Between the Spark and the Burn (15 page)

“Take your shirt off,” I said, again.

“You're getting as bossy as that Carollie girl.” Neely set the candle down and began tugging up his finely knit, rich-boy sweater.

I looked at Neely, at the long scar that ran from his neck to his right wrist—a scar that River gave him, though he hadn't meant to. But it wasn't the scar I'd come to see. Black and blue and purple, four of them stretching across his torso, each the size of my fist.

“Neely.” I put my hands on his chest. I ran my fingertips over his ribs. “You're covered in bruises.”

“Yes.”

“And you haven't been fighting.”

“No.”

“Tell me what's going on.”

“You already know what's going on.”

Neely shuddered as my fingers moved across his skin, but whether it was from pain, or something else, I didn't know.

“You have a glow,” I said, because suddenly I knew, I just knew.
“You've had a glow all along.”

Neely paused.

Shook his head.

Nodded.

“I have a . . . it's more like an anti-glow. It's not the same thing. It's . . . it's why I'm not worried about River. I've temporarily castrated him, so to speak. He couldn't use his glow now if he tried.”

“How long have you known?” I asked. My hand touched his arm, my fingers going up and down the fire-scar.

“I've suspected for a while. I started putting two and two together last summer, after everything that happened in Echo. But I wasn't sure until we got River away from Carollie, and I tried again. I didn't know this kind of Redding glow was even possible. Which is why it took so long for me to figure it out. Things make a lot more sense now. Like why River always got worse when he left home and I wasn't around. And the bruises . . . I was in so many fights I never knew the difference.”

A few minutes passed, where we both just sat next to each other and thought.

“If you're anti-glowing River,” I said, finally, “why is he still being the sea king?”

Neely shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe he used too much glow and went crazy with it, like Brodie. It'll pass. I know it will. He just needs time.”

I kept moving my fingers on his scar and not meeting his eyes. “You've got to stop, Neely. You can't keep this up.” And, as if proving my point, he flinched when my fingers moved down and touched his ribs again.

He took short, fast breaths until I moved my hand. “I can't stop. I have to hold River in, keep him on a short leash.” Neely breathed in. And out. Slower. Like it hurt. “At least until he stops being so damn crazy. When he's like this he's capable of anything.”

“But what if he never quits being the sea king? What then?”

Neely shook his head. “He will, Vi. He'll come back to us. He just needs a break from the glow.”

Maybe Neely was right. River had said something, right before he left last summer . . . something about his grandfather telling him he needed to abstain to get his control back. That's what he'd set off to do when he left. River was supposed to cut himself off so he could recover from too much glowing and stop losing control.

Of course, he broke that promise, in the end.

“What does it feel like?” I put the palm of my hand on another of Neely's bruises, and it felt hot. Even in the cold tent, it heated my hand right up. “Does it feel good, like the glow?”

Neely let out a small sigh. “No. Not at all. It feels like . . . a headache, mixed up with the smell of dust . . . and the color of rain, and . . . and a feeling of frustration.”

“Neely,” I said, not looking at him, only looking at my fingers. They wanted to move over his skin again, to make him shudder again. “If you keep doing this, keep getting the bruises and un-glowing River . . . what will happen?”

Neely laughed. “Who knows?”

“Will you go mad too?”

“I hope not, Vi. Then you'd have two singing sea kings on your hands.”

I didn't laugh with him. “I'm scared. I'm scared for you.” And my eyes snapped to his, and then back to the bruises, to the ones that spilled across his ribs from front to back, to the ones that made it hard for Neely to breathe.

It didn't seem fair that River's glow felt warm and good and made him a sea king when Neely's did . . . this.

“I'll be all right,” Neely whispered. He paused. Put his hands on my hips. Brought me closer. “Violet?”

“Yes?”

“You . . . you should go back to bed. Back to River. He needs you.”

He leaned into me then, close, close, and his lips brushed past mine, soft, soft, soft, and I could picture the wild horses again, picture their tails, and their warm breath fogging in the cold sea air, and the sand flying, and all of it, all of it.

“I don't regret what I did,” Neely said, so low it was almost a whisper. He didn't explain and I didn't need him to. “Not for a second. No matter what happened afterward. No matter what's going to happen now.”

“Neither do I.” And I didn't realize how true it was until it came out of my mouth.

Neely kept his hands on me, and blew out the candle. His thumbs started moving in little circles over my hip bones. We both sat there in the dark and I was shaking a bit and I guess I knew why. My blood was pulsing and roaring like a damn baritone singing out some heartbroken aria on the stage.

But I didn't move and I didn't talk. I didn't even sigh.

Neely said I was that kind of girl. Quiet on the outside and loud on the inside.

≈≈≈

Later, much later, I slipped out of the tent and back into the night. The nearby house kept up its creaking and sighing in the winter wind and it was creepy and beautiful at the same time. River opened his eyes when I slid in next to him, just for a second, and smiled at me before falling back to sleep. I held him in my arms and listened to his soft breathing—after a while it seemed to join up with the howling wind outside, as if they were singing in harmony.

I thought about life and death and sane and insane and I was stirred up and wide-awake. Eventually my thoughts drifted to the people buried beneath me under the dirt and snow. Was one of them a girl my age? When did she die? Why? Maybe we were the same height. Maybe she was stretched out just like me, six feet down, and we were aligned head to head and toe to toe.

That thought comforted me, for some reason, and I finally fell asleep.

R
IVER WAS BETTER.
He didn't scream in his sleep, not once. In the morning he rose before me and started the fire and brewed coffee in the moka pot. And when he poured espresso for the rumpled Canto and the quiet-as-ever Finch, they took it and acted like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

“It looks like his fever broke, just like you said it would, Neely.” Canto sat on the edge of the biggest gravestone, and Finch stood next to her, drinking his coffee.

Does Canto really believe that, Freddie?

Neely gave Canto a tired smile, and nodded. “I'm always right. Just ask Vi.”

And then he looked at me, those damn blue eyes straight on mine, and that was all it took.

Neely, half naked, candlelight, ribs, bruises, the old house creaking, the tent walls flapping, Neely's thumbs on my hip bones, and I wanted it, I did, Freddie help me, I did . . .

River got in the front seat of the car when we were ready to leave, but no one said anything. It meant that I had to sit next to, and witness, the caresses of Canto and Finch. But hey, River's eyes were calm and he looked less starved and lost and almost . . . civilized. I didn't see the glint I loved or his crooked smile. But I wasn't complaining.

“You need a haircut,” I yelled up to him at one point, somewhere in Kansas.

He turned back to me, eyes calm, face calm. “True. That's so damn true, Vi.”

And it was the only thing he said all day, but it was enough.

River was doing better, way better.

But Neely . . .

Three times I saw him stop what he was doing and suck air in through his teeth. Neely was faded. Tired and faded. His bruises were even worse in the daylight. He was moving slower than usual. He couldn't keep up this thing, not for much longer.

Maybe we really would find Brodie in Colorado. And maybe that would change everything, somehow. Maybe we would find Brodie, and slit his throat, and then we could go back to Citizen Kane and let River be as crazy as he needed to be, and just wait him out, and Neely could stop.

Though if we were really getting closer to Brodie, wouldn't I feel it? Wouldn't I feel his nearness, deep in my bones?

Did I even want to find him?

I would be meeting Death halfway, at least. Like Finch. Staring my fear in the face. There was something likable, something . . . serene . . . in that. There was.

≈≈≈

The first part of Colorado was flat and straight and pretty in a wide-sky way. It was dark by the time we reached the mountains, though we could see the setting sun glinting off the snowy Rockies miles before we got anywhere near the foothills.

We were in the West. The place of cowboys and horses and cattle and gunfights and poker and saloons and riding off into the sunset.

Gold Hollow proved much easier to find than Inn's End. We stopped to buy a local map at a small Wild West store in a Colorado town named Esther Park. The crinkly-eyed man at the counter told us Gold Hollow was pretty much a ghost town compared to what it was in the gold rush days, but some stubborn mountain types still lived and raised their families there. And then he pointed to it right on the map.

So things were looking up, in that sense.

We wound our way up the mountain, up and up. Switchbacks and more switchbacks and ice and snow and slick and skid and no side-rails and thank God Neely's car could take it.

Neely's hands clung to the steering wheel and his shoulders hunched up tight to his ears. His eyes, when I saw them in the rearview mirror, looked so dull and worn out I kind of felt like screaming.

Finally, finally, the road curved down into a valley.

Gold Hollow stretched out in a small dip of land, ending in a lake and surrounded by snowy peaks, the stars and the sky wide open above it all. It was a mix of abandoned miners' shacks and solid, well-maintained log cabin homes. There was one small little white church up the hill at the end of the street. Cool rusted-out cars from the fifties and sixties sat amid tree stumps and scattered log huts in the snow-filled meadow that broke up the middle of the town. Being the vintage-loving boy that he was, River smiled when he saw the cars, and it made me smile too. It did.

The town was dark. Quiet. I saw a few lights on, but no one was out and about. Which might not have had as much to do with Inn's End–ishness as it did the fact that it was dark, and winter, and suppertime, and the town looked like there wasn't much to do in it anyway. I saw a weathered hotel, a general store, and a small, rickety café. And that was it.

Brodie could be here,
I thought.
He could be standing up on that hill, or behind that tree, watching us right now, trying to decide which of us he's going to spark up first.

But he wasn't.

I had a feeling, suddenly. A deep-in-the-gut feeling. It had been building for the past two days and suddenly something about the white church and the meadow and the rusted cars broke it out of me.

Brodie wasn't in Colorado.

He was in Riddle.

I hadn't been able to reach Luke and Jack or anyone and I knew why.

Brodie had disconnected the phone and was sparking them all up and it was too late and I shouldn't have gone to North Carolina, I followed Neely, why had I done that?
It was so stupid, so very stupid, Freddie, I—

I shook myself, hard.

One step at a time. Just figure out where you're staying the night first. You can't make Neely drive all the way back to Maine right now anyway. And you don't know that Brodie's there. You don't know that at all. So shut your mouth and keep it together.

We parked the car outside the hotel, which, despite all expectations, appeared open. It was a big, boxy, wooden two-story building, white, with three rows of square windows, a long wraparound porch, and white letters on the top that said
Hollow Miner Hotel
. Definitely a step up from sleeping on the ground.

“How much money do we have left?” Neely asked.

“Not much.” I looked at River. If he'd had money before he went to Carollie it was long, long, long gone.

“I can pay my own way,” Canto said. And that decided it.

The front door was heavy, and creaked when I pushed it open. We stepped into a large room. Red rugs covered a hardwood floor, and hand-carved wooden furniture filled up the corners. An oversized fireplace was stoked and flaming and spitting out heat. The whole thing was so Wild, Wild West, it warmed the damn cockles of my heart.

There was a bar off to the side, and the large mirrors that lined the wall reflected shiny bottles of booze. A bright-eyed woman with narrow shoulders stood behind the counter. Her smooth white hair was cut in a neat bob and she looked like such an exact combination of Freddie and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple that I was drawn to her like flies to honey.

“Are you looking for a place to stay?” she asked, waving her small fingers in the air in hello.

We walked toward the counter, and set our suitcases down. “Well, how much is it for a room?” I asked.

She blinked clever Miss Marple eyes. “Forty dollars for a double bed with the bathroom down the hall and meals included. We're usually filled up with skiers this time of year, but the road into Gold Hollow has been in such bad shape the last few days that the snowheads had to go elsewhere. How did you five make it here?”

“Luck,” Neely said, and half laughed. And then put a hand to his ribs.

Finch looked worried and I guess I did too.

Miss Marple eyed up the two bruises on Neely's face. “I hope you gave the mountain as good as you got. You snowheads. You think you're immortal.”

She shook her head. And then, I swear, she actually clucked her tongue.

Neely didn't bother to correct her, because what would he say anyway? That he hadn't been skiing but instead had a strange power that stopped his brother's strange power, and it ran in their family, his brother's strange power, not his, his was the first of its kind, and . . .

. . . and that was already sounding so stupid in my head that I flinched.

Besides, Miss Marple was doing something interesting. Her small body was spinning and her fingers were dancing over the glistening bottles and the next thing Neely knew he had a shot of cognac sitting in front of him.

“Drink it,” she said. “It will help.”

Neely smiled. He tossed his head back and the lovely amber liquid disappeared. Miss Marple had already moved on down to Finch and River. “You two don't look quite right either. Here. Both of you.”

And two more shots of cognac appeared, and then disappeared, down the throats of Finch and River.

I wondered if the local police knew there was a white-haired Agatha Christie character giving expensive shots of liquor to underaged kids down at the hotel. And then I realized that everyone probably knew, and didn't really care. Which was kind of beautiful, when you thought about it. I was starting to see the appeal of the West.

I reached down into my zippered skirt pocket and took out all the money I could find. I had no more origami animals, just odd bits of change.

“We'll take three rooms,” I said. Which would leave us a little for gas and food and coffee and another night, if we needed it.

“By the way,” Neely said, rubbing his right face-bruise with his hand. The cognac had made his cheeks go a bit pink. “You haven't heard anything about the trees around here. About them . . . talking . . . have you? Or about some kids that have gone missing? Or a tall, redheaded kid causing trouble?”

Miss Marple had started to ring us up on an old cash register. She paused, her small wrinkled fingers still on the buttons. “You must have been chatting with Wild Ann Boe. Our town gossip goes right off her rocker every year when the snow comes. After the first big winter storm, they found the Scotsman hanging naked, feet up, from a tree outside that isolated cabin of his. Such a big man as that, with that fiery orange hair. He hunted grizzlies, in his time. But someone had it in for him. You children are in the wilds, in case you don't know. There's not much difference between now and a hundred years ago, except the loss of the gold and the people that followed it.”

She pushed a chunk of soft white hair behind her ear, and looked straight at me. “The snow set Wild Ann off, and the dead Scotsman just encouraged her. She started seeing all kinds of oddities again, just like last year, and all the years before. Omens in the sky. Portents in the rivers. And then the trees started talking to her, telling her to do things. Or so she said. If you ask me, Wild Ann is looking for attention more than sanity.”

“So no children are missing?” Neely took a deep breath, and then put his hand to his ribs again. “There's no red-haired girl? No talking trees? There must be more to this story than just one gossip. We heard about it all the way on the East Coast.”

Miss Marple shook her head. “It will trace back to poor Wild Ann, I'm afraid.”

I knew it.

What now, Freddie?

“Neely,” I said, not looking at him, keeping my eyes on Miss Marple. “Neely, we have to leave for Maine.
Tonight.
”

Miss Marple clucked her tongue again. “Haven't you heard? A storm is rolling in. Twelve inches of snow, plus wind. It's going to hit in a few hours. You're not going anywhere.”

≈≈≈

The keys to our rooms were big and black, with the room number hanging from a metal tag on the end. They felt heavy in my hand, and solid, like they had a purpose and were proud of it.

The hallway of the second floor was narrow and dark and the floorboards creaked. Canto and Finch took the first room, Neely the second, River and me the third.

There was something so much . . . more, to sharing a hotel room with River instead of a tent. But he just followed me down the hall, and we didn't have enough money for another room anyway.

And if Neely looked at me over his shoulder in the hallway and if I looked at him over mine, well, what difference did it make.

None.

I set my suitcase on the bed and looked around. There was an old white sink in the corner. The bed was narrow for two people, but firm. The pink-striped wallpaper was turning brown with age, but otherwise the room was clean and airy enough.

Freddie, you have to watch out for Luke and Jack. And my parents. And Sunshine. You have to keep them safe. Freddie, are you listening?

“I do believe,” River said, leaning one arm on the heavy wooden dresser, “that this place used to be a brothel, back in Gold Hollow's heyday.”

I jerked myself out of my grim Brodie thoughts. River was talking. And it was clear and sane and made no reference to the sea. I needed to pay attention. “I suppose that's why it was only forty bucks, then.”

River crooked-smiled at me, and his eyes were mischief and spark and sly. “Come over here, Vi. I want to see what it feels like to have you next to me with a warm roof over our heads.”

I went over and stood next to him by the dresser. He hooked one finger through the belt loops on my wool skirt and pulled me closer.

“River,” I said, kind of quiet, lifting my face to his. “River, I'm afraid Brodie is in Maine right now and hurting my brother and Jack. Where . . . where do you think he is?”

River shook his head, and his shaggy brown hair swept past my cheek. “No, Vi. He's not in Maine.”

“How can you be sure?''

River just shrugged, and pulled out his old crooked smile again and shined it down on me.

God, it was good to have him back.

And then I remembered.

Neely, shirt off, body covered in bruises.

I squirmed out of River's arms and went over to the window. I opened it a crack, and breathed in. Miss Marple was right. A storm was coming. I could smell it on the air, cold and sharp and angry.

We gathered on the main floor of the hotel for supper. Miss Marple was also the cook, as it turned out. The five of us sat at a solid table on an elegant, worn rug next to a roaring fire. We ate creamy corn chowder from steaming white bowls and buttered brown bread and homemade hot chocolate spiked with rum.