All their protective wards had held, and there’d been no sign at all of demons. As further anecdotes were shared, and bragging contests escalated, Hawk sat quietly, basking in the rosy glow of all they had achieved.
His mom had called the night before to say that she and Joby would be coming home today. She hadn’t sounded happy, which was unsurprising given what they’d gone there to do. His mother’s grief caused Hawk pain, of course, but he hadn’t known Ben well enough to take his death as personally as she and Joby did, and besides, now he’d have some news to really cheer them up when they got back. Visions of their pride and amazement danced through his imagination; he saw grateful congratulations from the Council and ticker-tape parades down Main Street. He imagined Solomon giving him a regal nod as their awards were being bestowed, and saying, You are a true bard now, young Hawk. If only Rose had been here, Hawk’s happiness would have been utterly complete.
It was half an hour more before they began to wonder where the Hamilton team was. Cob, Cal, Sky, and Jupiter were not known as early risers, and the group was still debating whether someone should go roust their lazy butts from bed when Blue arrived and told them he’d just seen Hamilton in town.
“She was in the coffee bar on Shea Street, asking if anyone knew where Foster went,” Blue said anxiously. “She didn’t seem upset at all, except she wanted Foster and couldn’t find him. I was hoping Sky and those guys would be here.”
“Something went wrong then.” Nacho frowned. “I’m going to find Cob.”
“I’ll go back and look for Jup,” said Blue.
Just as they turned to go, however, Ander crawled into the cave, and stood up looking pale and shaken. For a moment he just stared at them seeming to shiver, though it wasn’t all that cold. Then, as the cave fell silent, Hawk realized that Ander was crying.
“What’s wrong?” Hawk asked with dawning dread.
“Sky,” Ander croaked. “And Jupiter,” he said, crying harder now. “They’re dead.”
“What?” Nacho yelled.
“God!” Sophie shrieked. “Goddamn it!” she yelled again. “I told them! I told all of you!” She burst into tears, as did Autumn. Everyone else sat gaping, their faces drained of color.
Hawk could not move at first, couldn’t even breathe. It was his fault. He’d talked everybody into this. Steal your freedom, he had told them, and now two of them were dead. Three, Hawk amended numbly. His life was over too. “How?” he heard himself ask, as if someone else had spoken.
“They’re calling it an accidental fall,” Ander said, “from climbing on the cliffs out by the Circle.”
“That’s bullshit!” Nacho shouted.
Everybody knew that both of them could fly. They hadn’t fallen from any cliffs. If anything, they’d fallen from the air as they’d been murdered.
“It was goddamn demons!” Sophie bawled. “I told them not to do this!”
“Has anyone seen Cal or Cob?” Tholomey asked fearfully.
“Jake says they’re up in the Garden,” Ander said, “where they’ll be safe.” Not looking at Hawk, he added, “Jake says the demons know them now. They can’t come back to town.”
There was nothing Hawk could say, or even think, except that this was all his fault, and everyone would know it, and there would never be a way to take any of it back. Sky and Jupiter were dead! And he was finished here. He was finished everywhere. Imagining Rose’s face when she learned what he had done, he just wanted to escape, but how could he escape himself? Hawk’s mind began to rifle through some catalog of ways to kill himself, trying to determine which one would be fastest and least painful, until he imagined Rose’s face again, when she learned he’d killed himself, and realized, with even greater despair, that he could never do that to her, or to his mother, or to anyone he knew on top of what he’d done already. There was no way out of it. He was going to have to live with this. Forever! And all the “great bard” could think to say was, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” which, he realized, he’d already started saying through tears he’d been oblivious of until now too.
They were all looking at him, some with anger, some with pity, some with what seemed fear, but he had no more power to shut his mouth or stop the words than if he’d been a dummy on some ventriloquist’s knee. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” he kept sobbing, knowing he’d be saying those words until the day that he died too.
“You dare to lecture me on interference?” Merlin raged. “You, who let two boys die, when one flick of your angelic little finger could have saved their lives? Your lack of interference was unconscionable!”
“It was obedient,” Michael said sternly. “Painfully obedient, yes, but we both know this entire invasion is about Joby. And that attack was clearly aimed at him.”
“Lucifer has told you that?” Merlin spat. “Might not his ancient hatred of our race be sufficient explanation in itself?”
“And the first two attacked just happen to be particular favorites of Joby’s?” the angel asked levelly. “That stretches credibility, don’t you think?”
“Half the children in this town are particular favorites of Joby’s!” Merlin snapped. “If you were really so astute, you’d have noticed that. As long as such questions are remotely open to debate, I have no intention of letting any of them die like you did.”
“Arthur killed a great many children once, hoping one of them was Mordred,” Michael said implacably, “while you stood back and let him, as I recall.”
“Don’t throw that in my face just to excuse yourself now!” Merlin shouted, stung to fury. “At least I don’t keep blindly repeating my mistakes in the name of some abstract concept of obedience. I think and grow! I have a conscience!”
“Which is precisely why I mention it,” the angel sighed. “To make you think and grow. We both know why you didn’t stop Arth—”
“I should have!” Merlin cut him off, astonished at the angel’s cruelty. “I should have thrown Arthur in a tower cell and kept him there until he understood what he was going to do! To himself as well as all those innocents.”
“Then why didn’t you?” Michael asked quietly.
Merlin said nothing. He did not want to remember it, and he didn’t want to say the answer. This angel was trying to twist everything.
“Because you knew his life was no one’s but his own,” the angel said softly, “the only truly sovereign possession any person has. You understood, as few men ever do, what it would have done to him if you took that choice away, for whatever reason. Now Joby’s going to face such terrible choices. Would you prevent him from deciding?”
“Then why try taking choice away from me, angel?” Merlin rasped.
“I have not. Nor will I,” Michael said, “as you know very well. Have I thrown you in any tower cell? Or threatened to prevent you from choosing next time as you chose the last? Have I moved behind your back to alter choices you might make before they even reach you?” he asked pointedly. “I seek only to persuade you to greater wisdom, just as you tried to persuade Arthur once.”
“And failed,” Merlin said bitterly. “Just as you do now. Had I your angelic powers, Michael, I’d have saved all four of those boys, not just two. And I will do everything within my power to save the next four and the next four after that. I have no cold and callous angel’s heart, I fear. If I’m damned for that, so be it.”
“And if all of us are damned for it as well?” the angel asked. “Will that matter to your supple human heart?”
“Our loving Lord will now damn us all just to punish my misdeeds?” Merlin scoffed. “I have never seen you overreach so, Michael.”
“You know what’s at stake then, in this wager, I assume,” the angel said.
“My grandson’s life and many others,” Merlin growled, deeply discomfited at having to admit that he did not. “Have you some better information?”
“Not for one who would just use it to further interfere in what he doesn’t understand as well as he may think,” Michael rep
lied sadly. “But you would be wise to worry about why I dare not disobey the command we all were given, even to save lives that my cold, angelic heart dearly loved many years before you knew them.”
The worry this did cause Merlin just increased his irritation. “Yet you’ve no qualms about my incarnation spell, or helping to conceal the Garden from this invasion either,” Merlin countered. “Might those not be construed as interference too?”
“The last time I heard my Master’s voice,” said Michael, “was days before all this began. He seemed to suggest that morning that I’d have leeway, when the crisis came, to help defend Taubolt in general. Thus I have and will. It is a very troubling line to walk, but when it comes to intervening in specific acts so clearly aimed at Joby’s heart, my hands are tied, Merlin, as yours should be. We are commanded not to interfere unasked. How can you continue to ‘misunderstand’ that?”
Weary of their pointless sparring, Merlin said, “Your own remarks simply make the nature of that command seem even more ambiguous. I made my choice many years ago, and any damage it might cause must surely have been done by now. I still see no reason to abandon my grandson in the middle of this stream.”
He turned to leave and said, “I’m going now to interfere some more, I fear. I’ve heard rumors that this Redstone woman and her knitting circle have been looking for us. I think it’s time someone obliged her with the kind of real magic she’ll not soon forget. If my own investigations are correct, it was she and her women, not Joby, who led that hell spawn to those boys the other night. If so,” he said, looking pointedly at Michael, “the attack upon them had no more relationship to Joby’s trial than anything else happening in this town now. Think on that, my obedient friend.”
As the joint memorial service for Jupiter and Sky convened at the community high school in Taubolt, Joby lay on Laura’s couch, too exhausted to rise, and too plagued with thought to sleep. As profoundly as he grieved the loss of his two young friends, Joby and Laura had decided to stay here, with Hawk, who had adamantly refused even to discuss attending it himself. Joby wasn’t sure how many funerals he could take in one month anyway. His reservoir of tears was badly overdrawn.
Beyond Ben’s funeral itself, the journey back to Joby’s childhood home had been a nightmare—literally. He’d been subjected to demoralizing dreams every single night. In some, Laura had pulled away from him in the middle of their lovemaking to sullenly admit he’d only won her because Ben was dead. In others, Ben’s ravaged body had turned up in the trunk of Joby’s car, as police arrived, accusing him of murdering his friend to steal his wife. Fortunately, Joby and Laura had slept together at his parents’ house, so each time he had woken in a rigid sweat, all he’d had to do was turn and see her lying there, kiss her shoulder, and feel her press against him in the dark, to know that she was not there by default. If not for Laura’s presence all that week, in fact, Joby didn’t know how he’d have survived the trip.
He’d been stung to see how rundown his old neighborhood had grown. The grassy hillsides of his childhood were brown and threadbare now, gouged with ruts and bald expanses of hard, colorless dirt. The neighborhood had seemed a sterile maze of faded stucco houses landscaped in anal geometries of close-cropped grass and olive-drab shrubbery, the streets awash in litter.
In his parents’ house, the same paintings had still hung above the same furniture, the same books and knickknacks cluttering the shelves, the same framed photos on the mantel, all as if he’d entered some ghastly museum. At the sight of his high school graduation picture, Joby had felt as if that boy might still be living there, not just on the mantel but in the very air. Eighteen years and nothing had changed, unless the gloom had grown a little deeper, though that had likely been just the weather.
Then he and Laura had come home to Taubolt.
Joby had read somewhere about a form of medieval execution where a plank was set atop the condemned, and stones piled on, one by one, until the person underneath was crushed. Lying now on Laura’s couch, Joby could not help but empathize.
They’d returned to Laura’s home to find a note in unfamiliar handwriting, saying Hawk had gone to Rose’s house, and they should come at once. There, as Clara had horrified Laura in one room with news of two more deaths and the dimensions of Hawk’s own disaster, Tom had shocked Joby in another with assertions of demonic invasion and a mind-numbing list of precautions that must now be taken by anyone of the blood, including Hawk and Joby. Almost worse, Joby had been advised to keep all of this from Laura for a host of reasons, topped by the likelihood that she was not remotely prepared to believe any of it, especially amidst so much other trauma.
As Joby lay wondering if there could be anything to the idea of karma and, if so, whether he’d been Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan in some other lifetime, he heard Laura coming down the stairs from Hawk’s room. He sat up to look at her.
“He won’t even speak to me,” she said quietly, looking drawn and pale. Her reservoir of tears seemed empty too. Theirs was a dry and weary grief by now. “You want to try?” she asked. “Maybe it’s because I’m his mother.”
Joby got up off the couch, and stopped to kiss her on his way toward the stairs. “It’s in spite of that,” he told her softly, “not because.” Then he went up to see what he could do. From the moment Joby had understood Hawk’s place in all of this, he’d hardly ceased to think about what he might have tried to tell his younger self if he’d been able to after Lindwald died. Would it have made much difference? Probably not, but the time had come to try.
Laura had left Hawk’s door open. Hawk was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling as he’d done for most of every day since they had brought him home from the Connollys’ house.
When Joby’s knock got no response, he walked in anyway, sat down on Hawk’s desk chair several feet away, and let the silence stretch.
“Hey,” Joby said at last.
He might have been a ghost, for all Hawk seemed to notice.
“Sometimes,” Joby said, remembering the day he’d found Hawk crying on the headlands, three long years ago, “it helps to talk when things are bad.”
Hawk’s eyes grew red as his face struggled to remain dispassionate. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he murmured. “You can’t help me. No one can.”
Was this what Ben had gone through on the lawn in front of school that day? Joby wondered. At least Joby hadn’t had to tackle Hawk and pin him down yet.
“What you and all the others tried to do was brave and well intended,” Joby said. “You were trying to help Taubolt defend itself. Everybody knows that.”
“Not Sophie,” Hawk said stonily. “She told us this would happen. I talked everyone into ignoring her. Everybody knows that too.” He went back to staring at the ceiling, the smoldering anger that had briefly lit his eyes evaporating once again.
After they had sat in silence for another lengthy spell, Joby took a breath and said, “I’ve got a story for you, Hawk, and when I’m done, you’ll have to tell me if I’m guilty.”
Without waiting for permission, he began, for the first time in eighteen years, to speak of Jamie Lindwald’s last night on earth, leaving nothing out except for having slept with Hawk’s mother after prom.
“So did I murder Jamie?” Joby asked when it was done. “Should I be punished?”
Throughout the entire tale, Hawk’s eyes had never moved from whatever they’d been staring at above his bed for half the week.
“If you’re going to condemn yourself,” Joby pressed, “you’ll have to shoot me too. Can’t have it one way for you and another for me. That’s not how justice works.”
“All you did was drink some beers,” Hawk said at last, his eyes still on the ceiling. “Your mistake was nothing like mine.”
“Glad to hear you admitting it was a mistake,” said Joby. “Everybody makes those. You think all of us should suffer what you’re putting yourself through then?”
“They’d told us it was dangerous!” Hawk snapp
ed, finally glancing at him. “I defied the Council! I knew better!”
“They’d told us drinking was dangerous too,” Joby shot back. “That we were too young. I also defied the edicts of authority. It was against the law for me to drink, but I knew better too—just like Jamie and half the other kids at school did. Stop thinking your mistake was unique, Hawk. The only difference I can see is that you had far, far better reasons than mine.”
“Pride,” Hawk said, eyes back on the ceiling. “That was my only reason.”
“And what’s wrong with being proud?” Joby demanded more fiercely than he’d meant to. “Every kid who’s ever grown up has known better than his elders somewhere along the way, and nothing ever comes of it for ninety-nine percent of them. You got unlucky. Being unlucky isn’t any more a sin than being lucky is a virtue!
“While I was driving back here from Ben’s funeral, I looked down to fiddle with the radio, Hawk. Your mom nudged me, and I looked up to find my car way over the centerline. I yanked it back where it belonged, took a deep breath, and forgot all about it. Was it my fault there was no one in the other lane? Does my good luck make me better than you? Your mom was in the car, Hawk. I could have killed her. If you’re so sure of this unbending justice you’re inflicting on yourself, don’t be a hypocrite! Get up and punish me for what I could just as well have done to you this week!”
As Joby’s voice had risen in frustration, Hawk’s eyes had brimmed with tears and begun to spill at last.
“I just want to take it back!” Hawk cried, rigid as a board. “Every minute. That’s all I think or feel, but I never can! I never will be able to!”
Joby rushed to pull Hawk off the bed and wrap him in his arms, which Hawk lunged into as a drowning man might hurl himself into a life raft.
The Book of Joby Page 62
