Someplace to Be Flying (56 page)

The next oldest after Dominique was Tatiana Morgan, Idonia’s sister. She’d been living in Mexico when Jack Daw decimated her family in Freakwater Hollow. Self-exiled at the time from the endless feuding between cuckoo and crow, the slaughter had brought her back into the conflict with a hatred for the corbæ that rivaled Dominique’s.

“Well?” Tatiana said, stirring impatiently. “What’re we waiting for?”

Dominique kept her gaze on the chalice. There was something odd about it. When she looked at it from a certain angle, the figure inside appeared to double.

“There is a problem,” she said.

She was only half paying attention to Tatiana. The chalice and its contents mesmerized her. The way the light from the window played on the facets of the crystal created a gleaming pattern that almost seemed to shape pictographs. And then there was the puzzle of the figurine inside, solitary from one angle, doubled from another.

“Cody claims the world won’t survive without the firstborn corbæ in it,” Auguste explained when his sister didn’t elaborate.

“Bullshit,” Tatiana said. “Where’d he get that idea? From one of Jack’s stories?”

Dominique finally looked up. “He didn’t say.”

“But you’re still buying into it?”

“It seems worth considering,” Dominique told her.

Tatiana shook her head. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing here.” She looked around the room. “If the corbæ are so powerful why’s Raven spent the last sixty years sleeping like some fat hog in its trough? Why does Jack live like a bum in an old school bus in the Tombs? And the crow girls … weeping Jesus. If they had anything to do with the making of the world it’d be a circus fun house with every street a carnival ride and jelly beans growing from the trees.”

A murmur went through the room, heads nodding. Tatiana appeared to take it as a general agreement that she remain their spokesperson. She turned back to Dominique.

“If you don’t have the balls to get this show going,” she said, “pass that crystal spittoon over to me and tell me what to do with it.”

“Be careful you don’t overstep the bounds of my patience,” Dominique told her.

For a moment it seemed that Tatiana would continue the argument. Dominique met her gaze steadily until Tatiana had to look away.

“So,” Dominique said. “Tatiana has been kind enough to share her views on the matter with us, but what of the rest of you? Do we proceed?”

She looked at them one by one, holding their gaze until each of them had nodded in agreement. A moment’s silence followed, then Auguste cleared his throat. Dominique gave him her attention.

“Without Cody … ,” he began.

“Yes?”

“It’s just, I was under the impression that he was the only one who knew how to operate that … that …”-Auguste waved a hand toward the chalice-“device.”

Dominique smiled. Device. That was an eloquent description.

“Cody told me all I needed to know before he made himself redundant,” she told her brother.

It wasn’t entirely true, but Dominique’s pride wouldn’t let her admit that she’d allowed Cody to simply walk out, unharmed, the working of Raven’s pot unexplained. No, that wasn’t entirely true.

There’s one thing you have to know about the pot, darling. Everybody’s got to figure out on their own how it can work for them.

Fair enough, she thought. How difficult could it be? She was sure she knew the basics from the stories. What it seemed to boil down to was that one had to be utterly focused on what one desired. And then one stirred.

Stirred what, she wasn’t entirely certain. The air inside the pot? And what did one stir with? Presumably one’s hand-if something Cody had told her when they first embarked upon this partnership was anything to go by. She could call up his voice without needing to try very hard:

“So there I was, darling,” he’d told her after his last botched attempt to use the pot. “Up to my elbows in the primordial goo, and then I don’t know what it was. Maybe a skitter flew up my nose, or maybe it flew into my ear, but all of a sudden I’ve got this humming in my head, like a wind coming down off the mountains, and I lose my concentration.”

That wouldn’t happen to her. She could maintain her concentration, it didn’t matter how many bugs tried to fly into whatever orifice. Her hatred of the corbæ was so singular and focused that it didn’t require attention. It drummed in time to her heartbeat, a constant nagging reminder of their dominance, despite-as Tatiana had so readily pointed out-their obvious unsuit-ability as a ruling class. Although that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was their damned indifference to their position as the ruling class.

So the problem wasn’t focusing on what she wanted from the pot, nor even a fear of thrusting her hand into it. She’d dare that and more to rid the world of the crows once and for all. What troubled her was Cody’s parting remark in reference to the corbæ earlier today.

Truth is, I’m not all that sure there’d still be a world, you take them out of the equation.

He’d lied about the chalice not being Raven’s pot. She knew that. But she wasn’t as certain that he’d lied about the firstborn corbas’s place in the world. What if they truly were its anchor, if the world couldn’t go on without them?

That was one possibility. The other was that it would simply be a different world. Radically altered, it was true, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Not if the cuckoos were finally in ascendance.

At any rate, the questions were irrelevant. It was too late to back out now and still retain some semblance of pride.

Before some new argument arose, she thrust her hand into the open mouth of Raven’s pot.

There was time for a moment of surprise. Earlier she had stuck various objects into the chalice and met no resistance, but now the air inside the pot was thick and cold, clinging to her skin like wet, runny mud. More confusing was how the relatively confined space inside appeared to be far larger than should be physically possible.

Then came the pain.

Her mouth opened, lips twisting, but no sound came forth. The pain was beyond articulation. It flared up from her hand and wrist as if she’d plunged her fist into a vat of acid, a burning that seemed to strip the flesh from her and leave all her nerve ends raw and bare.

She knew a momentary admiration for Cody, that he could dare this not once, but time and again.

And then she cursed him for what he hadn’t told her.

The pot had a mind of its own.

The knowledge came to her through a swelling wave of agony. And as soon as she understood that the pot was sentient, she also realized that one was expected to approach it as a supplicant, not a master. That the pot decided whether or not to grant one’s request. That the pot admired a creative petition, but abhorred destruction and turned such negative impulses back upon the supplicant.

The pain that ravaged her hand and wrist was the acidic boiling of her own hatred.

She could feel her arm being pushed up out of the chalice, clamped her mouth shut against the torment that grew in intensity even? moment she remained in contact with the damned pot.

“No,” she muttered from between her gritted teeth.

She forced her hand more deeply in and continued to stir whatever invisible muck it was that rilled the pot. The raw heat of pain spread up from her lower arm, encompassing her shoulder, moving across her chest and into her neck, but instead of allowing it to weaken her, she used the pain to combat the will of the pot, used her hatred to make it submit to her command.

The sound of a hundred winds filled her head. The room went black. The chalice rattled and bounced on the table and she used her free hand to keep it from falling to the ground. But it wasn’t simply the chalice that was banging about on the tabletop. The whole building trembled and shook.

“I will not submit to you!” she cried and thrust her arm up to the shoulder into the pot.

The pot lunged from the table. She threw her free arm around it, hugging it to her chest. Her body arced with a new blaze of pain.

Then the pot came apart in her arms.

She was thrown back against the windows. Glass shattered and only the sash bars kept her from being thrown outside. She could hear the cries of her family and the others-wild shrieks that rose above the screaming winds. Her body slid to the ground, all her muscles in spasms so that she jittered and bounced on the floor. Blood oozed from her nose, her ears, her eyes, filled her throat, choking her.

What have I done? she cried soundlessly. What have I done?

Though she clung to every tattered vestige that was being spun and torn away, she could feel her life ebbing away. It was too dear a price to pay, and yet, and yet …

She could sense that she had succeeded.

It was costing her her life, but the corbæ were no longer in the world.

One of the worst stories Rory had ever written had been about “the last man on earth.” It was an awkward, seriously juvenile effort, but then he’d only been fifteen when he’d put it down on paper, so perhaps he could be forgiven its stolen premise, faulty logic, painful storytelling, and other excesses.

What he’d really been writing about was how disassociated he felt from everyone around him. His character hadn’t been so much the last man on earth as an anxious teenager trying to make sense of his raging hormones and loneliness. It hadn’t been much of a success on either level, but at least he’d been wise enough to throw it out and move on. Still the idea, once awoken, remained with him, resurfacing not in his writing, but in his dreams. The scenarios varied, the world ending in everything from bangs to whimpers, but he was always the one man left alive while everyone else was gone.

All of which was to say that he was perhaps overly familiar with the concept. So when the sky flooded with darkness and the ground under the junkyard began to tremble, making the junked cars shake and rattle, he actually knew a moment’s relief.

Everything was suddenly explained. All the weirdness of the past few days was only part of a dream, leading up to this familiar place where he was,
da—dum, da-dum,
the last man on earth once more. All he had to do was wake up and everything would be back to normal.

Except dreams didn’t go on for this long, did they? Stringing together day after day of such detailed mundane activities along with the strange.

Nor were his dreams ever lucid. He never
knew
he was dreaming until after he’d woken up.

“Oh, man,” he said softly as the realization hit home.

His voice seemed so small in the sudden vastness that surrounded him. He’d never felt so alone before in his life. And then there was this wind blowing in his head, inside, whining in his ears. A wind he couldn’t feel on his skin.

This wasn’t a dream. This was the strange times cranked up another notch, like the difference between watching
The X Files
on his television set and actually being a character in the story. Stepping from the known all the way into someplace no one had ever gone before. Into the impossible.

A stronger tremor made him jockey for balance. He looked up at the raiding cars, junked heaps piled one upon the other, already losing their definition in the growing dark.

If one of those stacks came down …

He headed back toward the front gates while he could still see, while the ground was still relatively stable underfoot, before some huge crack opened up underfoot and swallowed him whole. Halfway back down the lane between the stacked cars he saw Paris standing motionless, a couple of the dogs at her heels. He called out to her, but got no response.

The sick feeling that had started up in the pit of his stomach intensified.

“Paris!” he called again as he closed the distance between them.

Still no response.

“C’mon,” he said. “Stop screwing around. You’re really creeping me out.”

But it was no use talking to her because she wasn’t really there. Her body was standing in the dirt in front of him, but there was no one home. Her gaze was vacant, refusing to track his hand when he moved it back and forth in front of her eyes. He touched a tattooed shoulder and shuddered. The skin didn’t feel real. It was spongy and cool to the touch.

He pulled his hand back and wiped it on his jeans. Hard. Backed away, desperate to put distance between them, but unable to take his gaze from her. One foot, two. By the time he was a half-dozen feet away, he couldn’t see her anymore. Couldn’t see anything, the darkness was so profound.

He stood perfectly still, listening for something, some sign of life, anything, but all he heard was the wind in his ears and the rattling and clanking and grinding of metal as the wrecked cars jostled in their stacks.

He couldn’t stay here.

Hands held out before him, he shuffled slowly back the way he’d come, half-expecting to come into contact with Paris again, bile rising in his throat at the thought. Instead he bumped into one of the dogs that had been standing by her. Under its for, the flesh was as spongy as Paris’s had been.

Swallowing thickly, he circled around the motionless dog and continued his snail’s pace toward the junkyard’s front gates. At one point he heard a car engine start up, not close, but not that far away either. He thought of calling out to whoever it was, then realized they wouldn’t be able to hear him over the sound of their engine. Standing quietly, he listened to the motor rev. A moment later he heard the vehicle moving away.

Oddly enough, the receding sound comforted him.

He wasn’t alone.

He wasn’t the last man alive on the earth.

When he could no longer hear the car, when there was only the wind in his ears and the rattling metal of the stacked cars again, he started forward once more. Hope made the sick feeling subside in his stomach, made him feel stronger, more able to cope.

He wasn’t alone.

It was odd how quickly he lost his sense of time. He had no way of gauging how long he’d been shuffling down the lane before he finally stumbled into one of the lawn chairs they’d been sitting on earlier.

What he wanted most was light.