Someplace to Be Flying (61 page)

Lily slowly shook her head. “It’s just … under this red … there’s the other light. I can’t see it ever causing anyone pain. Not deliberately.”

Hank regarded her for a long moment, then shrugged.

“I’ve been with you this far,” he said. “I’m not about to back out now.”

When the dog whined, he added, “Don’t worry, Bo. We’re being careful.”

Bocephus turned his head away when Hank turned his attention back to the chalice, bringing his piece in close again to check its fit.

Rory stopped across the street from the Harbor Ritz hotel, using the height of the curb to make it easier to steady the bike with his foot. A large crowd of people had gathered on the street in front of the hotel. Old, middle-aged, teens, children. And not only people, he realized as he looked more closely. There were cats and dogs, rats, raccoons, a fox, and birds of all kinds, mostly crows and other corbæ. Ravens, rooks, jays, magpies. All of them staring at the light that had sheathed the hotel with its amber-gold glow.

“Who are all these people?” he asked Annie, then realized he was talking to a bird.

She regained her own form and made the bike wobble with her sudden weight as she leaned back over the handlebars to look at him, upside down. Where he felt all on edge and anxious, the situation only seemed to be making her giddy.

“They’re like you. They’ve all got the blood.”

“And the animals? I suppose they’ve got it, too?”

“Well, of course.”

Of course, Rory thought. Like it’s an everyday thing. Though in her version of the world he supposed it was.

Annie straightened up and got off the bike. Leaning on the handlebars, she studied him for a long moment.

“So how come you’ve never made a pass at me?” she asked.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Is this really the time to get into something like that?”

“For all we know,” she said, “the world could be ending. So I’d just like to know before everything goes away.”

“That … that could happen?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Rory? You’re walking under the surface now, seeing the world the way we see it. Anything could happen.”

“Oh.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

Rory took a steadying breath. “I was too scared to.”

“Scared of
me?”

“Not exactly, though at first you kind of intimidated me.”

“So you didn’t like me playing the strong-woman card.”

“And then, when we started getting along so well, I didn’t want to screw up our friendship.”

Annie smiled. “I guess I know that feeling. It’s kind of sad, isn’t it? I mean, lovers should be best friends, too, don’t you think?”

Rory nodded.

“But then there’s the trust factor, I guess. The problem is, if you don’t believe it’ll happen, it won’t. It’s like everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well …” She shrugged. “If you don’t believe in magic, then it won’t happen for you. If you don’t believe that the world has a heart, then you won’t hear it beating, you won’t think it’s alive and you won’t consider what you’re doing to it.”

“I don’t-” He had to stop and correct himself. “I didn’t believe in magic. This all still seems like a dream to me.”

She smiled. “I know. But just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it’s not real. Sometimes it just sneaks up on you all the same. Like love.”

Rory nodded, wondering if she was talking to him as a friend, or if there was something more happening here. But before he could take it any further, one of the Aunt’s came flying back. The sounds she made as she circled above them were only so much gibberish so far as he was concerned, but Annie seemed to be understanding her.

“What … uh …” This was so weird. “What’s she saying?”

“Apparently the pot’s inside the hotel and the cuckoos have been using it.”

“That’s bad, right?”

Annie nodded. “And your friend Lily and her boyfriend went inside.”

It took Rory a moment to figure out who she meant.

“You mean Hank?”

“If that’s his name.”

“What are they doing in there?” he asked.

“Nobody knows.”

“What about Kerry? Have any of them seen her?”

The Aunt replied, but Rory had to wait for Annie to translate for him. She shook her head. “No, but apparently her twin’s supposed to be inside.” “But she’s …”

Imaginary, he’d been about to say. Except, so was all of this. Or at least it should be, if the world made any sense. “It’s a long story,” Annie said.

Rory looked up at the hotel, craning his neck to take in, first its height, then the enormous canopy of the tree of light that had swallowed the building. “How long have they been in there?” he asked. “I’m not sure. Awhile.” Rory swallowed. He didn’t want to do this. “We have to go in after them-“

He broke off as a spot of the amber-gold light flared bright white at the top of the building. Around him the crowd suddenly stirred. He glanced at Annie and saw that the giddiness had finally left her. She gazed up with a solemnness he’d never seen in her features before. Awe, he realized. She’s awestruck. Oh, and like he wasn’t? But somehow it wasn’t the same. “Annie?” he tried.

There was no response, not even when he touched her arm. He looked for the Aunt who’d been flying above them, but she was perched on a lamppost now, as entranced as Annie. They see something we don’t, Rory thought.

The crowd was still shuffling restlessly in place. Flocks of birds suddenly rose into the air. They weren’t corbas, he realized, but birds with the blood. A vast cloud of blackbirds. Like him, they were nervous. Anxious. Nearby a dog began to whimper. Then another. A child cried. He saw a woman that he didn’t think was the little girl’s mother go down on one knee beside her to offer comfort. Annie’s words from a few moments ago returned to him now, heavy with the possibility that they weren’t so much a consideration as a promise.
For all we know, the world could be ending.

The building dragged his gaze back to it. The white light on the top floor made his eyes tear.

Your friend Lily and her boyfriend went inside.
Jesus, he thought. Kit’s in there.

He laid his bike down on the curb and moved forward through the crowd, heading for the front door of the hotel.

Jack’s words hung in the air.

You can have a lot worse sins hanging on your soul, and unlike myself, you’re not guilty of any of them.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Katy asked finally.

“I’ve brought too much pain into the world as it is,” he told her. “It’s time for me to move on.”

“That is so not true. The world needs you, Jack.”

He shook his head. “It needs Raven and the crow girls, but not me. What I do, any storyteller can do. All you need is an ear to listen and a voice to pass them on.”

They spoke as if only the two of them were here in this place, gazes locked on each other, not at all aware of Kerry, the other corbæ, or even the Grace.

“Look,” Jack went on. “If the world’s going to need us to make our own grace from here on out, I’m just going to bring everybody down. I’ve got too many sins hanging on my soul. If you know I’m your father, then you’ve got to know that.”

“What happened to our mother-“

“Should never have happened, period. No one deserves that kind of a fate. No one.”

Katy nodded. She couldn’t think of a more awful thing.

“But it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You didn’t do anything.”

“That’s just it,” Jack replied. “I didn’t do anything. If I had, none of that would have happened.”

“But-“

“And then after-that’s nothing I’m proud of either.”

“They deserved to die,” Katy said.

“But so many? For the sins of a few?”

Maida spoke up then. “All cuckoos are guilty of something.”

“Maybe,” Jack agreed. “But that doesn’t make me judge, jury, and executioner.”

“The Grace is my responsibility,” Raven said. “I will do what needs to be done.”

“I don’t think so,” Katy told him.

The other corbæ regarded her in surprise. Maybe the crow girls could get away with teasing him, but it was obvious that normally no one would think to contradict Raven. Katy didn’t care. This had to be said. He had to hear it.

“You claim to be responsible,” she went on, “but how can you even say that when you’ve been asleep-or whatever it is you’ve been-for the past fifty years or more? You don’t even know what the world is like anymore. Maybe things are getting worse, but there are still people trying to do good. There’s still hope. Maybe if you were pulling
your
weight, things wouldn’t have got to where they are now.”

“But they have.”

“That still doesn’t give you the right to decide whether the world goes on or ends.”

“You forget. I brought the world out of the dark.”

“With the help of others.”

Raven glanced at the crow girls and Jack.

“With the help of others,” he agreed. “But I have carried the burden of the pot since the first day.”

“And done such a good job of it, too.”

He frowned, dark eyes flashing, and gestured toward the light.

“You see for yourself,” he said. “She has always had a mind of her own.”

Katy sighed. “That’s not what this is about. It’s not about trying to control what can’t and shouldn’t be controlled in the first place. The pot only holds her-keeps her in this world. All you were supposed to do was guard it.”

“You came here to destroy it.”

“Or send it back,” Katy said. “But that was before she let me know that the pot’s only a vessel to hold her to this world. Now I know.”

“And yet
I
was supposed to have intuited-“

Katy cut him off. “Yeah, you
should
have known. You’ve had the pot long enough. But you’ve never even tried to communicate with her.”

“It is not such a simple-“

“Don’t you see? You’ve tried to hang on to that pot for all these years, tried to keep it under your tight control, and then, when you finally realized you couldn’t, you just gave up on it.”

“No one else would accept the burden.”

“That’s not true,” Katy said. “You chose to be responsible for it. Maybe if you hadn’t laid such a strong claim to it, other people would have taken responsibility for it and come to understand what it really means to be its guardian. It’s always been the mythic ‘Raven’s pot’ instead of what it really is: the vessel of the Grace. Instead of thinking of it as an object of power, you should have been celebrating it, cherishing it. Thinking of it as an object of wonder instead of some scary thing that had to be hidden away.”

Raven hesitated for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “I see your point.”

“Except now it’s too late.”

They shared the sorrow of it, argument forgotten.

Kerry suddenly tugged on Katy’s sleeve. “Something’s happening to her… .”

Katy turned and the warmth of the Grace washed over her anew.

“There’s nothing … ,” she began, but then her voice trailed oft?.

“What is it?” Raven asked.

They peered at the light, corbæ and twins, and this time they could all read the wordless voice in the light. They all felt the pull of the medicine lands, the world being drawn back through the door the cuckoos had stirred open.

And there was something more.

“She doesn’t have to go,” Maida said softly.

Zia nodded. “Not anymore.”

“But the door still needs closing.”

Katy moved forward, but Jack was quicker. He stepped into the light and it enveloped him. Spreading his arms, he became …

A dark angel, winged.

A jackdaw, blue-black feathers gleaming in the light.

A shadow in the heart of the Grace that shrank to the size of a pinprick.

The light blinked. For one moment an awful dark swallowed them. Then the light was back. But diminishing. Leaking away. Returning to the state it had been in before the cuckoos had called her up with their hate.

They could see in her dwindling light that the door was closed, the world was safe.

But Jack was gone. Forever gone.

Turning to her sister, Katy burrowed her face in Kerry’s shoulder and wept.

As Hank brought his piece of the chalice toward the two Lily was holding together, he felt a sudden pull and the piece in his hands jumped toward the others, fusing with them. He had long enough to see that the chalice was whole once more, with not even a seam showing. Long enough to lift his head and exchange a surprised look with Lily, then a flare of brilliant white light blazed up from the chalice, blinding him.

“Oh, shit,” he heard himself say.

His voice seem to come from far away, as though he were talking from across the room, or from another room, or from somewhere else entirely where he didn’t even exist anymore.

A deep vertigo grabbed him and held him hard. He could no longer sense the floor under his feet, the walls around him. Outside of his body the only things he could sense were the smooth warm crystal of the chalice and the blinding white light that came out of it. All other physical sensation was gone.

He tried to pull back from the chalice, but couldn’t.

Tried to close his eyes against the light, but couldn’t do that either.

Then he saw something, deep in the glare. A black spot. A ho!e.

The sound of the wind that had accompanied the first fall of the darkness returned. Until that moment, he hadn’t really thought about its having gone away.

He knew now where the sound came from. That hole. It was the sound of the world being drawn down into the hole. Drawn where, he didn’t know. The hole was somewhere inside the chalice, that was all he knew.

No, that wasn’t true. He also knew the hole was hungry. Not the way he thought of hunger, but a more primal appetite, what the vast canopy of space must feel when it tried to swallow the light of the stars. It was the oldest hunger there was, a desire that could never be appeased because no matter how much light the darkness swallowed, it always wanted more.

This was their fault, he thought. His and Lily’s. Messing with things they had no hope of understanding. They should have let well enough be, gotten out of that room and left the pieces of the chalice lying there, just like they’d found them.