Between the Spark and the Burn (6 page)

T
ORCH LIGHTS.

We stood out on the front step, watching, not caring who saw us now.

Twenty or so men walked down the street outside the house. There were dogs at their heels and they were carrying torches,
torches,
like they'd been out hunting monsters. Twenty men and a swarm of dogs and one boy, tied up and held tight and dragged between them.

The men were quiet, making no sound but the crunch-crunch of boots on snow. Their torches shifted slightly with each step, and long shadows slithered and danced across the trees and houses.

The boy was slack, the firelight flashing off his long hair as it swung about his ears.

Long, red hair.

“It's him, it's Brodie,” Sunshine said in a hollow, quiet voice, her eyes staring straight out, her body stiff and still except for the palm she still held to her head.

I took her free hand and squeezed. Luke stayed hunched in the doorway behind me, and whispered
we need to get out of here, Vi,
over and over.

People were coming out of their houses now, children in socks and women in white nightdresses under black woolen coats grabbed from a peg by the door. The children cheered at the sight of the red-haired boy, their arms raised. But the mothers . . . the mothers put their hands together under their chins, or one palm on their heart, and stayed as silent as the men.

The four of us were out on the street now, our socks getting soaked up with snow. We watched the men march the boy up into the squat, white church, to the Gothic-arch-framed doorway. They pulled back the two heavy wooden doors and went inside.

The church bell started ringing a minute later, urgent and crisp.

Back inside the Lashley house.

Neely said nothing and his cheeks turned red and his eyes went dark.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, because no one had. “We can't control Brodie. He almost killed us the last time. We should have talked about this. What the hell is our plan, Neely?”

Neely started moving a bit, side to side, like he was eager and it was getting hard to stand still. “Don't worry, Vi. He's already captured. The town did us a favor. They caught him. I don't know how, but they caught him. Maybe he over-sparked himself and went weak from it. Maybe they have their own magic here. I don't know.” His hands were twitching. I could see them. “But we'll go to the church. We'll see what they plan to do.”

Neely was right. Brodie was caught, captured, tied up. River wasn't here, he was safe somewhere, laying low, as he'd promised. It was just Brodie. Had been all along. Everything led up to this. Everything since Brodie cut my wrists and kissed me, everything since I'd stabbed him in the chest and passed out. One step after another, all leading to this.

Finding Brodie.

Getting vengeance.

Watching him die.

The bat, and Sunshine bleeding, and strips of red across Jack's skin, River, blood on his neck, and the waiting, and the dark corners and shadows and hearing laughter that wasn't there, and it will never ever end, ever. Ever. Unless.

I was fidgeting too now, all fear gone, nothing but courage beating in my blood. I shoved my feet into my winter boots, quick, quick, and the tune popped back into my head, the one from the beach, the one that went
A-hunting I will go, a-hunting I will go . . .

“No.”

I turned. Luke. His hand shot out and gripped my arm again.

“No,” he said. “I won't let you. Let's just leave, Vi, okay? Let's just get out of here, leave the sleeping bags, leave everything, and just get to the car. Now.”

I put my hand on his, and then gently, gently, pulled his fingers away. “I have to go, Luke. I have to. This is it. If they kill Brodie, I need to be there. I need to be sure it's him. And I'll need to be sure he's . . .” I paused. “I'll need to be sure he's dead.”

Luke met my eyes. And nodded. Once.

“You should pack up while we're gone,” I said to him, in a louder voice. “Sunshine, you stay and help him. When this is done, we'll meet you at the car and then we'll leave Inn's End and never look back, all right?”

And I was out the door before my brother could say another word, Neely right behind me.

I expected the hard stares but I wasn't prepared for them. The looks from the Inn's End residents as we walked up the church steps . . . they cut sharper than the winter wind that blew right through me.

No one stopped us, though.

The church was already almost full. The only light came from the fat candles that sat on the windowsills lining the wall. Shadows crept and crawled across the stark, stark room, nothing to see but a stained-glass window depicting a pink beast, lying on its back, legs raised in the air, neck spilling blood. The stiff wooden pews were packed with families huddled and bundled up in the great, white, unheated room. It smelled like apples and snow and candles and wet wool. Neely and I squeezed into the last bench on the left, deep in the shadows, next to an elderly couple who refused to look us in the eye. Neely's elbow brushed by the woman, and she cringed against her husband.

The boy was by the pulpit, half hidden by the group of men. He just stood there, alone, his chin on his chest. Tangled red hair covered his face, hiding his features, and his arms were twisted behind him and tied. He wore black wool slacks and a hand-knit sweater like Pine's. His clothes were torn in places, his pale, bare skin showing through. Dead leaves and twigs and dirt clung to every inch of him, as if he'd been living in the wild for years, running with wolves and sleeping in trees.

I felt bad for him. I did. Even if it was Brodie. Even knowing it was probably Brodie. I still flinched at the sight of him, alone and tied up and waiting for whatever horrible thing was going to happen next.

The candlelight rippled over his body in flickering bursts. I strained forward.

“Is it him?” I whispered to Neely. I pressed on my wrists. They had started hurting again. “It can't be him, though. Look how he's standing. Brodie would never stand like that, so quiet and patient and doomed.”

Neely kept staring at the boy. “River was here. Or Brodie. One of them, I'm almost sure of it. But—” He just shook his head, and kept staring.

I saw Pine's white-blond hair shining from one of the front rows. She was still wearing the scarf I gave her. There were six children next to her and an older woman that I figured must be her mother, though she looked close to sixty. I wanted Pine to turn. I wanted to see her face, to see what she was thinking about the captured boy. But she didn't look back.

A man stepped away from the torch-carrying group and came to stand at the front of the aisle between the two rows of pews. His shoulders were strong and wide, his pale blue eyes big and piercing and grim, not a drop of mischief or humor. His beard was thick, and soft-looking, and brown turning to gray.

“And so,” he said, his voice booming across the room, rock solid and deep, “we have finally caught the devil that plagued our daughters these past weeks. I don't need to tell you the horror I felt the night I heard a noise and walked into Prue's room, just in time to see a flash of red hair slipping out the window, a string of black birds trailing behind.”

People began to talk, loudly, all at once, telling their own stories of the devil-boy and his birds. The voices bounced off the rafters and echoed off the white walls and the room swelled with sound. The bearded man waited a few seconds, then held up his hand.

“The question is,” he said, “what to do with him? There is no precedent for devils. Witches, yes, as you know. That is simple. Our ancestors took care of them years ago. And thanks to Pastor Walker Rose, God rest his soul, we haven't had any since my father was young. But devils . . . this is a delicate matter, not to be rushed. Drood there wants to hang him—”

Here he nodded at another man, a man with a bandage over his eye and several seeping sores on his face.

“But,” the bearded man said, “as I told Drood, a hanging may not kill a devil. Burning has been suggested, though that, in my mind, is for witches and witches alone. Giver Crisp advised tipping him upside down and draining all the blood from him, as that is what we do to pigs—the idea being that devils and pigs are in the same category, so to speak. I am now opening the floor to other suggestions. Remember, whatever we do, it must be quick. And quiet.”

Everyone was silent again. They seemed to be . . . waiting. Their expressions were obedient, but impatient and . . . eager, almost like children trying hard to be still at the end of a long day of school.

I'd seen that eager look before.

River . . . eyes dancing . . . jaw clenched tight . . . right before Jack's dad slit his own throat in Echo's town square . . .

And then I realized, fully, what we'd walked in on. This town, these people . . . it was off. It was all
off
. What had Neely and I been thinking, marching right into the church like we belonged? This town was . . .
wrong
.

“We will do this civilized,” the man continued, looking back at the congregation again. “You will raise your hands. Yes, Minnie Brown, go ahead—”

“Duncan. Duncan Begg.”

The voice was hoarse, and young, and yet still it soared above the rest of the noise in the church. It came from the red-haired boy. He had . . . changed. He stood straight now, chin up, his hair thrown back. His skin was clear, his forehead wide, his cheeks pink with that healthy glow people sometimes get from spending a lot of time outside.

He looked right at me. Me, and then Neely, right at us, and his eyes were hurt, and dark, and scared, and sane.

Neely's hands, on my own, holding tight, tight, tight. “It's not Brodie,” he said, quiet, his mouth near my ear. “It's not Brodie,” he said again.

And he was right. How could we have thought it was Brodie? The kid in front of us had the red hair but he was strong and young-Gene-Kelly, not tall, all-elbows-and-knees Texas cowboy.

“Then who is it?” I whispered back. But Neely just kept staring ahead, alert, focused.

“Duncan Begg, you've known me my whole life,” the boy called out as the room went pin-drop still. “You taught me how to carve a horse from a piece of white pine when I was five years old. You built my grandmother a special rocking chair to save her back in those hard years before she died. How can you stand there and say I'm this devil-boy?”

The woman on Neely's left, the one who had cringed away from him, made a small noise. She unwound herself from her husband's arms, and stood.

Everyone turned to look at her, and I flinched back farther into the shadows.

“That is Finch Grieve, from out near Sin Hill,” the woman said. “His grandmother and me used to knit the souls of the dead together on Sundays, before her aches and pains stopped her from coming into town. He's not the devil-boy, Duncan. Couldn't be him there.”

Finch turned his head, and rested his gaze on her, as did the rest of the crowd.

“You're saying we have the wrong boy?” Duncan's blue eyes were very, very calm. “This is serious, Aggie Lennox. Be sure of your next words. If you are wrong, the people here won't be kind. Revenge is owed.” He motioned to Finch. “He has the red hair, flaming red, underneath all that dirt. We found him hiding in the woods, and who hides but the guilty?”

Aggie reached a hand behind her back. Her husband took it in his own, quick, and squeezed. “It's Finch. It's just Finch. He's quiet, always been quiet, and lonely now, I should think, with his mother gone and his grannie too, living all those miles out there on his own. Some would say he has a bit of the moon in him. But that doesn't make him a devil.”

Duncan nodded. Slow. “Do you stand by your words, Aggie?”

A pause. Everyone looked at her, even Finch. Especially Finch.

“I stand by my words,” she said, loud and clear. And then she sat back down, next to her husband, and leaned against him.

Her husband looked worried. I saw it in his faded green eyes when they caught mine, before he turned away.

Duncan gazed out over the congregation. He was reading their faces, judging their response. A hand rose. He nodded. “Yes, Didi.”

A girl got to her feet. She was ten, maybe eleven, with thick, curly red hair flying out from her head. “The devil can hide in any man,” she said. She turned, and looked at Aggie, and at us, and there was a look in her eyes that was not child-like, not innocent.

“The devil can hide in any man,” she repeated. “Or any boy. Isn't that so? How do we know whether or not Finch Grieve is still as he once was? Couldn't the devil look like Finch, if he chose? Couldn't he look like anyone?”

A rumbling waved through the crowd, a rumbling of “true, true, out of the mouths of babes, true, true, true.”

Another hand in the air. Another nod.

“What if we buried him alive? Put him back under the earth where he came from?”

A dozen more hands raised.

“I think we should bleed him dry, like the pigs. Pour his blood on the gravestones and—”

“No, burning is the only way to know—”

“You got to drown the devil out—we could tie him down with rocks and throw him in Silky Pond.”

It was as if Aggie had never spoken.

I shifted in my seat. My breath quickened.

“Don't,” Neely said, knowing what I was going to do before I knew it myself. “Don't, Vi—”

I was already on my feet. “It's not him,” I cried out. My voice hit the tall angled ceiling and echoed around the church. “We came to Inn's End tonight because we heard the devil-boy was here. He tried to kill me. He tried to kill my friends. And that . . .” I looked at Finch, and he looked at me, and our eyes held. “That. Is. Not. Him.”

Chaos.

Shouts and yells and whispers and echoes,
what are they doing here, strangers, they need to leave, Pastor Walker Rose, leave, leave, leave.