Larque on the Wing (32 page)

Unaccountably, she felt frightened. “But we know who you are.”

“No, we don't.”

“Yes, we do. You're the one who—who—”

“Larque, stop fighting me, listen to me. I can't remember anything.”

He explained it to her, about the beating that had taken his past away. If he seemed to her to be all one person, it was because he had no past, no child in him, no parent either, no history beyond waking up in Gypsy Davy's trailer and being—what? Who? He did not know.

“But we do know.” Still scared, she had come up with words now. “You're the one who is like a cloud shadow between earth and sky. The power passes through you.”

“Then I'm a freak.”

“Shadow—”

“I want to be real. I can't tell what about me is real,” he told her. It seemed to tire him to talk so much of himself, he seemed to press his way through the words as if through drifting snow, but he kept going. “I barely feel human. Argent, I mean Ryder, he's—so damn brave, bald head and all, I can't go on the way I've been. I have to know, do I really look like this, or—maybe I can be authentic, maybe I have a big nose or something, do you see?”

“Is that what you want?” Larque could barely grasp this. “You hope really you are—homelier, more like Daddy, now that he's come back?”

“Partly. But—even if it wasn't for him, this thing has been creeping up on me for years. Only it was no use thinking about it, I had no chance of an answer. Till now.”

She stared at him.

“Open me up,” he told her, his gaze dead level on her. “You have the strength, you almost did it twice before. Break into me.”

It was almost unthinkable. He had been too adored, like a god to her for too long. To see him vulnerable would break her heart.

She stalled. “Have you talked this over with Argent? Uh, Ryder? My father?”

“No. He doesn't know about it. And I do not know what is going to happen, either, whether it will hurt me, or—or what. And I have to do it anyway. My life depends on it. Larque, please.”

She sighed, flattened her hands on the table and faced what had to be done. “Well,” she muttered, “okay, I'll doppelganger you. But if Gypsy Davy ever hears about it, he'll be pissed.”

Shadow almost smiled. “You're right. Dave has ideas of his place in the cosmos. He would not approve.”

They looked at one another.

“I'm better off in your hands,” Shadow said. “You care more for me.”

“‘Care for you' my hind foot. I love you, asshole. And what you're asking is an enormity.” Larque pressed her hands to her eyes, then lifted them away and took the enormity one step at a time. “I think maybe you'd better lie down.”

He moved to the sofa. On the way he said, “I thank you. No matter what happens—I thank you.”

“No damn thankyous. Are you ready?”

Lying there, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes.”

He was ever so slightly trembling. “Relax,” Larque coached. “Let me in. I will try like hell not to hurt you.”

He folded his hands atop his flat belly, and his trembling stopped. He waited.

“Okay,” Larque whispered, and she went ahead. It was very different to commit doppelganger on him out of love rather than out of anger. Concentrating was hard, yet easy—Larque stood there looking at Shadow, focused on him and only him, caressing him gently, very gently with her mind, trying (though her eyes were no longer painted True Blue) to really see him, his heart, his soul.

Dare to see the truth
! Sky challenged inside her.

“Take it easy,” Larque whispered. This penetration had to be done tenderly, or—she sensed pain waiting anyway.

Faintly, wavering and insubstantial, a shadowform began to take shape, a dark and cloudy something lying on the sofa beside this beautiful man, a—

Larque felt horror stop her heart, and her knees began to give way. At the same time Shadow screamed.

The doppelganger was that of a body too mangled to be recognized, too horribly beaten to have lived.

Shadow screamed and screamed, bent double in agony, trying to protect his head with his hands. Weak knees be damned—Larque got to him somehow, plunging right through the ghastly thing in the air, and put her arms around him. Sitting on the sofa with him, she cradled him to her shoulder like a baby, and Shadow lay there shaking.

“I died,” he cried wildly. “They hit me and hit me with a digging iron. Oh my Christ, all I remember is dying.”

“Shhhh. Shadow. Shhhh.” The doppelganger corpse was gone. Perhaps he had never even seen it, but it didn't matter. He remembered, he knew. Larque hugged him and rocked him in her arms—it did not help much. He lay moaning.

“He found me dead. They threw me along the tracks and he found me lying there and I was dead.”

Go farther back
, Sky suggested.
Make him remember something else
.

Anything else Shadow could recall had to be an improvement, the kid was saying. It was worth a try. But Larque felt so shaken she did not know if she could do it.

Have some courage
!

She concentrated on the person trembling in her arms, and he quieted and lay there panting. A doppelganger took form. In the air, rubbing his nose and blankly staring, stood a gawky, sandy-haired, freckle-faced young man about Jason's age. Attractive enough—aglow with hormones, aren't they all?—but ordinary looking. Just another teenage boy.

“Look,” Larque whispered to Shadow.

He had grown very still in her arms. He saw.

The teenager appeared sulky, as if he did not feel loved—but what kid that age does?

When he was little, his mother loved him
.

Larque felt sure of this too. He was Shadow, Shadow before Gypsy Davy had changed him, and just because of the way Shadow accepted her arms around him—she felt certain he had been loved.

All it took this time was the thought, and a freckle-faced child stood there. It was his tenth birthday, maybe. He wore a new fringed pinto-print cowboy suit—Shadow was that old, this was back in the days when kids asked for cowboy suits. It was a good one: his parents had sprung for the holster and plastic six-shooter too. He even had leggings to make his leather shoes look like boots. Under his straw cowboy hat he was grinning brighter than the candles on his cake.

“God,” Shadow whispered, “I come from Soudersburg. I was born here. I can't believe it.” He gathered himself out of Larque's arms and sat up. His breathing was quiet now, his face smooth and quiet, but tears were sliding down.

“It was worth it,” he said in answer to Larque's anxious glance. His voice quivered only a little.

She waited. The doppelgangers faded away.

“My folks didn't do it to me,” Shadow said. “All these years I was thinking—my family turned on me, but—it wasn't them, just gay bashers. It wasn't anybody I knew at all. I had a mother, a father, a couple of sisters. My God. I wonder if any of them are still alive.”

“Are you going to look for them?”

“No. Not like this. They wouldn't know me, and what could I tell them? Christ, I'm a—a ghoul.”

“No,” Larque said quietly. “More like an angel.”

He shrugged, beginning to get his poise back. “Depends how you see it, I guess.”

“I see the truth,” Larque reminded him. “Can you stand to look at your death again?” She had caught just a glimpse the first time, of wings coming down.

“No.” Shadow wiped his tears away with his sleeve, shook his head. “I remember, I just—it's going to take a little getting used to.”

“Gypsy Davy didn't bring you back.”

“No. He was there, but—the lightning shot through him, made a healer out of him. Everything like that comes from above. I was in the clouds, watching, and—thunderwind put me back. I'm a thing put together out of darkness and starlight and stormwind. The big gypsy in the sky was having some fun, I guess. Poor Dave.” Shadow started to smile. “He's never been the same. I scared him shitless. He only meant to rob the body.”

The way he said it made Larque laugh. Her relief was so great that she laughed herself breathless. Shadow sat there watching her, faintly smiling, and thinking.

“That's why he never told me anything,” he said slowly, working it out. “Partly because he figured it would hurt me to know—which it did, some. And he felt bad about—being what he was before. But partly because he was scared of what I might turn out to be. And he didn't want me to—to go after justice.” Shadow stopped smiling. His dark eyes grew intent, his dark brows stormy. “That Judas,” he said softly. “That snake. Screw me blind, Ryder was right about him all along.”

“Shadow?”

“Giving himself airs. And his brother was one of the scum who killed me.” Shadow got up and walked toward the door.

“Shadow!” Larque called after him, frightened. He strode as if into the sunset. She might never see him again.

He paused long enough to turn and nod at her. “I am going to get them,” he said, “one by one, all of them.”

“Shadow, wait. Think. Is it worth it?”

He looked straight at her, an odd, lost look. “What's life about anyway, Larque?” Then he was gone.

“He says he'll be back,” Ryder told his daughter. “I wanted to go with him, but he says no, it's not my fight. Proud bitch.”

This was what Larque had not wanted to hear. But it did not surprise her to hear it. “How does he plan to go about it?”

“Better neither of us should know, he says.”

The two of them looked at one another. Larque reached for her father's hand.

“He'll be all right,” she said. “What can they do, kill him twice?” Then she wished she hadn't said it.

“Shadow can handle things if he just thinks,” Ryder muttered. “Beautiful, crazy.…” He stopped trying to say it and sat down at Larque's table. It was no threat at all to him now that they both loved Shadow.

“Do you want to stay here a while?” She felt almost as close to him as she had when she was a little girl. She had even asked him his opinion of crinolines. He had very properly replied that crinolines were for the birds; when she was a little girl he had liked her in dungarees. But it was fine that she had grown up to be a woman. She didn't look as much like her mother as he had once thought.

“God, no. Get on with your life, Skylark. Just invite me to dinner now and then.”

“You'd eat my cooking? Brave man.”

They were getting ready to eat some of it right then: microwave hamburgers.

“You've got a point,” Ryder said. “Maybe I ought to invite you over to my place more while Shadow's gone.”

The boys ran in. Forget talking cogently about anything when the boys were all there. The warthog ran in with them, and Larque gave it a hamburger to keep it busy. Harold the Cowardly Boogie, still terrorized of the large animal, skulked under the table, watching the warthog savage its dinner on the floor.

“Tell me again how you bamboozled the city into letting you keep that creature?” Ryder asked.

“Just told them if they wanted it, they could come get it.”

“Right.” Ryder added blandly, “And how is your mother these days?”

“Much less dangerous.” Larque called softly to the warthog, “Florrie!”

It raised its head from its ravening, pointed its wrinkled snout toward her, and looked at her out of its little piggy eyes.

“You want me to scratch you behind the ears, Florrie? C'mere.”

It came over and laid its hairy head on her knee, its coarse bristles prickling through her jeans into her skin. She scratched as promised. The warthog groaned in pleasure.

Larque remarked, “Maybe Shadow could use one of these to help out, wherever he is.”

Hoot was putting paper plates on the table. “Only in this family,” he complained, “could we be standing around talking in a factual manner about a dead guy looking to get himself killed again.”

Larque and Ryder stared at one another. She felt chilled—words that were true sometimes had that effect on her. Her father said slowly to her, “What are you thinking?”

Have some courage
, Sky commanded.

“I'm thinking we shouldn't be standing around talking about it.” Somewhere out there Shadow wandered lonely as a cloud, a misty being forever suspended between earth and sky.

Ryder nodded. “I wonder where Gypsy Davy is.”

“I wonder whose side he's on.”

Find out
!

“We ought to go see.”

“Not without me, you don't!” Hoot declared, sensing the drift. He set down what he was doing.

“We can all go. Leave the boys with Doris and Byron.” Take Florrie the warthog along in case she was needed. “Maybe somebody on Popular Street knows where that carnival of Gypsy Dave's has traveled to.” Larque stood up. “Come on! If I can get under that purple hat of his again, maybe I can find Shadow.”

Fly
! Inside her, Sky was singing off-key, dancing a goblin dance.
Fly in the lightning! Shadow's in the night. Larque's on the wing
.

About the Author

Nancy Springer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including the Enola Holmes and Rowan Hood series and a plethora of novels for all ages, spanning fantasy, mystery, magic realism, and more. She received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for
Larque on the Wing
and the Edgar Award for her juvenile mysteries
Toughing It
and
Looking for Jamie Bridger
, and she has been nominated for numerous other honors. Springer currently lives in the Florida Panhandle, where she rescues feral cats and enjoys the vibrant wildlife of the wetlands.

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