“He killed Celia.”
The wind moaned, remembering the bitter scented bullets and the woman’s lifeless body. It curled around the boy’s shoulders. He needed rest. He needed sleep. He didn’t need to chase after conjurers.
The boy’s lips turned up into a smile, but it didn’t comfort the wind. It wasn’t a happy smile; it was a flint-hard, striking smile.
The boy stared at the trickster’s image—the television trickster, who accepted a white rose from a little girl.
“Find him,” the boy whispered. “Wind? Find Luvic Bard. When you do, tell me where he is. He and I have something to discuss.”
The wind moaned. But the boy shook his head.
“Go.”
No. The wind wouldn’t do it. The wind was its own being. Not to be controlled, or ordered, or?—
“Please?” The boy’s voice broke as he turned away from the screen. “Wind? Please?”
The wind huffed.
What was the wind to do when the boy was polite?
“Celia?” the woman asked, staring not at the boy but through him. “Celia Bard? Did you love her, Jacob?”
The boy gave his mother a startled glance. Then, turning back to the screen, he said slowly, “I don’t know. I only would’ve liked to find out.”
The wind sighed.
The boy, as smart as he was, was stupid sometimes too.
It would go. It would search. It would do what the boy asked.
It would find Luvic Bard, and then it would tell the boy where to find him.
15
They say there’s calm after a storm, but there was no calm at Hell Gate. The wind whipped savagely around the gray stone spires. It drove itself against the walls and howled as it hit immovable stone. The iron gates groaned as they resisted the wind, teeth bared against its howling.
While the tsunami had been swallowed whole by Finn’s abyss, the wind had been left to rage. It sped giant gray clouds through the city, a facsimile of the wave that was meant to strike. The clouds cloaked the sun and left the city in their savage shadow. The lightning was gone, but the violent anticipation remained.
I shivered as the clouds swamped Hell Gate in gray. I clutched my mug of chamomile tea and let the heat scald my palms. Grit and dirt from grimy sidewalks sandblasted the kitchen window, and even Rou’s kitchen fire couldn’t keep out the summer cold front’s chill.
Justice and I made it back right before the wind began its violent sweep. I didn’t know if it was attacking Hell Gate alone or if it was flying through the entire city.
Who can say with the wind? It has its own reasons for blowing where it blows and going where it goes.
On the roof, the grotesques were stone again. They snarled and bared their teeth, frozen on Hell Gate’s ledge.
In the kitchen, Justice, Griff, Jagger, and I sat at the long, scarred wooden table. Rou was at the stove, stirring a pot of something that smelled of cinnamon and anise. She hummed a disjointed song that sounded like the murmur of swift river water sliding over mossy rocks.
Jagger ignored her. He’d ignored her even when she set a plate of blueberry scones, a pot of tea, a cold roast, and a pint of beer in front of him. She’d recovered from the shock of the tsunami and was making up for her wavy disorientation by fixing an afternoon meal.
Justice pressed the towel she’d given him to the cut on his head. It was stained red from his blood and leaking melting ice onto his shirt collar. If it hadn’t been Rou who’d given him the towel, I know Justice would’ve left the cut to bleed and swell. It wasn’t that he wanted to appear tough; it was that he never remembered he was hurt until blood was running into his eyes. I understood. It was hard to feel the pain of a cut when your insides were constantly on fire. It would probably take something as strong as an arm falling off to catch your attention.
I took a sip of my chamomile tea, concentrating on the floral taste.
“You stabbed the Smith,” Jagger said in a deep, satisfied rumble. “And Jacob Ward fought him.”
We’d been through it all. Jagger had picked through the events like a man sifting through sand, looking for that one speck of gold.
