He made himself stop before he got too carried away. Concentrating on the dog helped.
"Or did you come looking for me because you missed out on breakfast?"
The dog moved its head, dislodging Hank's hand. Before Hank could pull his arm back, the dog closed its massive jaws around Hank's biceps and gave him a gentle tug.
"What?" Hank asked. "What do you want?"
The dog tugged again, firm, teeth not breaking the skin, until Hank started to stand up. It let his arm go then, pushing its head up against Hank's hand. It repeated the motion a few times. Finally Hank tried grabbing a fistful of the dog's rough hair. As soon as he did, the dog began to step away. When Hank let go, the dog repeated its earlier actions.
"So now you're Lassie?" Hank said. "I guess the next thing you're going to tell me is that little Timmy's stuck in the well."
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. All he could picture was some dark hole that this strange earthquake was about to drop them into. He didn't know what was making the unnatural grumbling and shaking that was coming from the ground, but he wasn't in the least bit interested in coming face-to-face with its source.
The dog barked. Once. A low, gruff sound that made Hank feel a bass note deep in his own chest. Again it bumped its head against Hank's hand. This time Hank held on to the dog's fur and let it lead him away.
They could have been walking through limbo, for all Hank could tell. He couldn't judge one direction from another. If he hadn't had the ground underfoot, he would have been hard-pressed to pick an up or a down. The strangest thing was how there were no lights anywhere—not from the buildings in the city or from the vehicles on the streets. He knew if he'd been near a light source, he'd have turned it on as soon as the darkness came flooding in.
Maybe there was a power outage as well? But while he could imagine the whole city being blacked out—that was the sort of thing that could actually happen in the world he knew—a problem with the power company couldn't explain the lack of car headlights.
"You got a destination in mind?" Hank asked as he followed alongside the dog, fingers lodged in its fur. "Because I'll tell you the truth, I can't make out a damned thing."
But the dog seemed sure of its destination, whatever it might be. It led Hank, winding through the rubble and trash at a slow, steady pace that Hank couldn't have managed on his own. The ground underfoot wasn't trembling so much anymore, though he could still hear a low resonating mutter of sound coming from deep below. The dark hadn't let up at all—if anything, it was now more pronounced—and the unfelt wind still blew somewhere deep inside him.
"You know," Hank said, "I was heading for Jack's bus myself …"
Then he heard the sound of the crows again, somewhere overhead. Loud. Insistent.
"I'll be damned," he said in a low voice.
Ahead of him he could make out the flickering light of an oil lamp. It was held aloft by a woman he didn't recognize—casually dressed and dark-haired except for two white streaks running back from her temples. In the light cast by her lamp he saw what he took for a boy and then Lily. The dog shook its head, dislodging his hand, but he didn't need its guidance anymore. He hurried forward.
"Are you okay?" he called to Lily.
She turned in his direction. "Hank?"
She seemed relieved as he came into the circle of light until her gaze fell on the enormous dog padding at his side. Her eyes widened.
"Well, now," the woman holding the lamp said. She, too, was looking at the dog. "You're not exactly a puppy are you?"
"It's all right," Hank told Lily, sensing her nervousness. "I know he looks mean, but he's a friend."
Lily gave the dog a dubious look.
"This is Margaret," she said, gesturing to the woman.
Hank nodded, remembering the name. "From Tucson."
"From everywhere," Margaret said, smiling. "That is, if you want to get specific."
"And this is Ray," Lily finished, introducing the boy.
Up close he didn't seem so young anymore. There was a sense of antiquity in his gaze that you'd never mistake for a street kid's assumed worldliness.
"Hey, cousins," Ray said.
"Cousins?" Hank asked.
"Well, sure," Ray replied. "You think I can't smell the wolf in you? Though your friend's got more'n canid blood. Bear maybe?"
Margaret nodded, the motion making the lamp bob slightly in her hand.
"Grizzly," she said. "Though it goes back a long way."
Hank looked slowly from the dog to Lily's companions.
"They're animal people," Lily explained. "Like in Jack's stories."
"Animal people … ," Hank began, then he shook his head. "And you're saying I'm … that is …"
"Well, it's thin, cousin," Ray said, "but we can smell it. You've got some old lobo back there in the bloodline, same as your friend."
"But he's …"
"A dog? Sure. But when we're in animal form, we hang with the animal cousins." Ray grinned. "Family trees can get a little complicated."
"So what does it mean?" Hank asked.
Ray laughed. "You people are always asking that. Find out you've got a little bit of the blood in you and it gets all these questions rolling around in your head."
"Well, wouldn't you—"
"It doesn't mean anything, cousin. It's like saying you've got brown hair or an overbite—you follow me? It's just something that is."
Hank tried to digest that, but had to put it aside until later.
"Does anybody know what's going on?" he asked.
"Somebody's stirred the pot," Lily told him.
Margaret nodded. "And unless you've got the blood, the world's standing still, which means except for you and about five percent of the people living in this city, everybody else is living in one piece of time right now. It took us a while to work it out, but it's the only thing that makes sense."
If this made sense to her, Hank thought, he'd hate to see what confused her.
"We were just about to leave," Lily said. "Margaret says we've got to wake up Raven."
"That's got to be what Jack was trying to do," Margaret said, "before he got pulled away."
"Pulled away to where?" Hank asked.
"We don't know," Lily told him. "Are you going to come?"
He nodded. He had no idea what was going on anymore, but if Lily was going, he wasn't going to punk out on her again.
"Then I'll explain along the way."
Hank followed Margaret and Ray to Lily's car, Lily walking at his side.
"I'll drive," Margaret said.
She opened the car door and blew out the oil lamp when the interior light came on. Hank got into the back with Lily while Ray took the front passenger's seat.
"How come we can't see other car headlights?" Hank asked. "Or lights from the buildings?"
Margaret glanced at him in the rearview mirror. "We're outside of time. The world the way we know it has stopped, only not for us. We're moving on. Light doesn't just exist, remember. It needs time to travel from its source to our eyes and it's not getting that time right now."
"But our headlights are working."
"That's because they're moving with us."
Hank settled back into his seat. Between the wind blowing in his head and the confusion that deepened every time someone told him something, he was having a hard time of it.
"I'm glad you came," Lily said.
When she gave his fingers a squeeze, he held on to her hand.
"About what happened earlier," he said. "In the junkyard."
"It's okay. I understand. But I'm happier that you're with me."
Margaret started up the car. The headlights seemed abnormally bright when she turned them on, throwing Jack's bus into bright relief. The dog stood in their glare, blinking, eyes flashing red.
"So here's what we're thinking," she said as she backed the car out onto Gracie Street.
There were cars, but they were all stationary. D
ark shapes on the road. When their headlights slid across them, Hank could make out blank-eyed people sitting in the vehicles. Occasionally he caught glimpses of furtive movement—figures ducking down alleyways at their approach, crouching low behind cars. Some of that five percent who hadn't been dropped out of time, he assumed. They'd be more scared than he was, having no explanation at all as to what was happening to them.
Not that having an explanation helped all that much.
Margaret wove a slow, winding path in between the vehicles, talking the whole time about things that just made Hank's head ache. Cuckoos. Raven's pot. Animal blood.
"See," Margaret was explaining, "the crow girls couldn't have helped either you or Lily if you didn't have it. Which is the same reason you're not stuck out of time like most of the people are. There has to be a connection or the magic can't travel. It's simple physics. Or is it genetics? Anyway …"
Hank tuned her out.
He glanced out the back window. In the rear lights—which also seemed abnormally bright to Hank—he could see the dog loping along behind the car. The red glare of the taillights made the dog's coat turn the color of blood. It looked like a hellhound with its red fur and enormous size, some damned creature that escaped from the nether regions.
Maybe we're all damned, Hank found himself thinking. He faced the front again.
"The dog's following," he said. "What do you think it wants?"
Ray turned to look.
"Maybe it just wants to see how it all ends," Margaret said.
Ray shrugged. "It's just going to have to wait in line like the rest of us."
"What's its name?" Lily wanted to know.
"Bocephus," Ray said before Hank could tell her the dog didn't have one.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
"How come you didn't?" Ray replied. "You being related and all."
"How can I be—"
"It goes back a long way," Margaret said.
"And what's so bad about carrying canid blood?" Ray asked.
Margaret glanced at him. "If you're so proud of it, why're you walking around pretending to be a crow girl?"
For a long moment, Ray glared at her, then suddenly he changed. Gone was the small, dark-haired man sitting in the passenger's seat. In his place was a red-headed stranger, tall and pointy-featured. All Hank could do was stare. Beside him, Lily gasped.
"Happy now?" Ray asked Margaret.
"Oh, yeah," she said. "Like that's supposed to be an improvement."
Lily tightened her grip on Hank's hand, edging closer to him for comfort. Hank was in need of some himself. He forced himself to look out the window of the car, away from the pair in the front seat. The blackened streets only drove home how far removed he and Lily were from the way they'd always supposed the world worked.
"It could've been worse," Lily said softly.
He turned to look at her.
"You could've found out you were related to a cockroach."
With all they'd been going through, they surprised themselves to find that they could still share a laugh.
A half-dozen blocks away from the Rookery on Stanton Street they finally ran into a traffic snarl that Margaret couldn't finesse her way around.
"We're close enough that we can walk from here," she said.
Bocephus was waiting on the pavement when they got out of the car. Hank reached out to give him a pat, then reconsidered when the dog gave him a look that said in no uncertain terms, back off.
Yeah, Hank thought. I wouldn't want someone giving me a pat on the head either, no matter how related we might be.
"Nice to have you with us, Bo," he said instead.
The dog replied with a rumbling sound from deep in its chest that made both Lily and Hank back away.
"He's just being friendly," Ray said.
Hank nodded.
"What's he sound like when he's not being friendly?" Lily said.
"I don't think we want to know," Hank replied.
Margaret killed the engine, but left the headlights burning until she got the oil lamp lit once more. The circle of light it cast when she held it aloft seemed smaller than it had been before, by Jack's bus.
"Is it getting darker?" Hank asked, though it didn't seem possible.
Margaret shrugged. "Probably."
She took the lead and they fell in alongside her. Bocephus kept pace for a while, then ranged on ahead, obviously impatient with their slower progress.
"You give any thought as to how we're going to wake Raven?" Ray asked. "I mean, he's been gone down inside himself for a long time now."
"I'm thinking of banging a brick up alongside his head," Margaret said. "This is all his fault. If he didn't want to take care of the pot, he should've passed it on to someone else."
Ray laughed. "Like who? You? Me? How long would it be before we gave it a stir, just to set some little thing right?"
"I don't know. Maybe the crow girls then."
"Like they wouldn't be a hundred times worse than Raven? They'd probably trade it to someone for a lollipop or a Cracker Jack ring. When's the last time they ever did anything that made sense?"
"They saved our lives," Lily said.
"I'm talking global here," Ray told her. "Maida and Zia are great with the details, but they can't seem to step back and take in the big picture."
Margaret shook her head. "Like you know them so well."
"You're saying I'm wrong?"
"No. What I'm saying is, when it comes to the old corbae, we're talking about people who think as differently from us as we do from humans. None of us know what they can or can't do."
"That's like—"
Margaret cut him off. "Are you forgetting who it was that made this world?"
Hank didn't like the sound of that at all.
"Wait a minute," he said. "Are you telling us—"
"That's right," Margaret said. "It was Raven and the crow girls who pulled us out of the medicine lands and made the long ago, and Jack was there to watch them do it, to hold the story of it so that we wouldn't forget. Things were pretty good until Cody came along and screwed everything up—just like he's doing again."
Ray shook his head. "You can't blame Cody this time."
"Oh no? Who brought the cuckoos into Newford?"
Hank and Lily exchanged glances. Hank could tell from the look in Lily's eyes that she was feeling the same as him, trying to come to grips with the idea that the two punky-looking girls who'd rescued them in that alley were immortal creation goddesses of some kind.
"Well, why not?" Hank muttered. "It makes about as much sense as anything else."
"No," Ray said, thinking that Hank was contributing to his argument with Margaret. "The cuckoos were going to make a move sooner or later—everybody knows that. Cody was only using them to create some confusion so that he could make his play for the pot. The only thing I don't get is what he was expecting my granddaughter to do."
"You haven't figured that out yet?" Margaret said. "It costs big time to use the pot—why do you think Cody keeps screwing it up? He can't make the commitment to give up enough of himself to use the pot right."
"What do you mean?" Lily asked.
"You have to give up a piece of yourself to make the pot work," Margaret explained. She gave Ray a sidelong glance. "All the corbae know that. The more you try for, the more you've got to give. If you're not strong enough—haven't got enough of the blood—the pot'll just swallow you whole."
"He was going to use Kerry for that?" Ray said.
"Get with it," Margaret told him. "Cody uses everybody."
"I'm going to kill him."
"You'll have to stand in line. I've about had it with his idea of fun and games."
"But I thought Cody was the one who told you where the pot was," Lily said.
Margaret sighed. "Okay. He gets points for not bailing on us totally. And to tell you the truth, I can't help but liking him for all that he's a stubborn jackass. But still. When you add up the his
tory of everything he's put us—"
A low rumbling growl rose up from the dog, cutting her off. Hank looked up to see a tall black man step out from behind one of the massive oak trees lining Stanton Street. He was carrying a shotgun, the muzzle pointed their way. A long steady rumble came from deep in the dog's chest as it stood its ground.
Hank wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of the dog's attack, but the man with the shotgun didn't seem to be in the least bit fazed. When he moved a little closer and the light from Margaret's lamp illuminated his features, Hank recognized him. It was Brandon Cole, the sax player he checked out at the Rhatigan whenever he could.
Hank had to shake his head. "What?" he said. "Is everybody one of these crow people now?"
"Brandon's a rook, actually," Margaret said. She stepped closer and pushed the barrel of the shotgun away. "And would you stop pointing that thing at us?"
Brandon lowered the muzzle so that it was aimed at the ground.
"Sorry," he said. "Chloë's in such a twist she's got me jumping at shadows." He looked from her to Hank and the others, eyes narrowing when he noted Ray and the dog. "So what's going on here?"
"We're here to see Raven."
"You're kidding."
"Do I look like I'm kidding?"
Brandon regarded her for a long moment before saying, "Chloë's not going to like this."
"Why don't you let me worry about Chloë," Margaret said.
Brandon gave them all another considering look.
"You have a problem with this?" Margaret asked.
"Nope," Brandon said, standing aside. "I just want to be there to see it."
"This Chloë," Hank asked Ray as they followed Margaret toward the house. "She runs the show here?"
"She likes to think so," Brandon replied from behind them. "It's getting so that even she believes she's firstborn."
Hank remembered Moth telling him once, you get more than two people together in any one place, and right away you've got politics. Looked like it held true for animal people as well.
Someplace to Be Flying Page 42
