by Rhodi Hawk
But she already knew where he’d gone.
Madeleine turned back and went swiftly to where Bo was listening to the iPod in the far corner. “Come with me, honey. Can you be really quiet and hide in the bathroom?”
“What’s the matter?” Esther asked.
“I need to check on something.”
Bo had pulled out the earbuds and was following her to the bathroom. “Did Mare come back for me?”
“No, no, we’re just playing safe.”
Madeleine secured him inside the bathroom, then stepped back into the hall, closing the door behind her. It had only been a minute or two since the nurse had tried to enter. If she hurried, she could get to Zenon’s room before Ethan did.
* * *
THE CORRIDOR WAS QUIET. Madeleine scanned ahead as she jogged toward Zenon’s room, drawing curious glances from the staff. From halfway down the hall, she could see that there was no guard posted out front.
She hurried to the open door and caught her breath. Ethan was already there. Zenon was not.
She stepped inside, looking from Ethan to the bed—empty and stripped down. No quilt, no shortwave radio. The chair the guard had been using in the hall was now pulled inside and placed by the door.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Ethan said, “You shouldn’t have left them alone.”
“I didn’t feel I had a choice! What exactly are you doing here, Ethan?”
“You know damn well what I’m doing here.”
And then a voice from behind said, “Well maybe you can enlighten me.”
They turned.
Standing in the doorway, arms folded, was the short blond nurse, Vessie. “I don’t recall y’all having checked in at the nurse’s station. You can’t just wander into patients’ rooms like this.”
Madeleine said, “What happened to my half-brother?”
Vessie shrugged. “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“No one knows. The hospital tried to reach you.”
Madeleine frowned. “Well they didn’t try very hard. How do you lose a patient with a guard posted at the door?”
“From the looks of things, he up and walked out on his own.”
Ethan said, “The man’s been in a coma for the past several months!”
Vessie’s hands went to her hips. “I don’t like your tone of voice. If you have a problem you can take it up with the administrator, but for now you better get off my wing before I call security.”
Madeleine stepped toward her, teeth clenched. “No, my dear, you are going to tell us exactly what happened.”
And she found that little catch inside Vessie’s mind, and she pulled. Hard.
Vessie sat down abruptly. “I took him out.”
Madeleine exchanged a frown with Ethan and then looked at Vessie again. “Go on.”
“That’s it. I took him out on a stretcher. Covered him with a sheet.”
“What about the damn guard!” Ethan said.
Vessie looked at him. “He helped. We went in the early hours when no one else was around. I know where the blind spots are in the security cameras. It was easy. There been all kinda investigators come askin questions.”
Madeleine said, “Just tell us where he is now.”
“I don’t know. Me and the guard, we took him down to patient transport. There was a man waiting there for us. No one I know. Loaded him up and took him away. Bye-bye.”
thirty-two
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
MADELEINE AND ETHAN FOUND Bo waiting safely in Esther’s bathroom. Esther looked anxious.
“We’ve got to go now,” Madeleine said.
Esther reached for Madeleine’s hand. “I have one more thing to ask you. And I’m sorry. You’ve done so much.”
“What is it?” Ethan asked.
Esther took a deep breath and looked at Ethan. “Doctor Manderleigh, I want to ask you to personally watch over my boy. And Doctor LeBlanc, I want to ask that you not be alone with him.”
Silence settled over the room. Esther was still holding Madeleine’s hand, her fingers cold and moist.
Bo said, “But Mom!”
Ethan started to say, “Do you realize—”
But Madeleine shook her head. “No, it’s OK. I understand.”
Because Esther was right. Esther had looked at Madeleine and seen shadows of the monster inside. A relief, actually, that the truth was out there. She squeezed Esther’s hand and did not look at Ethan.
* * *
SEVERIN WAS RUNNING. SHE clearly wanted Madeleine to chase after her but Madeleine didn’t want to go any deeper. She looked back and saw only the black trees with their coils of thorns and the curling mist. Already she wasn’t sure where the entry point was. Beneath her feet the spongy, pale green duckweed rolled with the water’s surface. She could slip into that water or she could run across it. Water in the briar wasn’t like water in the material world.
“Severin!” she called.
Rustling of leaves. The child’s laughter echoed back to her, echoed among the trees, and did not seem to come from any direction in particular. Irritating.
The dragonfly beasts sprang up from the duckweed. But before they could sting her she turned and stared them down. They hovered, watching. She let her fury course through and away from her so as not to indulge them.
She sang softly against her frustration, “Three blind mice, three blind mice…”
The dragonflies receded. They could be lulled like Severin.
Or was Madeleine just lulling herself, she wondered. And the other creatures were reacting in kind?
She heard the rustling again, and wondered if Severin was making the noise. Everything around her was silver and black or faint green or red. Leaves fluttered everywhere but she couldn’t pinpoint the origin of the sound.
She felt …
Something out here. An airless, cold void. The chill came not so much from an active source as from an absence of warmth. Of life. Blackness, thickening the shadows. She wondered if Severin had caused it.
She watched.
Emerging from the trees came the colorful flying lizards: sylphs. They formed around her, their hues shimmering, their backs gleaming, their collars puffed. Madeleine could not help but feel awe. The void was still there, but now less important to her. The sylphs circled around her like the wind patterns of a tropical storm, then trailed off into the woods on a stream of mist.
Deeper into the briar like Severin. She didn’t follow them, either.
She wasn’t going to fall for these tricks—chasing deep into the woods, where the trees might fall away to tunnels of thorns. Where she might lose her bearings.
She had no intention of staying here for days, weeks, months, the way her father had been known to do. She was going to return to the material world tonight.
At the base of one of the great trees, a shelf of lichen had formed a sturdy half-ring. She went to the shelf and lay down. It felt soft as any feather bed. The mist settled over her face in a crisp, cool mesh. She closed her eyes.
“Ah, so as to sleep? Should you sleep it does not count for our bargain.”
Madeleine opened her eyes and saw Severin crouched on a limb above where she lay.
“What bargain, Severin? You only honor it when it suits you.”
The little river devil’s face formed a sly frown that became a grin. “You blame me. You should blame yourself. I come at your will.”
“Why do you keep saying that? You show up uninvited and I tell you to go away!”
“What you say with words is not all that I hear from you.”
The rustling sound came from the trees again. So it wasn’t Severin making it. Madeleine looked, and saw that Severin was watching for the origin of the sound, too.
“What is it,” Madeleine asked. “What’s out there?”
“It is there and wishes to be everywhere. It is what makes us.”
Madeleine sat up on the shelf of lichen. “Severin, I need t
o find where Zenon is hiding.”
“He is here in the bramble. Call to him—”
“No! I need to find his physical body. Where is he hiding?”
“Let us take a look to see.”
Severin climbed down from her branch and settled in next to Madeleine on the shelf of lichen, pushing herself up under Madeleine’s arm. Madeleine waited. The sensation began only as a matter of equilibrium, a sudden feeling of weightlessness. Her mind went dizzy. The platform of duckweed suspended over the water’s surface—though only inches beneath the lichen shelf—seemed to wobble in such a way that Madeleine thought they might fall in. And then the duckweed was disappearing to whirlpools. Madeleine held on to Severin. The world around them fell away, and she couldn’t tell if they were lifting or falling. Everything shifted to black.
Then, Madeleine saw a gleam. Far down below. A long, shimmering dendrite shape that stretched as far as she could see. And then she saw that it led to a strange spread of light: a circuit board with lighted parallels. It bent itself in a crescent moon shape around a bend in the glassy dendrite. A city. Her city. New Orleans.
But before she could even steal more than a glance, it went dark.
Everything was dark. And then there was a patch of duckweed just a few feet away from her. And trees were stretching up from the duckweed, black and thorny, stretching impossibly high.
“What happened?”
“No, we cannot,” Severin said.
“What do you mean ‘we cannnot?’”
“He is not there where we can find him.”
Madeleine pulled away from Severin. “Why not? Is he … dead?”
Severin shrugged, growing bored. “He found a trick of hiding, is what he’s done, surely.”
“Is there any way to find him?”
And then Zenon’s voice came from across the duckweed. “Who you looking for?”
Madeleine jumped.
He was watching her from between two wide tree trunks, looking satisfied with himself. “Look at you, pretty as you please, stretched out like a bayou fairy.”
She rose from the lichen shelf. “How long have you been standing there, Zenon?”
He strode toward her, walking over the duckweed. “Honey, you don’t need to go to no special lengths to find me. Just call. I’ll come every time. Hell I’ll come even when you ain’t callin.”
“You really have become a damned river devil.”
He laughed. “And you, baby, are still good and stained.”
She looked down at herself, her blood pulsing with phosphorescence beneath her skin. Bo’s light.
“Stay away from me, Zenon. I’m done with you.”
“Honey, you ain’t never gonna be done with me. We connected just as sure as our river devils are bound to us. It’s in our blood and our genes. Ain’t nothin gonna change that. Besides.”
He sat down on the lichen shelf and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “Weren’t for you I wouldn’t have any friends ’sides that bastard, Josh. You’re fresher company.”
“We’ll never be friends again.”
“Sibs then.” He struck a match and flared the end of his cigarette.
Severin stretched out on her back in the duckweed and floated across the surface, the tiny pads clinging to her, making a garland in her hair.
Zenon took a drag from his cigarette and pointed it at Severin. “Your devil’s underdeveloped, baby. You need to work to get her bigger, more coherent.”
Madeleine would sooner nurture a patch of poison ivy, but she asked, “How do you do that?”
“You get your hands dirty. Right now she just antagonizing. Am I right?”
Madeleine nodded.
“All that’s good for is putting you in the insane asylum. You don’t have to go nuts. What you do is make your kills, but you control your mind when you do it. Don’t go postal. Can’t be rage or nothin. Like you did with the little blind boy, that was fine. Calmly drownin him under that trailer like he’s a sack of kittens. More of that and you train for the briar.”
“You sound like Chloe. Trying to school me on the briar.”
His expression changed. The easy, cocky smirk left him and was replaced by a more sober demeanor.
“Look, we on the same team now so quit bein difficult. You ready for some more training?”
“What, you gonna try to teach me firearm and bayonet drills?”
He shook his head, stone serious. “We can if you want. But you can do that anywhere. Right now we got bigger fish to fry.”
He was on his feet and face-to-face with her before she had time to react, his hands wrapped around the base of her skull. She tried to jerk away but he had her clean.
Severin flipped over in the water and surged toward them. “Ah, so lovely!”
It’s not that Madeleine felt the change itself. Not like she could sense that something was draining out of her or that something else was filling her up. But as Zenon held on she did know that any quiet inside her had been replaced by noise. It felt exciting and exhausting all at once, the way she might sometimes listen to music that pushed her limits. It both energized and depleted her.
The cigarette was still burning in his right hand. Casting its scent into her hair.
He released her and put it to his lips, speaking through it. “There now. See what your big brother done for you.”
She stared at him, unsure what any of it meant. “What was that?”
He waved the cigarette at her. “Stain removal.”
She looked down. All traces of that phosphorescence were gone. If anything, she saw hints of the strange sepia anti-shadow, like the way the river devils and Zenon looked when they walked the material world.
“Much better,” Severin said.
Madeleine lifted her gaze to the massive black trees. “There’s something out there.”
He nodded. “That’s it, baby. I just gave a little piece of it to you.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s going to come in real handy.”
“It’s cold.”
She tried to pinpoint the sensation. Cold, not in such a way that made her feel a chill, but perhaps more the way a cold-water fish might exist. Not desirous of warmth. Cold on the inside.
He said, “You know how long it took me to get to that phase? And here I give it to you in just a few seconds.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
He laughed. “You’re fuckin welcome.”
“So you can just pass these abilities on to anybody?”
“No, you probably gotta have the briar in your blood. Everyone else is just pigeon meat.”
She wrapped her hands around herself, thinking. He was wrong. She’d passed the stop-breathing technique to Bo, to save his life.
“But … so the lumens?”
He shrugged and took a drag from his cigarette. “They’re different. They can steal any of these little tricks from us, too. And they stain the people around them so alla sudden we ain’t nothin special. You gettin me?”
“Yes. No. Not really.”
“It’s why they gotta go, babe. I come to believe that people like you and me, we get to be the hominids that come after homo sapiens. Or—”
He gestured behind him. “Or—the lumens do. They like a virus. Evolutionary competition. Look at your science books. Sometimes a species’ll split off into parallel sub-species. But only one of’m wins out in the end.”
He said, “So you’re ready for the next phase. You got one lumen down, the little blind kid. But he was all over the place. Stained up everyone who’s around him. His mama, some school kids, people that lived nearby.”
Madeleine stared at him. “And?”
“So you gotta clean house.”
“You mean…”
“To send them through,” Severin said.
And Zenon said, “Yeah. Get rid of’m all.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I’m serious alright. Kill’m all. Wipe’m out. Era
dicate.”
Intellectually, she knew she ought to find the idea shocking. Ludicrous. Unthinkable. Zenon was a madman.
And yet.
Inside, she felt differently. The cold void that now permeated through her had deadened her sense of vitality. In its absence, the new excitement was what replaced the feeling of being alive.
thirty-three
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
MADELEINE SAT UPRIGHT ON the couch. She looked toward the stamped tin ceiling above just to make sure it was there. No black thorns. And no Zenon or Severin. She was fully back. But that coldness, it still lingered inside her.
Ethan had been sleeping with his arm wrapped around her but he awoke with a start. Bo lifted his head at the change in their breathing sounds, his hand over the Braille copy of The Cay.
“What is it?” Ethan said.
Madeleine was staring at Bo, trying to find that sense of protectiveness she’d felt for him before. But: nothing.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said.
Ethan rose up on his elbow, rubbing his eyes. “What? Now? Baby, I’m tired.”
Madeleine watched Bo as he returned to his book. “You sleep. I’ll take Bo out for a little bit.”
Something inside her was objecting to this idea. Where would she take Bo? How safe would he be in her company, now that the void had emptied her? The truth was, she wanted him out of her home. Felt absurdly territorial.
Ethan blinked the sleep from his eyes. “No. Let’s stick together. Let me just brush my teeth and change my shirt.”
Madeleine swallowed and nodded.
“How’s your book?” she said to Bo, eyeing Ethan as he left the room.
“It’s good. There’s a blind kid in it. He wasn’t blind starting out, though.”
She stood, breathing in carefully.
Because the urge that filled her right now …
Madeleine closed her eyes. She had to stop this. Whatever she felt, she needed to make her conscious mind override the other thing, or the lack of something, that begged to be filled. Make pain to prove its existence.
Bo was clicking at her. “Doc LB?”
In her mind, she counted, breathing in and out carefully. Because she knew Severin would appear at any moment unless she found a way to still this thing.
