The Elves of Cintra (42 page)

“What are you going to do now?” Helen Rice asked him quietly.

He stood where he was for a moment, letting his emotions settle and his scattered thoughts come together. He waited until he was calm inside, until he could measure his heartbeat and feel the steady pulsing of the finger bones against his thigh. He waited until he could sense their response to his thinking—until he could gauge whether they would slow or quicken. He waited until he could feel something of that pulse seep into him, join with him, and become more than an external presence.

He waited to discover what he should do to fulfill his need. He waited for guidance and understanding, for this strange co-joining with the external world to reveal its purpose.

“Hawk,” Tessa whispered, an unmistakable urgency in her voice.

He walked forward alone, not directly toward the militia and the barricades, but toward a ragged clump of scrub, stunted trees, and withered vines growing bravely to one side of the approach. He was responding to the voice, but acting on instinct, as well. His course of action was decided, but its intended result still remained vague and uncertain. He could feel the eyes of both armed camps on him, could almost hear what both were thinking. He wondered at the stupidity of the militia holding the bridge, playing with matches while the rest of the world was already afire. What did they think they were going to gain by trying to collect a fee—whatever its nature—from those seeking to cross the river? What was the point of such an undertaking in a world like this?

He knelt amid the scrub and trees and vines, running his fingers over dried-out grasses and leaves.

The world at his fingertips, waiting to be reborn; the thought came to him unbidden. Life waiting to be quickened.

I know what to do,
he realized suddenly.

He took the withered plants in his hands, closing his fingers gently but firmly, taking care not to crush their brittle stalks. He held them as he would a child’s fingers, reaching down into their roots by strength of will alone. He could feel them stir, coming awake from the deep dormancy into which they had lapsed. They took their nourishment, fresh and new, from him, from the magic that he fed them, come to him from a source still unknown, one that might have its origins either in his mother’s finger bones or in his own life force. But it came from the earth, as well, from the elements that were intrinsic to her soil and rock and metal and molten core.

Come awake,
he urged the plants he held in his fingers.
Come awake for me.

That he might be able to do this was at once astonishing and exhilarating. That he could command magic of any sort was the fulfillment of the promise made to him by Logan Tom in the revealing of his origins and the delivery of his mother’s finger bones. He had not dared to think it possible—yet he had known, too, that it must be if he was to do what he had been given.

His whole being was attuned to and connected with the earth upon which he stood and to the plants that rooted within, and in that instant he was changed forever. No longer a boy, a street kid only, he was a creature of magic, too, a gypsy morph come into being, its potential realized.

The result was instantaneous. Vines and brush and grasses erupted from the earth at both ends of the bridgehead, exploding all around the barricades and weapons and the men who staffed them. They shot out of the earth as if starved, as if reaching skyward for the sunlight, for the air, for the rain, for whatever they were lacking in their dormancy. But their emergence was his doing alone, and they were obedient to his command. They fell upon the barricades and the defenders, upon metal and human alike, enfolding them in ropes of green that wrapped about like cables to make them all fast.

The militia never had a chance. They never even managed a single pull on their triggers. The handguns were ripped from their fingers, and the tanks and cannons were throttled in place. The men themselves were bound as if by ropes, the greenery first making them fast and then climbing the entire bridge, wrapping about the metal spans and struts, about everything that formed the body of the structure until nothing remained visible. In the end, there was only the bushy, dripping green of plant life extending end-to-end, the whole of the bridge and its barricades and its defenders become part of a vast jungle. The entire swallowing took only minutes and left the onlookers standing with Tessa and Cheney staring in shocked silence.

“Oh, my God!” whispered Helen Rice softly, speaking for them all.

I
T TOOK THE CAREGIVERS
the remainder of the day to decamp and move the children across the bridge to a new site that Helen and her advisers had chosen, one that Hawk instinctively felt was easier to defend. After releasing the entrapped militia, they set them free on the south side of the bridge and assumed control of the barricades leading to the new camp.

By nightfall, everyone was pretty much resettled and the move across the river complete.

“I don’t know how you did that,” Helen told Hawk later when they were sitting alone, close to where Tessa had gone to work helping the children. “But it’s proof enough for me that you are who you say.” She shook her head. “No one I’ve ever heard of could do what you did. Not even Angel Perez.”

Hawk didn’t know what to say. He was still coming to terms with it himself. He could not understand yet how he had managed to generate such rapid growth from a few withered plant and grass ends, a talent so new to him that it seemed as if it must belong to someone else. He could not even decide how he had known what to do.

“The children will be safer on this side,” he said. “But you may have to defend the bridge.”

“If we stay here, I know we will,” she said. “You were right about the pursuit. Already an army is coming up the coast. We had hoped Angel would be back before it reached us. Now I don’t know.” She looked off into the twilight, as if she might find her friend there. “How long before we leave? You sound as if it might not be right away.”

He nodded. “It won’t. We can’t leave until I find my family and bring them here. They are somewhere north, coming to meet me. I should be back with them in less than a week.”

“You’re leaving?” she asked.

“Not for long. But you have to hold the bridge until then. You have to protect the children. If others come this way, take them in, as well.” He paused, and then added, “Angel would want that.”

He didn’t know if she would or wouldn’t, didn’t know the first thing about Angel Perez besides what he had heard from Helen Rice, but he thought that mention of her would help strengthen the other’s resolve.

Helen sat silently for a moment, her slight form hunched, her head bent. “I am so tired,” she said.

Then she rose, smiled at him momentarily, and walked away. Hawk watched her go. He was already making his departure plans. He waited until the camp began to go to sleep, then found Tessa and told her he was leaving to find the Ghosts. He watched a mix of fear and uncertainty flood her amber eyes and tighten the smooth skin of her dark face.

“You don’t have to come with me,” he said. “You can wait for me here, if you want.”

Tessa laughed. “I could do lots of things if I wanted to. But none of them are things I want to do without you.”

“I’m sorry about everything that’s happened—the compound, your mother and father, all of it. I wish it hadn’t.”

“I’m sorry about what’s happened, too. But mostly I’m sorry for you. It must be very scary, all of this…though it isn’t so out of keeping with who you are.”

He smiled. “I wish I could feel that way. It all seems so weird.” He hesitated. “You’re coming with me?”

“What do you think?”

“I want you to come. Maybe we can talk about what’s happened while we walk. I think I need to do that. I think it will help make it more real.”

She took his hands in her own. “Then we’d better get started.”

They gathered a few supplies in backpacks and with Cheney leading the way set out west, following the river as it wound through a chain of mountains that flanked it on both sides.

By midnight, they were ten miles away.

F
INDO
G
ASK
stalked the darkness, a gray ghost on a shadowy night, the sky heavily overcast and empty of light, and the woods through which he passed deep-layered with gloom. Behind him, the camp of the once-men slumbered, their grunts and snores mingling with the whimpers and moans of the slaves they had taken on their march north from LA. Their journey had been a fast one, coming overland afoot and by flatbed truck, each travel day spanning sixteen to eighteen hours. There had been little time for delay once the gypsy morph had resurfaced, and less time still now that it had revealed itself a second time. It appeared stronger this time, its magic more potent and sweeping, and it was making no effort to mask what it was doing.

Which was more than the demon could have hoped and dreamed for, and it knew it could not afford to let this chance slip through its fingers.

Still, the source of the magic was a long way north, several hundred miles farther on at least, and this second using had not originated from the same place as the first. That meant that the morph was on the move, which meant that it had decided on a destination or a goal. Findo Gask could not know its purpose, but there was no mistaking the need to reach it before that purpose could be fulfilled. The morph was the demon’s most dangerous threat, the one servant of the Word who might undo everything the demon had spent so much time achieving.

It still rankled Findo Gask that he had let the morph get free of him all those years ago when it had been within his grasp. Somehow, Nest Freemark had tricked him. He sensed it instinctively, knew that she had bonded with this Faerie creature and kept it safe from him. His victory over John Ross—or any of the other Knights of the Word he had dispatched over the years—felt hollow and insufficient. Nothing less than the death of the gypsy morph would satisfy him now.

Nothing less would ever give him peace.

It was a goal he expected to achieve. John Ross and Nest Freemark and all the rest of the magic wielders from that time were dead and gone, even that big copper-skinned war vet. Only he remained. The gypsy morph, whatever its form, was alone and isolated from its own kind, and was also, perhaps, unwitting of its danger. If he could just manage to reach it before it was warned…

Or, he amended, if another could reach it in his place, one even more lethal and relentless than he was…

He left the thought hanging as he moved into the deepest part of the forest, the part where sunlight never reached, and stopped at the edge of a pond. The pond was choked with water grasses and reeds and coated with a thick layer of scum, its waters fouled in the culmination of the destruction of the environment years earlier. What had once been clear and clean was now murky and polluted. Nothing that lived here was what it had started out as. Everything had evolved. The bite of the smallest insects would sicken a human. Even the air and water and plants were poisonous.

But Findo Gask walked with impunity, picking his way without fear through the things that could kill humans. Nothing came near him—not the snakes or spiders or biting insects or creatures for which there were no names. Nothing came near because nothing was as dangerous or as venom-filled as he was. The denizens of the dark woods recognized one of their own, and they stayed clear.

Except for one.

It rose out of the pond’s mire like a leviathan surfacing from the deep ocean, the waters bubbling and heaving about it as it lifted clear, the gases escaping in spurts and burst bubbles, their stench filling the fouled air with fresh odors. Findo Gask knew it was hiding but would sense his approach and reveal itself because that was its nature. He stood safely distant and watched it emerge, the scum and dead grasses clinging to its broad back and hunched shoulders in damp patches. He watched, and he marveled at the monstrosity of its demon form.

The Klee was like nothing else he had ever encountered. Its head was a conical plate of bone flattened and dented as if struck repeatedly by a heavy mallet. Its features were submerged in the leathery tissue beneath its brow, stunted and difficult to discern save for its small, wicked green eyes. Its long, heavy arms were fringed with hair and ridged with muscle, its hands crooked and gnarled, its tree-trunk legs thick and bowed, all of it encrusted with a mix of scale and hair and debris. When it stood clear of the mud and water, it towered over him, dwarfed him with its mass, and gave him momentary pause despite what he knew about it.