Hank glanced at Lily, but all she could do was shake her head. It was making no more sense to her.
"And is it a good or bad thing?" he asked. "Us seeing it like this, I mean?"
"It's not good or bad," Margaret said. "It just is."
The others nodded in agreement, but nobody added anything to explain the puzzle. The corbae seemed to be good at that. Hank gave the source of the light another considering look.
Okay. It was a forever tree. Whatever that meant.
"What do we do now?" Lily asked.
"I don't know about anyone else," Hank replied, "but I'm going on."
Lily nodded, but nobody else responded. Hank looked down at Bocephus, sitting on his haunches, also staring up at the source of the light.
It even had the dog spellbound, he thought, but then Bocephus shook his head and made a rumbling, querulous sound deep in his chest. Hank followed his gaze to see what had distracted him.
"Heads up," Hank said.
Only Lily looked away from the big glowing tree to see what Hank and the dog had already noted. They were no longer alone.
In some ways, nothing had changed. The buildings were all still dark. Cars, buses, cabs, delivery vans … nothing was moving. The drivers and passengers remained immobile in their vehicles. Pedestrians were still frozen in the positions they'd been in when the world went strange.
But now dozens of people had joined them on the street, all of them looking up at the glowing tree that lit the skyline and was banishing the dark that had swallowed the world earlier. Slowly they started walking toward the waterfront. Hank waited a beat, then took Lily's hand and they started walking again as well. Bocephus immediately fell into step beside them. When they'd gone a half-dozen steps, Hank looked back to see that the corbae and Ray were following.
With the stronger light to guide their way, they made much better time than they had coming from Stanton Street. It only took them a few minutes to reach the Harbor Ritz, where a large crowd had already gathered. Hank estimated there were at least two or three hundred, maybe more. They appeared to come from all walks of life. Men, women and children. Black, white, Asian. Everybody with a drop of animal blood in them, he figured.
There was little conversation and no one paid much attention to them, even when they made their way through to the front of the crowd. Hank craned his neck. This close, the glowing tree was beyond impressive. He stared up until he got a crick in his neck, then made himself look at the building itself, enclosed by the glow. Katy was in there somewhere.
He gave the crowd a once-over. No one was making any effort to get any closer or trying to get in. He didn't blame them. The whole situation was completely out of his experience as well. But he didn't see that he had a choice.
"I'm going in," he said.
"There's no point," Margaret told him.
He glanced at her in surprise. This was the first comment she'd offered freely since the tree appeared.
"Katy's in there," he said.
She nodded. "But there's nothing we can do about it now. It's out of our hands."
"But—"
"Trust me, Hank. All we can do is wait."
Hank shook his head.
"You don't understand," Brandon said. "But we've been here before—when the world began. That light is the place the music comes from. You can't mess with it. You can't talk to it. So what's going inside it going to do?"
"What do you mean it's where the music comes from?" Hank asked.
"It's where everything comes from," Brandon said. "Music. Art."
Chloë nodded. "Intellect. Dreams."
"Hope," Ray put in. "Compassion."
"Heart," Margaret added.
"So tell me this," Hank asked. "What kind of heart would I have if I just left Katy in there on her own without trying to get her out?"
"The light won't harm her," Chloë said.
Hank turned to her. "You know that for a fact?"
Chloë hesitated for a long moment.
"No," she said finally.
"So I'm going in."
Hank walked toward the building, Bocephus padding along at his side. Lily waited a heartbeat before she started to follow. Margaret caught her by the arm, her strong grip holding Lily back. Hank paused, turned to look at them.
"You don't have to do this," Margaret said.
But Lily shook free. "Yes, I do. The only reason Hank got caught up in all of this is because he stopped to help me. I can't let him go on now by himself."
Hank was going to tell her that it was okay, she didn't have to come, but Margaret spoke first.
"He's going in because he's worried about Katy," she said, "and Katy has nothing to do with what's going on."
"But I do," Lily told her. "Remember who handed the pot over to the cuckoos. If it weren't for me, if I'd just held on to it better or hidden it or something, none of this would be happening."
"You didn't know."
Lily glanced at the building. "What are you so afraid of?"
"It isn't fear," Margaret said.
"Then what is it?"
Hank nodded. He wouldn't mind knowing that himself, since however this conversation turned out, he was still going in.
"Do you believe in God?" Margaret asked.
Lily looked confused. "I … I'm not sure. I guess so. Or at least I believe there's something, some kind of spirit or force. But when I was a kid I believed in God."
"So you can remember those feelings you had about God when you believed in him?"
"Sure."
Margaret pointed to the light. "Going in there for us would be like the child you were meeting God."
"Oh."
Hank looked at the building, then back at Lily. When he held out his hand, she walked over to him and took it. With the dog at their side, they went up to the revolving doors of the hotel, pushed on them, then stepped through.
Into the light.
13.
"Oh my goodness," one of the Aunts said.
Rory looked up from the steps where he and Annie were sitting. He still didn't know which was Eloisa and which was Mercedes. But one of them was pointing south, toward the lake.
He stood up to get a better look. "It's some kind of light," he said.
As he watched, the distant glow took the shape of an enormous tree that almost seemed to fill the entire skyline above the roofs of the neighboring buildings.
"Not just any light," Annie said, coming to stand beside him. "That's the light from the first day—what Raven brought across from the medicine lands to make the long ago."
"It looks like a tree."
"That's the way it looked back then, too."
Rory gave her a considering look, then walked slowly over to the idling cab. Reaching in, he turned off the engine and the headlights. The sudden silence was eerie. The dark came washing in on them, but it was only their eyes adjusting to the change of light. After a few moments he realized that he could see as well as he normally could in the twilight.
"We have to go," one of the Aunts said.
The other nodded.
"But Rory won't be able to keep up," Annie said. "And," she continued, "he can't take the car because the streets are probably even more blocked up downtown than they are here."
The Aunt who'd first spoken shrugged. "But that's where the others are."
"Let him take his pedal bicycle," said the other one.
Annie nodded. "Good idea."
Rory went up the steps to the back door and brought his mountain bike out of the shed where he stored it. When he had it down on the lawn, he looked at the three women.
The Aunts leapt into the air, arms outspread. Instead of coming back down on the ground, the way he would have if he'd tried to do that, they shrank, were transformed, kept rising, and two small crows—no, he corrected himself numbly, they're rooks—were circling above his head, under the boughs of the elm.
"Oh, Jesus," he said, staring up at them.
He turned slowly t
o Annie.
"You didn't really believe me, did you?" she said.
"Well … that is … I just thought it was … um, some kind of metaphor …"
Annie laid the palm of her hand against his cheek. "Don't freak out on me now."
"I …" He cleared his throat. "I won't."
"Good." She smiled and stepped back, making a motion toward his bike. "So let's go."
Rory slowly straddled his bike. He looked south to that giant tree of light that rose up from somewhere near the waterfront, then back at Annie. But she wasn't there anymore. A blue jay had joined the two rooks in the air above him. Seeing they had his attention, the rooks flew out of the yard, southward. The jay dropped down to land on the handlebars of his bike.
"Uh … Annie?" he managed.
The bird scolded him until he set the bike in motion and started down the lane. The rooks were no longer in sight.
I'm going insane, Rory decided.
He really didn't see another logical explanation.
14.
"What does he mean, about the world coming to an end?" Kerry asked.
Katy gave her sister a sympathetic look. Kerry looked scared and Katy couldn't blame her. By all accounts, Raven wasn't exactly the easiest of the corbae to warm to and while he might look like a Buddha, he added a grimness to the image that the statues of the real Gautama Buddha never portrayed. When you put that up alongside his stern pronouncements, uttered in that deep bass rumble of his voice, it was hard not to be nervous around him.
Though he didn't seem to faze the crow girls at all.
"Oh, don't pay attention to Raven," Maida said.
Zia nodded. "He just loves to sound dramatic."
"The more dramatic the better."
"As if the world would end on his say-so."
Maida shook her head. "As if."
Raven shot them a dark look, obviously intended to silence them, but all it did was make them giggle.
"It would not be my decision," he said. He nodded toward the Grace. "But hers."
That quieted the crow girls.
The reactions of the corbae surprised Katy. They all seemed to be, if not nervous about the Grace like Kerry was, nevertheless very much in awe. But what surprised her more was that none of them seemed to know why the Grace had gathered them to this place.
"That's not why she's here," she told them.
Dark corbae gazes settled on her.
"The cuckoos broke her vessel," Katy explained. "And because of that a door's opened and it's drawing her back." She gave them an apologetic look. "One of us has to accompany her—to close that door after her—or the whole world's going to get sucked out through it."
"How can you know that?" Raven asked.
The resonance of his voice made it feel as though her ribs were vibrating against each other. She felt Kerry's fingers tighten on her own. Raven made her nervous, too, but she was too stubborn to let it show. Her way of dealing with it was to be more aggressive.
"How can you not?" she shot back.
Raven frowned. "The light has no voice. She doesn't speak."
"Not in words, exactly," Katy said, "but that doesn't mean she isn't communicating."
It was hard to explain. When she quieted the inner chatter of her own thoughts and let the warm, amber-gold glow swell inside her, she simply knew what the Grace wished to express.
"I have never heard of such a thing," Raven said.
"So that makes it a lie?" Katy asked.
"I did not—"
Katy made a movement with her free hand toward the figure of the woman in the light.
"Tell her about it," she said. "Not me. I didn't come here to argue with you."
For a long moment no one spoke.
"The door," Jack asked finally. "What does it open into?"
"To …" Katy had to think a moment. "What you call the medicine lands."
"But without her … if she's drawn out of the world …" Jack's voice trailed off.
Raven turned to the crow girls. "Was I so wrong? Without her light, the world might as well cease to exist."
He's like me, Katy realized. He doesn't fit in either. The difference was, he wanted to take everything with him when he went.
"That's not how she puts it," Katy said. "The world will be different, that's all. Not over. We'll just have to make our own grace."
Raven gave a short, humorless laugh. "And what a world this would be if its grace were dependent on the good nature of its inhabitants. Every year the world becomes more dour, more hateful. Kindness has become a myth."
Katy regarded him thoughtfully, trying to understand why all the animal people held Raven in such esteem. He was certainly large enough, with a big voice, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot of compassion in him. Maybe he'd been asleep for too long. Maybe he'd forgotten what it was like to live, to care about other people.
"It doesn't have to be like that," she said.
The crow girls nodded in agreement.
"We're happy," Maida said. "We're ever so veryvery kind."
"It's true," Zia added. "We bring grace wherever we go."
"Or at least we try to."
"And that counts, doesn't it?"
"Of course it does," Jack said.
"Which of us has the Grace chosen for her guide?" Raven asked.
"That's not actually up for grabs," Katy told him, "because I'm doing it."
"You can't!" Kerry cried.
Katy let go of Kerry's hand. Putting her hands on her sister's shoulders, she looked her in the eye.
"But I told you," she said. "That's why I came here."
"And why are we here?" Raven asked. "Simply to wish you bon voyage?"
Maybe, Katy thought, the real reason no one disturbed him was that it was better when he was asleep. At least then you didn't have to listen to him.
"No," she said, turning away from her sister to face him. "The cuckoos were trying to use the Grace to kill you, but she's a life-giver, not a life-taker—remember?"
"She brought death into the world," Raven said.
Katy looked to the Grace, quieting her thoughts so that she could find an answer in the amber-gold light.
"No," she said after a moment. "Cody was using the pot that time, and death was attracted by the light. He woke from it."
"There has to be some other way," Kerry said.
Katy could only shake her head. "Maybe I'm not the only one who wants to go, but I'm the only one who should go. The world loses too much if one of you goes, but it's not going to miss me. It's not like I've been pulling my weight."
"Don't say that, Katy," Kerry said. "It's not true."
"Listen to your sister," Jack told Katy. "You can have a lot worse sins hanging on your soul, and unlike myself, you're not guilty of any of them."
15.
Once they were inside the hotel, Hank and Lily walked across the wide marble floor of the lobby, Bocephus padding at their side. The light was brighter in here than it had been outside, but the hotel's patrons, bellboys, desk clerks, and all were as immobile as were the rest of the people in the city who didn't carry a trace of the blood.
"How are we going to find out what room she's in?" Lily asked.
"Well, normally I'd bribe the desk clerk," Hank said, "but considering she can't stop me …"
He went around behind the counter, laid down the shotgun he'd taken from Margaret, and flipped through registration cards until he came across the name "Couteau." There were two cards, one for Dominique, the other for her sons. They'd taken connecting suites.
"Here we go," he said. "They're all the way up on the top floor. Do you want to trust the elevator?"
"Well, my car worked, didn't it?" Lily replied.
The bank of elevators was on the far side of the lobby. The only sound was the sound of their shoes and the dog's toenails clicking on the marble as they wound their way in between the frozen people to reach it. Hank pressed the "Up" button and they waited a moment for an elevator to
arrive. When it did, there were people in it.
"Oh, this is too creepy," Lily said, looking at their blank faces.
Hank nodded. "I know. But it's this or thirty flights of stairs."
Bocephus made the decision for them. The dog padded into the elevator, then sat on its haunches, regarding them with a patient gaze.
"Okay, Bo," Hank said.
They joined the dog inside. Hank pressed the button for the thirtieth floor and the elevator doors closed with a hiss. Lily couldn't suppress a shiver.
They immediately noticed a change in the light when they arrived at Dominique's floor. Where before it had been a rich amber-gold, now it held a red tint that grew darker the farther they progressed down the hall to the Couteaus' suites. A low growl woke in Bocephus's chest.
Lily wished she could be as brave as Hank and the dog, but it wasn't the same for them. They'd never seen the cold light in Dominique's eyes while they were told that they were only alive at her sufferance. Dominique had been very clear to Lily about what would happen if she tried to interfere. Any minute she expected one of the Couteaus or the other cuckoos to step out into the hall, gun in hand. This time there were no crow girls around to magically kiss them back to life.
This time they'd die for real.
But she couldn't back out now. The need to at least make an effort to retrieve Raven's pot had become an obsession akin to the solemn promises the knights had made in old medieval romances she and Donna used to read when they were supposed to be studying for their classes. It lay on her like a geas—a compulsion. Leading her on to her doom, no doubt, but there seemed to be only one path lying in front of her and she had to take it.
She could choose to ignore the compulsion, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to live with who she would be if she did.
Ahead of her, Hank had stopped in front of the door to the suite registered in Dominique's name. Pooling around the carpet in front of the door, the amber-gold of the light was almost entirely swallowed by a flood of dark red.
Blood, Lily thought. This is the light of blood.
The air held a vague metallic taste.
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