Magic, he thought.
He limped up the steps, not in pursuit of Malcolm and Violet and the body they’d snatched but just to see the sky. Outside, he watched them slide the body into the back seat of a mint-green convertible Frazer Manhattan sedan. The only car like that in town belonged to Fogg’s boss, the owner of the funeral home, but it was a woman who climbed into the back seat of the Frazer with a boy who looked maybe ten or eleven.
Violet and Malcolm got into the front seat, closed the doors, and the Frazer whisked away with Malcolm at the wheel. Fogg might have imagined the few piano notes he heard in that moment,fading as the car gained distance, but he allowed himself to think they were a private farewell. He tilted his head back and stood in the rain, wondering what other magic might be out in the world, waiting for him.
The question frightened him, but the fear felt good. Like something worth embracing.
He’d been among the dead long enough.
36
Elias fell asleep in the culvert. Water diverted around him, soaking through his clothes, level rising as the rain kept on. In the days when he’d had a beating heart, he would not have considered this sleep, but Root had explained this was the closest he would ever get to slumbering again. It felt to him more like drunkenness, as if his thoughts had slowed to a trickle, his inner voice now like murmured conversation drifting in from another room. He thought of the hissing static on a television set late at night, after they’d played the national anthem.
That was sleep for his kind. It made him want to die all over again.
Someone kicked him. Elias sneered without opening his eyes. His long fingers flexed, the new instinct to claw, to rend.
A fist clutched his hair and dragged him up from the water. Smashed him against the curved inner wall of the culvert. Elias’s hands moved even before his eyes were open. His claws dug into rubbery flesh, and the static left his mind. He opened his eyes to see Root’s pupils flare with rage. Disoriented, Elias had attacked it, and that could not stand.
Root lifted him, smashed him to the floor of the culvert on his back, and straddled him. It twisted Elias’s face aside and pressed down so his nose and mouth were both under the water. Rain and filth flowed in. Elias fought, tried to save himself, but it went on for an eternity of seconds before Root bent and whispered in hisabove-water ear, “You cannot drown. You are not a thing of life now. You are a thing of death. Understand it.”
Root released him and stood back while Elias scrabbled to his hands and knees and vomited water. He might not need to breathe now, but he could inhale, and habit had choked a lot of water into the useless lumps of his lungs.
“Son of a bitch,” Elias growled.
Root smiled. Elias thought there should have been another word to describe the look on its face, because this cruel, black-eyed, murderous mask was not the expression people thought of as a smile.
“Hate me, but obey me,” Root rasped. “They are running. We must be after them.”
Elias dragged himself to his knees. The others stood hunched farther along the culvert, eyes like embers in the shadows, watching and waiting. He thought of the terms of venery, the words coined for groups of animals, which had always fascinated him. A pride of lions. An ambush of tigers. A murder of crows. He’d once bedded a poetess who’d studied at Vassar and wanted to misbehave. Her favorite of those phrases had been a fascination of larks, and Elias thought of her now, and that phrase. The way the monsters looked at him, that fascination, kindled something in him. But just as quickly, he dismissed the idea of larks. They reminded him more of wolves or dogs, but not a pack. He felt there ought to be a better term. When the strongest wolf clashed with another among them, the others would stand back and watch, waiting for the outcome. Waiting for their turn at violence.
The term, he thought, should have beenan anticipation of wolves.
That’s what these things were. His brothers and sisters now, in death.
It had grown darker outside the culvert, but Elias could see that night had yet to fall. If he could trust the way he felt, another of his new instincts, he felt as if hours of daytime still remained.
“How can we follow them?” he asked. “The storm is blocking out the sun, but it’s still there. Even if we can go now, I don’t have any sense of Maggie. We know they’re bound for Shediak, but a lot of roads head north.”
“Many roads north, but only one to the island.”
Elias stared at it. “Shediak is an island?”
Root bent over him. Something had begun to grow from the flesh beneath its eyes, small pink nodules shaped like tiny mushrooms. They quivered while Root spoke.
“I will not waste hours in hiding. Not this day. We need a puppet to drive us.”
“The Irishman—”
“Is dead or dying. He was shot, useless, and I severed myself from him. We need another.”
Confused, Elias glanced at the gleaming orange eyes of the others in their pack, their anticipation. “I don’t understand. Sundown is still a couple of hours away. How do we find someone new?”
Root slapped its hand down on top of Elias’s skull and dragged him up by the hair again. Elias struggled to escape that grip, but Root marched him along the culvert. When he realized what Root intended, Elias tried to plant his feet but didn’t have the strength. One hand in his hair, the other bunched in the back of his jacket, Root propelled Elias out into the rain.
He’d grown used to the simmering agony of this existence. The curse Maggie the witch had put on Root and the rest of their kind came with a grinding in the bones and a searing on the skin. Elias had grown used to it, but that didn’t eliminate the constancy of the pain.
Daylight felt so much worse.
