I ran back to Gram’s and took my bicycle from the garage. With a longing look at the Cadillac, the keys to which were in Agnes’ pocketbook, I pedaled out into the pouring rain and didn’t stop until I reached the shore of Whitfield Bay, with Shaw Island barely visible in the distance.
CHAPTER
•
THIRTY-NINE
LADY OF MERCY
One of the rowboats was missing. I tried to remember what condition they’d been in when I first saw them on the last day of school. I looked across the roiling water to Shaw Island. It had seemed so close before, as if you really could walk over to it under the right conditions. Now it was almost invisible in the downpour.
The abandoned boat, so far from shore the last time I’d been here, was practically at the water’s edge. Peter must have taken the other. I hoped it had been in better shape than the leaky tub that remained.
Tipping it on its side, I could see through its entire length. I pulled out rocks and pieces of broken glass and several crabs that had nested there. On the sand nearby were a few half-buried strands of rope and some rotted planks.
I looked helplessly at the island. Peter had to have taken Eric there. But how could I follow?
You can only do what you would normally do, Gram had said. Only more so.
That was it! Experimentally I concentrated on the broken pieces of wood lying at my feet until they stirred.
“Into the boat,” I ordered, and the planks flew into the bottom of the rowboat, arranging themselves into neat rows over the hole.
I took out my wand. “Nails!” Hundreds of rusted nails of every description emerged from the wet sand like midges. I directed them into a formation and sent them hammering into the wood, expelling a few gigantic hand-forged iron monsters from long-sunken ships as I went.
“Rope!” Broken strands from all over the beach, plus an enormous coil buried a hundred feet from where I stood wound around the interior of the rowboat.
Inwardly, I thanked my dad for forcing me to stay holed up in my room without any distractions. The time I’d spent practicing my teleporting skills was paying off.
Within minutes I had what looked like a relatively serviceable vessel. I even managed to scrounge up a couple of oars, but I had no idea whether the boat was seaworthy.
“Well, I don’t have to go far,” I told myself encouragingly as I slipped the patched rowboat into the water. Instantly the high winds yanked its bow practically out of my hands.
“Okay, Mr. Haversall, that’s enough,” I said, rowing like crazy just to steer in a straight line in four feet of water. I didn’t know how rainmaking worked, but I guessed that, like all magic, once you started something in the natural world, you had to see it through to its natural conclusion. The storm would have to run its course.
But at least now the Meadow wasn’t going to burn down. The big oak that Livia Fowler had set on fire might even have survived.
“Power-hungry cow,” I said uncharitably. “I wish the djinn had . . . Whoa.” A swell lifted me ten feet into the air. My stomach felt as if it had just dropped to my knees. And then it happened again. Lightning spidered across the sky, sending shivers through me. A defunct rowboat was definitely not the place I most wanted to be during an electrical storm, but I was too far from shore to go back now. In fact, to my dismay, it occurred to me that I could no longer even see the shore. Or Shaw Island, for that matter. I couldn’t see anything at all except for the choppy, swooping waves that threatened to capsize my boat.
I pushed back my sopping hair and tried to wipe the rain out of my eyes. I’d been in worse storms in Florida, even a couple of hurricanes. Although, admittedly, I hadn’t been out on the ocean at the time.
Then it came. Lightning, filling the sky with blue light, and revealing Shaw Island off to the left. And one more thing, at my feet:
Water. Quite a bit of it, reaching to the top of my shoes.
Don’t panic, don’t panic . . .
I hadn’t thought to bring a bucket. Bringing in the oars so that they wouldn’t drift away, I got on my knees and started bailing water with my cupped hands until my arms felt as if they were falling off. In time, I saw that the bilge level was under control. I was reaching for the oars when I felt my wand slipping out of my sleeve. It fell somewhere on the rope-lined bottom. In the dark I felt around for it, but I couldn’t locate it.
Then, during the next illuminating lightning bolt, I saw that it had lodged in the space between two lengths of rope. As I stood up to retrieve it, the boat listed precariously on another swell, but I couldn’t risk losing my wand. So I lumbered forward and snatched it up while I was still certain where it was.
That was a mistake. As I was taking the two steps back to my original position behind the oars, another swell lifted the boat, tipping it dangerously at the height of the wave. Windmilling my arms to keep my balance, I couldn’t hold on to my wand. It flew out of my hand, tumbling just out of reach toward the sea.
“No!” I shrieked, lurching to grab it as it fell. All I managed to do as the wand vanished under the white-capped waves was to lose my balance. I reeled around for a moment as seawater sloshed over me, until my toe caught under a loose rope and I fell backward, screaming, my head smacking into the wooden stern with a crack.
It was the last thing I heard before I passed out.
Lady of Mercy
Save us from our madness
Let us see the truth
Of our sublime divinity
The voice was faint at first, singing through the thick silence of unconsciousness. Where . . . how . . . what . . . was I . . . am I . . .?
Questions I could not answer.
It took a long time for me to be able to open my eyes, as if there were silver weights on my eyelids. I awoke to a calm silver sea, blinding in its beauty. On it drifted my boat, or what had once been my boat, transformed now into a sleek silver fish complete with scales and a face on its bow like the serene visages on Chinese junks, meant to appease the water gods.
And I was not alone, although I wasn’t startled by her presence when I saw her: a beautiful young woman with skin the color of teak and long ropy hair tied at the top of her head so that it hung down her back like a corsair’s.
“Ola’ea,” I said.
“Shh.” She smiled at me through dark elongated eyes. “You must not be so loud here. Too much talk will deafen you to what you need to hear. Learn to be silent,” she said. “It will give you courage and power.”
“Okay.” I spoke as quietly as I could. “Ola’ea?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not dead, am I?”
“No, little one. You are resting.”
“Good.” I shook myself, trying to get rid of the leaden grogginess that weighed on me so heavily. “I need to reach Peter and Eric. I have to help them.”
“The Darkness is stronger than you. Stronger than almost everything.”
“I know.”
“So you cannot fight it and win.”
“I can try,” I said. I shifted in my seat. “Will you help me get to the island?”
“Henry Shaw’s island?”
“Yes. Where he died.”
“He did not die there.”
I blinked. “I thought he set himself on fire after being infected by the Darkness.”
“That was what he planned. But it was not a good plan. Death is never the answer. There was another way.”
“I knew it!”
“Quiet. You know nothing.”
“Sorry.”
“Still, you have not lost faith. That is why I am here. Your name is Serenity?”
“Katy.”
“Oh? Ashamed, or unsure?”
“Huh?”
“Are you ashamed of who you are, or do you still not know your true name?”
“My name is Katy,” I said truculently.
“Katy,” she repeated. “A safe, harmless, powerless name. Who wouldn’t love someone named Katy?”
�
�Ola’ea—”
“Shh.”
“It’s important.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to be loud.”
“What’s the other way to defeat the Darkness? The way you taught Henry Shaw?”
“I did not teach him anything. By the time I arrived on the island, Henry was already near death.”
“From burning?”
“From fear, I think. His heart had stopped. I brought him back to the Meadow.”
“And he walked into the fire there?”
“Not him. His wife, Zenobia, took his place.”
“What?” I was outraged. “She would do that for that . . . that creep?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps she knew that it was the Darkness perpetrating such evil, and not her husband.”
“But still. She didn’t have to die for him.”
“It was not her dying that saved Henry,” she said. “It was her willingness to die. A different thing entirely.”
I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but it didn’t seem to be worth pursuing. “Wait a second,” I said. “If Henry Shaw didn’t die on the island—if there was actually a ritual in the Meadow to get rid of the Darkness in him, and his wife Zenobia took his place in that ritual . . .”
“Yes?”
“Why isn’t there any record of that in the Great Book of Secrets?” I asked.
“Isn’t there?”
“No. There’s just the song about the sacred fire. Which is why they think burning people is a good idea.”
“Shocking. That isn’t even the song.”
“It isn’t?”
“It’s the spell. It must be spoken while the ‘Song of Unmaking’ is sung. Was that not clear?”
I sighed. “Not really.”
She shook her head. “I suppose I forgot to write that part down, then.”
“Forgot? You just forgot to write down something so important?”
“I was rather busy at the time.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said disgustedly.
“Transporting an entire village to another plane of existence is not an easy task, whatever you may think in your sixteen-year-old wisdom.”
“All right, all right.”
“Not to mention holding off the cowen lynch mobs.”
“Fine,” I said levelly. “I understand. You had your hands full.”
There was a long silence. “I suppose I should have written it down,” Ola’ea said finally.
“That’s okay.”
“I think perhaps that was a mistake.”
“Hey, I know all about that,” I said. “Sometimes I think making mistakes is my calling in life.”
She laughed. “You are kind,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“But loud.”
Deflated. “I guess.”
“If I could give you any gift, it would be the ability to listen.”
I swallowed. “I can listen,” I said quietly.
“Good. Practice. You will not be sorry.”
“Okay,” I said. I lay back in the boat. The sun felt warm on my eyelids. “So did things turn out okay for old Henry?”
“Oh, yes.”
“But his wife burned in the fire.”
“The sacred fire, yes.”
I sat up. “I’m sorry, but that’s just not cool. Mrs. Shaw didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Neither of them did anything wrong.”
“But . . . the Darkness . . .”
“There is always the Darkness. The magic lies in being able to walk through the Darkness without being changed by it.”
“Without . . . How is that possible?”
“By knowing who you are,” Ola’ea said.
“Did Henry Shaw know who he was?”
“He knew he was not the Darkness.”
I lay back again. “I’m tired,” I said.
“I will sing to you.” Ola’ea guided the boat toward a glowing shore.
Lady of Mercy
Save us from . . .
“. . . our madness,” I finished lazily. “The burning is the madness, isn’t it?”
“Bad mojo.”
“Is that a real word?”
“Not in my language.”
“And the song?”
“A translation.”
“It sounds familiar, though.”
She smiled. “Ah, you have listened. Do you see how valuable silence can be?”
Lady of Mercy
“Is that Olokun? The Lady of Mercy?”
“Olokun, Kwan Yin, Mary, Cybele, Nokomis, Isis, Astarte, Athena, Inanna, Freya, Lakshmi, Amaterasu. She is the Goddess, the Earth, the source of life. The name we use for her does not matter, if we know her true name. What is that name, Serenity?”
“Love,” I said.
“Very good. How do you feel?”
“I’m . . . let me see. I’m cold, I think.”
“Good. That means you are still alive. Tell me, why would you wish to be alive?”
“Because someone I love needs me,” I said.
Ola’ea sighed. “Then you have reached your destination.”
“The island? I’m there?”
“Remember the song.”
I sang.
Lady of Mercy
Save us from our madness
Oh, so cold.
Let us see the truth
Violent sensations: Horrible pain in my head. Thunder crashing. Rain hitting me like needles. Lightning turning the insides of my eyelids red.
Of our sublime divinity
And cold water, bucketsful.
I opened my eyes, screamed. The rowboat was half submerged, my body almost entirely underwater. When I scrambled to sit up, my foot broke through the rotten floorboards.
“Ola’ea!” I cried as more water gushed in. Memories, or fragments of memories, whizzed through my head. A silver boat, a black woman with hair like a corsair’s . . .
A swell picked up the sinking boat and shot it forward with me inside, still holding on to its sides. I forgot everything about my dream, if that was what it was. All I could think was that I was riding into doom.
Lady of Mercy
Lady of Mercy
Lady of Mercy
With a crash like the crack of a whip the boat collided with a boulder and broke apart, spilling me out along with the ropes and bilge water onto the rocky shallows.
For a while I just lay there, coughing, tasting the sand in my mouth. Lightning forked overhead, illuminating a strange horseshoe-shaped configuration in the distance.
Whitfield Bay.
I’d made it to the island.
Wincing, I got to my feet. Every part of me hurt. One knee and all my knuckles were scraped, and there was a lump the size of a lemon on the back of my head, but I wasn’t bleeding badly, and I didn’t think any bones were broken. My bare legs under my shorts were covered with goose bumps. I rubbed them to get the blood flowing into them again as I tried to figure out which direction I should take.
There was another flash of lightning, this time fainter and farther away. The storm was finally subsiding. I walked over to the remains of the rowboat. It was in pieces, splintered against an outcropping of big rocks. There was no water around it now, no shoreline for ten feet.
The tide was going out.
I listened. There were no cars on the island, no radios, TVs, computers, no artificial noise at all. The rain was milder now; I could even hear insects in the brush.
And then, with the intensity of a hundred bolts of lightning, a ball of red and yellow flames streaked across the sky and exploded into the trees on the interior of the island. The fourth harbinger, fire.
“Peter,” I whispered, already running.
The Darkness had come home.
CHAPTER
•
FORTY
TRUE NAME
The cabin was already burning when I reached it. Even in the dark I could see that part of the roof had collapsed and most of the windo
ws had blown out.
It was an odd sort of structure. When Peter had mentioned the family “cabin,” I figured that the Shaws’ idea of a cabin would be a lot different from mine. But this really was little more than a shack, and very, very old, too, judging from the thick, uneven stone walls and squat doorways.
I’d approached the building from the back, and walked around it carefully, feeling my way through the weeds that surrounded the house while trying to avoid the roof slates and broken glass that were still exploding all around me.
“Peter?” I called tentatively. I was sure he was here. I could feel his presence.
And I could feel something else, too.
“Eric?” I asked tentatively.
He was sitting in the crook between two big tree branches, his useless legs dangling like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Kaaay?” he croaked, lifting his arms.
I ran up to him. “Honey, it’s going to be all—”
He kicked me in the face. “Surprise!” He burst out laughing. “That was a pretty good imitation of the cretin, don’t you think? Kaaay?”
I rubbed my cheekbone where his sneaker had connected. It was in almost the same place I’d fallen in the Meadow. I’d have a black eye by tomorrow, for sure. On the bright side, though, it hadn’t been a very hard kick. Fortunately, as malevolent and powerful as the Darkness inside him was, it was still restricted by the frailty of Eric’s body. The blow hadn’t really hurt me. The only real pain was in losing Eric to the monster who had taken over his body and then wanted to destroy it.
“Oh, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t been a very gracious host. Let me kiss it and make it better.” He showed me his teeth, clacking them in a chomping motion.
“Where’s Peter?” I demanded. Eric’s gaze slid toward the burning building. As I rushed toward it, Peter emerged from the kitchen entrance, coughing and sweaty. His bare chest was smeared with soot. “Katy,” he said. His eyes looked infinitely sad. “Why did you come here?”
“Because I knew this was where you’d be,” I said.
He didn’t answer, just turned with his hands on his hips to stare at the blaze.
“Maybe I can help you put out the fire,” I suggested.
He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “I think it’s a lost cause. There were some extinguishers in the house, but they weren’t much use. I’ve just been clearing some of the brush away.”
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