When they reached the porch, a woman was waiting for them. She cut a tall and stern figure, her hair a massive cloud of dark curls that simply merged with the surrounding shadows. Hank assumed she was Chloë.
"We've come to wake Raven," Margaret said.
Hank could hear in her voice how she was bracing for an argument, but now that they were this close, it was plain that the woman on the porch had no fight in her. She looked drawn and worn out.
"You're too late," Chloë said.
"He's already awake?"
Chloë shook her head. "Something took him away. One minute he's sitting there at his window, the next he's gone."
For a long moment no one spoke. It was, Hank thought, as though they simply couldn't believe what they were hearing. Well, welcome to the club.
"Just like Jack," Ray said finally.
Margaret sighed. "It's that damned pot. Every time things go bad, that pot's right in the middle of it."
"Don't be so quick to judge what you can't understand," Chloë said, her voice mild. "The pot's not good or bad—it's only what we do with it that makes it one or the other."
"Well, the cuckoos have it this time," Margaret told her.
Chloë's features sagged. She lowered herself onto the wicker bench on the porch and leaned slowly back against the wall of the house.
"Maybe Annie's right," she said. "Maybe it does have a mind of its own."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Brandon asked.
"She means it's perverse," Margaret said. "The way it keeps disappearing and then showing up again in the wrong hands."
Brandon looked back and forth between them in confusion. "But I thought it was on our side."
"The pot doesn't take sides," Chloë told him. "It just is, Brandon."
"So what happens now?" Hank asked. "What are the cuckoos doing with it?"
"Well," Chloë said, bitterness heavy in her voice. "This is no more than wild conjecture on my part, but I'd say they're trying to do what they're always trying to do: get rid of the firstborn corbae."
"And that means?" Hank continued when she didn't elaborate.
"The world can't exist without the corbae," Margaret explained. "It'll either end abruptly, or it'll go on like this, an endless night that'll only last until everything finally runs down."
"But don't the cuckoos know this?" Lily said.
Hank nodded. "They've got to know they're just shooting themselves in the foot."
"Cuckoos don't listen to the same kind of reason as normal people do," Chloë told them. "They don't consider cause and effect. When the world ends, they'll be the most surprised of anybody."
Hank looked around at the others. "So we've got to stop them, right? Ray says he knows where they're holed up."
But Margaret was already shaking her head.
"You don't get it," she said. "We're already too late."
Chloë nodded. "Once the pot's been stirred, all we can do is wait it out."
"No," Hank said. "Maybe you're ready to quit, but I'm not."
"There's nothing you can do," Margaret said. "Whatever's happening with the pot has got to play out, and your confronting the cuckoos can't do a thing to stop it. Besides, any one of them could break you like a twig without even needing to work up a sweat."
"I don't give up."
Chloë regarded him thoughtfully. "I'd forgotten how tenacious your kind can be. Though perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, considering it was Cody who brought you into the world and I don't think I've ever met anyone more stubborn."
Hank couldn't tell whether she admired that stubbornness or not. The truth was, he didn't particularly care. He turned to Ray.
"Where'd you say they were staying?"
"The Harbor Ritz."
"Then that's where I'm going," Hank said.
"Me, too," Lily added.
Hank looked at the others. "You can tag along or stay here. Your choice."
As though the dog had been following the conversation, Bocephus padded over to stand beside him.
"What the hell," Margaret said. "I always said I'd go down fighting."
In the end, they all went.
8.
The Aunts had joined Annie and the crow girls on their perch above the cathedral's rose window, stopping long enough to report on the general fruitlessness of the search so far before flying on again in their rook skins.
"Everybody's looking, looking, looking," Maida said. "It's so funny, really."
Annie had been watching the Aunts' flight, shading her eyes with her hand. Now she lowered her hand and looked at the crow girl.
"I don't get the joke," she said.
"Not funny ha-ha," Maida told her.
Zia nodded. "Which we like."
"But funny strange."
"Even a little sad."
"What are you talking about?" Annie asked.
Maida shrugged. "You know, that it takes something like this for us all to start paying attention to each other again."
"Doing something together," Zia put in.
Annie settled back against the wall and sighed. "Oh," she said. "Now I know what you mean. I suppose you're right." She was about to go on when the cathedral shook and they all had to cling to their perches. Annie looked at her companions.
"What was—" she began.
"Oh, look," Maida said.
But she didn't have to point. Annie could see the darkness flooding across the sky. She knew what was causing it, too—the darkness, the tremors that shook the building and the deep rumbling underground, the wind that had risen up, which they could only hear, not feel. This wasn't the first time she'd been near Raven's pot when it was being used. But she'd never been this close before, so near the epicenter. She'd heard how disorienting it could be, but never actually experienced it for herself.
It was a very disconcerting feeling. She had the sense that if she didn't get down to the ground right away, she might lose her perch and be too disoriented to shift to her blue jay skin. She was about to suggest that they all fly down, but the crow girls had both suddenly gotten odd, surprised looks on their faces.
Maida blinked. "Oh …"
"… my," Zia finished.
And then they were gone.
Annie sat very still, holding on to the ledge. She tried calling their names, but there was no reply. She knew they hadn't slipped into some shortcut or a fold in the world, because there were none up here. That was one of the things she liked about this spot—it offered safety from surprises. Nobody could sneak up on you. By the same token, nobody could slip away unseen, either.
Except that had changed, hadn't it? Just like that.
And now she wished there was some hidey-hole she could slip into, some quick shortcut to safer ground because this perch of hers suddenly felt like the least safe place she could be.
Where had the crow girls gone? Or more to the point, what had taken them away because what had just happened wasn't another one of their little tricks. They'd been just as surprised as she was when they'd vanished.
A wave of vertigo touched her, something she'd never experienced before. Wouldn't that be strange, to die falling from the sky?
Don't wait any longer, she told herself.
She shifted skins and lifted off before she could change her mind. The wind blowing inside her head threw off her equilibrium, but she forced herself to concentrate on her flight, gliding on the faint air currents, dropping downward in long, wide circles. When she finally touched the ground, she tumbled, wing over head. Shifting from bird to human form, she lay breathless on the pavement.
It was a long time before she could sit up without feeling nauseous.
Finally she managed to get to her feet. She staggered at first, then caught her balance. She called for the girls again.
"Maida! Zia!"
But they were well and truly gone.
It was so dark that she couldn't see anymore. Shifting her principle concentration to her olfactory senses, she began the slow trek b
ack to the Rookery, hoping it was still there, that it hadn't disappeared along with the crow girls.
The idea of being all alone in a world gone black made her shiver with dismay.
She thought of the crow girls' gentle reprimand and promised that if she got through this, she'd look up from her work more often. She'd connect more with the world, make the effort to spend more time with the other corbae.
Then she remembered what they'd told her about Paul, how he'd lost himself in Raven's pot and had never come back.
The pot had taken them. She was sure of that. Taken them, but not her. Why? Because they were oldest?
What if it kept them?
She didn't even want to imagine a world without the crow girls in it, but she couldn't stop the thought now that it was in her head. What if the pot had taken them and they were never coming back?
Would there even be a world without them in it?
9.
Before the darkness flooded the skies and the world fell out of time, Dominique Couteau sat with her chin cupped in her hands and stared at the crystal chalice she'd taken from the woman in the library.
Raven's pot. She didn't care what Cody thought. She knew what she had and with it, she finally held the fate of the corbae in her hand. And yet she hesitated to use it, all because of Cody and his parting comments.
She was no longer alone in her hotel suite. Her two surviving sons had joined her, along with her brother Auguste, some of the Morgans from Hazard, and representatives from a half-dozen other cuckoo families. Dominique was the oldest of them, although it wasn't obvious from her looks. A stranger entering the room would have been forgiven in thinking that he had stumbled into a secret meeting of animated department store mannequins—they were all so indistinguishable from one another. Men and women. The old and the young. They weren't simply of a type, but identical. All of them tall and handsome. And ageless.
The next oldest after Dominique was Tatiana Morgan, Idonia's sister. She'd been living in Mexico when Jack Daw decimated her family in Freakwater Hollow. Self-exiled at the time from the endless feuding between cuckoo and crow, the slaughter had brought her back into the conflict with a hatred for the corbae that rivaled Dominique's.
"Well?" Tatiana said, fidgeting impatiently. "What're we waiting for?"
Dominique kept her gaze on the chalice. There was something odd about it. When she looked at it from a certain angle, the figure inside appeared to double.
"There is a problem," she said.
She was only half paying attention to Tatiana. The chalice and its contents mesmerized her. The way the light from the window played on the facets of the crystal created a gleaming pattern that almost seemed to shape pictographs. And then there was the puzzle of the figurine inside, solitary from one angle, doubled from another.
"Cody claims the world won't survive without the firstborn corbae in it," Auguste explained when his sister didn't elaborate.
"Bullshit," Tatiana said. "Where'd he get that idea? From one of Jack's stories?"
Dominique finally looked up. "He didn't say."
"But you're still buying it?"
"It seems worth considering," Dominique told her.
Tatiana shook her head. "I don't believe what I'm hearing here." She looked around the room. "If the corbae are so powerful, why's Raven spent the last sixty years sleeping like some fat hog in its trough? Why does Jack live like a bum in an old school bus in the Tombs? And the crow girls … weeping Jesus. If they had anything to do with the making of the world it'd be a circus fun house with every street a carnival ride and jelly beans growing from the trees."
A murmur went through the room, heads nodding. Tatiana appeared to take it as a general agreement that she remain their spokesperson. She turned back to Dominique.
"If you don't have the balls to get this show going," she said, "pass that crystal spittoon over to me and tell me what to do with it."
"Be careful you don't overstep the bounds of my patience," Dominique told her.
For a moment it seemed that Tatiana would continue the argument. Dominique met her gaze steadily until Tatiana had to look away.
"So," Dominique said. "Tatiana has been kind enough to share her views on the matter with us, but what of the rest of you? Do we proceed?"
She looked at them one by one, holding their gaze until each of them had nodded in agreement. A moment's silence followed, then Auguste cleared his throat. Dominique gave him her attention.
"Without Cody … ," he began.
"Yes?"
"It's just, I was under the impression that he was the only one who knows how to operate that … that …" —Auguste waved a hand toward the chalice— "device."
Dominique smiled. Device. That was an eloquent description.
"Cody told me all I needed to know before he made himself redundant," she told her brother.
It wasn't entirely true, but Dominique's pride wouldn't let her admit that she'd allowed Cody to simply walk out unharmed, the working of Raven's pot unexplained. No, that wasn't entirely true.
There's one thing you have to know about the pot, darling. Everybody's got to figure out on their own how it can work for them.
Fair enough, she thought. How difficult could it be? She was sure she knew the basics from the stories. What it seemed to boil down to was that one had to be utterly focused on what one desired. And then one stirred.
Stirred what, she wasn't entirely certain. The air inside the pot? And what did one stir with? Presumably one's hand—if something Cody had told her when they first embarked upon this partnership was anything to go by. She could call up his voice without needing to try very hard:
"So there I was, darling," he'd told her after his last botched attempt to use the pot. "Up to my elbows in the primordial goo, and then I don't know what it was. Maybe a skitter flew up my nose, or maybe it flew into my ear, but all of a sudden I've got this humming in my head, like a wind coming down off the mountains, and I lose my concentration."
That wouldn't happen to her. She could maintain her concentration, it didn't matter how many bugs tried to fly into whatever orifice. Her hatred of the corbae was so singular and focused that it didn't require attention. It drummed in time to her heartbeat, a constant nagging reminder of their dominance, despite—as Tatiana had so readily pointed out—their obvious unsuitability as a ruling class. Although that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was their damned indifference to their position as the ruling class.
So the problem wasn't focusing on what she wanted from the pot, nor even a fear of thrusting her hand into it. She'd dare that and more to rid the world of the crows once and for all. What troubled her was Cody's parting remark in reference to the corbae earlier today.
Truth is, I'm not all that sure there'd still be a world, you take them out of the equation.
He'd lied about the chalice not being Raven's pot. She knew that. But she wasn't as certain that he'd lied about the firstborn corbae's place in the world. What if they truly were its anchor, if the world couldn't go on without them?
That was one possibility. The other was that it would simply be a different world. Radically altered, it was true, but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Not if the cuckoos were finally in ascendance.
At any rate, the questions were irrelevant. It was too late to back out now and still retain some semblance of pride.
Before some new argument arose, she thrust her hand into the open mouth of Raven's pot.
There was time for a moment of surprise. Earlier she had stuck various objects into the chalice and met no resistance, but now the air inside the pot was thick and cold, clinging to her skin like wet, runny mud. More confusing was how the relatively confined space inside appeared to be far larger than should be physically possible.
Then came the pain.
Her mouth opened, lips twisting, but no sound came forth. The pain was beyond articulation. It flared up from her hand and wrist as if she'd plunged her fist into a vat of acid,
a burning that seemed to strip the flesh from her and leave all her nerve ends raw and bare.
She knew a momentary admiration for Cody, that he could dare this not once, but time and again.
And then she cursed him for what he hadn't told her.
The pot had a mind of its own.
The knowledge came to her through a swelling wave of agony. And as soon as she understood that the pot was sentient, she also realized that one was expected to approach it as a supplicant, not a master. That the pot itself decided whether or not to grant one's request. That the pot admired a creative petition, but abhorred destruction and turned such negative impulses back upon the supplicant.
The pain that ravaged her hand and wrist was the acidic boiling of her own hatred.
She could feel her arm being pushed up out of the chalice, clamped her mouth shut against the torment that grew in intensity every moment she remained in contact with the damned pot.
"No," she muttered from between her gritted teeth.
She forced her hand more deeply in and continued to stir whatever invisible muck it was that filled the pot. The raw heat of pain spread up from her lower arm, encompassing her shoulder, moving across her chest and into her neck, but instead of allowing it to weaken her, she used the pain to combat the will of the pot, used her hatred to make it submit to her command.
The sound of a hundred winds filled her head. The room went black. The chalice rattled and bounced on the table and she used her free hand to keep it from falling to the ground. But it wasn't simply the chalice that was banging about on the tabletop. The whole building trembled and shook.
"I will not submit to you!" she cried and thrust her arm up to the shoulder into the pot.
The pot lunged away from the table. She threw her free arm around it, hugging it to her chest. Her body arced with a new blaze of pain.
Then the pot came apart in her arms.
She was thrown back against the windows. Glass shattered and only the sash bars kept her from being thrown outside. She could hear the cries of her family and the others—wild shrieks that rose above the screaming winds. Her body slid to the ground, all her muscles in spasms so that she jittered and bounced on the floor. Blood oozed from her nose, her ears, her eyes, filled her throat, choking her.
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