by N. D. Wilson
Dedication
This book is for mi Marisol, sunny seas indeed
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1. Strange Fire
2. The First Shadow
3. Services Required
4. The Vulture’s Heir
5. The First Flight
6. First Blood
7. Young and Old
8. Family Will Out
9. Bait
10. Gathering
11. The Night of Sorrows
12. Grievous Meeting
13. A Stitch in Time
14. A Death Well Died
Epilogue
Gratitude
About the Author
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
DEATH IS A DEPARTURE. A ROOM LEFT EMPTY. A DREAM dreamed and vanishing. Breath rising on a cold night and disappearing beneath unseeing stars. Death is you, moving on. From this moment. From this day. From this body. From this room to that one. From one riverbank to the other.
Death is a kind of birth. Into another place. Another when. Another you. For those outlaws who leap the boundaries of time, it is the same and, yet, not. One you meets another you, and for a moment, you stand looking into your own eyes. But one of you will depart into the other. The weaker body crumbles, vacant. The stronger body receives and lives on. It is the way of all things living within time . . . even the outlaws. Your soul cannot dwell within two bodies in the same moment and in the same space. One body—one room—must be left empty.
1
Strange Fire
SINCE YESTERDAY, THE WORLD HAD BEEN ENDING. ALEX WAS sure of it.
After his mother had gone to bed, his father had fallen asleep, slumping over his typewriter at the kitchen table. As far back as Alex had memories, such a thing had never happened. Alex had been drifting off to the clack and ding of the old machine for the entirety of his life, and he had often woken to it as well, morning light spilling in through his high bedroom window and across his bunk to the tune of his father’s percussion, punching ink through ribbon and onto scrolling paper. Those finger-fired hammers marched through countless nights, commanding stories into existence, marking every moment of Alex’s dreams. Even in the big old house, when his father still had money from his writing, and his older sisters lived at home, from two floors down, the faint sounds of the dancing steel alphabet had punctuated the uneasy creak and sigh of night noises. But now, in the little single-story mustard-colored duplex that shared a wall with a Korean family of three, the sound traveled down one short hallway and filled Alex’s room completely, amplified by his lightweight, hollow door.
Which is why, when the typing stopped, so did Alex’s dreams. His eyes jumped open and he was suddenly sitting up in bed. One glance out the window from his bunk and he knew that morning was still hours away. The quiet glow of winter midnight filled Alex’s room, and he recognized every shape and shadow on his floor—his shoes, his basketball, his tipped-over laundry hamper. Darkness wasn’t possible with smooth blankets of snow on every horizontal surface, and jagged rime frost armoring every pole and wire and fence post. Light, any light, bounced and bounced and lived on in such a white winter, but it also arrived in stillness, with none of the traffic and chatter of day.
Alex swung his bare feet over the side of his bunk, and static sparks snapped and popped in the sweatpants he had worn to bed. The elastic hems slid up over his calves and stuck beneath his knees as he dropped onto what, in daylight, would have been his worn and matted pea-green carpet. By night, the color was slate gray, like concrete. The worn plastic feel under his toes was just the same.
Shirtless, Alex slipped out into the hall and blinked at the harshness of the kitchen light. The air was cold. Too cold. And he could see his father’s back, rounded forward, his right arm dangling awkwardly by his chair.
“Dad?” Alex attempted a half whisper, but the word caught in his throat. Shivering, he moved forward, rolling his shoulders as prickles erupted up his spine. The muscles in his chest and arms trembled beneath his skin.
Pausing in the mouth of the hall, Alex took in the strange scene. To his left, the small living room. Couches his mother had partially reupholstered, bookshelves, old TV, and a straggly long-needled Christmas tree—dense with homemade ornaments, fat colored lights glowing. To his right, the tiny dining room and kitchen—four chairs, round table, sewing machine and stool, typewriter, and his unconscious father.
The front door was gaping wide open. From outside, a trail of snowy footprints marched across the brown-bronze carpet, past the saggy couches and the tree and the old TV with the bent antenna, arriving in the kitchen, beside the table where his father’s curly head rested on the keys of his typewriter. The snow tracks were oozing small puddles on the linoleum by his father’s chair, but they still hadn’t completely melted. The snowy feet hadn’t been gone long.
With his eyes on the front door, Alex moved quickly to his father. There was no paper in the typewriter and not a single sheet on the little table, where his father usually stacked the finished pages as he worked. His freckled left arm was stretched out on the table, palm up, callused fingers curled in. His sleeve was bunched around his upper arm and a stripe of blood ran down from the soft skin inside his elbow into a dark pool the size of a half dollar on the table top. Still sticky. Not scabbed.
“Dad,” Alex said again, and this time he rested a palm on his father’s back. Ribs rose against Alex’s touch as his father’s lungs expanded. Not dead.
Alex’s relief didn’t last long. The tracks, the blood, the missing pages. He couldn’t leave the front door open and just go back to bed.
Up on his toes, avoiding the snow prints with his bare feet, he hopped quickly to the door, ready to slam it tight and throw the lock.
But he didn’t.
Burnt and burning pages were scattered across the yard, marring the perfect whiteness of the snow with black, fluttering char and uneven orange. The fiery pages hissed and popped on the snow, and the icy air smelled oddly like bacon. Flames danced at their own funerals, shrinking as the pages did, and as the melting snow doused them.
Alex forgot to shiver. He forgot all about his chill-tightened skin and his bare feet, and he stepped outside onto an icy concrete step. The flames dotted across the yard were dwarfed by the aurora in the sky.
Blue and green fire pulsed across the winter stars, streaming down like impossible burning waterfalls while seething eruptions of the same strange light leapt up to meet them.
The streaking cosmic fire formed a flickering tunnel above Alex, a tunnel above the entire world, and for the first time Alex felt that what his teachers had told him in school might be true. He was standing on a sphere hurtling among the stars. He was glimpsing the flaming track, the fiery railroad of planets, and it was dancing and leaping to music that he could not hear and a beat he could not catch, at speeds he could not comprehend.
Snow squeaked beneath a boot behind him, but before he could turn a thick arm slid around his throat. Strong fingers gripped the back of his head, and all around him, the snow, the sky, the crazy cosmos vanished.
Two men stood in front of a small duplex with an open front door. One was tall and lean with short white hair. One was thick and bald. A barefoot boy slumped unconscious on the icy sidewalk at their feet. Fragments of burning pages tumbled across the snow.
“We should have read it all first,” the lean man said. “And burned it later.”
“There is no later,” said the bald man. “We read enough. It was a message. To someone. Reading. Sometime. About our mistress’s plans.” He looked up suddenly, as
if startled by the wintry sky. “Quickly, now. Before the birds return.”
ALEX JERKED AND BLINKED, SHIVERING. BUT THE CHILLS weren’t real. He was warm. In his bunk. Bright morning was spraying in the window, lighting up his untidy desk, strewn with pencils and crumpled sketches, his pea-green carpet, his tipped-over hamper, the tattered poster of the one great player on his favorite football team. He heard toast spring and bacon hiss and pop. His parents were laughing quietly, talking in the low voices they always used when they were trying not to wake him.
The strange events of the night before didn’t feel at all like a dream, but he had no memory of returning to bed, or even to the house. Moments ago, he had been standing outside watching burning pages flutter across the snow and green and fiery northern lights fall from the sky, and then the sudden grip on his throat. That was it. Next stop, right now. Normal. But his body was hanging on to the dream—the smoky smell of burnt paper, the icy-cold concrete beneath his feet. . . .
Alex jerked his blankets off, swung his legs over the side of his bunk, and sat up, hunching slightly to keep his head clear of the low ceiling and the sharp, tiny stalactites of plaster that had been dotted with gold glitter for some inexplicable reason.
The entire sky had been full of strange fire.
Alex pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He could still see the falling light with his eyes shut. Could a dream give you afterimages, like staring at the sun? Maybe. Shifting his fingers to his scalp, he attacked his thick black hair, loosening up his bed head and his mind along with it.
The real world was right in front of him, all in order and right where he’d left it when he’d gone to sleep. His life.
The bedroom was small and every inch was worn, from the carpet in the corners to the hollow closet doors that were losing their stain. When the duplex had been built in the 1960s, the builders clearly hadn’t been thinking long term. The interior walls wobbled when Alex pushed on them, and drafts of cold air poured in around the outlets on the exterior wall and in the exterior corner behind his bookshelf. Layers of frozen condensation had built up knobby ice knuckles on the inside of his metal window frame, and the sill was constantly damp beneath it.
Alex had few possessions, and as a result, he cared about all of them, even the ones that he had outgrown years ago. His bear, his small stuffed rhino with wings, and his stick horse (a brown velvet head his mother had sewn onto an old hockey stick) all lived on the bunk below him with a homemade (ripped) dragon, a lopsided one-eyed killer whale, and a one-eyed shark puppet. Both eyes had been lost battling his older sisters in pillow wars in the old house. Since the whale was as heavy as a sandbag, and the shark puppet was just a plush boxing glove, his sisters had banned both weapons as entirely unethical. But when attacked or tickled, Alex had used them without apology and to great effect. A dozen surviving army men (some with bullet holes created by match-heated needles) were arranged in gruesome defeat on a small hanging shelf next to an old paint can full of mismatched yard-sale Lego pieces. They hadn’t been touched in years.
The desk was where Alex spent his time, with a shelf wedged in beside it. Above the desk, hanging on a nail, he kept a four-year-old calendar from 1978, each month adorned with a vivid painting of hobbits or orcs or elves. It was little use in tracking days through 1982, but it took him to different worlds and times whenever he sat beneath it with a pencil in his hand. He switched months at least once a week.
The top half of the bookshelf held his most-visited volumes—three westerns, four sci-fi epics, two spy novels, and a stack of Sam Miracle comics, all authored by his father, along with a fraying Narnia box set, The Hobbit, and a paperback set of the Lord of the Rings books with yellowing pages that smelled—Alex was sure—exactly like Middle-earth. That trilogy was stored next to a thick, sacred bundle of typed pages bound in unlabeled blue. Written for Alex and Alex alone, it was the tale of a boy (who shared his name) questing through dozens of mysterious portals alongside a cast of young characters and heroes who were all far cooler than he was. Those characters had become Alex’s closest friends in the world—real or imagined. His father had written it for him, and it was the only copy in existence. Alex had read it at least twenty times, and he loved it with a fiery but regretful love. He wished that his father hadn’t made the main character so completely like him. It was embarrassing, even reading it alone. When fictional Alex stood next to the other boys—Cyrus, Henry, Tom, Charlie, Cotton, Zeke, Howard, Sam Miracle—he seemed so pathetic. He couldn’t fly a plane or throw fireballs. He’d never discovered ancient treasures or battled swamp monsters or faced a soul-sucking witch with nothing but a baseball bat. He definitely didn’t have rattlesnakes in his arms like Sam, and he couldn’t imagine stepping through time. In his dad’s pages, he was just Alex with the dark hair and the slow smile, Alex who always asked the obvious questions and worried about every possible disaster. And next to the girls in those pages, Alex felt even worse about his character. They were fearless adventurers, time-walkers, and legends. And not one of them ever seemed impressed by fictional him.
He wished his father would write him a sequel, but he also wished that his father would make his character cooler. He would have asked . . . if such a request hadn’t been so awkward.
Alex slid down to his floor and grabbed his Star Wars T-shirt from the hamper pile, pulling it on as he staggered into the hall. At thirteen, he no longer cared to breakfast shirtless.
At first, his parents didn’t notice him. They were side by side in the tiny kitchen, heads down and hands busy. His father was scraping butter onto his mother’s homemade seedy bread, and his mother was scrambling eggs and hash browns and peppers and cheese all together in a frying pan. Bacon was already on the table, cooling on a plate beside his father’s typewriter . . . and a towering stack of finished pages that had obviously not been burned in the front yard the night before.
“Does it feel accurate?” his mother asked.
“Doesn’t matter how it feels,” his father said. “It’s everything they told me and everything I remember. I’m finished. I’m not touching it again unless I have to. I’m moving on. If they don’t like it, they can come return from wherever they vanished to and give me some more details.”
Alex plucked the thickest bacon strip off the plate and folded it into his mouth.
“Finished what?” Alex looked at the stack of pages. “A new book? Can I read it?”
“Good morning, Alexander,” his mother said, smiling. “I hope you slept up an appetite. Grab a plate.”
Alex lifted up the top page, reading the title aloud. “The Song of Glory and Ghost. Is it spooky?”
“In some ways,” his father said. “And I’m sorry, you can’t read it. Not yet, anyway.”
“But you just said you were finished,” Alex said. He thumb flipped the stack open and a single typed name jumped out at him from the middle of a sentence.
Sam Miracle
“Dad! Sam? Seriously?” Alex grabbed the heavy stack up off the table. “You have to let me read it now!”
Jude tugged the pages out of Alex’s hands. Alex stepped back, startled, looking straight into his father’s gray-green eyes. Normally bright with laughter and suited to the sharpness of his face, they were instead saddled with dark weariness. His curly hair was still wild from the night before.
And then Jude Monroe stepped around his son and disappeared down the hallway toward his bedroom.
Alex looked at his mother. “I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a Christmas present or something? Did I just ruin it?”
Millie Monroe shook her head, her mouth tight, and her eyes uneasy. Her long blond hair, almost always kept in a thick braid, had only just begun showing strands of snow among the gold, and her strong, veined hands, always flushed from kitchen work, were sprouting creases faster than the corners of her eyes.
“Mom?” Alex asked again. “Did I ruin something?”
“No, honey,” she said. “It’s just something hard
your father has been working on for a long, long time. Something he has to do, not something he wants to do for fun. Some of the things your father writes are made up. And some are more like . . . messages and lessons and predictions from very particular people in the future, for very particular people in the future.” Done waiting for her son to bring her a plate, Millie pulled one out of a cupboard and scooped a mound of steaming goodness onto it.
“I don’t understand,” Alex said. “Messages? If it’s about Sam . . .”
“You don’t need to understand,” said Millie, handing him the heavy plate. “Not yet. But you need to eat.”
“You can read it,” Jude said, reentering the dining room and dropping into the chair behind his typewriter. “But not for a long while yet. Not until I’m sure no one has changed anything and the story is done shifting. I’ll get you something else from the library if you’ve run out.”
“I’m always out,” Alex said, poking his eggs. “Tolkien is dead.”
Jude laughed. Millie smiled, but not a smile of understanding, more a smile of gratitude that the conversation was moving on. Alex knew she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to read about orcs and goblins and imaginary hard things when so many real hard things were readily available for the doing. Sometimes he wondered what she thought of his father’s books . . . if she liked them as much she liked cooking. No, that wasn’t fair, not even close. She didn’t like anything as much as she liked cooking. Except for her people . . . and she even seemed to like them best when they were hungry.
Alex sure didn’t mind. He had seen the contents of his classmates’ sack lunches. He’d eaten at their houses, and he knew that his mother was unique among women. He couldn’t remember the last time there wasn’t a fruit pie in the fridge, and his mother would have died before using factory-made bread from a plastic sack, or paying some company for jammed raspberries when she could jam her own and beat the store-bought flavor silly.
