I didn’t let myself stay in the room, though. I continued my search, checking the bathrooms and even the linen closets on the main floor. Nothing but dust and disorder. I knew it had to be Mr. Green, though. The way he had spoken about my grandfather implied their familiarity—those brief, tantalizing phrases haunted me now. Mr. Green’s passion for gardening, his perfect yard, the line of hawthorn trees in the back that were heavy with blood-red berries. The terrible blistering on his hands and neck that I had assumed was sunburn, which had started right after I poisoned the tree. The perfect placement of his house, right between Melanie’s and Olivia’s, where he could drain the life from both families without ever leaving his home.

  But that made me wonder—was there another grower? What accounted for all those sprawls? And where was Mr. Green’s tree? The biggest thing in his yard was the hawthorn trees—there was nothing to compare with that ancient tree in the cemetery. So where did he gain his power? I was tempted to go out and burn his yard to ash, but the police would be out there right then, and I was more worried about finding Olivia. Save her first, then worry about neutralizing Mr. Green.

  I made my way back to the kitchen, where I had seen a door that led down to the basement. The handle turned easily, and I pulled it open. Then, slightly anxious, I fed a little more energy into my blink, masking my scent in addition to any sounds I made, on top of making myself invisible. That should make me impossible to find. I hoped.

  Dousing the light from my ground, I flipped the switch at the top of the stairs. Fluorescent bulbs grumbled to life in the basement, illuminating a set of unpainted cement stairs and a swatch of cement floor at the base. Creeping down the stairs, grateful for the blink that masked me, I crouched as low as I could. There could be traps, and being invisible wouldn’t stop those from activating. More importantly, though, I wanted to get a glimpse of the basement before I reached the bottom of the steps. About halfway down, I stopped and settled down to examine what I could see of the room before me.

  The basement was one long, open room, supported with a few thin metal pillars. Plastic shelving lined the walls, filled with cardboard boxes. Tinsel and tangles of colored lights poked out of one. I still couldn’t see all the way to the back of the basement, but as I got ready to move, a smothered whimper echoed off the cement.

  Someone was down there.

  Caution forgotten, I threw myself down the stairs, barely keeping my footing as I hit the floor and lurched into the center of the room. Against the far wall, piled carelessly like stacks of firewood, were people. Bound and gagged. I ran across the room, slid to a stop next to them. Olivia’s mom was on top; she couldn’t see me, I realized, but her eyes were open. Pupils dilated, she didn’t seem to be fully conscious, but she did look terrified. I pulled her off the top of the stack of people. Olivia, so pale, lay next to her father. She still wore the papery hospital gown, and her pretty eyes were closed. I lifted her up, clutched her to my chest. She was breathing, but only barely.

  “Olivia,” I said. “Olivia!”

  She couldn’t hear me, not with the blink. So I cut the energy I was feeding the blink, dropped to my knees, whispered her name again. No response. Then I saw it. A tiny, barbed thorn lodged at the base of Olivia’s throat, almost at her collarbone. I could feel the magic running through the thorn—it was like the energy I felt running through the electrical lines in the house around me, or in the storm churning overhead, but it was different too. It felt sluggish and cold, foreign. I pulled it from her neck and threw it across the room, but she remained unconscious.

  I glanced over at the stack of people. Melanie and her children, their limbs tangled together. Chad, of all people, his handsome face seemingly confident even unconscious. And then I saw him. Mike, at the bottom of the dog-pile. I couldn’t pull him free, not without sending Melanie and her children toppling to the ground, and it took agonizing minutes to separate Melanie and her kids, to gently lay them out on the cold cement. I plucked out their thorns while I was at it, tossing them as far away as I could. And then I was kneeling next to Mike.

  No thorn in his neck, but then, it didn’t look like he needed anything to keep him unconscious. Deep lacerations covered his chest and side, almost identical to the ones on Mr. Wood�
�s chest—although Mike’s wounds looked much more serious. Another long cut, much neater, ran from his left temple almost to his jaw, and blood stained his cheek and his blond hair. I pressed my fingers to his throat, trying to find any hint of life. After a frantic moment of only hearing my own raging pulse, I felt a heartbeat. And then another. Slow and weak, but there. He was alive for now, but those wounds needed attention, and he didn’t have any of his foci. He didn’t even have a ground. Mr. Green must have taken it.

  “Alex,” a voice behind me said. I spun to see Mr. Green, his sunburn—or whatever it had been—now healed. He stood halfway down the staircase, one pudgy white hand against the wall for support. Wearing a stained, tan polo and a pair of old-man light blue jeans, there was very little about him that looked threatening. I held still though, watching as he took another step down, always keeping one hand on the wall, as though afraid of falling. “I need you to be really calm right now, Alex,” he said, his voice even.

  “What did you do to them?”

  “I know this will be hard for you to hear, Alex, but this is all your fault.”

  “Like hell,” I said. “What are you doing to them? I destroyed your damn tree; you should be dead.”

  “That’s what I mean. You need to be calm. This is going to be hard for you to hear, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. But that wasn’t my tree you destroyed. Or at least, not in the way you think.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” I said. I pushed some energy through the ground, and arcs of lightning wrapped around my hand. The blue-white flashes crackled in the silence of the basement.

  “So much like your grandfather,” Mr. Green said. “I suppose he trained you?”

  I fed the ground a little more energy, letting the angry rumble of electricity answer for me.

  “He must have been so disappointed that your father wasn’t born with it. That was almost all he could talk about when they first moved here—what he would teach your father, the things they would be able to accomplish, his dreams of what your father might be able to do.”

  “He talked to you about that?” The words left my mouth before I realized it. Grandfather, the man who had taught us that to tell anyone—even our parents—about quickening was a death sentence, had shared his dreams with a grower.

  “We talked about many things,” Mr. Green said. “Your grandmother had her dreams as well, I suspect, though she never spoke of them. I think she might have wished your father to be born normal. She didn’t seem to . . . relish quickening the way your grandfather did.” He had reached the bottom of the stairs now. Mr. Green leaned against the wall, watching me.

  “Undo this,” I said, gesturing to the people lying around me. “Or I’ll finish what my grandfather started.”

  Mr. Green let out a pained chuckle. “Alex, this is what I’m trying to tell you. What you’ve done, since you’ve been here—you’ve undone everything your grandfather and I worked to accomplish. Finish what he started? Alex, you’ve destroyed the most important thing your grandfather ever did.”

  “What are you talking about?” Grandfather working with a grower was about as likely as . . . well, as him telling a grower about quickening, about his dreams for his son. I couldn’t reconcile those thoughts with the cold, hard man who had trained me to be a killer. But looking at Mr. Green, listening to him, I couldn’t help feeling that Mr. Green was telling the truth.

  “That’s why I told you to stay calm, Alex. We’ve reached a critical moment. When you came, when I saw you, I thought for sure that you were like your father—no quickening. A shame, considering your grandfather’s remarkable legacy, but not without its own advantages. A normal life. Happiness. Things that those of us who have the magic can never really know. That boy,” his eyes darted to Mike’s bloodied form, “was less than a child. I knew that one day a trained quickener would catch wind of him, hunt him down, end him.”

  “So you thought you were safe, huh?” I said. “Thought you could suck the life out of these people, and that no one could stop you. God, it’s a shame you don’t have the balls to go for blood sacrifice, like you would have in the old days. Leeching them dry like this, that’s about the most pathetic thing I can imagine.”

  Mr. Green’s smile faded. “You sound like your grandfather, at the end. He betrayed me, you know. He struck first, thinking to take me by surprise. After everything we had done together! After hunting him down, defeating him, binding him in that tree. How could he not see—one of us had to remain alive, young, strong, in case he escaped.” He pounded one fist against the wall. “It was never about me—but Cesar couldn’t see that, didn’t want to see that. He couldn’t see the advantage, the necessity. All he could see was the cost. A few lives—rapists, escaped convicts, whores. And for the dregs of society, your grandfather turned against me.”

  I didn’t understand much of what Mr. Green was saying, but I was surprised to hear him call my grandfather by his first name. No one called Grandfather César. At least, no one I’d ever met. “The tree,” I said, latching onto one thing he had said. “What do you mean you bound him? Who?”

  “And now you’ve burned it down,” Mr. Green said, his voice turning frantic. “All that energy, that pinnacle of magic—blending quickening and growing, the perfect prison—lost! This is what I’m trying to tell you, Alex. You’ve undone what your grandfather did, his greatest accomplishment. And now I need you to help me bind him again, before he can escape.”

  “Who?”

  Mr. Green’s pasty flesh paled, noticeable even in the flickering of the fluorescent tubes. When he spoke, the words came out as a whisper. “The eater.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I pressed my advantage. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll help you. Let these people go, and I’ll help you bind this thing again.”

  “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. It’s never that simple, Alex. You should know that. I would let them go, I want to let them go.” His eyes flitted to Olivia’s parents, and he let out a sigh. “But I can’t. No, I won’t—this is too important. Their lives will be the power to bind him; we do not have time for me to gather the energy any other way. They will save the rest of the town—my God, Alex, they’ll save hundreds, thousands of lives. A sacrifice they would be happy to make, if they knew what it meant.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said. “I don’t see you preparing to sacrifice yourself, though.

  “If the situation were reversed, I would. But if I died, who would perform the binding? Where will you find another grower? My son—” He stopped for a moment. “My son is dead. Do you believe me, Alex? Do you believe me, that I would let myself die if there were another way?”

  I shook my head. “I won’t be part of this. My grandfather wouldn’t do such a thing, and neither will I.”

  “Be reasonable,” Mr. Green pleaded, taking a step toward me. I let the electricity flare back to life, and the fluorescent lights flickered and hummed at the surge of power. He stopped, but reached out toward me. “Even your grandfather knew when sacrifices had to be made. We are not so different, you and I, Alex. Quickening and growing—they are the same. We take power, refine it, process it. Think of a tree, sending its roots deep, drawing nutrients and water from the ground, drinking in the sun and the air, and turning them all into something else, something greater than any of those microscopic, individual elements: life. We are the same, taking the world around us, those isolated fragments, and turning it into power. And then we make wonderful things with it. Help me do this, help me bind the eater, and you’ll see what I mean.”

  “That’s how you see these people? Fragments? Fertilizer for your damn tree?” But my breath was short and shallow in my mouth. His words echoed inside me, eerily close to my own thoughts, but different too. Too close to what I had thought about quickening before—too close to what I had learned from Christopher. “They’re people. They’re who we’re supposed to protect.”

  Saying those words meant nothi
ng, though. When had I ever protected anyone? All I’d done was hunt down other quickeners, kill them for infractions against Grandfather’s seemingly interminable list of rules. Was that protecting people? Did it matter now?

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. Had Grandfather really helped Mr. Green? Had he consented to the deaths of innocents to do what he thought was necessary? Grandfather had been ruthless, pragmatic. He probably would have done it, although I couldn’t be sure. Allying with a grower, even befriending one, sharing the secrets of quickening—well, it seemed there was a lot I didn’t know about my grandfather. Perhaps my own mistakes, my own failings—Christopher, and now Mike—well, perhaps I wasn’t the only one in my family to have made those kinds of decisions. But I realized, right then, that I did know one thing. I was not my grandfather. And I wasn’t going to let him make my decisions for me any longer.

  “I don’t have time to explain the threat of the eater,” Mr. Green said. “But you have to believe me, Alex, this is beyond anything you have faced. You can’t imagine what he will do when he is free—on your own, you’ll not have a chance of stopping him. And you will be alone, Alex. This other boy, this quickener, you know that he wants nothing to do with you, that he’s using you, and that when he’s done, when he’s learned what he can, he will leave you, or he will kill you. Your parents, these other poor fools, they have no magic. The eater will strip the flesh from their bones, and he will grow unstoppable. Without me, you will have nothing.”

  I stood up, let the electricity wrapped around my hand die. “That’s where we’ve both been wrong, Mr. Green.” I glanced down, first at Mike, and then, my tongue thick with fear and love, at Olivia’s pale form, so still. “I’m not alone.”

  Mr. Green stared at me. My chest felt lighter. No more fear about my past, about my future, about how I had failed. I had made my choices. I had made mistakes. But more importantly, I knew myself. Whatever I had done, I had been trying to do what was right. And Mr. Green had brought me to confront myself, to realize that I was a different man from my grandfather. A better man. I could move forward, believing that I could make the right choices, in spite of what had gone wrong in the past. A deep, thrilling warmth swelled inside me, as though in answer to the surge of the storm overhead, to the pulse of the electricity in the walls around me. For several minutes, neither of us said anything; the buzz of the lights spoke for both of us.

  “I’m taking these people with me now,” I said.

  “I can’t let you—”

  I didn’t wait for him to finish. I slammed energy through my silver blaster. Pure, refined quickening poured out, the white energy fracturing with a rainbow shimmer that flashed across the painted concrete. It wasn’t lightning or electricity. My body had refined the energy, changed it, and the silver focus had refined it even more, turning into a bolt of power that would tear through concrete and steel like they were paper. For a nanosecond that blast of quickening made the basement ten times brighter than day, with rainbow shadows racing before it. It struck Mr. Green without a sound.

  The bolt of quickening vanished as though I’d turned off a light. I blinked, struggling to adjust my eyes to the relative darkness of the fluorescent tubes. Mr. Green just stood there, unruffled. The blast of quickening should have reduced him to ash—to less than ash, to an infinitude of particles too small to see. But he stood there, his stained polo and too-light jeans unsinged, unruffled.

  “I’m sorry it came to this, Alex,” Mr. Green said. He started walking toward me, and I launched another bolt of white-fractured quickening. It disappeared into him as easily as the first, like water vanishing into sandy soil. I sent out a third, but the rainbow tracers vanished without a sign. “Quickening won’t work on me, I’m afraid. I’m very well grounded.” He said the last with a dry smile that reminded me, more than ever, of an overweight accountant.

  I opened a channel of energy into my silver pusher and threw it toward him; if he was anything like a sink, I wouldn’t be able to blast him, but I could definitely knock him around a bit. Maybe enough to buy myself some time to escape, get the police over here. Boxes flew off the plastic shelving, thrown through the air by my wild push. Cardboard split, sending skeins of colored lights across the floor. Long tubes of wrapping paper unrolled, carpeting the bare cement. Mr. Green took another step toward me. I hadn’t even ruffled a hair on his head.

  “I’m so sorry, Alex,” he said, his smile hovering somewhere between that dry, superior humor and something that looked like genuine sadness. “My roots run deep. Your tricks won’t work on me. I’m surprised your grandfather didn’t tell you.” He continued to walk toward me, closing the distance with even steps.

  One more experimental push, this time more controlled, focused just on Mr. Green. Nothing moved. A worm of fear curled in my gut. I opened the channel of energy again, this time wishing I had a gold pusher; gold would have worked better for what I wanted to do, but silver would have to serve. With as much energy as I could force through the focus, I pushed. Not on Mr. Green. On the room. On everything. And not just in one direction. Wrapping paper flew into the air in great sheets, fluttering like the wings of a bird in flight. Mr. Green disappeared from view behind the swirl of cardboard and lights. My push ripped open the boxes even further, sending glittering ornaments, old Halloween costumes, yellowed papers, and more whipping through the air. The rustle of paper, the clatter of plastic, the whisper of cloth—they sounded louder than any thunderstorm in the small basement.

  Taking advantage of the confusion, I let a thread of energy into the copper traveler and moved myself to the stairs. I could see Mr. Green here, just a swatch of graying hair amidst the tempest. The silver focus was hot against my arm, but I ignored the warning sign for the moment and fed more energy into it. A series of pops rang out as I began to rip the plastic shelving from the walls and sent it hurtling into the maelstrom of leftover holiday decorations. I couldn’t hear the shelves strike Mr. Green, but I saw him lose his footing and fall, disappearing beneath the rippling waves of paper and cloth. With one last surge of energy, feeling the focus burn my arm, I pushed everything—the costumes, the tangled Christmas lights, the plastic shelves—in on Mr. Green, and then cut the flow of power. A final few streamers of wrapping paper that had escaped my push fluttered to the ground like dying doves, brushing the mountain of junk with a rustle.

  Nothing moved for a long moment. I traveled across the basement with another thread of energy; my reserves were getting low, so I reached out through the ground strapped to my left hand. With a crack, one of the fluorescent tubes above me shattered, sending shards of opaque glass tinkling to the floor. Electricity burst from the broken light, slamming into my palm and sending a tingling warmth throughout my body. The lights in the basement surged and went out, leaving only the light of the electricity connected to me. When I had taken as much as I could stand, I cut the flow off. In the darkness, the rivers of purple-white energy under my skin lit a small circle around me. I knelt next to Oliva, put my arms under her.

  Something crashed in the darkness of the basement. I traveled without even thinking about it, acting out of instinct. Just a thread of energy, but enough to take me outside the house, to Olivia’s front porch. I set her down. She was so thin, with dark circles under her eyes. The hospital gown only accentuated her pallor.

  What was I supposed to do? I had left the others—abandoned them without even thinking about it. I had abandoned Mike. That sent a twist through my gut. But did I go back? Try to fight something I couldn’t harm—something I didn’t even understand? Was I supposed to let myself be killed so that I could rescue those people?

  Police cars sat outside Melanie Wood’s house, the blue and red lights chasing each other across the lawn. In her house, yellow lights shone behind the curtains. The police were in there; they’d have found Mr. Wood by now. If he was conscious, if he was coherent, could he tell them it was Mr. Green? Had he even recognized his attacker? Would they believe him?


  With a last glance at Olivia, I ran down the steps and across the lawn, cutting through Mr. Green’s garden as I went. I felt something as I crossed onto his property—a faint tingle, like leftover quickening energy, but different. Sluggish. A part of my mind registered it; perhaps this would be a way to identify growers in the future, a way they marked their land. Sweat slid under the foci along my arms, the humid air, still hot even this late, pressing against my skin. Twenty yards to the police cars. Fifteen. Ten. I could see one of the officers in his car, the outline of his mustache visible in the streetlamp that stood behind him.

  “Help,” I shouted through the muggy air. My shout sounded funny, as though all that humidity, all my fear, choked the words, dragged them to the ground too soon. “Officer, help!”

  He didn’t hear me, but it didn’t matter, I was almost there. A last line of hostas marked the edge of Mr. Green’s garden, and I jumped, hurtling over the broad green leaves.

  And then I hit something. An invisible wall. I felt my nose bend, cartilage snap as my momentum slammed me into the barrier. Pain danced in front of my eyes as I fell back into the flowerbed.

  It took me a minute to move again, to start thinking after the pain. I checked my nose. Broken and extremely painful. Then my teeth. I couldn’t tell if some were loose or if I was imagining it. Crazy bad headache. Wiping the blood from my nose, mulch clinging to my hands, I crawled past the hostas again, moving slowly until my hand met the unseen wall. It was there, firm as the ground beneath me, locking me into Mr. Green’s yard. As I ran my hand over the barrier, I felt the cold, unfamiliar energy compact ever so slightly under my touch, the way a layer of snow might pack down and become firm. I slid a thread of energy into my ground, sending a shower of white sparks towards the grower’s barrier. Where the sparks met the unseen wall, sickly green and blue ripples spread out, as from a stone tossed in still waters. Another tentative touch, but the barrier was as firm as ever.

  I didn’t have time for this; aside from the twinned pounding in my head and my broken nose, I needed to get help, needed to rescue Mike and the others before Mr. Green could kill them. How long would it take? Was there a ritual to be performed? Did he need to take them somewhere else? I had thought he would need to be at his tree, so the ground could drink up the blood, but how much had I gotten wrong? I opened a channel into the copper traveler, and in a white-and-grey stream of speckles, I found myself standing next to the police cruiser. I slapped one hand on the window, and the mustached officer leaped in surprise, his hand going not to his gun, but to his throat. I realized I might have picked the wrong people to help me.

  “Officer,” I said, leaning on the window. A quick glance at my skin confirmed that I had catalyzed most of the energy, although occasional purple-white shimmers rippled along my veins. I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain that. “Help, I need help.”

  He opened the door, stepped out, one hand resting on his gun now. The cop was an older man, his mustache more salt than pepper, with thin, straight hair in a neat part. “God, son,” he said, eyes going wide as he took in the blood on my face and shirt. “What happened to you? You alright?”

  “It’s Mr. Green,” I said, pointing back at his house. “He’s taken them—Melanie Evans and her kids, and the Weir family as well. I was just in there, I saw them myself. You’ve got to get in there, he’s going to kill them.”

  “Slow down, son,” the officer said. “How’d you know about Melanie and her kids?” He looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see another pair of officers coming out of her house. “Gary, Jeff, we might have another witness here.”

  The police walked toward me, slow and steady, another pair of middle aged, white men with the paunch associated with too much fast-food and too little actual excitement in a small, Midwestern town. “You don’t say?” said one of the men. They stopped by me, blocking me against the car. “What’s all that?” He pointed to the foci tied to my arms. “Looks like some kind of gang thing.”

  “Might be a cult, Gary,” the second man said. He fingered a cross. “Lots of messed up stuff going on in cults, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I just told you—Keith Green has six people tied up in his basement, and he’s going to kill them. Come on, you’ve got to go.”

  “Slow down,” the first officer said. “Tell us what happened.”

  “Kid’s on drugs,” the one called Gary said. “Looks like he messed himself up something.”

  “Isn’t he that León kid?” the other said. “Remember what went down when his grandfather was here? All those bodies that started turning up? How’d he get all that blood on him anyway?”

  “Didn’t Mr. Wood tell you?” I said. “Didn’t he tell you Mr. Green broke into his house and took his sister and her kids?”

  “How’d you know about all that anyway?” the first officer said. His hand tightened on his gun. “You just show up, and you already know they’re missing. Something’s not right—”

  Before he could finish, I spun, rammed my shoulder into the closest officer, and ran toward Mr. Green’s house. Shouts followed me, warnings to stop, but they were pointless. I had only taken a pair of steps before I looked up and saw something that brought me to a halt.

  Mr. Green’s house was gone. Not just gone—I mean, there wasn’t an empty lot there, or anything like that. It was like nothing had ever existed there, as though space itself had collapsed, so that the edge of Olivia’s yard ran right up against Melanie’s. As though there had never been a house there in the first place.

  One of the officers slammed into me, knocking me to the ground, but I let a trickle of energy into the copper traveler, and an instant later I found myself in the darkness of Mr. Green’s basement. Only my breathing, ragged with fear and too many heartbeats, broke the silence. Then something moved in the darkness.

  I traveled again, and as the world reintegrated around me, I sent energy into several of my foci. First, into the ground, sending a brilliant, blue-white glow shooting through the basement as soon as I arrived in the far corner of the basement. At the same time, I poured a river of power into my gold eggshell. It was like the other barrier foci that I had loaned to Mike, but much less specific. It wouldn’t block quickening, but it would keep out almost everything else physical, an impenetrable bubble around me. At least, impenetrable to most things. I took a moment to examine the basement, my eyes adjusting to the brilliance of my illuminated ground. The debris from my earlier assault still littered the room, but I could make out a path that had been cleared to the stairs. At the opposite end of the basement, I saw Chad, and Melanie and her kids, but Mike and the Weirs were missing. My heart skipped a beat.

  The attack came with no warning, while I was still caught up in my fear. Mr. Green dropped from between the exposed rafters above me. He hit the eggshell and started to slide down the spherical surface toward the ground, but as he fell, he drove long, curved claws—dark and shining in the light of my ground—into the invisible barrier. The claws slid in easily, tearing through a surface a hundred times harder than steel, and leaving invisible gouges in my protection. When Mr. Green hit the ground, I stared in surprise. Gone was the flabby, pasty-white accountant. The face was the same, at least the bone structure, and the eyes—the eyes were the same. But he was lean, muscled. Young.

  No, not young. Something wasn’t right, but I didn’t have time to focus on him. Mr. Green slammed into my eggshell again, claws ripping through the focused energy as though it were old cloth. I poured more energy into the focus, feeling it heat against my skin, but I couldn’t keep up; no matter how much I put into the eggshell, Mr. Green’s claws were faster. The deep cuts that he left in my invisible shield seemed to widen, drinking up the quickening energy, splitting and spreading like a cracked glass in winter. Another slash of the claws tore away a patch of energy, and Mr. Green rushed through it, those midnight-shining claws racing for my face.

  I pulled the energy from my eggshell focus, shi
fted it to the traveler. I didn’t go far—in the blink of an eye I stood immediately behind Mr. Green. I kicked hard and low, slamming my tennis shoe into the back of his knee. He was still moving forward, charging toward where I had been before I traveled, and I heard a snap as his knee gave out beneath him. Mr. Green fell to his left, but his right arm swung out and back, catching me in the chest. I flew backward, propelled across the room by the strength of his blow, and I felt a warm, bitter pain ignite in my chest as the tips of the claws ripped open my shirt and skin.

  In a moment of panic, I traveled again, just to the other side of the room, but it kept me from slamming into the concrete wall. I had barely landed when a tangled mess of plastic shelves flew toward me. With a trickle of energy into my silver pusher, I caught the bent and broken storage unit. It hung before me in the air, still rotating slightly from the force of the throw. I crouched, trying to catch sight of Mr. Green. For a moment, I saw nothing. Then a limping shape scurried into sight, at the same time that two more pieces of shelving—each almost as long as I was tall—flew toward Chad and Melanie and the kids. The shelves weren’t that heavy, and even moving as fast as they were, they probably wouldn’t kill Mr. Green’s unconscious victims. I reacted to the threat anyway, unable to stop myself, and grabbed the shelving with my pusher. In that fraction of a second, I lost Mr. Green again.

  The basement was not large, but with only the light of my ground to illuminate it, there were shadows for him to hide in. I sent more energy into the ground, lighting the room, and then I saw him. Standing across the basement, almost opposite me, and leveling a huge pistol at my head. His finger pulled back on the trigger.

  I didn’t hear the clatter of the shelving fall as I shifted my power from the silver pusher to my gold eggshell. Any noise the plastic made when it hit the ground was muffled by the crack of the gunshot and my panic. Pushing was out of the question; I never even thought of trying to catch the bullet, and I certainly didn’t have the reflexes for it. I poured everything I had into the golden eggshell, the air distorted through the cascading dome of energy that formed around me. I felt each bullet as it struck the barrier, rippling the eggshell as they hit home. The sudden silence after the gunshots was broken only by the teetering of the plastic shelving as it fell in toward me, finally coming to rest against the eggshell, and the faint clink of the last spent bullet hitting the bare cement.

  Inside the eggshell, hidden behind the plastic shelves, I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear Mr. Green moving around out there. A shuffling limp. I held onto the eggshell for a moment, then reached out, pulling on the electricity running through the house around me. Another of the fluorescent tubes split apart, sending a rain of glass to the floor below, and a bolt of energy shuddered into the ground on my outstretched hand. For the third time that night, I felt myself light up, violet-tinged fire under my skin. It would take precious time to catalyze the energy, refine it so that I could use it with my foci, and what energy I had left was maintaining the eggshell around me. I stayed there, hidden by my magic and the collapsing shelving, as I felt a trickle of energy change within me. I needed to get out there, save those people; Mr. Green could be killing them. But I didn’t much like the idea of taking a bullet in the head.

  Finally, impatience won out; the purple-white light still burned along my veins, and only a fraction of the energy had been refined, but the silence outside my barrier spurred me forward. I traveled twice, in quick succession. Once to the opposite side of the room, where I sent a flood of light through the room, and then immediately to an empty corner, my back against the cold cement. I stood just a few feet from where Chad lay on the floor. Alone.

  Melanie and her kids were gone, taken somehow in those brief minutes I had barricaded myself behind that cheap plastic. I damped the eggshell, let the energy rest just at the edge of my gold burner, waiting for me to open a channel. A quick glance confirmed that Mr. Green was not waiting for me in the rafters overhead; I didn’t plan on falling for that trick twice. And then I found myself waiting again. Waiting for Mr. Green to come back.

  He would come back for Chad, and we would fight again. And then what? All I could do was, at best, keep him at bay, maybe save my own life. He was too clever, too powerful, and worst of all, he was immune to my quickening. It was like fighting a sink, but a sink with magic of its own.

  Like fighting a sink. I knew how to fight a sink.

  Calm gathered inside my heart, like a shuttered lamp in a storm. I opened a thread of energy into the silver pusher, and the thorns I had pulled from the victims’ throats came hurtling through the darkness to hover above my palm. That faint, alien energy moved sluggishly within them; they were still connected to Mr. Green’s magic. I let them float there, encircling the hand without the ground, sustaining them with just a sliver of power through the pusher. And then I saw Mr. Green coming down the stairs with measured steps.

  He stopped just past the edge of the blue-white light of my ground. I studied him, still marveling at the transformation. Younger was not the right word, I realized. Fine, webbed wrinkles covered him—not just his face, but his bare arms and hands. He was thinner, though, and hard, that rough, lined skin covering shifting muscles. The same slow, chilly magic roiled within him, as sluggish as pitch brought to a boil. My plan suddenly seemed extremely foolish; this was no sink. No sink had magic of its own, no sink had the cunning of years, the power of lives. Christopher’s focus, the metal warmed to the temperature of my chest, gave me a sudden breath of confidence, and the calm within me fluttered back to life.

  A thread into the traveler and I hung in the air behind Mr. Green. I kicked him hard in the back of the head, and before I could fall back to the ground, I opened a wave of energy into my pusher. As I traveled again, I grabbed the joists of the exposed ceiling and pulled.

  I reappeared in front of Mr. Green just as he was starting to turn, his dark eyes angry. I didn’t give him time to react; I continued to pull with my silver focus, yanking on the joists with as much energy as I could spare. The floor above us buckled with a loud crack, and Mr. Green’s head shifted, still turning, to watch as the first floor of the house above us started to collapse. Joists splintered and sagged, pulled steadily downward until they pointed toward the basement floor in a jagged line. All of this happened in a heartbeat, as Mr. Green continued to turn, still moving in response to the kick I had delivered to his head. One set of claws was still a threat, but I leaned back, letting them whiff past my chest, where the old cuts still burned with shadowed pain. Then I drove my heel into Mr. Green’s crotch.

  The look on his face made almost everything worth it—whatever else he might be, Mr. Green was definitely still a man. The claws sagged for a moment, and I delivered another kick, higher up his chest, sending all the strength into it that I could. Mr. Green stumbled back, his injured knee folding under him. One set of ebony claws caught my leg, at the top of my thigh, and tore through jeans and skin, cutting me all the way down to my ankle as his momentum pulled him backward. With one last flail, Mr. Green fell, his momentum and his own weight driving him onto one of the split joists. The splintered wood tore through his back and burst from his chest, and Mr. Green stared up at me in shock.

  Pain blazed to life in my leg. Cold, colder than any New York blizzard, and laced with something else. The basement spun around me, and I could feel Mr. Green’s magic rippling through my system, a glacial fire that crept through me, millimeter by millimeter. I took a deep breath, but the basement continued to whirl, so that it was all I could do to stand. Turning to where I thought Chad might be, hoping it was the right direction, I took a step. My injured leg gave out from under me, and I hit the floor on both knees.

  My ground scraped across the cement as I crawled forward, the world still a blur of magical poison and pain. Chad was the last one left; Mr. Green had taken the rest. He had taken Mike. Had he found Olivia? I didn’t know which one of those names hurt more, but they burned worse than the pain in my leg and che
st. They burned, truly burned, in tangled knots of emotion hotter than any star. But they were gone, and I didn’t know where, so all I could do was help Chad. Even through the pain, that brought a bitter smile to my lips. A lot of thanks I’d get for saving his life.

  The world was steadying around me, I realized, the unpainted cement, the jumble of torn and broken holiday decorations, the debris all taking shape. The blaze of quickening within me seemed weaker now, but the cold was receding under its warmth. A quick glance at my arm confirmed that I still had plenty of energy that my body was trying to catalyze, but then I saw something surprising. A whisper of firefly green now shone along my veins, almost masked by the purple-white light of unrefined quickening, but definitely there. I stopped crawling for a moment. The neon green light ran up my arm, and through the tear in my shirt, I could see it concentrated around the slashes along my chest. A glance at my leg confirmed my suspicion; my leg was practically ablaze with the brilliant green glow, my torn veins bleeding light with every pump of my heart.

  The shuffle of cloth and the creak of wood brought me back to the basement. I glanced behind me. Mr. Green, his creased face rigidly blank, reached back to grab the joist with slow, mechanical movements. And then he started to push himself free, inch by painful inch, his flesh catching and tearing along the length of splintered wood.

  Although that sluggish chill still gripped my leg, I tried to orient myself; I had been crawling the wrong direction, toward the bottom half of a snapped Christmas tree that I had mistaken for Chad. A quick scan of the basement and I found him. Sitting up. Staring at me, his mouth hanging open. And there I was, torn and bloodied, shining like I’d had a glow-stick blood transfusion. Damn, nothing was going right tonight.

  I reached him as quickly as I could; the chill was receding, but something felt wrong with the quickening inside me. It wasn’t moving as quickly, and I felt flushed. Sweat broke out all over my body.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Chad asked. His voice was slurred, the words barely distinct. He swayed and raised one hand to press it against the thorn prick on his neck. “Where am I?”

  “Later, Chad,” I said, using the basement wall to push myself to my feet.

  “You’re glowing.”

  I let that pass without comment. Only a few inches of wood still protruded from Mr. Green’s chest, and I watched as they disappeared with a low slurp. He took a step, his bad knee buckling, and then another.

  “Holy shit, what did you do to me?” Chad said. “I—I don’t feel right. What’s going on?”

  “It wasn’t me, Chad. You have Mr. Green to thank.”

  “Did he just pull himself off a freaking joist?” Chad’s voice was getting clearer. Not a good sign; I had been hoping he’d attribute my glowing to whatever Mr. Green had given him.

  “The rest are already mine,” Mr. Green said. Each word came out with a slight wheeze, weak and fluttering as falling sparrows. The joist must have wreaked havoc with his lungs. That was a small consolation. “Leave him; run, you stupid boy. Run, like your grandfather, and never come back. That is the only mercy I’ll show you.” Another step toward me.

  “As you’ve already suggested,” I said, opening channels to my foci, “my grandfather would be seriously disappointed in how I turned out.”

  And then I let the energy loose. The pusher and the burner simultaneously. Debris—old decorations, plastic shelving, even several of the fallen joists—spun through the air, a whirlwind of detritus that my burner set ablaze. Quickening, especially refined quickening, could light things on fire, but the beauty of a burner is that it took that refined energy and made a lot of fire. Plus I could control the heat, directing it away from me and Chad, so that we stood in a narrow column of safety, surrounded by the whirlpool spin of fiery wreckage. Muffled by the roar of the fire and the clatter of the spinning devastation, I heard an angry growl.

  Chad stared up at me, panic legible in his handsome face. I didn’t have time for him though; through the flames I saw a dark shape moving towards us, staggering when boxes or shelves hit him, batting aside obstacles. It made slow progress, but it was progress nonetheless.

  “That’s too bad,” I said, giving Chad my best, fake-confidence grin. He might hate me, but I felt responsible for the bastard. At least, until I got him away from this murdering sorcerer. “Kind of hoped it would work.”

  Chad didn’t respond; he was probably going into shock. Kind of better, in a way. Mr. Green continued through the whirl of burning trash, and my reserves of energy were low. I hadn’t expected it to take him this long, and my body was taking more time than normal to catalyze the electricity I had absorbed. The dark shape staggered closer and broke through the last line of flame.

  Mr. Green’s hair and clothes had been burned away, aside from a few last scraps of burning denim. Small flames danced along his arms and shoulders, as though they found some unknown fuel within the surface of his skin. Without eyebrows and hair, his ridged face looked different, the lines too rough and asymmetrical to be human. He took another step toward us, tatters of burning sneaker falling from his feet. Chad grabbed my leg with both arms and let out a high-pitched whimper.

  Shaking his head, as though trying to clear it of the flames that were crawling across him, Mr. Green let out a growl that grew in pitch until it was almost a scream. “You burned my—”

  Before he could finish, I sent the chain of hovering thorns into his chest, a neat line that ran from navel to the gaping hole in his chest. Mr. Green cut off with a grunt. He glanced down, and his eyes widened. He reached out and knocked the thorns free with a ragged swipe, but I could see the magic already taking effect. He swayed on his feet for a moment and then collapsed, falling back into flame.

  Chad still held my leg, so I cut the channels to the burner and the pusher and sent a thread into the copper traveler. A blur of signal-free, TV gray and we stood outside, rain misting down on us. Whatever magic Mr. Green had worked was still in effect, because we stood on the edge of Olivia’s lawn, and there was no sign of Mr. Green’s immaculate yard. I knelt down, my bad leg screaming in protest, and pulled Chad’s arms from around me. He was shaking badly, his strawberry-blond hair plastered to his face, his eyes wide and unresponsive. I should have felt satisfied; the prick finally knew who he’d been messing with. And I’d saved his life. He owed me. Instead, I just felt bad. Nobody should have to see what he’d seen. God, nobody should have to go through what he’d been through.

  The police had seen us, and I heard them shouting as they ran toward us. I didn’t wait for them to arrive; they’d take care of Chad. A glance at the porch confirmed my suspicion; Olivia was gone. Another rivulet of energy into the traveler and I stood a few paces away, within Mr. Green’s manicured garden, behind the lines of cold power that locked us away from the world. In here, the house was fully visible, smoke blending perfectly with the drizzle of rain and the great thunderheads above us. From where I stood, I could feel the heat of the flames as they surged up from the basement, devouring wood and drywall, drawn upward along the frame of the house. I hadn’t spared any energy, or any anger, when I used the burner, and the flames—although originally magical—were now quite normal and spreading quickly.

  I sent quick threads of energy through the copper traveler. It was kind of like skipping a stone across water, except in this case, I was the stone, and the world—or maybe reality—was the water. I flashed into one room in the house only to vanish a heartbeat later. It took a lot of concentration, but not much power. Best of all, it let me do a quick search of the house with minimal risk of running into Mr. Green—if he was even still going. The thorns had had an effect on him, similar to what they had done to his victims.

  His own magic had hurt him, when mine had done nothing. That was important; there was something deeper about it, beyond just its tactical significance, but I didn’t have time to think about it now. After skipping myself through the upper floors of his house, the rooms choked with smoke and u
ncomfortably warm, I came to rest in the relatively fresh air of the gardens.

  No one. I had found no one, not a single one of them. Where had he taken them? How fast could he move? Could he travel? Questions I had no answers for, but if he could travel like a quickener, then he could have taken them anywhere. So I had to be practical, do what I could. I started toward the line of bent hawthorns; they were the biggest things in Mr. Green’s yard. Maybe one of them was his tree, maybe he’d taken the others there. It was the best thing I could think of.

  Neat, trimmed green grass ran right up to the perfectly mulched hawthorns. The branches, heavy with autumn leaves and berries dark as blood in the night, kept off some of the rain, the water collecting in fat drops that fell with irritating irregularity. I pushed energy through my ground, illuminating the space beneath the trees. There was no one there.

  It didn’t make sense; where else could he have taken them? I took a few more steps, pushing past the row of hawthorn trunks, with the desperate hope that the uncut grass of the abandoned field behind Mr. Green’s house might hide something.

  Between one step and the next, the world changed around me. Trees, ancient and grasping for the churning clouds, rose up around me, their branches locked in an age-old effort to strangle the hidden stars. No grass covered the ground here; just earth, covered with fallen leaves, the spicy smell of autumn diluted by the freshness of the rain. The abandoned field was gone. The forest stretched out around me, endless tangles of roots and limbs. A forest like this hadn’t stood anywhere near West Marshall—hell, anywhere near anything—for centuries. But here it was, tucked right behind Mr. Green’s house.

  A quick look back showed the line of hawthorns and, visible between their branches, the well-tended yard and the house. The tinkling of glass, breaking as the heat within the house grew too much, preceded a surge of flame that leapt out and licked the night air. I could walk right back, back to West Marshall, away from this forest that, in its very age and silence, terrified me.

  I sent a defiant surge of energy through my ground, as much as I dared use, generating a sphere of brilliant white light around me for almost a hundred yards. The darkness near me vanished in the strength of the light, but in a way, my efforts had almost the reverse effect. Far from comforting me, the light sent long, creeping shadows through the furthest trees.

  A small path appeared in the light of my ground, so I followed it between the ancient trees. Rain still fell here; I could feel lightning rumbling in the storm clouds over head. If this forest were far away, then perhaps the twin storms were just chance, but I had my doubts about this. This place seemed linked, somehow, to West Marshall. A few over-heavy drops reached me, landing on the back of my neck and making me jump, but when they hit the carpet of dying leaves, they did nothing to break the silence of the forest.

  Then I saw it. Taller than any of the other trees, as though this ancient forest were nothing more than a field of saplings, the tree stood in a clearing that permitted me to gauge its size, even if I couldn’t fully understand it. Like the tree in the cemetery, this one’s branches were crooked and knotted with time. I could feel the grower’s magic moving like midnight sap through the wood, a sorcerous blood. I had found it.

  I ran forward, my light suddenly weak and pathetic compared to the grower’s tree above it. Moving quickly, I made my way around the tree, searching between the twisted roots that had torn themselves free of the earth at some distant time. When I reached the back of the tree, I found them. Bodies piled at the base of a lump of shadows. My light washed over them, revealing Mike first, and then Olivia, and then the others. The blue-white light of the ground pushed back the darkness; what I had taken for a lump of shadows was a pile of rough-edged stones. The top of the pile reached my waist, and its surface was smooth, as though worn with time. Dark stains marred the grainy white of the stone.

  The grower’s altar.

  Dropping to my knees next to Olivia, I rolled her onto her side. No visible wounds, but she drew shallow, slow breaths. Mike was still alive as well, and he didn’t seem to have any additional injuries—just the ones from when Mr. Green had captured him. Mr. and Mrs. Weir, Melanie and her kids—they were all fine, lying there, unmoving. Chad had woken up; why hadn’t they? I reached out, gripped Olivia and Mike, and sent a thread of energy into my copper traveler.

  Blackness crawled up around me like swarming ants and then dropped away in patches. I still knelt in the clearing. I focused, visualizing Mr. Green’s yard. It was only a few dozen paces away, past the row of hawthorns. A wider channel, practically a river of energy into the copper traveler, and again the speckled darkness that left me under the tangled limbs of the enormous tree. One more try, sending a flood of energy into the traveler, too much energy; I could feel the copper burning my arm, smelled the singing hair. Panels of shadow clustered in front of me and dropped into nothing, over and over again, until I finally closed the channel.

  My breath stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was trapped here. Maybe I really was far away from West Marshall, so far that a copper traveler wouldn’t be enough to get me back. Or maybe Mr. Green’s magic prevented people from reaching this place by any means except the row of hawthorns. I didn’t know, but the pulse pounding in my ears was enough to tell me that I didn’t have time to try to figure it out. I would have to carry them out, past the hawthorns. And that meant taking them one at a time.

  It took me one heartbeat—so painful it felt more like a heart attack—to make my decision. I scooped up Olivia in my arms, her back, bare under the flapping, papery hospital gown, smooth and soft under my hands. And then I ran, stumbling under the weight. Olivia’s head bounced in time with my steps, her eyes closed. Off in the darkness, at the edge of the light of my ground, something moved. No, not something. Somethings. Scurrying shapes, perhaps three-quarters my height, too thin to be human. The light never really reached them; they were shadows of shadows, things that lurked in this ancient, untouched forest.

  The dirt path crunched under my sneakers. Roots threatened to trip me with every step. And then I felt the blood-drop berries of the hawthorns, the branches clawing at my cheeks, and I stumbled into air heavy with smoke and rain. I set Olivia down and ran back into the hidden forest.

  My body had almost finished catalyzing the stolen electricity, so I sent more energy into my ground, pushing the dome of light even further. For a moment, I thought I saw the creatures—spindly shapes, like patchwork bones or withered saplings—and then they shuddered away into the night. The pain in my leg was an inferno now; not even the swollen, fugitive raindrops that penetrated the canopy overhead could cool the jagged wounds. In an instant, I realized that I was probably losing blood. A lot of it. As if in answer to my thought, the world spun around me.

  I went to Mike next; don’t ask me why. He was heavier than Olivia—damn heavy, actually. I’d never really thought about how much bigger than me Mike was, but I certainly got a good idea of it when I tried to lift him. I had to throw him over my shoulder, fireman style, and by the time I stood up, I was exhausted. The world was swimming around me now, tilting in a sea of shadows. I didn’t run back to the hawthorns this time; I shuffled, my shoulder burning under Mike’s weight, my leg and chest burning from Mr. Green’s cuts. Past the hawthorns, where flames now billowed up past the roof of Mr. Green’s house, I let Mike down and stumbled back into that nightmare world.

  It took me longer each time; I carried Cheryl, because she was as petite as her daughter, and Melanie’s children were easy enough—in comparison to Mike. Melanie I had to drag; I could barely move by then, and though I think I dimly regretted it when her head thumped on a root I had overlooked, it’s hard to remember. Last came Mr. Weir. When I felt that mist of rain beyond the hawthorns, free of the forest, I collapsed. My leg was still hot; it was the only part of me that still was. I shivered in the wet grass, chips of mulch sticking to my scratched and bloody cheeks.

  In the darkness, something moved closer. I lurche
d upright, or tried to. What if it was one of the things from beyond the hawthorns? My lurch was more of a sluggish shifting; I barely had the energy to prop myself on one arm.

  And then I saw who it was. Skin blackened, strips peeling off like cheap wood paneling, Mr. Green stood over me.