Legacy (39 page)

“Forget about the bird,” Peter said. “Katy, try to find something we can tie Eric onto my back with. He may not be able to hold on—” His mouth stopped moving. He was watching the eagle, lying lifeless in the dirt.

In the starless night, it was hard to see clearly, but there was no mistake about it: Its wings were twitching.

“Wind,” I said.

Eric screeched with delight as the big bird slowly pulled
itself upright, adjusting its feathers, shaking its head, scratching the ground with its yellow talons.

Peter sucked in his breath. “That’s not wind.”

The eagle flapped its wings experimentally. Then, with a final glance toward us, it took off in a long, low arc before soaring to the tops of the distant trees.

Gooseflesh covered my arms. “That bird was dead,” I said.

“Obviously it wasn’t.”

Eric clapped his hands. “Buh.”

I felt my eyes filling. The eagle had been resurrected by some force beyond my reckoning.

Maybe it was watching over us, too.

One thing I knew, though: Peter wasn’t going to die alone. If it came to that—and it probably would—all it would take would be for me to step into the fire with him.

Overhead, the eagle curved in a big loop before disappearing into the sky.
Good-bye,
I thought.

Every day, it seemed, brought another good-bye.

The shore bordering Shaw Island was a surreal landscape of utter desolation. Gravity had transformed what had been Whitfield Bay only a few hours before into a vast expanse of slimy mud dotted with debris.

The storm had diminished to a cold drizzle. Intermittently, the moon shone through the thick clouds hanging over the night sky to reveal a blanket of discarded objects jutting starkly out of the wasteland. My wrecked boat, resembling the bones of some long-dead sea monster, lay in splinters against the rocks that had destroyed it.

“It’s a long way,” I said, following Peter into the mud.

“You don’t have to go,” he reminded me for the fiftieth time. “When I reach your aunt Agnes, she can—”

“I’m coming with you,” I groused, also for the fiftieth time. “I just wish I hadn’t lost my wand.”

“Can it make you fly?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then even if you had it, we’d still be standing here up to our asses in mud, wouldn’t we?” he said irritably.

My sneakers made a squishy, sucking sound with every step I took. With the additional weight he was carrying, Peter was sinking up to his ankles already. He adjusted Eric on his back—we’d strapped him in place with a network of sticky vines from the island so that he wouldn’t fall if he happened to let go of Peter.

“Are you hanging on tight, little brother?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Tiii,” Eric answered happily, wrapping his arms closely around Peter’s neck.

“Good job. Should we go faster?”

“Go!” Eric shouted, giggling.

“Katy?”

“I’m coming.” I was not nearly as cheerful about the prospect as Eric was.

“Got your weapon?”

“Commando One, affirmative,” I said, feeling the object in the pocket of my shorts. The “weapon” was actually a vegetable peeler we’d found in the kitchen of the burned cabin. Peter’s was a little better, an actual paring knife with a blade about as sharp as the edge of a Frisbee. The sole reason for carrying them at all was so we could cut the vines holding Eric in case something went wrong.

“But only cut if they’re strangling him,” Peter had said. “We can’t afford to lose him out in the bay.”

My shoes were filled with gritty slime. I couldn’t see where I was going. Then, to make things even worse, the rain was beginning to pick up again. As I wiped it out of my eyes, my
fingers strayed to my cheek, where the Darkness had slashed it.

It was still gaping, probably hanging open like a pocket by now. I knew I’d never look the same. Hell, who was I kidding?—how I looked was the least of my problems. I’d be lucky if I didn’t die of infection—assuming I failed in my plan to burn at the stake.

But all that was beside the point at the moment. All that mattered now, all we could afford to think about, was that somehow we had to get through this muck to the other side. Whatever happened after that was a universe away.

By the time we were halfway across the bay, the rain was pouring again, coating the sticky mud flat with a filthy soup that skimmed across the surface and washed over us on its way to the ocean. We’d sunk nearly to our knees, and every step had become a monumental effort. Occasionally there would be outcroppings of rock sticking out above the surface where we could pull our legs out of the mud—literally pull them, with our hands—and rest for a few minutes. But mostly it was just a slow, heavy slog in the dark, with only the intermittent light of the moon to tell us we were going in the right direction.

“How much farther do you think it is?” I panted, trying to step as high as I could. My shoes were long gone by then, sucked into the mud so that everything I stepped on came into direct contact with my skin. There were a lot of slippery, squishy things I felt that I was just as happy not having to look at. Once in a while I came across things that hurt. I just tried not to think about those.

“It’s not more than half a mile,” Peter answered.

“Do you have your shoes?”

“I have one left,” he said. “High tops. Harder to lose.”

The crud was nearly hip deep on me now, and the rain was coming down harder. “We need oars or something,” I said.

“Oars?”

“Or poles. Something to push us along through this muck.”

“So? You’re the one with the magic,” he said. “Make it happen.”

“You know perfectly well what I can do and what I can’t,” I said. To tell the truth, I was beginning to get tired of Peter’s anti-magic attitude. I mean, if help is available, why not use it? “Oars!” I commanded defiantly, holding out my hands in expectation. “Oars,” I said again.

Nothing. “Er . . . Poles.”

I didn’t know whether it was because the mud was so thick that even magic couldn’t pull anything out of it, or because using a wand had weakened my ability to perform without one, but whatever the reason, nothing happened.

Nothing. If crickets could have lived out here, they’d have been chirping.

“Wand,” I said quietly, a little embarrassed. I looked out the corner of my eye. Peter was smiling. “Well, you’ve got to admit, it would help to have one right about now, wouldn’t it?” I pressed.

He turned toward me. “Of course it would help,” he said gently. “There’s not a single day that I don’t wish I had your gifts, Katy.”

“I thought you saw the need for magic as a weakness.”

“Only for people who don’t have it,” he said. “I just don’t want to be the guy who spends his life wishing he was somebody else. I’m not one of you, Katy. I don’t have any special talents.
I’m not a genius at anything, and I’ve always had to work harder than everyone else to get the same results.”

It was awkward. What he said may have been true. It had just never mattered to me, so I assumed it hadn’t mattered to him. “Maybe you’ll find a special gift later,” I said lamely. “People do, sometimes.”

“And sometimes there just is no magic,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other.” He hitched Eric higher on his back and walked on. “Hey, go ahead and summon your wand,” he shouted over his shoulder. “You probably just weren’t loud enough the first time.”

“Okay.” I could feel myself blushing. Still, I knew it would make things a lot easier to have a little magic on our side. “Wand!” I called, as loud as I could.

Nothing.

Again: “Wand!”

All I heard was the sound of rain falling. Rain, and the whoosh of a rising wind.

“Wand! Wand!” I felt tears in my eyes. “Wand . . .”

With deliberate slowness, Peter squelched back through the mud to put his arm around me. “The only trouble with magic,” he said softly, “is that you can’t always count on it.”

I wiped my eyes. My dirty hands filled them with grit. “I guess there isn’t anything you can really count on,” I said.

“Yes, there is,” came a voice out of the night, slow and sinister. It gave me chills. “You can count on me.”

“Peter, was that . . .”

A cold wind picked up, pelting us with rain. Water sprayed into my eyes and nose and mouth. It was hard to breathe. I staggered against the weight of the moving air.

“Did you really believe I’d allow you to destroy me?” The voice was louder now, recognizable. As the thunder crashed around us, I looked into Eric’s now-animated face. He was smiling the empty, soulless grin of a death’s head.

“Frankly, I’ve always felt that three was an unlucky number. One of us doesn’t belong here. Does she?”

My blood ran cold.

“How’s your belly, dearie?” it asked smoothly.

I doubled over. A sensation like being impaled by a hundred poisoned arrows shot through me. Peter tried to elbow Eric, but I grabbed his arm. “Don’t,” I warned. I could hear how shaky my voice sounded. “He’s . . . he’s using me to get to you. He’s . . .”

The pain knifed through me again. I threw up, staggered a few steps, then fell face-first into the mud. Black slime oozed into my nose and mouth, and I could taste the briny paste of decayed fish that made up the soil of the seabed. The cut on my cheek filled, pulling the skin under my eye downward.

“Take my hand,” Peter said. I tried, but it seemed like every effort I made to extract myself pulled me in deeper. The mud was like quicksand, sucking me under as I struggled to keep breathing.

“Let her go,” Eric said. “She can’t make it to shore, in any case. Better not waste your strength, Peter.”

“Shut
up
!” Peter roared.

“Make me.” With that, all manner of debris that had been buried in the seabed flew up into the air—rusted nails, sharp broken shells, splintered pieces of wood—and rained down on me. With a scream I tried to roll out of the path of shrapnel, but every object was trained on me. My hands, which I’d used
to protect my face, were cut to ribbons. Then, one by one, I felt my organs puncture: my lungs, my stomach, my kidneys.

“Katy!” Peter lunged toward me, He reached me just as the assault ended. He was crying. He tried to touch me, but I guess there wasn’t much left of me that was whole. My face was cut open with a gash that would probably take my whole eye out. My hands, both of them now, were useless. My body . . . well, let’s just say that the way it looked, which must have been pretty scary, didn’t begin to reveal the extent of the damage.

I tasted blood. I spat. It gushed out of me as if there were a faucet in my mouth. I don’t think I’d ever seen so much blood come out of one place.

Eric blinked sleepily, exhausted from his exertion. There was no one but Eric inside him now, at least for the moment. No Darkness.

No more magic.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Peter. He was kneeling beside me, and had to lean down to hear what I was saying. It was still raining hard, but I could barely feel it. All I was aware of was a creeping kind of cold. Not a bad sensation, really, sort of like a fog making its way from my hands and feet toward the middle of my body. “I can’t seem to move much just now.”

“Take it easy,” Peter said. He lifted up my head and kissed my mouth. His lips were soft and warm. If I had to die, I thought, I was glad it was with the taste of Peter’s kiss on my lips.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know.” I smiled. “Go ahead,” I said. It was easy now. Everything was becoming easy. “I’ll catch up.”

I meant that to be funny, in a grotesque sort of way, but I
don’t think Peter got the joke. He’d always said that my sense of humor was weird.

“Peter . . .” I began, but then I couldn’t remember what I was going to say. I could feel myself shutting down. Slowly, gently. Easily.

“Don’t you dare,” he rasped. “Don’t you dare leave me, Katy.” He stood up and adjusted Eric on his back. Then, bending his legs, he picked me up and began to walk.

One step, two. Every movement, every instant, was an agony for me. I screamed at first, but even that took too much effort. After a while all I could do was lie back while Peter walked with me in his arms and Eric on his back. Three steps. Four. One foot in front of the other.

My head lolled backward. I had nothing left. Neither did Peter, but he went on anyway.

Five, six, seven . . .

Sometimes there is no magic.

Eight . . . nine . . .

“You see?”

“See what?” The light was blinding bright, golden and welcoming. I tried to shield my eyes, but someone was holding my hand. “Ola’ea?”

“Welcome, my beauty!”

I could see her now. Her hair was white, loose, long.

“Where are we going?” I asked, squinting into the light.

“Why, anywhere you like!”

My heart sank. “I’m dead, then,” I said.

“You are with me. Think of it that way.”

As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I saw a crowd of people gathered below us. “This is the Meadow,” I said.

Just about every witch in Old Town was there: Dr. Baddely, Mrs. Thwacket, and Mr. Midgen, the school custodian, were all present. Jonathan Carr was standing with his arm around Aunt Agnes. Gram was with the hospital volunteers. Mr. Haversall and Dingo were walking around the perimeter, near Miss P and
Hattie. They were all holding candles. On the other side of the botte, which was still open, stood Livia and Becca Fowler and Mrs. Fowler’s followers, grim-faced and eager for bloodletting.

“What are they doing here?” I asked.

“They are waiting for you. They believe they are going to burn the Darkness out of Whitfield.”

“All they’re going to do is kill Eric,” I said dispiritedly. “And probably Peter, too.”

“What can I say? They do not know the right song.”

I whirled around to face her. “Whose fault is that?” I almost shouted. “You’re the one who wrote that stupid spell in the first place. How’d you expect anyone to know what to do with it? You didn’t even include the real words!”