An Inheritance of Ashes (18 page)

We lit Gus's pyre on the other side of the hawthorn tree, between John Balsam's knife and the river. It took too long to build the fire: the ground was frozen now, the wood wet, and my gloved hands kept slipping on the striker. Tyler held the lamp high, and I blew endlessly on the curling tinder to grow our meager sparks. We didn't speak.

Tyler set the cat's limp body into the flames when they caught, solid and bright. I stared off across the river, at the choppy winter waves. I was starting to hate this field. When this was all over, I would level every weed inside it and drown it in river water.

“The gloves too. They touched the body,” Tyler said, and I peeled off Nat's fine blue gloves regretfully.

“She'll be so upset.”

He found my good hand and squeezed it. “She won't. They're just
things.
”

They curled like crackling paper in the low orange flames. A wild dog called, lonely, up the river, and its cry sank into the snap of dying logs.

“Do you want its ashes?” Tyler asked. I stifled a bitter laugh: what a mockery that would be. A cat's ashes in that venerated place on our mantel while Thom stayed unburied, missing, gone.

“No,” I said, and kicked the cold dirt. Another loss on Roadstead Farm, half-funeraled, done in secret. Another piece of mourning we couldn't finish and move on from.

When the fire cindered, we walked single file through the broken brush to where our fields started, to where everything still tenuously made sense. “Walk with me a bit farther?” I asked Tyler after a moment. Our house was a dark cloud atop the hill, and I couldn't face it yet with the feel of that orange fur on my hands.

“It'll be more of a meander,” he said dryly.

“I don't care.”

“Yeah. Okay,” he said, and we changed course: down the frosty field road, toward the orchard and the cold riverbank. He took my arm after a moment, and it wasn't to hold me upright or to ask me to keep him from falling.

“This is still weird,” I said into the silent fields.

“Yeah. Um—” Tyler started. “Thank you for saying that. It's weird.”

I couldn't tell why it felt less okay when it was him who said it.

“Bad weird?” he asked as we approached the glittering orchard trees. The apple branches loomed, frosted into false stars.

“Not bad weird,” I said, and slid my hand down his arm. Took his hand.

His lips pressed to mine, gentler now, steam-warm against the night. I pulled back, drew breath, and bumped into his frozen nose. “Right,” he said. “No, your
other
right,” and I laughed, a nervous giggle that bloomed into an all-out grin.

Tyler looked down at me, his frost-pinched face weirdly fond. “I missed your laugh.”

I wiped my eyes with gloveless fingers. “I do too,” I said when I could breathe again. “I just . . . I've had about a hundred feelings since I woke up this morning, Ty. It's too much. It's exhausting.”

His shard-bright eyes shuttered. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean you should do it for
me,
or—” He ran a hand through his hair. “God, I'm bad at this.”

“I'm an expert,” I proclaimed brightly. He stared at me for a second, and then deliberately poked one finger into my gut.

I laughed again, helpless, ticklish gasps, and his face went less grim. “I like when you're happy too,” I said, and wrapped my cold hand around his finger. “Just . . . take it slow. Give me time. I need—I need to breathe.”

“Right,” he said softly, and turned his caught hand to take mine. “C'mon. I'll walk you home.”

We set off up the frozen path, slow enough that I could think about that hand in mine and what it meant. Ice popped sharply beneath our boots. We gained the orchard path, and Ty's arms moved like shadows flecked with dim starlight. His bad leg lagged through the hardened dirt:
crunch, crunch—clink.

“What the hell—” he started softly, and stepped back. “Not again.”

Right, he swears now,
I reminded myself, and tugged my hand free to unshield the lantern.

A river stone. Five river stones. And then a whole pathway of them, icy wet, small, and graying. They'd come back in the night: a long howl written dot by dot across the frozen mud.

“Oh—” I said, and my stomach dropped. I knew the way those stones clustered together. The same hard corners and tight curves had told me for two silent years, two terrified years of living with Papa after Uncle Matthias was gone:
STAY CLEAR TONIGHT. LEFT YOUR SUPPER IN THE HAY BARN. BE STRONG. I LOVE YOU MOST.
“Marthe wrote this. She's writing
back,
” I said, and in the lamplight, Tyler went still.

“
TELL ME HOW TO HELP
,”
Tyler read, barely above a whisper.
“
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FIND YOU. LOVE
,”
and his voice stumbled.
“
I NEED YOU SO MUCH I CAN'T EVEN BREATHE
.”

“Marthe said she saw a ghost the night the first message appeared,” I said, and the words burned my throat to the tongue-roots. “She saw Thom. She thinks it's
Thom
asking for help.”

The last line glimmered at the lantern's edge:
I NEVER SHOULD HAVE LET YOU LEAVE HOME.

I reached for Tyler's hand, and it fell limp between my fingers. The stars glowed, gap-toothed, and between them I also burned with unruly embarrassment, with fear. Marthe had to be hallucinating: wishing for magic, wishing for a miracle so hard she'd fabricated one whole. She
had
to. I'd worked so hard to stop waiting. I'd just finally learned to let Thom Clarlund go.

The ember of hope Marthe's letters woke inside me burned. It
hurt.

Tyler's hand tightened on mine. “Hal, we should go up to the house.”

I tossed him a confused glance. He stared straight down the path, his white eyes gleaming. “There's something down the road right now,” he said in a too-calm voice. “On the beach. And I think it just
saw
us.”

My heart stuttered awake. “A Twisted Thing? We'll get the soldiers—”

“No,” he said, and squeezed my hand until it hurt. “Not a Twisted Thing. A man.”

“Marthe said she saw a ghost,” I repeated with a seizing terror, even though I didn't, not for real, believe in ghosts. Tyler pulled me backwards slowly, step by inching step, and I backed away with him and hated the weakness in my knees.

“It's not a ghost,” he said softly. “It's walking toward us. And it's real.”

I dug my nails into my palms. “I can't see it. How are you seeing this?”

Tyler's Adam's apple bobbed. “I saw the Wicked God die, Hal,” he said softly. “And now I see Twisted Things. I see
everything.
”

I opened my mouth, soundless, and stared at his pale, thin face. “I . . . how?”

He grimaced, dark, in profile, his eyes still fixed on that advancing threat. “We were on the front line when John Balsam killed the God. It was like the world exploded, but
inward:
the Great Dust swirled into the hole Balsam cut in the God's heart, like water down an outhouse drain. And suddenly there were trees, and—” He shook his head, still ashen, still backing out of the orchard trees. “I've never told anyone this. It's insane. I don't want you to think I'm insane.”

A feverish memory surfaced: Nat chasing a terrified Tyler down on the beach where Gus had dropped that first Twisted Thing, asking
Do you have to act so insane?
“Tell me,” I said, and gripped his hand tight. “Please.”

“Inside Him, somehow,” he said, confused and, more confusingly,
yearning
, “there was this whole other world. There was a forest in the Wicked God's heart: droopy, pointed leaves, blossoms falling free in the rain, warm and wet. Just the colors were—” He let out a shaken breath. “That's what broke my eyes when the Wicked God died: I watched all the Twisted Things scatter into that world, running from the desert. But now,” he said, and shook his head like a stunned man, “I can't
stop
seeing it.”

“Seeing it where?” I whispered.

“Everywhere,” he answered, and waved his arm wide across the night sky. “It's laid over our own world like a veil. There's a lizard-fox nest right in front of us, against that tree. The web-spinner birds are on a branch two feet higher, feeding their chicks something dead. But it's not here; it's
there;
it's in the Wicked God's world. They couldn't see us if they tried.”

We backed out of the orchard, into the plain, empty fields, into the plain, empty, mundane night. “It wasn't just that bird you saw on the beach last week,” I breathed. “I knew it. I knew you lied.”

Tyler's eyes flattened. “A figure. A man, standing at the riverbank. How was I supposed to tell you I saw someone in another
world?
”

I risked a glance behind us at the goat pen and the house on the hill. Our feet moved in concert; our hands were fused together. “You're telling me now.”

Tyler flushed, and nodded slow. “I see Gods in the lakelands. I see monsters. They crawl across the sky and through the walls at night. But all the way from John's Creek to Windstown, I've only seen monsters. This is the first time I've ever seen a
man
there.”

We backed painfully up the hill, the lamp swinging wild. The porch loomed, and Sadie leaped up from it, from the night-darkened house. She whimpered, confused by the smoke-stink on us and the palpable taste of our fear.

“Is he still there?” I asked. The world was tipping like thin china, headed for the floor.

The wind curled through Tyler's shaggy hair. I lifted the lamp against the darkness, against something I couldn't see. “He's going up the hill,” Tyler whispered, and traced a path with a pointed finger. “Down the other side.”

His finger dropped.
Gone.

“God, I'm tired,” Tyler muttered, despairing, and buried his face in his hands.

Sadie whined and snuffled Tyler's knees. I looked at them both, set the lamp down, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Ty.”

He took it, enveloped it in his mittened palms. “That was the same man I saw on the beach, Hal. That man, whoever he is. And
he saw me back.
He saw us. If Marthe left that message,
she
saw him too, somehow. The Wicked God's world and ours have never
touched:
not since John's Creek. Not since the war. And I—Hallie, what do we do?”

You're asking me?
I thought wildly, and swallowed the thought back. He needed me. To be smart, and brave, and strong.

I squared my shoulders and curled my fingers around his. “Marthe left a message,” I said haltingly. “We wait for him to answer.”

DAWN SMOKED CLOUDY ON THE HORIZON WHEN I WOKE
, rumpled and still dressed, in my unkempt bed. Marthe clanked about downstairs, every piece of her steady routine stubbornly unchanged: the ring of the kettle on the stove, then the thunk of stacked wood to feed the fire.
We are living amidst gods and monsters,
I thought, and shivered in my quilt.

She'd left Tyler's shadow man a message. An answer might have come.

There was one bun, one teacup on the table this morning, and my sister's basket was full of washed milk bottles. “Good morning,” I said cautiously, and Marthe leveled her infamous stare.

“I found Tyler Blakely on the sofa this morning.”

My cheeks kindled. Of course she had. It had been much too dark to walk through the icy fields alone, and he and Nat both knew where our spare blankets were. “He, ah—” I started.

“Let me guess,” she said dryly. “You can't tell me.”

The part of my head that could make up stories failed. “I'll go get the eggs,” I blurted, and hightailed it out the door.

The farm was eerily silent without Tyler's sheep out; with Heron gone to ground. I crept, tiptoe to match it, down the orchard path to the river.

Marthe's letter had been disturbed in the night: the smooth gray letters duller by daylight, broken off mid-word. Robbed of the mystery of the night air, they looked absolutely crazy. I caught the edge of voices farther down the path—Heron's low baritone, Tyler's tenor—and hurried along the scree to find them, their heads bent over the shoreline.

“What're you doing?” I asked, and they jumped apart like guilty children.

“Figuring out if we have enough firewood,” Heron said, and pointed down.

The shoreline was rotten with Twisted Things: dead, stinking, crumbling. A pile of them lay soot-smeared and burning at Heron's feet.

“What—” I started, my eyes caught on whiskers, on ears like leaves. There were at least two dozen of them—a whole heaped massacre, drifting in and out with the current.

“We found them,” Heron said numbly. “We came down to pick up those stones.”

“You're not even supposed to be outside,” I muttered. Heron looked awful: stubble-faced, blue-lipped, utterly exhausted. A Twisted Thing crawled from the beach toward us, smoke rising behind its lizard legs, and Tyler crushed it with his stick.

“Where are they
coming
from?” I asked, and paced alongside the Twisted Thing's trail. The rock had crumbled in its wake, turned into ash and the stink of burnt lizardflesh. I covered my nose and traced the blackened, glassy footprints down a small hillock and around the riverbend. The air shimmered. That same thinness I'd felt before scored my throat, made me cough. There was a circle of sand here, scorched smooth and entirely black. Its edges bled messily out across the beach, a burn licked into paper.

“This is where we found that bird,” Heron said. His voice echoed weirdly in my ears. They felt full of water.

Tyler walked a jittery circle around the stain, his white eyes sharply focused.