The Book of Joby (97 page)

“You
dare
to lecture
me
on
interference
?” Merlin raged. “
You,
who let two boys die, when one flick of your angelic little finger could have saved their lives? Your
lack
of interference was
unconscionable
!”

“It was obedient,” Michael said sternly. “Painfully obedient, yes, but we both know this entire invasion is about Joby. And that attack was clearly aimed at him.”

“Lucifer has
told
you that?” Merlin spat. “Might not his ancient hatred of our race be sufficient explanation in itself?”

“And the first two attacked just happen to be particular favorites of Joby’s?” the angel asked levelly. “That stretches credibility, don’t you think?”

“Half the children in this town are particular favorites of Joby’s!” Merlin snapped. “If you were really so astute, you’d have noticed that. As long as such questions are remotely open to debate, I have no intention of letting any of them die like you did.”

“Arthur killed a great many children once, hoping one of them was Mordred,” Michael said implacably, “while
you
stood back and let him, as I recall.”

“Don’t throw that in my face just to excuse yourself now!”
Merlin shouted, stung to fury. “At least I don’t keep blindly repeating my mistakes in the name of some abstract concept of obedience. I think and grow! I have a conscience!”

“Which is precisely why I mention it,” the angel sighed. “To make you think and grow. We both know why you didn’t stop Arth—”

“I should have!” Merlin cut him off, astonished at the angel’s cruelty. “I should have thrown Arthur in a tower cell and kept him there until he understood what he was going to do! To himself as well as all those innocents.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Michael asked quietly.

Merlin said nothing. He did not want to remember it, and he didn’t want to say the answer. This angel was trying to twist everything.

“Because you knew his life was no one’s but his own,” the angel said softly, “the only truly sovereign possession any person has. You understood, as few men ever do, what it would have done to him if you took that choice away, for whatever reason. Now Joby’s going to face such terrible choices. Would you prevent him from deciding?”

“Then why try taking choice away from
me,
angel?” Merlin rasped.

“I have not. Nor will I,” Michael said, “as you know very well. Have I thrown
you
in any tower cell? Or threatened to prevent you from choosing next time as you chose the last? Have I moved behind your back to alter choices you might make before they even reach you?” he asked pointedly. “I seek only to persuade you to greater wisdom, just as you tried to persuade Arthur once.”

“And
failed,
” Merlin said bitterly. “Just as you do now. Had I your angelic powers, Michael, I’d have saved all four of those boys, not just two. And I will do everything within my power to save the next four and the next four after that. I have no cold and callous angel’s heart, I fear. If I’m damned for that, so be it.”

“And if all of us are damned for it as well?” the angel asked. “Will
that
matter to your supple human heart?”

“Our loving Lord will now damn us all just to punish my misdeeds?” Merlin scoffed. “I have never seen you overreach so, Michael.”

“You know what’s at stake then, in this wager, I assume,” the angel said.

“My grandson’s life and many others,” Merlin growled, deeply discomfited at having to admit that he did not. “Have you some better information?”

“Not for one who would just use it to further interfere in what he doesn’t understand as well as he may think,” Michael replied sadly. “But you would be wise to worry about why I dare not disobey the command we all were
given, even to save lives that my cold, angelic heart dearly loved many years before you knew them.”

The worry this did cause Merlin just increased his irritation. “Yet you’ve no qualms about my incarnation spell, or helping to conceal the Garden from this invasion either,” Merlin countered. “Might those not be construed as interference too?”

“The last time I heard my Master’s voice,” said Michael, “was days before all this began. He seemed to suggest that morning that I’d have leeway, when the crisis came, to help defend Taubolt
in general.
Thus I have and will. It is a very troubling line to walk, but when it comes to intervening in specific acts so clearly aimed at Joby’s heart, my hands are tied, Merlin, as yours should be.
We
are
commanded
not to interfere unasked. How can you continue to ‘misunderstand’ that?”

Weary of their pointless sparring, Merlin said, “Your own remarks simply make the nature of that command seem even more ambiguous. I made my choice many years ago, and any damage it might cause must surely have been done by now. I still see no reason to abandon my grandson in the middle of this stream.”

He turned to leave and said, “I’m going now to interfere some more, I fear. I’ve heard rumors that this Redstone woman and her knitting circle have been looking for us. I think it’s time someone obliged her with the kind of
real
magic she’ll not soon forget. If my own investigations are correct, it was she and her women, not Joby, who led that hell spawn to those boys the other night. If so,” he said, looking pointedly at Michael, “the attack upon them had no more relationship to Joby’s trial than anything else happening in this town now. Think on
that,
my
obedient
friend.”

As the joint memorial service for Jupiter and Sky convened at the community high school in Taubolt, Joby lay on Laura’s couch, too exhausted to rise, and too plagued with thought to sleep. As profoundly as he grieved the loss of his two young friends, Joby and Laura had decided to stay here, with Hawk, who had adamantly refused even to discuss attending it himself. Joby wasn’t sure how many funerals he could take in one month anyway. His reservoir of tears was badly overdrawn.

Beyond Ben’s funeral itself, the journey back to Joby’s childhood home had been a nightmare—literally. He’d been subjected to demoralizing dreams every single night. In some, Laura had pulled away from him in the middle of their lovemaking to sullenly admit he’d only won her because Ben was
dead. In others, Ben’s ravaged body had turned up in the trunk of Joby’s car, as police arrived, accusing him of murdering his friend to steal his wife. Fortunately, Joby and Laura had slept together at his parents’ house, so each time he had woken in a rigid sweat, all he’d had to do was turn and see her lying there, kiss her shoulder, and feel her press against him in the dark, to know that she was
not
there by default. If not for Laura’s presence all that week, in fact, Joby didn’t know how he’d have survived the trip.

He’d been stung to see how rundown his old neighborhood had grown. The grassy hillsides of his childhood were brown and threadbare now, gouged with ruts and bald expanses of hard, colorless dirt. The neighborhood had seemed a sterile maze of faded stucco houses landscaped in anal geometries of close-cropped grass and olive-drab shrubbery, the streets awash in litter.

In his parents’ house, the same paintings had still hung above the same furniture, the same books and knickknacks cluttering the shelves, the same framed photos on the mantel, all as if he’d entered some ghastly museum. At the sight of his high school graduation picture, Joby had felt as if that boy might still be living there, not just on the mantel but in the very air. Eighteen years and nothing had changed, unless the gloom had grown a little deeper, though that had likely been just the weather.

Then he and Laura had come home to Taubolt.

Joby had read somewhere about a form of medieval execution where a plank was set atop the condemned, and stones piled on, one by one, until the person underneath was crushed. Lying now on Laura’s couch, Joby could not help but empathize.

They’d returned to Laura’s home to find a note in unfamiliar handwriting, saying Hawk had gone to Rose’s house, and they should come at once. There, as Clara had horrified Laura in one room with news of two more deaths and the dimensions of Hawk’s own disaster, Tom had shocked Joby in another with assertions of demonic invasion and a mind-numbing list of precautions that must now be taken by anyone of the blood, including Hawk and Joby. Almost worse, Joby had been advised to keep all of this from Laura for a host of reasons, topped by the likelihood that she was not remotely prepared to believe any of it, especially amidst so much other trauma.

As Joby lay wondering if there could be anything to the idea of karma and, if so, whether he’d been Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan in some other lifetime, he heard Laura coming down the stairs from Hawk’s room. He sat up to look at her.

“He won’t even speak to me,” she said quietly, looking drawn and pale. Her reservoir of tears seemed empty too. Theirs was a dry and weary grief by now. “You want to try?” she asked. “Maybe it’s because I’m his mother.”

Joby got up off the couch, and stopped to kiss her on his way toward the stairs. “It’s
in spite
of that,” he told her softly, “not
because.
” Then he went up to see what he could do. From the moment Joby had understood Hawk’s place in all of this, he’d hardly ceased to think about what he might have tried to tell his younger self if he’d been able to after Lindwald died. Would it have made much difference? Probably not, but the time had come to try.

Laura had left Hawk’s door open. Hawk was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling as he’d done for most of every day since they had brought him home from the Connollys’ house.

When Joby’s knock got no response, he walked in anyway, sat down on Hawk’s desk chair several feet away, and let the silence stretch.

“Hey,” Joby said at last.

He might have been a ghost, for all Hawk seemed to notice.

“Sometimes,” Joby said, remembering the day he’d found Hawk crying on the headlands, three long years ago, “it helps to talk when things are bad.”

Hawk’s eyes grew red as his face struggled to remain dispassionate. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he murmured. “You can’t help me. No one can.”

Was this what Ben had gone through on the lawn in front of school that day? Joby wondered. At least Joby hadn’t had to tackle Hawk and pin him down yet.

“What you and all the others tried to do was brave and well intended,” Joby said. “You were trying to help Taubolt defend itself. Everybody knows that.”

“Not Sophie,” Hawk said stonily. “She told us this would happen. I talked everyone into ignoring her. Everybody knows that too.” He went back to staring at the ceiling, the smoldering anger that had briefly lit his eyes evaporating once again.

After they had sat in silence for another lengthy spell, Joby took a breath and said, “I’ve got a story for you, Hawk, and when I’m done, you’ll have to tell me if
I’m
guilty.”

Without waiting for permission, he began, for the first time in eighteen years, to speak of Jamie Lindwald’s last night on earth, leaving nothing out except for having slept with Hawk’s mother after prom.

“So did I murder Jamie?” Joby asked when it was done. “Should I be punished?”

Throughout the entire tale, Hawk’s eyes had never moved from whatever they’d been staring at above his bed for half the week.

“If you’re going to condemn yourself,” Joby pressed, “you’ll have to shoot me too. Can’t have it one way for you and another for me. That’s not how justice works.”

“All you did was drink some beers,” Hawk said at last, his eyes still on the ceiling. “Your mistake was
nothing
like mine.”

“Glad to hear you admitting it was a mistake,” said Joby. “
Everybody
makes those. You think
all of us
should suffer what you’re putting yourself through then?”

“They’d told us it was dangerous!” Hawk snapped, finally glancing at him. “I defied the Council!
I
knew better!”

“They’d told us drinking was dangerous too,” Joby shot back. “That we were too young. I also defied the edicts of authority. It was
against the law
for me to drink, but
I
knew better
too
—just like Jamie and half the other kids at school did. Stop thinking your mistake was unique, Hawk. The only difference I can see is that you had far, far better reasons than mine.”

“Pride,” Hawk said, eyes back on the ceiling. “That was my only reason.”