Boys of Blur (16 page)

Charlie walked back to his bag, his legs shivering as he stepped, wanting to spring. He lifted the bag and slid it onto his shoulders.

“What’s your real name?” Charlie asked his brother. “I should know.”

Sugar bit his lip, almost objecting. Almost.

“Bobby,” he said. “Bobby Reynolds Diaz. But don’t you ever call me that.”

Charlie nodded. “Thanks for finding me. And for … telling me.” He was feeling a lot of things, impossible things, and most of them didn’t have words. “I’m sorry that our dad … I’m sorry that he was like that. To you.”

Sugar smiled, barely. “Wasn’t roses on your end, either. I wouldn’t trade.”

“If I don’t … if we don’t …” Charlie stopped. The panther was nudging the back of his leg. “Tell my mom I love her. Tell Mack thanks for everything. And please be Molly’s brother. She needs one. Everything I have is hers. Including you.”

“Tell them yourself,” Sugar said. “I’m coming with you.”

But Charlie had already turned. He was running toward the stadium and Taper beyond it, matching strides with the panther loping beside him.

Sugar shouted and jumped forward. He dug in and lengthened his stride and chewed up the dirt track at his top speed, and still Charlie pulled away. Forty yards, and Sugar slowed, chest heaving.

Charlie was gone.

Charlie was running at daydream speeds. Years before, when Mack would drive him to school, he’d press his head against the glass and imagine running alongside the car, leaping roads and mailboxes and pedestrians and cyclists as he kept pace. Daydream fast.

The panther turned into a field with waist-high cane. Charlie turned after him, ignoring the blades slashing his arms as his feet pummeled soft earth. They crossed a dirt road and the panther leapt a canal. Charlie planted and followed, arms swinging, floating too far, too high. The panther landed and turned. Charlie landed and tumbled into a wall of stalks.

The pain was like laughter. Like a joke between his already-throbbing ankle and the rest of his body. Charlie fought free and kept running.

A train mounded high with burned and diced sugar bones was rolling through the cane without lights, without bells or horns or warnings, clicking and sparking on tired rails. The panther turned and led Charlie alongside it, lengthening its stride. Charlie followed, the burning in his muscles ignored by something older and stronger and more stubborn. They were near the train engine, then they were pulling away, and the panther leapt the tracks.

Charlie was alive, and he was quick. Something inside him that had only ever whispered was roaring. Every spark in every cell of his body was firing. He was planting his
left foot. He was turning in front of the train. He was jumping.

He was flying.

The engine slid behind him as he twisted in the air and landed. The panther was waiting. A gravel road ran between cane fields to a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was the underbelly of shaking bleachers, beaten like drums by thousands of feet. Beyond that, white lights on green grass. Boys running in bright helmets.

Charlie could smell popcorn and hot dogs and pizza. He could smell fryers frying. But there was something else, too. Something much, much worse.

Charlie watched the panther accelerate, then rise up and over the fence. He watched her clear the line of cops on the other side, and saw them jolt in surprise and reach for their guns when she landed. And then Charlie was jumping. His hands grabbed the top bar and his legs swung to the side. He rotated and landed with hands up, facing the cops.

“Don’t” was all he said. And he was running again.

Charlie followed the panther past an ambulance, past a marching band with dancers and cheerleaders and three drum majors with huge hats and massive scepter batons, all assembled and waiting for halftime.

Then he followed her out under the lights as she shot onto the field.

The crowd jumped to its feet, and Charlie saw the ball flying. He saw three players racing toward him with eyes up, tracking the ball. They didn’t see him.

But the crowd did. There was a slow moment of pure silence. And then shrieks. Shock. Fear. Laughter.

The panther darted between the players, sending one of them tumbling. Charlie jumped the player as he rolled, spreading his legs above flailing cleats.

On the sideline, Sheriff Leroy Spitz tugged off his sun visor and leaned forward squinting. The ball was caught. The player scored. But no one cared. There was a boy chasing a panther—a
panther
—across the field. Spitz burst out laughing.

“Hell in a basket,” Spitz said. “I told Mack that kid would show. I told him.”

Hydrant pulled off his sunglasses. “He got some
speed
.”

Spitz looked around. “Bobby should have been here for this. He shoulda seen his boy run, shoulda seen his boy
fly
.”

Spitz laughed again as Charlie and the panther shot past the rest of the players, more than a few of them scrambling out of the way, and scattered the other school’s band.

“I tell you what,” Spitz said, settling his visor back onto his head. “Most boys chase rabbits.”

Charlie followed the panther through a tunnel of shocked kids in baggy uniforms, holding horns and strapped to drums. He and the panther jumped another fence and the lights were behind them. Wisps of reek drifted around them and then were gone, clinging close to the stadium.

Away from people, the panther slowed to a trot, her head forward and low like she was hunting. Charlie didn’t feel quite as springy as he had when they’d started. His lungs were heaving quickly, and pain was more noticeable underneath the cold, sharp burning life that had filled him.

They cut through Taper, jogging behind houses, hopping fences, disturbing dogs, avoiding nothing. Then Charlie could see the church.

The panther turned onto a road between a cane field and a canal that ran straight back toward the dark wall of the swamp. Charlie knew where they were going.

The panther quickened her pace, her tail stiff and her shoulders rocking but her head and neck always level with the ground. Charlie could feel her tension. Something was different in the fields. Something had changed, and not for the better.

The panther slipped off the road and padded through soft, thick muck cut bare between fields to control the
burns. Road. Track. Ditch. Track. Canal bank. The panther was choosing her course carefully, sinking lower and lower to the ground as she went. Doubling back. Circling around.

Charlie didn’t argue.

When they were right beside the swamp, dark trees jutting against the sky, she went into cane too dense for him to walk through.

As Charlie paused, a breeze rustled through the cane and the smell hit him like a fist. He dropped to his knees and stifled a gag. Now he knew why they’d been circling. They were downwind.

Holding his breath, he wormed into the cane, grateful that the wind would cover his rattling with its own.

The darkness under the leaves was total. His hands and knees sank inches into the cool, silty muck, too sheltered to have become mud in the rain. His hand found the panther’s tail, and it twitched, thumping him in the face. Lowering himself onto his stomach, he slithered forward. Trying not to smell. Trying to ignore the resentments springing up in his mind:

Mack was Molly’s real father. She had it so much better than Charlie ever would.

His mother would never stop being scared. He needed a mother who was brave.

Cotton was dying in some happy dream. Charlie was going to die in a nightmare.

Sugar was a football star.

As soon as he pushed one away, the next one would pop up. Anger. Hate. Self-pity. Anger. Just about every human on the planet was better off than Charlie at this moment. Every single one of them.

Charlie couldn’t bite his brain, so he bit his lip. Not true, he thought. He adored Molly. He would die for Molly. He apologized to his mother in his head. He threw his arms around her and lifted her off the ground until she laughed. If she hadn’t been brave, he wouldn’t still be alive. Cotton had gotten hurt saving Charlie, and he wasn’t going to die. Sugar should be a football star. He should be winning a game right now. But he’d given that up to look for a brother who’d known nothing about him.

Charlie saw light. Fire. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, then pressed his face between two cool stalks of cane. The panther was warm and solid against his shoulder. They had cut across the corner of the field and were looking at the trees. At the canal bank. At the mound that bridged it.

There were a dozen Gren at least. The muck on their skin was still wet. Every one of them was holding a torch. Every one of them held a weapon—clubs, hooks, claws, spikes, spears.

A tall, slender woman stood above them on the mound that dammed the canal, just beyond where the chalk death stone would be. She wore a fur hood and cloak that
reached the ground, hiding all but her mouth in shadow. There was a man’s body curled on the stone at her feet. Torchlight glistened on his dark skin. There was a broken sword beside his hand. A helmet lay on the ground beside his head.

Lio.

The woman spoke and it was like the voice came from behind her, like she was funneling wind and releasing it in the shape of vast but quiet words.

“The stone is broken. The lion soul has departed. I have killed the one you could not.” The cane swayed. Charlie felt the panther whisper a growl beside him.

“My mounds will draw strength enough for you, my newborn sons, and many more to come.” The wind grew and the voice with it. “Gather them for me.” The torches flickered. The Gren stirred.

“Burn the church. Burn the fields. Make this your mother’s holy place. Quiet every mouth but mine.”

The wind swirled, and the cane with it.

“Your older brothers begin already. Go.”

The Stanks opened their mouths in silent howls and then sprang away. Only one Gren remained, tall and broad and still. Shadow and darkness clung to him where the others had worn skins. Light avoided settling on his face. Charlie knew that he had seen that darkness before. He had smelled its stench. The Mother looked down at Lio. She pushed back her hood. Her hair was thick and straight
and white, like ice spun into silk. Her face was pale underneath a spatter of freckles, like a thrown stain.

Charlie held his breath. He was looking at a version of Mrs. Wisdom, but taller, thinner, and without the softness or the goodness or the creases of age.

She nudged Lio with her toe.

“Bring him,” she said. And as the shadowy Gren bent over Lio’s body, she turned and disappeared into the swamp.