Between the Spark and the Burn (4 page)

But Neely just laughed again. He patted the sleeping bag next to him. “Climb in. I wasn't using it anyway. Can't sleep.”

He didn't have to offer twice. I slipped off my winter boots and slid into the red bag. Neely had a book beside him, unopened—a wintry book full of orphans and family secrets and misadventures and lies and epic misfortune.

“Read to me?” I asked him.

And he did. Neely had a great voice for reading and soon the wailing of the wild dogs outside bled into the wild winter setting of the book and suddenly I was content and sleepy and doing all right again.

Later he offered me a sip of cognac from a flask to heat me up from the inside, and took one himself too. Then he climbed into the sleeping bag with me. Because it was big enough. And because I wasn't going back to my tent all by myself, no way in hell.

Neely's breath warmed the hollow of my throat, right where the jade-green necklace met my skin, and it felt good.

“Do you think the devil-boy story could be true?” I asked him, because suddenly I felt I had to get the question off my chest, or die trying. “Could it be Brodie up there in the mountains, doing those things? Or River?”

I could feel Neely shrug next to me in the dark. “I don't know. Devil-boy stealing girls' dreams . . . could be them. Both of them. Either. Could be nothing. I guess we'll find out.”

I looked up straight into his face, my blue eyes on his. “So you think it could be the both of them, working together?”

River, you wouldn't, would you? Even if you killed the entire town of Rattlesnake Albee, even if you made my uncle slit his own throat, even if you made that kid throw himself in front of a train, you're not evil. Not evil like Brodie. Not deep down. You hated him, just as much as we did.

Didn't you?

“Yes,” Neely said, after a minute, in answer to my question.

And then he flipped over to face the other wall of the tent, as if he didn't want me to keep looking into his eyes.

“Then you think River's gone mad,” I said. Statement. Not a question. “You think he went crazy from the glow and teamed up with Brodie, just like Brodie wanted all along.”

“Yes. No. I don't know. He's just been gone a long time, is all.” And Neely didn't laugh when he said this. He didn't shrug. He was just . . . quiet.

I put my hand on his side, on the soft part between his ribs and his hip. He reached back, grabbed my fingers, and pulled me up next to him, tight.

And if I wished he was River, and if he wished I didn't wish he was River, well, neither of us said anything because he was still warm, and I was still cold, and both of us needed the comfort. Neely-warmth started warming me up, finally, finally, and we both fell asleep wrapped up together with the wolves still lullaby-ing us in the background.

T
HE
A
PPALACHIAN
M
OUNTAINS
had an air of Echo about them, lots of trees and small towns. There was less snow, only an inch in some places, fluffy and new and unfrozen with brown grass still poking through. And we were grateful because it was steep gravel roads much of the time, and Neely's car was a smooth black luxury thing meant for the city, not circumnavigating mysterious mountain paths on the way to hunting down a stranger-hating village plagued by a devil-boy.

The landscape had stayed roughly the same since we turned away from the sea . . . winter, winter, winter, with barren trees and green pines and wooden fences and open fields full of crows. But we were up higher now, and the sky was bigger. Even the clouds were bigger.

“I'd be inclined to paint this, if I had my tools,” Luke said, taking a bite of his cheese and apple sandwich.

We'd stopped to have lunch, and were eating standing up because it was too cold to sit on the ground. Luke was facing a little clearing in the trees. There was an old brown barn in the shape of one of the Citizen's vintage art deco clocks—square on the bottom, dome-shaped above. It stood gazing out at us as we gazed at it, the mountains rising blue in the background.

There hadn't been room in Neely's car for paints and canvases. And I think my brother was missing it, the painting, like how I was already missing my distracted parents, and Jack, and my closet full of Freddie's old clothes, and just about everything I was used to. Being away from home was an eerie thing, thick and powerful and overwhelming. It was energizing to see new places and people, your brain on fire, your heart stirred up. But it was also kind of . . . sad too.

I'd been itching to leave Echo and now that I was on the road, I felt an itchy need to get back home again, damn it. There was no satisfying me.

“You know what this scene needs?” Sunshine stepped in front of the barn, swung her brown hair under her blue hat, and struck a curvy, sultry pose, one palm spread open on her hip. She batted her sleepy eyes at Luke. “Me. That's what.”

Luke laughed. “I've already promised to do your portrait when we get back home. How much of my art do you plan to take over?”

Sunshine shrugged, and then turned to me. “A nude,” she said, smiling. “I'm going to make him hang it in the Citizen's art gallery ballroom, right next to all those naked paintings of Freddie.”

I looked from Sunshine, to my brother, and back again. Then I tilted my head back, clenched my fists, very, very dramatic, and screamed.
“Noooooooo.”

My voice echoed off the silent mountains and came back to me, and Neely started laughing. I pointed at my brother. “If you paint our next-door neighbor in the nude, then you damn well better hide it under your bed, because if I have to look at it I'll kill someone. Probably you.”

“I'd love to see that,” Neely said, his arms crossed, his back leaning against his now very dirty car.

“Sunshine's nude painting or me killing someone?” I asked.

“Both,” Neely said, and then he was laughing that laugh again, his eyes crinkling up with it, and the next thing I knew I was laughing along with him.

Luke tossed an apple core over the fence, into the snow, short and quick and cocky-like. “You're such a prude, Vi.”

Sunshine nodded. “It's true, Vi. It's always been true.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Would a prude do what I did with River? Would she? Even after he suicided Jack's Pa, even after all of it? Would she have let him do what he almost did?” And then I shut my mouth again, seeing the looks on their faces.

Especially Neely's.

His eyes had changed. They'd been happy and amused half a second ago. And now they were hot and dark and fiery.

“You were under his glow, Vi,” he said, the blush spilling off his face and spreading down his neck like it did sometimes right before he let his fists start swinging. “That wasn't your fault.”

“Wasn't it?” I asked, but my voice barely rose above the cold breeze blowing down the mountains.

Wasn't it, River?

≈≈≈

We found Inn's End just as the sun started sinking into the horizon. We pulled over no less than eight times, asking farmers and postmen and kids playing in the snow for directions. It wasn't on the maps, just as Wide-Eyed Theo had said.

Everyone gave us directions willingly enough, though they looked at us strangely and seemed a bit unnerved at the question. Even the kids—a brother and sister on a small farm, wrapped up against the chill. They were no older than ten, with grave expressions, like old black-and-white pictures of towheaded Great Depression children I'd seen in
National Geographic
. They came up to Neely's rolled-down car window and the green-eyed older brother peered over the top of the car door and told us where to go . . . down this road, up the next, very earnest, as if he were being graded on it. And when he was done he rubbed a calloused un-mittened hand over a small cut on his left temple.

I wondered what work he'd been doing at his age, to get hands like that. I wondered how he'd gotten the cut on his face.

The boy caught my eye and added, “You shouldn't go there, though. Bad things happen in Inn's End. It's a bad place.” And his little sister pursed up her chapped red lips and nodded too, like it was the God-given truth, praise be to him.

But it would take more than two wary little kids to make us turn back now, even if the directions were full of wrong turns and dead ends and misleads, as if people didn't want us to find the town. Two hours it took us. Two hours of twisting roads and black trees and dark hollows. And then we turned down another unnamed, unpaved road, crossed a covered bridge, and there we were.

The town sign was weathered and tilted at an angle, but we could still read it.

Inn's End.

I guess I had built it up in my mind as a wild backwoods place with barefoot children and chickens running around squawking and rusted-out washtubs and weathered, beaten-down shacks. The reality was a windy, one-main-street town with a vague New England feel that reminded me of Echo, just like the rest of the Appalachian Mountains. The white wooden houses looked suspicious and tight-lipped, with their black shutters closed tight against the wind, but the outskirts of the town backed up into sloping meadows, which themselves backed up into endless rolling hills and trees, trees, trees. Beautiful.

We parked the car next to the small, steepled, red-roofed church at the end of the main road. We got out. Stood still. Took the town in.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. The deep, deep, middle-of-the-forest quiet. After the quiet, I noticed the lack of Christmas decorations. No lights on trees, no greenery around door frames, no cheery red tinsel hung between streetlights. All the towns we'd passed recently had put up their own slightly shabby holiday trimmings, making the streets seem more cheerful and sweet than usual. But not Inn's End.

And then I noticed the birds.

Black-feathered corpses. Everywhere. Piled up on steps, kicked into snow piles, dangling by their necks from lampposts and signs. There were eight nailed to the door of the dark, abandoned-looking Youngman's Inn, and five hanging by their feet from the iron church gate.

The four of us walked down the center of the road. Still and silent. I saw lights in windows, but there was no one in the street. Not a soul.

The sun was just a sliver on the horizon now, like a small prayer said without much hope. The orange-pink light reflected off the snow and turned the world a strange, ominous color that put dark thoughts in my head.

“What was it that Wide-Eyed Theo said?” Neely asked, quiet.

“The devil-boy commands a flock of ravens,”
Luke said, voice low.

I shivered, a sick, hard shiver, like the ones you get when you have the flu.

My wrists started hurting, sharp and cold at first, and then hot and full of sting. I tore my mittens off and turned my hands over, but all I saw was the same pink scars, looking like they always did.

“I don't like it here,” Luke said. His words fogged up in the cold air. His eyes were wide open, his arms straight down at his sides. “Vi, I have a bad feeling about this town. This—” He nodded his chin at the dead birds, their feathers ruffling in the chill wind. “I don't like it, sister. We should leave. Now.”

Sunshine turned around in a circle, saying nothing. So far she and Luke had flirted and kissed and been in love and acting like this trip was all good fun.

But now I saw it in her eyes. Fear. Raw and rotten and deep as winter is cold.

A door opened. One of the white houses at the far end of the street. It opened and then slammed closed again. The attached cluster of dead, black feathers swung back with it and hit the wood with a thud.

A girl stood on the steps.

She saw us just as we saw her. She jumped back a few inches, her mouth wide open.

Two heartbeats.

And then she started walking toward us, her eyes on Luke and his red-brown hair.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice small and hesitant like it was afraid to be heard. “Where did you come from? We don't get strangers here.” She paused. “At least, we didn't use to.”

I thought she was about fourteen, but slight and small, which might be making her look younger. She had white-blond hair, straight down her back, no bangs. She wore a green dress, a bit old-fashioned in a home-sewn way, plain with a tight waist, thick black boots, and a gray homemade sweater—one thread was coming loose and had opened a quarter-sized hole on her shoulder. In her right arm she held a large white bowl of something. Something thick and red that had sloshed over the side and stained the front of her dress.

She was looking at Luke but Neely answered her. “We heard about your town, about what was happening here. The devil-boy, with the ravens. We came to investigate.”

“No, Neely, don't tell her,” I whispered, too late. I'd read mysteries. I'd read Agatha Christie. You never tell people what you're up to. It's the golden rule. If people know you're looking for answers, they clam up and refuse to talk.

But Neely just winked at me, and then at her, as if we were all just a bunch of kids flirting with each other at the town carnival or something, our hands sticky from cotton candy and our hearts on our sleeves.

How did he do that? Make a hidden mountain town full of dead birds feel like a Norman Rockwell painting?

The girl nodded, as if what Neely said made sense and nothing could surprise her much anymore anyway.

“What's in the bowl?” Sunshine had a hand to her mouth, and suddenly I knew why. The winter wind lifted the copper smell to my nose.

“Blood,” the girl said, simply. “For the churchyard. We killed the pig today.”

Luke turned his head to look back at the church, then turned it forward again. “Why are you bringing pig's blood to the church?”

His voice got loud at the end, and it worried me. I wrapped my fingers around his arm and he leaned into me.

The girl shrugged. “To pour on the gravestones.”

“Why would you pour pig's blood on the gravestones?” I didn't really want to know the answer, and yet the question came out of my mouth anyway.

The girl shifted her hip and put the bowl in her other arm, more of it spilling onto her dress in the process.

A sound came from Sunshine's opened lips. A . . . sigh. A soft sigh. Usually Sunshine shrieked loudly when she was scared, or pretending to be scared. But she was quiet now. Sighs, not screams.

The girl looked at Sunshine, and then looked back at the blood staining her home-sewn dress. A flush started creeping over her cheeks, as if she hadn't thought to be embarrassed about the spilled blood before now.

“It's an offering to our ancestors, to help capture the boy,” she said, in answer to my question. The girl paused, looked toward her house, quick, and then looked back at us again. “Some people are saying he's the devil and has hooves for feet and fire coming out of his fingertips, but it's wrong. It's all wrong. He . . . he just looks like a boy, just a boy like either of you.” She stopped and stared at Neely, and then at Luke. “I saw him when he came to me, in my bedroom. He sat on my stomach, light as air, and tried to steal my dreams, only I woke up. The other girls, they didn't wake up in time, they didn't see his face in the dark, but I struck a match. I saw.”

Neely flinched when the girl said
a boy, just a boy like either of you.

The girl started blinking fast, and her eyes were pleading and wistful and kind of lonely. That look was familiar to me, in some deep, almost forgotten way.

“I didn't tell anyone,” she said. “The other girls told, but I didn't.”

I wanted to ask her more, and so did Neely, behind me. His mouth was parted and I could almost see his questions, sitting on the edge of his tongue . . .

But I felt so bad for her suddenly, with her red-rimmed eyes and her skinny shoulders all hunched up and the blood on her dress. I didn't care about anything, right then. Not the devil-boy, not the dead birds, not Brodie. There was just this girl.

I pulled myself away from Luke, and stepped forward. “Let's go to the cemetery and get this done, okay?” I nodded at the bowl, and then I reached for her free hand. It was small and calloused, like the boy who gave us directions. I took it in mine, and squeezed.

We all walked back down the road, past all the white houses with the tight black shutters and the dead birds on the doors, to the church. I opened the black iron gate, careful not to touch the birds, not to look into their black eyes, and pulled the girl in behind me.

“My name is Pine,” she said as we climbed up to the tiny cemetery off to the left of the church. “Like the trees. My mother likes the way they smell. And how they never die, even in winter.”