The Gypsy Morph (43 page)

She feels the heart go out of her then, and for a moment she considers just sitting down and waiting for the inevitable. She is going to die, and she
knows it. All of the Elves are going to die. But the moment passes, and her despair recedes. She will not give in. She will find a way to stay alive.

She slips from the rocks where the lifeless bodies of her companions lie and begins to walk. She travels all night through the scrub and the rocks, and by morning, when she has seen nothing more of the winged creatures, she knows she will be all right.

H
E WAITED
until he was sure she had finished, his eyes on the land ahead, and then he said, “Skrails.”

She looked over at him. “What?”

“That’s what they’re called. The winged creatures. Skrails.”

She nodded without comment. They drove in silence for a while, and he kept thinking she would say more about what had happened. Because something important was missing from her explanation, and it troubled him.

At last, he could leave it alone no longer. “Why didn’t you use the Elfstones?” he asked.

Her face was stony. “I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t?”

Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. She gestured absently. “I couldn’t make them respond. I don’t know why. I watched Kirisin do it. I saw what he did. We spoke of it afterward, and I understood what was needed. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what to do.”

She exhaled sharply. “But I couldn’t call up the magic. I tried, did everything I knew to do to summon it. I held the Elfstones in my hand and I begged for the magic to help me. I was fighting to stay alive, to keep the others alive, and I begged for the Stones to do something. But there was no response at all. And then there was no time, either. I shoved the Elfstones back in my pocket and fell back on what I knew best without even thinking about it.”

She wiped at her eyes, but it didn’t seem to help. He had never seen her cry. She was always so composed, so in control. It seemed as if all her defenses had simply collapsed. He didn’t know what to do.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Of course it is.”

“I would have done the same thing you did,” he said finally.

Her laugh was sharp and bitter. “Not you. You would have found a way. You would have made the magic obey you. You know you would have. I should have found a way.”

“You can’t know that. It was the first time you tried. Maybe trying to use them in the heat of battle was asking too much. Even Kirisin wasn’t asked to do that.”

She stopped crying finally, wiped again at her face, and looked at him. “I keep trying to forgive myself. I tell myself that using the magic would have just attracted the demons. That’s what happened to Kirisin when he used the Stones: it brought the demons hunting us. They could sense it.” She shook her head. “But it’s just an excuse. I don’t know how it would have worked out. I think I’m just looking for a way to get myself off the hook.”

“It doesn’t seem to be working,” he said. He gave her a quick smile. “You can’t second-guess yourself about things like this, Sim. You do the best you can and you walk away. If you try to rethink what you should have done or could have done, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

She nodded, looking off into the distance again. “I can’t help it. They’re all dead, Logan. All of them. No one made it out but me.” She looked over quickly. “Did they?”

“No. You’re the only one. Maybe, later, there will be some others.” He smiled again. “I’m just glad to see you.”

This time she smiled back. “I really didn’t think I would find you.”

Her face was battered and dirt-streaked, and he reached out to touch her cheek. “You say that as if you were looking for me.” He studied her blue eyes, surprised at what he saw there. “You were, weren’t you?”

She touched him back. “What do you think?”

It wasn’t a question that required an answer.

M
ILES DISTANT FROM LOGAN AND SIMRALIN
, Catalya hunkered down in the bed of a truck hauling tents and cooking supplies, MILES cradling Rabbit in her arms. The truck jounced and swayed over the uneven terrain, causing metal fittings and tools to clank noisily as they rolled about in their wooden containers. The day was hot and windless, but she had found some small shade in the lee of the piles of canvas where the sun did not penetrate, and what air was stirred by their passing helped cool her heated face.

She was two hours gone from Logan Tom and still thinking about him. He’d been so quick to dismiss her, she thought angrily, as if having her with him was a hindrance rather than a help. She supposed she understood his thinking. He was trying to protect her, doing so in the best way he knew, by sending her away. But his thinking was flawed, and she couldn’t help wishing he could have seen so. She was better equipped to survive this country than the Ghosts—perhaps as well equipped, in her own way, as he was. She had been doing so for several years now, and under less-than-ideal conditions. She had been outcast to all but the Senator, and he had protected her so that he could use her. She had been able to survive that; how could Logan doubt that she could survive this demon that was hunting the children?

She hadn’t been joking when she had told him she wasn’t in danger. A demon hunting human children would not bother with her. Not with another Freak. She might have been in danger once, but her transformation was sufficiently progressed that she was as much Lizard as human, and the mix made her something more than either.

Or something less.

She didn’t like thinking about it, and until now she had thought about it less and less since Logan had taken her away from the Senator. The Ghosts had embraced her, too. Even Panther, who had disparaged her so openly at first, had now become her newly appointed protector. As if Panther could protect her better than she could protect him! Her smile came and went. At least Panther didn’t want anything from her. He was just being a friend. He might have been something more, in other circumstances. She thought maybe he even wanted that. But she knew it could never happen.

Not just with him, but with anyone.

She pushed back the loose sleeve of her shirt and looked at her arm where the fresh Lizard patch had appeared two days before. It was already bigger.

Like the one on her leg and the one on her back.

Rabbit lifted his fuzzy face to nuzzle her nose, and she nuzzled him back. Rabbit was her best friend—her only real friend. Rabbit wouldn’t care that she was mutating again, the inevitability of what she was becoming so overwhelming she could barely stand to think of it.

No, Rabbit wouldn’t care.

But the rest of them would.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
HE WIND APPEARED
shortly after midafternoon in the worst heat of the day. Hawk noticed it first as a series of small gusts that touched down just long enough to stir the loose earth. The larger blow was distant still, too far away for its full force to be felt, an invisible presence kicking at the barren flats. He was walking point with Cheney, his eyes sweeping the horizon when he could make himself stop looking at the steady, monotonous movement of his feet. One foot in front of the other, second foot in front of the first, over and over. He was bone-weary and disheartened, but he was keeping it to himself.

Wind,
he thought in surprise, and then glanced at the cloudless sky. Was a change in the weather coming?

Within minutes, the first breezes blew across his face, hot and dry and empty of any promise of rain. The blown air was thick with dirt, and it stung the skin of his face as it swept past, died away, and started up again. He searched the horizon more carefully. Any clouds he could spy were clustered atop either the mountains they had left or the ones they were heading toward, the former seemingly no farther away and the latter seemingly no closer than when they had set out. He fought down the sensation of having gotten nowhere, of having not moved at all. He understood that distances were deceiving, but the perception was disconcerting nevertheless.

Ahead several paces, Cheney lowered his head against the bursts of wind and plodded on, ruff flattened.

As if he knew where he was going even if Hawk didn’t. The boy smiled despite himself. Good old Cheney.

As the force of the wind increased, he glanced over his shoulder at the caravan, a winding snake trailing away behind him in a ragged collection of vehicles, wagons, and people, a pall of dust hanging over everything. The muttering that had begun the night before seeming to trail after it, small whispers of discontent and doubt that circulated through the camp like bothersome flies. They had no specific source, only a specific target. He didn’t hear it himself; the speakers were careful not to say anything in his presence. But word got back to him nevertheless, the way word always does.

“You got to do something about these compound kids flapping their lips, Bird-Man,” Panther had told him as they’d set out earlier. “All they do is talk, talk, talk about how you don’t know nothing, you just wandering about like some fool. They say you brought them out here to die. This ain’t the little ones; this is the bigger kids, ones who ought to know better. I told a couple of them if I hear that kind of talk again, I’m gonna hit them so hard it’ll kill their whole family. Frickin’ fools.”

Panther, never one to hold anything back. Hawk told him to let it be, that there was bound to be some of that sort of talk. What mattered was that the Ghosts still believed in him.

But did they? Though openly supportive, they, too, must be harboring doubts by now. Some of them, at least. Owl would never doubt him. River probably wouldn’t, either. But the others were struggling, he imagined. They couldn’t help it, whether they admitted to it or not. He didn’t blame them. After all, he was struggling, too.

Not too much farther ahead, he believed, they would find the north–south branch of the Columbia River. Owl had told him so, had shown him the river on one of her maps, tracing their route from where they had left the bridge and its defenders. A little town called Vantage marked the crossing point, a bridge that he hoped was still intact. That was where they were heading. Once across, the landscape would change again, becoming rolling hill country for a time. Maybe they would find water in those hills. Maybe the sun wouldn’t be so intense.

Yet he still had no idea where it was they were going or how far yet they must travel. His sense of where they were meant to go, his instincts, kept him on this path, moving forward. But his instincts were blind, the path invisible, and time short. Everyone knew that the demon-led army would be hunting them. Perhaps Logan Tom and the men and women left behind at the bridge had stopped it momentarily, had turned it aside. But sooner or later it would find a way across the gorge and come after them anew.

Nothing would change for them until they reached the safehold promised in his dream. Nothing would change until he could find the King of the Silver River.

He felt a presence at his side, and a small hand reached over to take his own. Candle, her mop of red hair tangled and wild, her clothes disheveled and dusty, and her face intense, stared up at him, the look in her blue eyes uncertain.

“Can I walk with you?” she asked.

“Of course you can walk with me, peanut,” he told her.

He squeezed her small hand reassuringly and shortened his longer stride to match her own. They walked without speaking for a time, and Hawk found an unexpected measure of comfort in the warm touch of her little girl’s grip.

Ahead, the dust clouded the horizon in widening sweeps, and the wind gathered force.

“Tell me a story, Hawk?” Candle asked suddenly.

He glanced over. “What kind of story?”

“A story about the King of the Silver River. You saw him, didn’t you?”

“I did, but only for a little bit. And I don’t know any stories about him.”

“Tell me what he looks like.”

Hawk thought about it for a moment. “He is very old. An old man with white hair and a beard. But he has a nice voice.”

“What color are his eyes?”

“Blue, I think. He can appear and disappear just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “He did it to me once. It was so quick. First he was there and then he was gone and then a little later he was back again.”

“Was it magic?”

“I think probably it was.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, her eyes on the ground as she walked, thinking. He let her be. He knew she was going through a difficult period, that the loss of her ability to detect potential danger had left her feeling diminished and perhaps even useless to the family. Her talent had defined her for so long that it was hard for him to think of her in any other way, even knowing that she was different now. He could only imagine how it had affected her.

“Are the gardens beautiful, Hawk?” she asked finally.

“As beautiful as anything I have ever seen.”

“Can you tell me about them, too?”

He did so, taking time to describe all of the beds and bushes and vines, the colors and types of flowers and the way they formed patterns and shapes against their lush green backdrop. He talked about the skies and the sweep of the land. He sketched pictures of the fountains and the pools that dotted the countryside. He told her how the gardens stretched away farther than the eye could see, as if they might run on forever. He had walked and walked, and he had never seen their end.

She smiled when he was done, squinting against the glare of the sun and the gusts of wind. “I would like to see them,” she said.

“You will,” he answered.

She shook her head, as if uncertain of that. “I wish I could do more to help you. I’m just another kid like all those compound kids. I can’t do anything anymore.”

“That’s not true. You help Owl every day. She depends on you. She told me so.”

“River and Sparrow can help her better than I can.”

He took a deep breath. “Look, Candle. I want you to stop thinking about what you can’t do. I know you miss it. We all do. But things change. People change. I’m not the same, either. I worried about it all the time, at first. But I’ve learned to stop. You have to do that, too. Besides, I think you should give yourself some time before you decide that you’ve changed for good.”