An Inheritance of Ashes (19 page)

“Tyler—” I started, and he wrapped an arm across my shoulders and yanked me back
hard.

“Hey, what gives—!” I managed, falling against him, stumbling together.

The Twisted Thing materialized out of nowhere and flew, squawking, right past our noses.

I let out a squeak. Heron yelped and flung a rock at the fluttering sparrow wings. It missed by whole yards and splashed into the river. The bird cawed and sped away, wild, into the clouds.

“No way,” I managed, and shook myself free. “They can't just come from
nowhere.
”

“They aren't,” Tyler said, his eyes squinted against a light that wasn't there. He poked his shepherd's crook into the air, waving it like a dowser through that shimmer of heat. It wandered through the patch of sky just in front of us—

—and the knobbed wood smoked and vanished, inch by inch, into empty air.

“What the—” Heron muttered.

Tyler pulled the crook back, and it was six feet long again, the last foot a browned, sparking mess. “That's how he saw us last night, Hallie. Now it makes sense.”

“No, it doesn't,” I said, and my voice cracked. “What
is
that?”

“It's where the Twisted Things are coming from,” he said, struck with awe and terror. “It's a hole into the Wicked God's world.”

It was warmer in the smokehouse. Tyler held the door and scanned the empty fields as we scurried inside. “I'll find Nat. She needs to know about this,” he said. “Don't open up for anyone else.”

“Of course,” I answered irritably, and he shut Heron and me into the dark. I wedged the shovel across the jamb and rubbed my cold fingers together. The smokehouse didn't look familiar anymore; all its shapes had shifted in the weeks since Heron came. It was a wilderness of history—someone else's now, not mine.

Heron lit a twig off his battered striker and eased it into his cookpot. He fed the spark wood scraps until it smoked and glowed, until it flung the shadows of hand-carved cradles onto the walls. “God, I'm tired,” he said softly, as haggard as Tyler had been the night before.

“I brought you breakfast,” I said, useless, and fished the other half of Marthe's bean bun out of my pocket.

Nat and Tyler tapped on the door half an hour later, flushed with running, Nat's cheeks two bright round spots. “Did he tell you what happened?” I asked, and she fixed me with a furious glare.

“Yes,” she said, “which is good, because I spent all night looking through ditches for my brother's stupid corpse.”

I flinched. “I'm sorry.”

“You should be,” she shot back. “I can't
pretend
you came home last night, Ty. That was the worst thing you could've done to Mum, the absolute worst, and I wish to God anyone was trying to make this family work but me.”

Tyler looked up, suddenly dangerous. “You mean by trying to keep Mum off my back because I act
so insane
.”

Nat colored helplessly. “Tyler—”

“That was shit, Nat,” he said. “That was really shit.”

“Children,” Heron said with a hard intensity. “We just pushed a foot of wood into thin air.
Not now.
”

Tyler ducked his head. “Sir,” he said meekly. But his eyes found Nat's and promised:
This isn't over
.

Heron crouched in the smokehouse corner, his dirty hands over his cookpot fire. “That's the second time you've used that good eye of yours, Private. Is there anything we should know?”

Tyler slumped against the wall. And then his head came up, slow.

“Go on,” I said softly, and he cast me a bleak smile.

“I see things,” he said, defiant, and held up a hand to forestall whatever Nat might have said. “Since the battle. Since the God died and my eyes went all—” He shrugged. “I see Twisted Things and the world that opened up when John Balsam cut the Wicked God's heart.”

“What do you mean?” Nat asked, too fast.

Tyler flashed a sour grin. “As in: Am I acting
so insane
again?”

“Ty,” I said, awkward. The awful smile dropped off his face.

Heron watched Tyler with a naked, yearning fear. “You saw it. When the God went down: You saw the place on the other side of that knife cut. You saw the rain.”

Tyler blinked. “How close were you?”

The ghosts settled on Heron's face. “Close enough.”

“I saw it,” Tyler said, and looked down at his scraped hands. “I'm still seeing it. Those vines crawl across my ceiling every night.”

“Allah, Buddha, and Jesus,” Heron said softly, and I startled. I'd never, ever heard him swear.

The red spots were blanched clean from Nat's face. “Tyler—” she stammered, and rubbed her face with both hands. “That can't be. You can't be seeing another
world
.”

“Ask the uncles,” he said with a hard glitter in his eye. “Ask them about the time I stopped, three days out of John's Creek, and pointed to a Twisted Thing as tall as an oak tree, a growing, walking tree made out of dead deer horn. They'll tell you I was feverish. They couldn't see it. They still can't. We drove right through the thing, Nat. I thought it was going to touch me. I thought I was dead.”

He shuddered, and his smile—his smile could break hearts. “I saw its insides when we went through, you know. Its heart was an acorn, seeping blood. Its guts moved like grass snakes. It sat five feet behind us, poking its bone-roots into the ground and popping grubs into its awful white mouth.”

“That's real,” Heron whispered, a thousand miles away. “I saw one of those at John's Creek.”

“It's real,” Tyler said. “For weeks and weeks I thought I'd gone crazy, and then that Twisted Thing came through on the beach, and I figured it out: I see them, but they're not quite
here.
” He shrugged. “No one else sees them. No one else has
these eyes
. So I kept it to myself. So nobody else calls me
insane,
Nasturtium.”

Nat's mouth was open. Her hand crept out toward mine and caught it, all her rage forgotten. “I'm sorry. Tyler—oh, damn. I'm such an absolute shit.”

Tyler's eyes caught the place where my hand squeezed Nat's tight. “Apology accepted,” he said grimly. “And don't you
dare
tell Mum any of this.”

Nat's eyes went impossibly wide. “God, Tyler. I would never.”

“But you're saying,” Heron pushed on, “the place with the rain is real
too
.”

Tyler sagged against the wall and nodded. “It's where the Twisted Things live. It's their world, their home. It's just a little
off
from ours, I think, like a pair of shears that don't quite close. But they're closing now. I saw that spinner bird, this morning,
there,
” he said, and shaped its wing with his hands, “before it appeared on the beach, here. It came from that world to ours.”

“Through a hole,” Heron said hollowly. “Through that thin spot on the river.”

“Something's changed,” Tyler said, and turned his burnt walking stick end over end. “Something broke that hole between us and their home.”

Something,
I thought, and my whole body went cold. “Tyler. The man you saw. Marthe's ghost.”

“What man?” Nat snapped.

Tyler squinched his eyes shut. “Right. There's that too.”

“Tyler,” Nat said dangerously, and my patience for their sibling swordplay snapped.

“There's a man on the other side of the—whatever,” I said, and Tyler shot me a reproachful look. “Tyler saw him walk up the orchard road and over our hilltop last night. Right where we found the stone letters. And from what Ty said, he saw us
back.
”

“What?”
Nat managed.

“Marthe's ghost could be real,” I shoved out. “Whoever he is,
he
left us that message. And after what Marthe did, there'll be a reply.”

Heron leaned in, wildly intent. “What'd he look like?”

“Tall,” Tyler said reluctantly. “Thin as a corpse. The sleeves of his coat were all tattered, and his hat had a bowed brim.” He swallowed. “He looked lonely. He looked mad as hell.”

He looked like a veteran,
I filled in, sketching about the edges. Like a ripped-up scarecrow thing put hastily back together.

Tyler's eyes were abruptly young again: the Tyler Blakely who'd sucked in a breath to steady his nerves before he kissed me. “I stayed on your parlor couch all night in case he came back. I had this hope I'd get a good look at his face.”

“About that,” I said quietly. “My sister noticed.”

“Oh, great.”

Nat sagged against the cedar chest. “
Mum
noticed. I have no idea what to tell her.”

“And I have no idea what to tell Lieutenant Jackson,” I added. “They're looking around the property. They'll find that pile of bodies on the shore.”

We lapsed into silence: ceded the room to the twig-fire, the squeak of my stool, Heron's labored breath, to imagining army camps in the broken barley.

“How do we fix this?” I asked Heron. “We got the knife away. The Twisted Things aren't even
interested
in that knife. So how do we make this all
stop?
”

Heron knotted his hands in his long, dark hair. “I
don't know,
all right?” he said, and his fists tightened. “Why does everyone think I have all the answers?”

“You're the man with John Balsam's knife,” Nat said.

“So what? I'm not a
god,
” he snarled. He scrubbed his eyes; scratched his arms with the bitten-down nails of that broken hand. “I don't know how this works. I've dodged Twisted Things everywhere I've gone since John's Creek. So fine, they don't want the knife; they don't go near it. They want
something.
They fall out of the sky after me, and I
don't know how to make it stop.
”

Nat quirked an eyebrow mildly. “Get over yourself.”

Heron's chin jerked up.

“They're not after
you,
” she said, January-cold. “Tyler told me Ada Chandler's pet lizards turned to dust inside two weeks' time. If the Wicked God's minions were picking holes in reality just to find
you,
they'd be everywhere from here to John's Creek. You'd be dead already. Quit pouting and work on a
solution.
”

Heron's mouth opened and then hung.
Harsh,
I thought, with a dark satisfaction. This wasn't even Heron's farm. He wasn't even the one with the most to lose.

“If anyone knows how to fix this,” Tyler offered, tentative, “it might
be
Ada Chandler.”

Nat's eyebrows skyrocketed.

“She's studying Twisted Things,” he said, speculative, “just like the Chandlers study the ruins. Ada probably knows more about Twisted Things by now than anyone. If anyone in fifty miles knows about their world and how to close up that hole, it'll be her.”

“Even if she doesn't,” Nat said—Nat, who'd never really even
liked
Ada Chandler—“you're right, she'll go find out. She never wants to do anything except pin bugs to boards or pick through old-cities houses for salvage. Ada
hates
not knowing things.”

“All right,” I said, curling my fists around my shirt hem just to feel like I had hold of
something.
“We get Ada. We tell her everything. And we hope to God she can use it to figure out how to close that hole and lock the Twisted Things on the other side.”

Heron looked anxiously at the shovel barring the door. “You said you'd keep my secret.”

I stood and faced him full. “There are Twisted Things pouring onto my riverbank, soldiers touching every inch of my farm, and my sister thinks you betrayed us and skipped town northward. Telling Ada Chandler about that knife is the
last
thing likely to get you killed right now.”

Heron bowed his head. I could see it running through him:
I should have never left home.

“Well, you did, and now we've got to deal with it,” I said softly, and the gaze he turned up at me was hooded with regret.

“I'll go to the Chandlers, then,” Tyler said. “Now. We can't afford to wait.”

Heron's eyes shut, exhausted. “Where do I stay?” Now I knew what he was picturing when he closed his eyes: a cheesemaker's shop in a small town in the woods, where everyone spoke with his short and lilting grace.

“Not the hayloft,” Nat put in, and I gave her a filthy look.

I looked around at old desks and cradles, the shattered settee. “Here,” I said. “They've already been through the place, and everything here's broken. Nobody really
looks
for anything in here.”

Heron examined the endlessly branching trails I'd made when I was a child. “I'll find a spot,” he said softly, and wove into the ruins.

Nat cautiously unbarred the door, and we followed her like ducklings into the cloudy morning. The bar scraped back into place the moment the door shut.

“What do I tell Mum?” Nat asked.

Tyler huffed a cloudy breath. “Don't. I'll deal with it myself.”

Nat's baleful stare turned wounded for just a moment. “I'll find the lieutenant, then,” she said, and stomped toward the fenceline.

“She's mad at us,” I said when she was far enough away. “I didn't think she'd be mad.”

I rubbed my bad hand fretfully. Ty snorted, and folded it into his; tucked them both into his warmly lined pocket. “Nat's had a bad summer.”

Carrying Lakewood Farm. Tyler's leg. Her uncles. Her father. None of us had had a good summer at all.

“You okay?” Tyler asked.
No,
I thought.
Yes. No.
I shook my head, once. I was not okay.