Someone approached through the snow. Alfie, red hair almost black in the dark. Elias wondered why Root hadn’t killed him the moment the sun went down, or just left him behind. Without the vigor funneled into him through Root’s control, Alfie’s bullet wounds would have been fatal hours ago. He’d stopped bleeding, but the internal damage had been done.
“I think we should change vehicles,” Alfie said.
Root rose to its full height, imperious, murderous, waiting for an explanation.
“The snow keeps falling. It’s going to make travel more and more difficult,” Alfie said. “We should take the plow.”
“It will slow us down,” Elias said. Moments earlier, he’d have welcomed the idea, but something of Root wormed inside him now, bent his mind, altered his interpretation of everything. The echo of the real Elias had not gone entirely quiet, but its voice was muffled, and now Root’s intentions were his.
“The plow would be slower in better weather,” Alfie argued, glancing over at the modified dump truck, “but it’s heavy on the road, less likely to lose traction, and if snow accumulates too much, we can put the blade down and keep going. Whatever they’re driving, this storm is going to slow them down a hell of a lot more than it would that plow.”
They all looked to Root, who stared uncertainly at Alfie. Elias thought it seemed as if it didn’t trust its own puppet, and it occurred to Elias that the pain might be weakening Root’s hold. After Root’s disappointment in Elias, the need to correct one of its own creations, it almost seemed Root did not trust itself.
“Take the plow,” Root said.
Alfie had filled the panel truck with gas. Now they abandoned it. The winged one took flight, Mathieu and Afua rode in the rear of the dump truck, atop a bed of sand that could be spilled on the road if they’d actually cared about making the roads behind them drivable. Root stood aside to allow Elias to climb into the cab ahead of it, not as a courtesy but the way one might usher a dog into the car. Elias scrambled in through the passenger door and then into the cramped space behind the seats.
Alfie got behind the wheel, Root into the passenger seat. The engine grumbled, and when Alfie put it in gear and hit the gas, it had a dragon’s roar. Once it picked up speed, there would be no stopping it.
In the back, behind his master, the thing that called itself Elias could still hear the echo of a human voice in his head, but like all echoes, it was fading. Soon, inside the monster, there would be only silence.
41
If Malcolm had been at the wheel, he knew the Frazer would have been in a ditch or wrapped around a tree by now. But Jennie had taken over the driver’s seat, uncannily calm and perfectly in control. She tapped the brake and gently nudged the accelerator in rhythm with the turns of the road, rigid with purpose, driving as fast as she could.
Malcolm hoped it would be fast enough.
Violet sat in the passenger seat with Malcolm behind her and Benjy behind Jennie. The boy’s hands were still cuffed, but he could have twisted and grabbed the door handle, thrown himself out of the car. Malcolm knew this was what Violet feared, that she’d chosen to be responsible for the boy. For his part, Benjy only smiled at them all, showing too much of his teeth.
Between them in the back seat, Maggie Wise curled onto her side—dead but talking. Dead but able to look out from the husk of her corpse at the man her youngest son had become.
“You… found it,” his mother said, a quivering rasp somewhere between Katharine Hepburn and the buzz from a wasp nest. Like there were things crawling inside her, and she spoke to him from a deep well.
He wanted to ask if it was really Maggie, but he knew. They all knew.
“What did I find?”
“The… régi tuz,” Maggie managed. “The old… the old fire.”
Her pupils were so tiny, yet he feared if he looked too closely,he might glimpse an endless void. At the wheel, Jennie craned her neck to see the road ahead. The wipers did their job, but she’d had to stop several times to clear snow that had built up. Malcolm wondered how much his sister knew, how much more Maggie had told her that Jennie had not revealed to him. The gloom of the Frazer’s interior shimmered in such a way that if not for the shush of the wipers and the rumble of the tires on the snowy road, he’d have thought Maggie had stopped time.
None of them spoke, as if each of them understood precisely what she meant bythe old fire. Magic. Witchcraft. The thing she believed he had inherited from her, the legacy Jennie envied so much.
“You told Jennie everything, but never me. Why not me?”
Her expression never changed. Death did that. But her lips still moved. “I told Jennie when I knew… I knew she hadn’t the spark.… You… walked away from a slaughter… in Korea.… The old fire was with you. I’d suspected… but then I… knew it.”
“You could have taught me.”
“You will… learn. Jennie knows the books.… You will need… the advice you’ll have to… seek. There is no… school for this… Malcolm. No teacher.… There is the power of the old fire and the… intention of the witch. The words may… change, but with… purpose and passion, they will… suffice. You will be your own teacher.”
Her voice cracked and faltered. A kind of hiss came from her throat, as if some connection had been severed. She coughed once, lightly, and then her body jerked against the seat. A shrill keen burst from her lips, and her fingers curled inward, nails cutting her palms.
“Maggie?” Violet called. “God, Maggie, what is it?”
Violet twisted in her seat, reaching into the back. She tried to hold Maggie in place, but the seizure could not be stopped.
“Jennie!” Violet said. “Stop the car!”
