Someplace to Be Flying (53 page)

“Have you seen Jack?” they both said at the same time. Lily had a lot on her mind. She was depressed about how things had gone with Hank-she’d
really
expected more from him-and she was worried about the deep trouble she might be getting herself into by chasing after the chalice, but the way the small, boyish man stood blinking in surprise couldn’t help but wake a smile from her.

“No, I guess you haven’t,” she said. “I’m Lily,” she added, offering him her hand. “Ray.”

“You look like some friends of mine.”

“It’s a good time to be looking like a corbæ, considering,” he said.

“Considering what?”

Ray gave her a sharp look. “How do you know Jack, anyway?” he asked instead of replying. “I just-“

She broke off as behind Ray she saw Jack and Margaret literally step out of nowhere. The air in her lungs felt as though it were suddenly expanding, making her chest go tight, and the ground seemed to shift under her feet. The sudden sense of vertigo made her legs go all jellyish. I am
never
going to get used to this, she thought. Before she could speak, Margaret pointed at Ray and started to laugh. “Oh, Lord, Ray,” she said. “Now I’ve seen everything. What the hell are you doing, going about looking like a crow girl?” “The man has no shame,” Jack said.

Jack looked drawn and worn out-maybe “haunted” was a better word, Lily thought-but a thin smile touched his lips as he looked at Ray. Lily didn’t know what was so funny, but she took the opportunity while they were being so amused to make her way to the sofa, where she gratefully sat down.

Ray gave an embarrassed shrug. “I was keeping an eye out on Kerry and just trying to fit in.”

“Oh, you fit in, all right,” Margaret said. “But into what, I don’t know. How’re you doing, Lily?” she added, dropping down onto the couch beside her.

Margaret’s action made the sofa’s old springs bounce and worsened Lily’s vertigo.

“The crow girls like this look,” Ray said. “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”

“Okay,” Ray told her. “Enough with the jokes already.” Margaret gave a throaty laugh. “Oh, I’m just getting started.” “I’m here on serious business.”

“Right,” Margaret said. She sat up and leaned a little closer to him. “You know, I think you might have missed a few red whiskers.”

Ray lifted a hand to his chin.

“Gotcha!” Margaret said and fell back onto the sofa, laughing harder.

Lily had to grip the arm, but she was getting her sense of equilibrium back.

“Let the man speak his piece,” Jack said.

He pulled up a barrel and sat down, waving Ray over to the sofa. Ray gingerly took a seat beside Margaret, but she was done with her teasing, her expression serious now.

“Tell us what’s on your mind, Ray,” she said.

He gave a short nod. “Like I said, I’ve been watching out for Kerry when I got this call from Cody. He says the Couteaus have got both Raven’s pot and Katy.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “I know what you’re thinking, Jack, but Cody says he’s out of it.”

Jack’s face went grim at the first mention of the Couteaus.

“What’s he playing at now?” he said, his voice soft, as though he were thinking aloud.

“I don’t know,” Ray replied. “But I thought it was worth passing along. If it’s true …”

“I’ll kill them,” Jack said flatly.

Lily cleared her throat. Jack turned to look at her and Lily wanted to crawl under the cushions of the sofa to get away from the dark look in his eyes. She had to clear her throat again before she could speak.

“It … it’s true,” she said.

Jack nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I never did ask what you were doing here with Ray.”

His gaze was milder now, but the darkness was still in his eyes. The difference, for Lily, was that it no longer seemed to be directed at her.

“We didn’t come together,” she said.

“But you’ve got the same story?”

She had to clear her throat yet again. “They got the chalice from me. I didn’t even know I was carrying it around, because it looked like an old tin… .”

She told an abbreviated version of what had happened to her, finishing up with Dominique Couteau’s appearance in the library that morning.

“You got those juju charms I sent along with you?” Margaret asked.

Lily nodded. “I’m not wearing them, but I had them in my camera bag.”

“You were smart to keep them close. I put a little spell on them-something to make you seem innocent and ineffectual-and it’s a good thing I did. The Couteaus don’t usually leave loose ends lying around behind them.”

Lily shivered. She
was
innocent and ineffectual so far as all of this was concerned.

“Looked like a chalice, did it?” Jack asked.

“Made of crystal.”

“And you’re saying there was a little statue lying in the bottom of it?”

Lily nodded. “It was hard to tell what it was made of. It didn’t move at all, except for the hair, and I’m not even sure if it really moved or it only seemed to because the figurine was so lifelike.”

“That’s where she went,” Jack said to Margaret. “Into the damned pot. No wonder we couldn’t find her.”

“But why would she climb in there in the first place?” Margaret asked. “Better ask how’d she even know to manage the trick. It’s nothing I’ve ever heard of before.”

“Maybe the Couteaus …”

Jack looked back at Lily.

“The woman seemed surprised that there was anything inside,” Lily said before he could ask.

Jack nodded. “Which leaves Cody.”

“Or Katy herself,” Margaret said. “Give the girl some credit.”

“How would she-“

Margaret broke in. “She’s not exactly a known quantity, Jack. Who knows what she is or what she can do?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Jack allowed, “and they’re not connected. But Cody had a hand in it, somewhere along the line.”

Margaret shrugged. “All Cody wanted to do was set the world back into the long ago. Maybe when he found for himself what the Couteaus really want, he got an attack of conscience.”

Lily looked at Jack and Ray to see them nodding in agreement. They all seemed to know what Margaret was talking about except for her.

“What
do
the Couteaus really want?” Lily asked.

“To get rid of the corbæ,” Margaret explained. “Not just little spirits like me, but the old ones.”

Jack nodded. “Raven and the crow girls.”

“And you, Jack.”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Why’s it so important to them?” Lily asked.

“Well, we’ve had trouble between us for about as long as anyone can remember,” Margaret said.

Lily glanced at Jack, but quickly looked away. He was looking too grim for her again.

“Cody once told me,” Ray said, “that without the old corbæ; in it, there can’t be a world.”

For a long moment, no one spoke.

“Is that true?” Lily asked.

“Who knows?” Jack said.

“But if we don’t get the pot back, we’re going to find out,” Margaret said.

“I know where the Couteaus are staying,” Ray said. “They’re booked into the Harbor Ritz, downtown.”

Jack rose to his feet. To Lily’s eye, he was moving slow, as though he wanted to put off what was to come, but knew he couldn’t. When he was finally standing, he seemed impossibly tall, as though his hat could brush up against the clouds.

“Time we paid them a call,” he said.

On the heel of his words, the ground started to tremble and a rumbling sound rose up from deep underground, like a subway passing, except there were no subways running out here in the Tombs. The sky darkened, not all at once, but slowly, the way ink clouds water. Lily thought it was Jack’s doing and she was more scared than ever, but then she caught a glimpse of the pained expression that had settled across his features and realized that he was no more responsible for this than she was.

“Too late,” he said, his voice no louder than a whisper.

The rumbling came from under their feet again. Louder. And the ground began to vibrate steadily.

“What … what’s happening?” Lily asked.

From beside her, Margaret reached over and took her hand.

She’s as scared as me, Lily realized and that only made it worse.

“Somebody’s stirring the pot,” Margaret said.

Jack nodded. “Got something pulling on me… .”

This was all her fault, Lily thought. Maybe she hadn’t known she was carrying it, but once she did, she should have put up some sort of a fight, tried to do
something
to stop that woman from taking the chalice.

Jack tilted his head, turning his face up to the dark skies. He spread his arms wide. His crows lifted from the roof of the bus and began to circle above him.

“Raven!” he cried.

His voice boomed like thunder.

“Raven!”

A wind came up out of nowhere and touched only him. It made the tails and sleeves of his duster flap wildly, blew his hat from his head, shook him where he stood. Margaret’s fingers tightened their grip on Lily’s hand. Lily heard a doggish whine come from where Ray was sitting.

“Raven!” Jack cried a third time.

He took one step forward, another, and then it was like the wind lifted him up, blowing him from the world, and he was gone. All that was left were the crows, still circling above the place where Jack had been standing, cawing and shrieking now in a way that Lily had never heard crows
cry
before.

The sky went darker still and the rumbling underground was so close that the sofa began to shake under them. Behind them Lily could hear the contents of Jack’s bus rattling about, pots and pans falling from the shelves. She could hear the crows, flying higher than before, invisible against the blackening sky. And she could hear the wind, stronger now, carrying with it an otherness that was so alien it stole away the foreignness of the animal people, making them appear almost normal in comparison.

That wind.

It seemed to be all around her, but it had no physical presence. It didn’t touch them, didn’t touch the bus, didn’t rage across the empty lots of the Tombs, blowing refuse and litter ahead of it.

But she could hear it all the same.

She put her hands over her ears and the sound of the wind only intensified. That was when she knew that it was blowing inside her, a storm front moving across an inner landscape she hadn’t realized she was carrying until now.

When she lowered her hands, the sound was less intense, but she knew it was still inside her, she was still aware of that strange landscape swelling into life somewhere under her flesh and bones. She turned to Margaret, barely able to make out the woman’s features in the dark. Past her, Ray was only a smudge of darker shadow.

“It’s the voice of the pot,” Margaret told her. “That’s what we’re hearing. The voice of Raven’s pot.”

“I feel like it’s … inside me.”

Margaret nodded. “Blowing across places you never knew existed.”

“It’s happening to you, too?”

“It’s happening to everybody who can hear it.”

“What … what is it telling us? I don’t understand it.”

“Don’t even try to,” Margaret told her. “The only ones who can understand it are the mad and the dead.”

“But Jack … ,” Lily began, remembering how the wind they could only feel inside them had had enough physical presence for a brief moment to take him away.

“Now Jack,” Margaret said. “He’s somewhere in between the two. Not quite mad, not quite dead.”

“What do you mean?”

Margaret shook her head. “That’s not my story to tell.”

Earthquake, Hank thought when he first felt the ground shake underfoot. But then the sky darkened and that didn’t jibe with what he knew of earthquakes. You might get a cloud of dirt and debris when buildings collapsed, but that would be a localized phenomenon-nothing like what was happening now. This wasn’t natural. It was night coming too early, a storm front appearing out of nowhere to blanket the entire sky.

The tremors came again, stronger. They became a steady vibration and he could hear a dull rambling rise up from under the ground. He glanced back toward the junkyard. Because of the poor light, it was already hard to make out more than hulking shapes. If some of those stacked vehicles started coming down and anybody was under them …

He was ready to head back until Anita’s words returned to him.

We’re all pretty much grown up around here. Why don’t you let us worry about what happens to us.

Reluctantly, he decided he had to take them at their word.

Giving the junkyard a last worried look, he pressed on toward Jack’s bus. The going was slow. The constant tremors underfoot made it hard to keep his balance. The sky continued to darken. Visibility worsened until he had to feel his way through the rubble and trash. But what made his skin prickle with goose bumps was the sound of the wind. A gale raged all around him yet he couldn’t see or feel it. He could only hear it-the wind and the cawing of Jack’s crows, the latter sounding more distant with every step he took.

When he suddenly came up against the brick wall, he knew he’d gotten turned around. It was so dark now that he couldn’t tell what building he was standing beside or where Jack’s bus lay in relation to it. There were no reference points. He couldn’t even use the graffiti that covered every structure in the Tombs since it had all been washed away by the dark.

He pivoted slowly and put his back to the wall, trying to get his bearings. Logically, he had to be facing Gracie Street. Which would put the bus over … there. Unless he’d gotten more turned around than seemed possible. That pulled a humorless laugh from him. None of this felt possible. The dark. The wind. Getting lost in the empty lot that lay between the junkyard and Jack’s bus.

He couldn’t hear the crows at all now while the sound of the wind made it hard to think clearly. It felt too much like it was blowing inside him.

He wished he hadn’t thought of that. The situation was eerie enough without adding to it. The next thing you know, he’d started imagining spooks or-

Something cold and wet touched his hand.

“Ye-aah!” he cried, jumping back.

He banged his head on the bricks behind him and almost lost his balance. A large furry shape pressed up against his legs and he almost cried out again, but then he realized what it was. That monster dog he’d been feeding for all these mornings. The one that followed him on his runs but never came up close.