Someplace to Be Flying (54 page)

Lowering his weight onto his heels, he put out a hand and felt the large broad features.

“That you, boy?” he asked. “What happened? Did you get lost, too?”

The dog made a low grumbling sound deep in its chest. As though in reply, a deeper echo came reverberating from below.

Years ago an earthquake had leveled much of the city and parts of it still remained underground, pockets of hidden streets and building remnants that the present city had simply been rebuilt upon. Hank tried to remember if any of those sections were near this part of the Tombs. His suddenly overactive imagination could picture all of them tumbling into some lost piece of the old city-he, the dog, the junkyard, Jack’s bus, all of them. The ensuing rubble would close in on top of them and nobody would ever know where they’d gone. Who would even look for them?

He made himself stop before he got too carried away. Concentrating on the dog helped.

“Or did you come looking for me because you missed out on breakfast?”

The dog moved its head, dislodging Hank’s hand. Before Hank could pull his arm back, the dog closed its massive jaws around Hank’s biceps and gave them a gentle tug.

“What?” Hank asked. “What do you want?”

The dog tugged again, firm, teeth not breaking the skin, until Hank started to stand up. It let his arm go then, pushing its head up against Hank’s hand. It repeated the motion a few times. Finally Hank tried grabbing a fistful of the dog’s rough hair. As soon as he did, the dog began to step away. When Hank let go, the dog repeated its earlier actions.

“So now you’re Lassie?” Hank said. “I guess the next thing you’re going to tell me is that little Timmy’s stuck in the well.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. All he could picture was some dark hole that this strange earthquake was about to drop them into. He didn’t know what was making the unnatural grumbling and shaking that was coming from the ground, but he wasn’t in the least bit interested in coming face-to-face with its source.

The dog barked. Once. A low, gruff sound that made Hank feel a bass note deep in his own chest. Again it bumped its head against Hank’s hand. This time Hank held on to the dog’s fur and let it lead him away.

They could have been walking through limbo, for all Hank could tell. He couldn’t judge one direction from another. If he hadn’t had the ground underfoot, he’d have been hard-pressed to pick an up or a down. The strangest thing was how there were no lights anywhere-not from the buildings in the city or from the vehicles on the streets. He knew if he’d been near a light source, he’d have turned it on as soon as the darkness came flooding in.

Maybe there was a power outage as well? But while he could imagine the whole city being blacked out-that was the sort of thing that could actually happen in the world he knew-a problem with the power company couldn’t explain the lack of car headlights.

“You got a destination in mind?” Hank asked as he followed alongside the dog, fingers tangled in its fur. “Because I’ll tell you the truth, I can’t make out a damned thing.”

But the dog seemed sure of its destination, whatever it might be. It led Hank, winding through the rubble and trash at a slow, steady pace that Hank couldn’t have managed on his own. The ground underfoot wasn’t trembling so much anymore, though he could still hear a low resonating mutter of sound coming from deep below. The dark hadn’t let up at all-if anything, it was now more pronounced-and the unfelt wind still blew, somewhere deep inside him.

“You know,” Hank said, “I was heading for Jack’s bus myself… .” Then he heard the sound of the crows again, somewhere overhead. Loud. Insistent.

“I’ll be damned,” he said in a low voice.

Ahead of him he could make out the flickering light of an oil lamp. It was held aloft by a woman he didn’t recognize-casually dressed and dark-haired except for two white streaks running back from her temples. In the light cast by her lamp he saw what he took for a boy and then Lily. The dog shook its head, dislodging his hand, but he didn’t need its guidance anymore. He hurried forward.

“Are you okay?” he called to Lily.

She turned in his direction. “Hank?”

She seemed relieved as he came into the circle of light until her gaze fell on the enormous dog padding at his side. Her eyes widened.

“Well, now,” the woman holding the lamp said. She, too, was looking at the dog. “You’re not exactly a puppy are you?”

“It’s all right,” Hank told Lily, sensing her nervousness. “I know he looks mean, but he’s a friend.”

Lily gave the dog a dubious look.

“This is Margaret,” she said, gesturing to the woman.

Hank nodded, remembering the name. “From Tucson.”

“From everywhere,” Margaret said, smiling. “That is, if you want to get specific.”

“And this is Ray,” Lily finished, introducing the boy.

Up close he didn’t seem so young anymore. There was a sense of antiquity in his gaze that you’d never mistake for a street kid’s assumed worldliness.

“Hey, cousins,” Ray said.

“Cousins?” Hank asked.

“Well, sure,” Ray replied. “You think I can’t smell the wolf in you? Though your friend’s got more’n canid blood. Bear maybe?”

Margaret nodded, the motion making the lamp bob slightly in her hand.

“Grizzly,” she said. “Though it goes back a long way.”

Hank looked slowly from the dog to Lily’s companions.

“They’re animal people,” Lily explained. “Like in Jack’s stories.”

“Animal people … ,” Hank began, then he shook his head. “And you’re saying I’m … that is …”

“Well, it’s thin, cousin,” Ray said, “but we can smell it. You’ve got some old lobo back there in the bloodline, same as your friend.”

“But he’s …”

“A dog? Sure. But when we’re in animal form, we hang with the animal cousins.” Ray grinned. “Family trees can get a little complicated.”

“So what does it mean?” Hank asked.

Ray laughed. “You people are always asking that. Find out you’ve got a little bit of the blood in you and it gets all these questions rolling around in your head.”

“Well, wouldn’t you-“

“It doesn’t mean anything, cousin. It’s like saying you’ve got brown hair or an overbite-you follow me? It’s just something that is.”

Hank tried to digest that, but had to put it aside until later.

“Does anybody know what’s going on?” he asked.

“Somebody’s stirred the pot,” Lily told him.

Margaret nodded. “And unless you’ve got the blood, the world’s standing still, which means except for you and about five percent of the people living in this city, everybody else is living in one piece of time right now. It took us awhile to work it out, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

If this made sense to her, Hank thought, he’d hate to see what confused her.

“We were just about to leave,” Lily said. “Margaret says we’ve got to wake up Raven.”

“That’s got to be what Jack was trying to do,” Margaret said, “before he got pulled away.”

“Pulled away to where?” Hank asked.

“We don’t know,” Lily told him. “Are you going to come?”

He nodded. He had no idea what was going on anymore, but if Lily was going, he wasn’t going to punk out on her again.

“Then I’ll explain along the way.”

Hank followed Margaret and Ray to Lily’s car, Lily walking at his side.

“I’ll drive,” Margaret said.

She opened the car door and blew out the oil lamp when the interior light came on. Hank got into the back with Lily while Ray took the front passenger’s seat.

“How come we can’t see other car headlights?” Hank asked. “Or lights from the buildings?”

Margaret glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “We’re outside of time. The world the way we know it has stopped, only not for us. We’re moving on. Light doesn’t just exist, remember. It needs time to travel from its source to our eyes and it’s not getting that time right now.”

“But our headlights are working.”

“That’s because they’re moving with us.”

Hank settled back into his seat. Between the wind blowing in his head and the confusion that deepened every time someone told him something, he was having a hard time of it.

“I’m glad you came,” Lily said.

When she gave his fingers a squeeze, he held on to her hand.

“About what happened earlier,” he said. “In the junkyard.”

“It’s okay. I understand. But I’m happier that you’re with me.”

Margaret started up the car. The headlights seemed abnormally bright when she turned them on, throwing Jack’s bus into bright relief. The dog stood in their glare, blinking, eyes flashing red.

“So here’s what we’re thinking,” she said as she backed the car out onto Gracie Street.

There were cars, but they were all stationary. Dark shapes on the road. When their headlights slid across them, Hank could make out blank-eyed people sitting in the vehicles. Occasionally he caught glimpses of furtive movement- figures ducking down alleyways at their approach, crouching low behind cars. Some of that five percent who hadn’t been dropped out of time, he assumed. They’d be more scared than he was, having no explanation at all as to what was happening to them.

Not that having an explanation helped all that much.

Margaret wove a slow, winding path in between the vehicles, talking the whole time about things that just made Hank’s head ache. Cuckoos. Raven’s pot. Animal blood.

“See,” Margaret was explaining, “the crow girls couldn’t have helped either you or Lily if you didn’t have it. Which is the same reason you’re not stuck out of time like most of the people are. There has to be a connection or the magic can’t travel. It’s simple physics. Or is it genetics? Anyway …”

Hank tuned her out.

He glanced out the back window. In the rear lights-which also seemed abnormally bright to Hank-he could see the dog loping along behind the car. The red glare of the car’s lights made the dog’s coat turn the color of blood. It looked like a hellhound with its red fur and enormous size, some damned creature that escaped from the nether regions.

Maybe we’re all damned, Hank found himself thinking. He faced the front again.

“The dog’s following,” he said. “What do you think it wants?”

Ray turned to look.

“Maybe it just wants to see how it all ends,” Margaret said.

Ray shrugged. “It’s just going to have to wait in line like the rest of us.”

“What’s its name?” Lily wanted to know.

“Bocephus,” Ray said before Hank could tell her the dog didn’t have one.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“How come you didn’t?” Ray replied. “You being related and all.”

“How can I be-“

“It goes back a long way,” Margaret said.

“And what’s so bad about carrying canid blood?” Ray asked.

Margaret glanced at him. “If you’re so proud of it, why’re you walking around pretending to be a crow girl?”

For a long moment, Ray glared at her, then suddenly he changed. Gone was the small, dark-haired man sitting in the passenger’s seat. In his place was a red-headed stranger, tall and pointy-featured. All Hank could do was stare. Beside him, Lily gasped.

“Happy now?” Ray asked Margaret.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Like that’s supposed to be an improvement.”

Lily tightened her grip on Hank’s hand, moving closer to him for comfort. Hank was in need of some himself. He forced himself to look out the window of the car, away from the pair in the front seat. The blackened streets only drove home how far removed he and Lily were from the way they’d always supposed the world worked.

“It could’ve been worse,” Lily said softly.

He turned to look at her.

“You could’ve found out you were related to a cockroach.”

With all they’d been going through, they surprised themselves to find that they could still share a laugh.

A half-dozen blocks away from the Rookery on Stanton Street they finally ran into a traffic snarl that Margaret couldn’t finesse her way around.

“We’re close enough that we can walk from here,” she said.

Bocephus was waiting on the pavement when they got out of the car. Hank reached out to give him a pat, then reconsidered when the dog gave him a look that said in no uncertain terms, back oft.

Yeah, Hank thought. I wouldn’t want someone giving me a pat on the head either, no matter how related we might be.

“Nice to have you with us, Bo,” he said instead.

The dog replied with a rumbling sound from deep in its chest that made both Lily and Hank back away.

“He’s just being friendly,” Ray said.

Hank nodded.

“What’s he sound like when he’s not being friendly?” Lily said.

“I don’t think we want to know,” Hank replied.

Margaret killed the engine, but left the headlights burning until she got the oil lamp lit once more. The circle of light it cast when she held it aloft seemed smaller than it had been before, by Jack’s bus.

“Is it getting darker?” Hank asked, though it didn’t seem possible.

Margaret shrugged. “Probably.”

She took the lead and they fell in alongside her. Bocephus kept pace for awhile, then ranged on ahead, obviously impatient with their slower pace.

“You give any thought as to how we’re going to wake Raven?” Ray asked. “I mean, he’s been gone down inside himself for a long time now.”

“I’m thinking of banging a brick up alongside his head,” Margaret said. “This is all his fault. If he didn’t want to take care of the pot, he should’ve passed it on to someone else.”

Ray laughed. “Like who? You? Me? How long would it be before we gave it a stir, just to set some little thing right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the crow girls then.”

“Like they wouldn’t be a hundred times worse than Raven? They’d probably trade it to someone for a lollipop or a Cracker Jack ring. When’s the last time they ever did anything that made sense?”

“They saved our lives,” Lily said.

“I’m talking global here,” Ray told her. “Maida and Zia are great with the details, but they can’t seem to step back and take in the big picture.”

Margaret shook her head. “Like you know them so well.”

“You’re saying I’m wrong?”