“Right now, he’s a tool. A weapon. Don’t let the quiet fool you.”
“Then let’s take that weapon away.”
Violet loved the way Malcolm reacted when she made him think in a way he hadn’t been thinking before. Surprised and delighted in equal measure. In his life, he’d become so used to relying only on himself that he never seemed quite sure what to do with partnership.
“What do you have in mind?”
Violet stared at the boy’s disconcerting smile. “It’s still hard for me to think about all of this as real.”
“After all we’ve seen?”
Shuddering, she drew her hand back into her coat. “I know in my heart it’s real. But my head’s trying to reject it. Witchcraft?Vampires—whatever your mother wanted to call them? And the idea that you’ve got this in you.”
“The old fire.”
“That. Yes.” Violet turned fully around to kneel on the seat, looking over the back at Malcolm. There’d been so much fear, so much pure surviving, that she’d put aside her feelings for a time. But now it was quiet, for however long they had, and she looked at him with fresh wonder. His kindness had been the first thing she loved, and then the openness of his heart, his courage, his gentleness. This wasn’t a perfect man—if such a thing existed—but even an ordinary man could be good. He could look at her with those dark eyes and see her, and love her back, not caring about the nightclub or her life before him, not even caring she’d married his prick of a brother.
But now it turned out Malcolm wasn’t ordinary at all, and Violet didn’t know what to make of that.
“You feel it in you. I can see that,” she said. “Maggie might have laid out that song for you like putting cheese in a mousetrap, but it only worked because this fire is part of you. When we getto Shediak, you’ll need to figure out how to use it pretty quickly. Maybe there are words that go along with it, but Maggie said it’s about intention. So I think you need to practice before we get there, so you know what it feels like to… I don’t know, to call up that old fire.”
“Practice how?”
Malcolm had moved his mother up onto the middle of the seat again, tried to make her as comfortable as possible. It seemed obscene to pose a corpse that way, but she’d been moving and talking not long ago, and might start talking again at any time, so it would also have been cruel to leave her down on the floor at Malcolm’s and Benjy’s feet.
“It might be hard to concentrate back there, but it’s not as if we have time to pull over,” she said.
“The snow’s let up a little bit,” Jennie said, the first words she’d spoken in a while. “But even so, we have no time to waste.”
Violet pointed at Benjy. “I was thinking you could practice on him.”
“Practice how? I can’t practice burying him.”
“Like I said, you need to figure out how to call on that fire. What it feels like. I don’t think it matters what you do with it. So I’d like you to try to break the hold they have on Benjy.”
Malcolm looked over at the boy.
For the first time in hours, Benjy moved of his own accord. He swiveled his head to stare back at Malcolm, grin widening, tip of his tongue poking out.
“Good luck with that, peanut!”
44
When they were children, Malcolm had listened in twitching irritation as Elias tried to learn to play the violin. The screech made him wince, and when Elias didn’t pick it up fast enough for Maggie’s taste, she’d stopped paying for his lessons. All four of them had been relieved, and Jennie had put the pawnshop violin in its battered case and then into a closet, from which nine-year-old Malcolm had extricated it the next time he found himself home alone.
He loved music. The sound the bow made across the strings bore no resemblance to music at all. It reminded young Malcolm of the noise made by raccoons fighting over the garbage cans in the middle of the night. He scraped the bow on those strings again, tried to find an angle that would even suggest melody, and eventually, he did hear something sweet. Not lovely, but certainly not any worse than the best of the sounds Elias had been able to elicit from the instrument. Besting Elias was all he’d wanted, so that had been enough for him. Without lessons, he felt he’d be hopeless, and so the violin went back into its case and the case back into the closet.
Witchcraft felt like that.
Hopeless.
He’d shifted Maggie over behind the passenger seat and moved himself into the middle so he could sit next to the boy. Benjy spit on him, but only once, as if that had been statement enough. Jennie and Violet had the courtesy to stay quiet and focus on the drive,but Malcolm felt the passage of time quite keenly. Minutes would be hours, miles would vanish, and they’d reach Shediak with precious little time before sunrise.
“Abracadabra,” Benjy whispered.
Malcolm ignored him. He’d swiftly become expert at pretending not to see or hear the child. If he could manage this and the boy reverted to his own self, Malcolm would have a difficult time remembering that the putrid child in front of him was not the real one. But first things first.
Like the violin, he hardly knew where to begin. No spells or incantations, no special recipes. But he knew the old fire existed because he’d seen it work, made it work, and that was a powerful ammunition all its own. He closed his eyes and simply breathed, listening to the wipers and the road and the engine. The old fire had to be inside of him, and he tried to imagine looking inward, searching his heart. Shouldn’t he be able to sense such a thing, like discovering a muscle he’d never felt before? If he was meant to wield this power, there had to be some way to ignite it. He imagined a button or a lever in his chest, tried to reach out into the world around him. Perhaps he felt something, but he couldn’t be sure.
