Richard’s face turned white. “I must kill you,” he said very calmly. “Somebody give me a sword.”
Cerise rose. “Uncle Hugh and Mikita, take Erian out. Lock him in the north building. Make sure he can’t hurt himself.”
Erian bared his teeth. Hugh hit him on the back of the head. Erian’s eyes rolled back in their orbits, and he sagged down in Mikita’s arms. They carried him from the room.
Cerise turned to William.
“If you bargain for the journal, you will die,” he said. “If you go to fight Spider, you will die, too. Don’t. Don’t do it.”
“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “I can’t live knowing that I had a chance to keep thousands of people from dying and I did nothing.”
CERISE clenched her teeth. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her mouth tasted bitter. Erian. Of all people, it had to be Erian.
Her legs had turned to wet cotton. Her chest constricted. She wanted to bend over and cradle the hot knot of pain in the pit of her stomach, but the entire family was here, watching her, waiting to see what she would say, and she held it in.
William stood alone, in the middle of the room, his face pale. She looked into his eyes and saw it all: pain, grief, fury, fear, and resignation. He thought she would leave him. Why not, everybody else in his life did.
“You’re a Mirror spy?” she asked softly.
“Yes.” His voice was low and ragged.
She sighed. “I wish you had mentioned it earlier.”
It took a second to penetrate. Amber rolled over his eyes. Shock slapped his face. It lasted only a moment, but the relief in his eyes was so obvious, it filled her with anger. Anger at the monsters who had damaged him, anger at Erian, anger at the Hand . . . Her hands shook, and she clenched them together.
“I love you,” she told him. “When I asked you to stay with me, I meant it.”
“He’s a changeling,” someone said from the back.
Cerise turned in the direction of the voice. Nobody owned up. “I’ve managed the family’s money for the last three years. I know all of your dirty secrets. Think very carefully before you start throwing rocks at the man I love, because I will throw them back and I won’t miss.”
Silence answered her.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Glad we got that settled. Why don’t you talk between yourselves.” She turned and marched out on the balcony and walked away, around the corner, out of their sight.
Outside the heat of the swamp enveloped her and she exhaled. Tears wet her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She tried to wipe them off, but they just kept coming and coming, and she couldn’t stop.
William came around the corner and grabbed her.
She stuck her face into his chest and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop the tears.
He clenched her to him.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” she whispered. “I asked you point-blank back in the swamp, and you didn’t tell me.”
“You would never have let me come with you,” he said.
“We’re trapped,” she whispered. “I just want to be happy, William. I want to be with you and I don’t want anybody to die, and I can’t have that.”
He gripped her shoulders, pushing her away so he could look in her face. His eyes were driven. “Burn the journal, Cerise. Listen to me, damn you!”
“Too late,” she told him. “You know it’s too late. The Hand will come for us, if not now, then in a week or a month. You said it yourself: they can’t afford to let any of us live. And even if they did, if they use the Box, it won’t just mean war. It will mean the end of the world in the Weird, because they will make these creatures and then they won’t be able to control them.”
“Let me handle it,” he told her.
“Twenty agents against you alone? Are you out of your mind?” She wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve. “If I offered to go up against twenty agents, you would pitch a fit. We have no choice.”
He hugged her, his hands stroking her hair. They stood together for a long time. Eventually, she stirred. “I have to go back. It won’t be okay, will it?”
William swallowed. “No.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. She turned around and went back to the library.
Inside familiar faces waited for her. Aunt Pete, Aunt Murid, Ignata, Kaldar. Grandmother Az sitting in a corner, letting her run the family into the ground. Cerise sat at the table and braided the fingers of her hands together. Gods, she wished for guidance. But the person in the sky, the one she always asked for advice, was apparently running around in the woods, killing things at random.
Her grandfather had murdered her grandmother. If she thought about it too long, it made her want to rip her hair out.
Richard was off, too, gone to blow off steam.
Who am I kidding?
she wondered. Richard would never be all right. None of them would ever be all right.
“It has to be the Drowned Dog Puddle,” she said. They went to gather berries there every year to make the wine. It was a big family affair: children gathered the berries, women cleaned them, men talked . . . “What else could it be?”
Murid said, “Nothing else. Vernard didn’t know anything else.”
The question had to be asked and so she asked it. “What do we do now?”
“What do you want us to do?” Murid’s clear eyes found her, propped her up like a crutch. “You are in charge. You lead and we follow.”
Nobody disputed her words. Cerise had expected them to. “We must destroy the Box.”
“Or die trying,” Kaldar said.
Aunt Pete shook her head. “We all benefited from Vernard’s knowledge. We studied his books, we learned from him, we made wine together. He was family.”
Cerise looked to Kaldar. “Kaldar?”
“They’re right,” he said. “I hate it, but we must fight. It’s a Mar affair. Our land and our war, and it won’t be done until we’ve chased the freaks from our swamp.” He hesitated and scowled, deep lines breaking at the corners of his mouth. “I’m glad we have the blueblood. I don’t care if he is a changeling. He fights like a demon.”
They blocked her on every turn. Cerise turned to Grandmother and knelt by her. An old word slipped out, the one she used when she was a child.
“Meemaw ...”
Grandmother Az heaved a small sigh and touched Cerise’s hair. “Sometimes there are things that are best to be done and things that are right to be done. We all know which is which.”
Murid slid her chair back. “That settles it.”
Cerise watched them go and a sick feeling of guilt sucked at her stomach. Nausea started low within her belly and crept its way up. She was tired of the last dinners before the big battle. Tired of counting the faces and trying to guess how many more she would lose.
A hard, heavy clump of pain settled in her chest. She rubbed at it.
Her grandmother’s fingers ran through her hair. “Poor child,” Grandmother Az whispered. “Poor, poor child ...”
WILLIAM strode down the hill, carrying the Mirror’s bag. Gaston chased him.
“So that’s it?”
“That’s it. We get our shit together and go fight the Hand.”
Gaston mulled it over. “Will we win?”
“Nope.”
“Where are we going now?”
“We’re going to make sure that this insane family doesn’t get wiped out, if we win.”
Gaston frowned.
“Insurance,” William told him.
“Wait!” Lark’s voice rang behind them.
William turned. Lark dashed down the slope, skinny legs flashing. She braked in front of them and thrust a teddy bear into William’s hands.
“For you. So you don’t die.”
She whipped around and ran back up the hill.
William looked at the teddy. It was old. The fabric had thinned down to threads in spots, and he could see the stuffing through the weave. It was the same one she had up in her tree.
He pulled his bag open and very carefully put the teddy bear in. “Come on.”
They walked down, away from the house, deeper into the swamp.
“ ‘ Where the fisherman waits,’ ” William quoted. “What does that mean to you?”
“It could be a lot of places. There is a whole bunch of Fisherman’s this and Fisherman’s that in the swamp.”
“Vernard wouldn’t know many places. This place has to be close. Some place your family would go often.”
Gaston frowned. “It might be the Drowned Dog Puddle. It’s a bad place. The thoas used to come there to die.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a pond. There is a hill on the west side of it, and it kind of hugs the pond. The water is pitch-black because of all the peat. Nobody knows how deep it is. You can’t swim in it and nothing lives there except snakes. The hill and the pond open to some swampy ground, cypress, mud, little streams, and then the river eventually. The family goes there to pick the berries for the wine each year. They grow all around that hill.”
“What about the fisherman?”
“There is an old tree growing by the pond, leaning over it. People call it the Black Fisherman.”
“Sounds about right.” William looked around. Tall pines surrounded them. He couldn’t see the house. Far enough. He dug in his bag, taking care not to damage the bear. “How’s your handwriting?”
“Um. Okay, I guess.”
William got out a small notebook and a pen and handed them to Gaston. “Sit down.”
Gaston sat on the log. “Why do I need those?”
“Because Vernard’s journal is very long, and my handwriting is shit. I need to write it down because I don’t understand any of it, which means my brain will forget it soon.”
The kid blinked at him. “What?”
“Write,” William told him. “The art of medicine, as ancient as the human body itself. It began with the first primitive, who plagued by ache, stuck a handful of grass in his mouth, chewed, and found his pain lessened ...”
TWENTY-EIGHT
WILLIAM crouched on the deck of the barge. Before him the shore loomed, black and green in the weak dawn light. Cerise stood next to him, her scent twisting and turning around him. Behind them the Mars waited.
“Are you sure?” Cerise asked.
“Yes. We go our separate ways here. If I take out Spider, the Hand will break.” But to get to Spider, he’d have to have a distraction and the Mars were it.
“Don’t die,” she whispered.
“I won’t.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her, her taste so sharp and vivid, it almost hurt. So this was it. He’d known it was too good to be true. He had her and now he would lose her.
The barge swung close to the shore. He leaped, clearing the twenty-foot stretch of water, and took off into the woods.
Twenty minutes later William went to ground on the crest of the hill behind the Drowned Dog Puddle. The sun had risen, but the day was gray and dark, the sky overcast. In the weak light the swirls of green, gray, and brown on his face blended with the dense brush cover of the berry bushes. He’d molded himself into the hill so deep, he tasted mud on his lips. He was all but invisible to Spider’s agents busy below.
The hill cradled the pond in a ragged crescent, dropping down in a sheer cliff, made soggy and slick with recent rain. Bushes and pines sheathed the hill, but nothing grew down by the pond, save for a lonely cypress. It rose above the water, a gnarled and grizzled veteran of countless storms. The cypress cast no reflection. The water of the pond beneath it was pitch-black.
The entire place emanated an odd menacing calm. The sloshing of the Hand’s agents did little to disturb it, no more than a grave digger would’ve disturbed the serenity of a graveyard.
William shifted slightly to keep the circulation flowing in his arms. He hid above the pond’s northern shore, far enough to be out of the agents’ plain sight, but close enough to miss little. The Mirror’s bag provided him with a distance lens, which he wore over his left eye like an eye patch. The lens brought the agents so close, he could count the pimples on their faces.
Three feet beyond him the ground ended abruptly, and the hill plunged twenty-six feet straight into the pitch-black water of the pond. Spider didn’t pay the hill a lot of attention, posting only two guards. They had gone to ground, too, the closest only fifteen yards from where William lay. Neither would be a problem when the time came. In Spider’s place William would’ve done the same—any attack coming from the east, over the hill, would’ve ended in the peat, and his instincts screamed at him to stay the hell away from that black water.
Most of Spider’s agents were concentrated around the pond. William focused on the shock of white hair. Karmash. The massive agent barked an order to a swarthy thick woman. She tossed her hair back and went to a chain lying in the mud. The muscles on her nude back bulged. Something shifted beneath her skin, like a coiled spring, and she picked up the chain roll and carried it without apparent strain to where other agents untangled ropes by cypress roots.