Weather Witch (29 page)

He screamed her name, cried out her innocence again and again, and snow billowed out from his mouth but was whisked away with his words by the breeze and evaporated in the day’s heat and the crowd’s fierce haze of human musk.

The floor beneath Chloe’s feet dropped away and she fell toward the ground—only stopped by the sudden tightening of the rope round her neck. Her feet kicked out a moment and Marion gasped, ramming his knuckles into his mouth to keep from crying out to her—or anyone again.

Then she was still.

And he was all alone in the world.

This time for certain and for good.

The cold seeped out of him, cruel and deadly, burrowing into the tree that held him in the same insidious way the cold clutched his heart, so that, after the crowd drifted apart and Marion finally climbed down from its branches, only then did the tree’s leaves begin to curl and blacken along the edges. Only then did the cold begin to kill it from the inside out—the same way the cold was killing its young master.

Chapter Sixteen

Everybody talks about the weather,

but nobody does anything about it.

—MARK TWAIN

Holgate

That night Meggie again awoke to soaked sheets, a wet gown, and a perplexed Maude. Maude had decided to sleep on the floor at her side, as cramped and uncomfortable as it was, although Meggie had innocently suggested Maude share her papá’s bed as it was so big and he was quite alone in it every night. “And a spot of warmth and kindness never hurt a soul, my mother used to say,” Meggie said loudly enough that Bran couldn’t help but hear it.

“A spot of kindness, yes?” Maude said with a smile. “Such things do quite frequently help situations one might think beyond help…” She sighed. “Quite alone in it every night, is he?” Maude had asked.

“Most certainly so,” Meggie quipped. “And I think I know why,” she said with a solemn nod.

“Oh you do, do you?” Maude asked, tucking her in after one last story. It was harder than ever to get her to go to sleep now that every night she had a friend staying over.

“Yes. It is the snoring,” Meggie said sagely. “It is a dreadful racket,” she disdained. “It sounds like an elephant trying to blow its nose!”

“I heard that,” Bran called from the other room, sending both the girls into a wild fit of giggles.

“A rabid elephant blowing his nose,” Meggie squeaked defiantly.

“Oh, is that so?” he bellowed, racing toward them, a grin on his face. He jumped onto the bed and bounced Meggie so hard she was lifted into the air and gave a little scream. But she dissolved into laughter again when she landed and snuggled back down into her pillow, dragging the covers up around her ears to better ignore her father’s silliness.

A tickle battle then erupted between the two and Bran attacked, shouting, “Come here, you! You’re a soft little thing, aren’t you?”

Meggie squealed between giggles, “A lady should be
soft
!”

Bran froze on the bed, arms outstretched, body stiff but rocking to the swaying of the mattress beneath his feet. The smile fell from his lips and shadows hardened his expression. He swallowed hard. Something in his chest tightened and he turned to look past the girls. To the door.

But Meggie pounced on him, knocking him onto her bed and knocking whatever dark thought had been in his head right out with her relentless joy. Maude just sat on the floor beside the bed, watching and marveling at how free Bran was now with the child—how very different—how young he seemed when it was just the three of them together.

He was a man unburdened—because of what they were all certain would be a burden.

“What?” he asked, stepping off the bed and hopping over Maude on his way back to his room and his too large for one man bed. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

“Because I see them again,” Maude whispered, her cheeks heating with a sudden and surprising blush.

“What? What do you see again?”

“Your dimples,” she said. “Only when you smile that much do they appear. But there they are.” And with a sleepy smile she leaned back onto her makeshift bed and curled onto her side, tugging her own blanket up, a smile on her lips.

He stood there in the doorway between the two rooms like a man caught between two worlds, and he reached up to touch his own smiling face, amazed that she had found something in him he had never even noticed about himself. He uncrossed his arms and watched them for a moment before leaving for his own bed—watched the two most beautiful, gentle, and amazing girls in the world.

And they were both, in at least some small way, his. And he was ready to try and offer a spot of kindness himself.

Philadelphia

Marion tried to sleep that night in the park but his dreams were as dark as the farthest corner of the sky. When dawn finally came he rose from where he’d hidden by the public hedge-maze and staggered onto the main thoroughfare. He touched things at random as he stumbled back down the Hill to the Below. No longer did he worry who saw or who screamed. No longer did he bother with anonymity or soft action. These were the people who destroyed all he ever loved. These were the people who built on the backs of his kind and ruined anyone who loved the Witches. The Witches who provided stability for their country—their government’s country.

“An election year,” the boy had said.

Marion grinned and reached out for a window box hanging in front of a cheese shop’s painted window. He trailed his fingers along a single fringed dianthus petal and watched the frost spread out like tiny snowflakes flattened flush to the flower. Wrapping round its stem, cold consumed its leaves. The frost scrambled the short distance to the next plant in the box, leaving a glittering path of destruction that wiped the entire window box of life in under a minute—all while Marion stood silent and watched his talent seek and destroy.

He would bring them all down, he promised himself, make them all suffer the unseasonable cold that was ever in his heart. He began his journey down to the Below once more, his eyes on a certain bridge and the warm glow of firelight peeking out from beneath it already. The sun was still low in the sky when he began to formulate his plan. Destiny had saved him five years ago and Made him who he was for this purpose. And if he was to get his revenge in a proper way, he had best research and prepare.

Bringing down the Maker would require planning and transportation.

But if revenge was a dish best eaten cold he was surely the best man to enjoy both its taste and temperature.

Holgate

“Today we will try something new,” the Maker told Jordan.

Her stomach flopped like a fish caught in the net of her gut. Silently she assumed her spot by the board, offering her manacled wrists to be bound for the day’s new torture.

“No, no,” he corrected. “Today we will have a spot of kindness. And a spot of tea.” He smiled and opened the door to the laboratory. In walked Meggie, carrying a tray with a teapot and cups and saucers balanced on its surface.

“Sit, please,” Bran requested, motioning for Jordan to perch on a chair.

It was then, as she sipped tea with her torturer, that Jordan realized he was quite insane. It was also then that she wondered if perhaps she would not soon follow in the same manner.

Following the new treatment he asked her if there was anything he might do to make her feel more comfortable. He made it clear he would not remove her from the Tanks, but was there anything else she might appreciate? Her eyes fell on the tea set and narrowed. “A daily cup of tea in my Tank.”

His eyes crinkled at their edges and he nodded. “That I can most certainly provide.”

And for the next several days, he was good to his word, hoping that kindness might make magick blossom when nothing else would. For those days tea became the shared ritual of Jordan and her cell mates—a spot of sanity amid the pain and darkness. And on those days, unbeknownst to Jordan, the Maker was a kind, gentle, and happy man.

One day Jordan would take a sip and pass the cup and saucer through the hole between her cell and Caleb’s, the next she took a sip and passed it the other direction to Kate.

But the happiness was short-lived. Jordan still summoned no storms and, having proof that she could, the Maker had to presume she was refusing or required a different method to trigger her skills. So the torture resumed, but the tea kept coming.

It was on one such a day after Jordan had returned from her time on the Eastern Tower’s top, her hand aching all over again from the Maker’s attentions, that the trio first argued over who received the precious liquid.

Jordan passed the cup through the hole in the wall, her shaking hand making the cup clatter against the saucer. “Apologies,” she whispered, tea spilling onto her fingers.

“Stop,” Caleb insisted. “You need it more than I…”

“No,” Jordan said.

But the cup and saucer paused and Caleb scooted it back so it rested just in the shared shadow of the wall.

“I will leave it there,” Jordan challenged. “You should drink it—enjoy it so it does not go to waste.”

There was a groan from the wall’s other side. “It is on
your
side of the wall.”

“It is not,” Jordan protested.

“Indeed it is.”

“Not.”

“You are the most difficult neighbor I have yet had,” Caleb muttered. With a grinding and chattering noise the cup and accompanying saucer walked closer to her in the grip of her mysterious neighbor’s hand.

It was the most Jordan had ever glimpsed of Caleb and just one look made her stomach do flips. The hand was as dirty as hers—that was far from surprising, but the marks that crisscrossed the back of Caleb’s hand were a system of cross-hatched scars, white and rising from the skin’s already pale surface and a testament to Caleb’s continued courage.

He said he wouldn’t give in to the Maker and he hadn’t, though it had cost him.

Before Caleb could withdraw his hand, Jordan knocked the cup awkwardly aside to grasp his fingers.

For a moment they were still and silent that way, tea leaking from the overturned cup, Jordan’s hand clenching the fingers of the boy next door.

“Please don’t,” he whispered, his voice rasping to finally break the shared silence. “You’re wasting good tea.”

But she wrapped her fingers more tightly around his. “How did you come to be here?”

“Although I do not mind your questions normally…” He shifted in the straw on the hole’s other side. “You must not ask me that.”

His fingers twitched against her palm.

“You must let me go,” he said.

“Not yet.” She twisted closer, trying to get her face close enough that she could see his face.

But the darkness between them was too deep.

“I don’t wish to let go just yet.”

“We never do.” He groaned. “Who are you really holding on to, Jordan? It can’t be me … You barely know me…”

She sighed.

“Who was he?”

She released him then, pulling away to tuck her knees up and wrap her arms around them. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Liar. You’re holding on to someone. In your heart. I know it.”

“How would you know?”

“Because we do that—hold on. It’s what keeps us going. It’s all that keeps us going.”

She heard him move in the straw again and she imagined him mirroring her position just a wall away. “
Is
that what keeps us going?”

“Well, it certainly isn’t the love of one’s family … not for me.” Silence soaked up the moments like a sponge falling into water for the first time. He reached through the gap in the wall again, this time even farther into the grim space of her cell. His fingers fidgeted, wanting hers, and she could not help but take them again.

“Who keeps
you
going?” she asked into the dark.

“Thomas.”

She nearly pulled back in surprise at him naming another man. But his delivery of the name, so soft and sweet and …
loving,
made her brow furrow, and not thinking of her own imperfections or the wrinkles she’d surely earn, she squeezed his fingers tight, whispering, “Tell me all about him.”

And they rested that way in the dirt and the straw, neither of them worrying over filth or social convention, holding hands and remembering a brighter, better time when love was fresh and new and within reach. It was remembering those things that next spurred Jordan to action. Caleb was right, she was holding on to someone and realized then in her Tank how lost she felt without him.

En Route to Holgate

Rowen was lost and he’d been lost for days. How was it that a man of his education and breeding could be so utterly turned around in a forest? He sat with a huff at the base of a tree and ran his hands across his face, scratching at the stubble growing there. He growled out his despair. He no longer had clean clothing, a ramrod for his pistol, or his horse, and, to make things worse, he was growing whiskers to rival his grandfather’s. Soon he’d have a full beard and mustache and children would flock to him and call him Father Christmas …

How did people stay reasonably clean shaven before barbers and razors and straps? Did they use other knives? He looked at his sword. He’d cut his head clean off if he tried to shave with it. The natives. What did they use? Flint? He glared at his pistol and its firing mechanism. No flint to be had as they’d made the fashionable switch to percussion caps not long ago. They fired better most times, but one could hardly get a good shave from a percussion cap.

Flint was merely a piece of rock that could be sharpened. Surely he could find that. Even if he couldn’t find the horses. Or Holgate. Or Jordan.

His stomach rumbled. Well, no one would mistake him for Father Christmas, as lean as he was becoming. He threw a rock he’d managed to sit on and cursed at the thought it might have been flint. And no one would ever mistake him for being jolly.

Damn it all! His best friend was dead, his steed was missing along with most of his remaining possessions, he hadn’t had a meal of substance since Frederick’s house, and he was absolutely certain he had sat beneath this same exact tree raging about his failures before!