The boy smiled. “And when everything’s right, you, me, and maybe Lia . . .” He lifted an eyebrow, checking the wind’s reaction. “Right. And Lia. We’ll go north together. It’ll be . . . it’ll be good. I promise. Okay?”
The wind touched the boy’s cheek, checking for tears. It pressed the boy’s neck, listening for his pulse. It beat steady and sure. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t worried. The wind sniffed, and all it could smell was honesty, steadfastness, truth.
The wind sighed.
It would do as the boy asked.
The boy smiled at the wind’s assent.
“You are,” he said, “the greatest, most courageous, most wonderful wind in the whole wide world. You know that, right?”
The wind knocked against the boy. What did he know? But still, it wasn’t a terrible thing to compliment something as wondrous as the wind. It hummed happily. Then, with a final tap goodbye, it spread itself thin.
It left the boy with only the tiniest, thinnest, weakest tendril of itself.
The boy jogged down into the bowels of the subway, hurrying to meet with his father’s killers.
80
The wind was airless. It was breathless and weak. It could not whisper. It could not gust. It could not comfort. It could not blow. Even its thoughts were sluggish and thin.
If the wind ever wanted to lose itself, it would make itself thin until its spirit frayed, its edges unraveled, and it floated into a million particles of nothingness.
It was everywhere and nowhere.
It heard a city of voices voicing at once. It smelled every city scent that had ever been scented. It touched every burning metal surface, every saw-toothed blade of grass, every spinning rubber tire, and every belch of steam. It tasted the hot lick of sizzling condensation hitting asphalt, the burned edge of a street vendor’s hot dog, the mountain-metal flavor of a copper fountain with a shower of pennies glinting beneath the surface.
It lay as a thin, weak, pitiful thing beneath the unending, eternal pressure of a massive waterfall of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. The city was like the giant Hoover Dam, and all the water had been unleashed to pour over the wind.
It was too much. Its thin spirit was pummeled by the voices, the scents, the feel. It couldn’t stop the onslaught; it could only lie shuddering beneath the ordeal.
Yet then, amid the universe of noise, it heard a single voice. And then another. And another. It sifted through the waterfall and found the flowing thread of each being the boy needed it to follow—and others . . . The wind would follow others.
It hurt.
Once, the wind had thought nothing could hurt it. But that was a silly, ignorant, wind-thing to think. Now, it knew many things could hurt.
It didn’t want to stay in this thin place for long.
But the boy had asked, and the sky was darkening, and something wrong was scenting the air with a cold, blood-toothed smell.
It could be strong by becoming weak. It could be brave by being scared. It could help by hurting. It could do that for the boy.
It spread itself thinner still, tearing itself, fluttering weakly. It would watch. It would listen. It would warn the boy when the time was near.
When the man was young, and the fawn-like one was still alive, and her wolf had decided he did love her, they’d told the wind this day might come.
“You might be the only one left,” the fawn-like one had said, looking urgently at the leaf blowing in the wind, “and if that’s the way it happens, you have to—Wind, are you listening?—Phil, your wind never listens?—”
“It isn’t my wind. The wind is its own thing?—”
“I don’t understand why you two are always acting like the wind can hear you. It’s like expecting a glass of water to talk back to you.”
“Silly Wolf,” the fawn-like one said fondly, taking his hand. “Of course the wind is listening. Can’t you hear it talking to you?”
He’d looked at her skeptically, but the man had said, “Wind, listen to Lu.”
And so the wind had listened as the fawn-like one told it that someday, something wrong would come, and the wind would want to stay with someone it loved?—
