Someplace to Be Flying (57 page)

He slowly felt around the chair he’d just knocked over until he came to another one, then a third. By the way they were facing he was able to make an educated guess as to where he remembered seeing the two cabs parked. Taking a deep breath, he started in what he hoped was their direction, counting his steps.

Seventeen … eighteen …

When he hit twenty, a sinking feeling rose in him. He became convinced he was off on his angle, heading to who knew where in the darkness. Everything was so disorienting. He was about to try to retrace his steps when his questing hands came into contact with the hood of one of the cars. He felt like kissing the smooth metal. Feeling his way along the side of the car, he reached the door, opened it. The flare of the interior light seemed blinding. He looked away, letting his eyes adjust through his peripheral vision. When he could see without spots dancing in front of his eyes, he got into the cab and checked the ignition.

The keys were there.

The engine turned over smoothly. Closing his eyes, he flicked on the headlights. He waited a moment, then slowly eased them open. His pulse jumped into sudden overtime when he saw the man standing a half-dozen feet away from the front bumper.

Who-?

He calmed a little when he realized it was Moth, the junkyard’s unfriendly owner, but the rush of? adrenaline had put him all on edge again. Moth was standing as motionless as Paris and the dogs had been, a frozen cloud of cigarette smoke hanging by his head-a grim reminder of how much the world had turned upside down. Everything was unknown territory now.

Rory put his foot on the clutch and shifted into reverse, backing the cab up a few feet so that it would be easier to circle around the motionless figure caught in his headlights. He had to stop at the gates and get out to open them. Once he drove through, he didn’t bother to close them again.

Heading slowly down Gracie Street was a surreal experience. Frozen figures on the sidewalks. None of the cars moving, the drivers sitting with their hands on the steering wheels, staring vacantly out of their windshields. The traffic had been light before it was abruptly frozen, so it wasn’t too hard to make progress through the maze of stopped vehicles, but he still took the first side street to get away from them. He couldn’t bear to look at all of those uninhabited faces.

He was making for home, because he didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. And now that he had the glare of his headlights to cut away at the darkness, the solid metal body of the cab giving him a sense of protection from whatever might be out there haunting the streets, he could think a little more clearly about what had happened. The trouble was, being able to think more clearly didn’t help, because the questions he had didn’t have answers.

What had become of the world he’d always known?

Why had he been spared?

And who else was out here in the dark with him?

He thought of Kerry then, how she’d disappeared. Was this where she’d vanished to? Was this some parallel world set next to their own where when you were drawn into it, you could still see an aspect of the world you’d left behind, but they couldn’t see you at all?

All these frozen people and vehicles. He wondered if the world had actually stopped, or if he was only looking at something like a snapshot of the way it had been when he stepped out of it.

It all made his head ache. He had a sharp throb behind his eyes that wasn’t helped at all by the wind that was still inside him.

Blowing.

Endlessly blowing.

It was hard not to just pull over to the side of the street and simply give up. The world, the wind, the frozen people …

It was all so insane.

That made him think of Kerry again, locked up for ten years in an institution when there was nothing wrong with her. But because of that, because of how the experience had left her so unprepared for life outside of the institution, she’d ended up having all sorts of trouble functioning in the ordinary world.

He shook his head slowly.

Christ, if she
was
in this world, would she be able to cope at all?

He wished he could help her, but if she was here, where would he even begin to look?

Get back to the Rookery first, he told himself. Maybe there’d be somebody there who could help.

Twice he came to side streets that were completely blocked with stopped cars on either side of the road and he had to back up to the last intersection he’d passed. The back lights were far dimmer than his headlights, making the procedure that much more nerve-wracking.

Occasionally he caught glimpses of people. They were always darting into an alley or lane, away from his headlights. He thought their caution was a little extreme until he put himself in their position and decided he’d be just as leery of approaching a stranger himself if he was out there, alone and on foot, with no light. The world had gone so off-kilter, who knew what you might run into?

A half-dozen blocks from the Rookery he came around a corner and spied a figure on the street ahead of him. A woman, walking slowly along the side of the street, one foot scuffling against the curb, using it as a guide. She stopped and turned, shading her eyes against the glare of his headlights. Rory’s heart lifted. He rolled down his window and called to her.

“Annie!”

When he pulled up beside her and put the car in neutral, she climbed in the passenger’s side, her familiar features oddly lit in the lights from the dashboard. But Rory didn’t care how strange she looked.

“Oh, man,” he said. “Are you a sight for sore eyes.”

Annie leaned back in the seat as though all her muscles had gone limp. She turned to him and managed a half smile.

“Now that’s what I’d call an understatement,” she told him. “What are you doing with this car?”

He was so glad to see her that he began to babble, the words coming out all in a rush. “I took Kerry up to see Jack, except he wasn’t there. Instead there was this tattooed woman with a bunch of dogs who started off being really pissed off with us, but then she took us over to this junkyard and …”

He gave her the abbreviated version. Annie listened without interrupting-a first for her, Rory thought, but these were weird times.

“Did Kerry disappear before or after all of this”-Annie waved her hand toward what lay outside the windshield-“happened?” “Before. Why? Is it important?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that the crow girls disappeared as well, right when everything started to shake and the sky went black.” “Do you think they’re in the same place?” Rory asked. “I don’t know that either.”

“Because I thought maybe this was where Kerry had disappeared to.” Annie gave him a blank look.

“You know,” he said. “Because it’s like we’re someplace else, too, aren’t we? The way we can move around but everybody else is frozen like time stood still for them or something.”

“This is still our world,” Annie told him. “It’s only like this because Cody got his hands on Raven’s pot again.”

Rory shook his head. “Lily said these cuckoos have it.”

“Shit. That makes it even worse.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Rory stared out at the endless night that had fallen across the city, broken only by the headlights of the cab. They lit the street ahead of him, but in comparison to the darkness that lay beyond their reach, they seemed woefully inadequate.

“Annie, what’s going on here? I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not anymore.”

“Take us home,” she said, “and I’ll try to explain while you drive.” But it didn’t help. The things she was telling him were too divorced from life as he knew it-never mind that life was no longer even remotely the way he knew it. The corbæ, magical cauldrons, Cody, the cuckoos … it was all too much like walking into the middle of a particularly convoluted foreign film that had no subtitles and was already half over.

“So … everybody in the Rookery,” he said. “They’re all bird people?” Annie gave him a tired smile. “Even you-though your blood’s pretty thin.” “Even me.” She nodded. “We’re all bird people.”

She nodded again. “In the house, at any rate.” “I guess that’s why it’s called the Rookery,” he said.

A mild hysteria was building up inside him. The only thing that kept him from losing it completely was Annie’s calmness. He was able to accept, if not understand, all the strange things she was telling him because he trusted her implicitly, because she’d never lied to him and had no reason to be lying to him now.

The absence of normality outside the cab did much to help convince him as well.

“How could I have lived with you all for nine years and not known any of this?” he said.

Annie shrugged. “There was never any need for you to know.”

She gave him a look that reminded him of the old Annie, the one he’d always thought he’d known. The one who’d been as human as he was-though of course he wasn’t entirely human himself, was he? He had this bird blood running through his genes, too.

“Besides,” Annie said. “What would you have thought if I’d told you all of this before?”

“That you were just being Annie. Putting me on.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of obvious now.”

They’d reached Stanton Street, but soon their way was blocked with stopped cars. Rory backed up the cab again and took a side street. From there he turned into the lane that ran behind the Rookery.

Rory glanced at his companion. “So you figure Lucius-who’s really this Raven guy-will be able to make things right?”

“If we can bring him back.”

“And he’s gone where?”

Annie shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a matter of waking him up. He’s just gone, you know? His body’s here but who knows where his mind is roaming? You have to understand, Rory. I’m not one of the firstborn. I’ve no idea what makes them tick.”

If, as Annie had told him, the crow girls were also firstborn corbæ, Rory knew exactly what she meant.

The lane was clear all the way to the Rookery. When he got to the coach house, Rory pulled in, pointing the car into the backyard so that the headlights illuminated the back of the house. Two tall figures, all in black, were standing in the yard, looking back at them. It took Rory half a moment to recognize them. The Aunts. Eloisa and Mercedes.

“So they’re crows, too,” he said.

“Rooks, actually.”

“Rooks. Right.”

Annie got out of the car and crossed the lawn toward them. Rory sat for a moment, then put the car in neutral, engaged the hand brake and stepped out as well. He left the engine running, the lights on.

“We’re too late,” one of the Aunts was saying as Rory approached.

As usual, he didn’t know if it was Eloisa or Mercedes. Some things didn’t change, even when the world went crazy. He took a small measure of comfort from that.

“Everyone’s gone,” the other Aunt said.

The first one nodded. “We made our way home-“

“… through the endless dark-“

“… across the trembling ground-“

“… and they were all gone.”

Rory had never realized how much like the crow girls they were-if the crow girls were to speak with less modulation in their voices and looked to be in their sixties, that is.

“Gone how?” Annie asked. “I was at St. Paul’s when Maida and Zia simply disappeared. Are they gone like that, right out of the world?”

“We don’t know,” one of the Aunts replied, her voice mournful.

The other nodded. “All we know is everyone’s gone-“

“… and nothing will be the same again.”

Annie had explained to Rory that what was happening now wasn’t the usual effect that came from this cauldron of Raven’s being used. The other times there’d be a shift in the world, but it was transitory. Over in minutes. Nothing like this.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

Annie slumped on the steps of the back porch.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Pray?”

“Who would you pray to?”

Her only response was to shake her head.

Rory’d never seen her like this. Annie wasn’t even remotely prone to depression. She was always the one who jollied him out of bad moods, made him smile when he was feeling down.

He sat down beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. When she leaned against him, he reached up with his free hand and stroked her arm.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, “but whatever it is, you’re not going to face it alone.”

“Thanks,” she said, her voice so soft he had to bend down to hear her. “Thanks for being here.”

“Works both ways,” he told her. “I’d be going seriously crazy by now if I hadn’t ran into you.”

She put both arms around him and burrowed tight against his side.

He glanced up to find that the Aunts were looking up at the house once more, holding hands, heads cocked like the birds they were supposed to be able to turn into. They seemed resigned, simply waiting now for what was to come next, comforting each other the way he was comforting Annie, the way his having to be strong for her made all of this easier for him to bear.

That made him think of Kerry again. Kerry who was out there somewhere, alone, with no one to turn to.

Kerry wasn’t alone.

But she had been alone, weeping in the backseat of the Volvo earlier, and she had been alone when she first found herself drawn into this strange place by her need to make amends with Katy.

Now I’ve gone all the way, she thought as she slowly turned in the gray space that surrounded her. Stepped all the way through how things are supposed to be into … what? Madness or magic. The line between them had never seemed so blurred and thin as it was now.

Junkyard, car, tattered blanket, the world she knew was gone. She’d been spirited away into otherness, into an eerie, but oddly calming, place. The ache in her heart was soothed, though she couldn’t have said how or why.

She should have been panicking, because this was worse than any anxiety attack. It was impossible to differentiate directions. Turning slowly on the balls of her feet, she saw the same unchanging vista on all sides, an endless gray haze that held nothing except…

She paused, focusing on a tiny spot of color half-hidden in the distance.