Four Roads Cross (28 page)

Claire watched her father.

Corbin woke.

Just a snaking beneath the sheets at first, a protrusion of knee from covers. He thrashed against synthetic pillows. Claire's sudden tension made Matt look. Rafferty's eyes were open, staring straight up as if a sword hung over his bed. No sword, though, only a pitted moonscape of drop ceiling.

“Father,” Claire said.

Matt thought he answered “Daughter,” but the word was really “Water.”

She poured him a cup, brought it to the bedside, and set it on the table, just in reach. Rafferty did not look at the cup, or at Claire.

Matt thought he should not be here. He almost excused himself, then realized his movement would draw more attention, and kept still.

“I took care of the deliveries today,” she said. “The girls are well.”

“I saw something last night,” he said. “It was last night.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn't in my body.”

“You were.”

“I was and wasn't. I remember. I hit Matt. And Sandy.”

“You almost hit Ellen.”

“I scared her.”

“Us.”

“I was angry.”

“Yes.”

“I've been angry. Angry or drunk. For a long time.”

“Yes.”

“I can do this. I can hold it together.”

“Sleep, Father,” Claire said, and he did.

Matt and Claire did not speak on the ride back.

*   *   *

The gargoyles were not gone by the time the Blacksuits arrived. The toll of battle was too great. The demons had carved deep grooves in the gargoyles' stone, and dried moonlight coated their limbs. Cat stood among the fallen. The Suit kept her standing. It pressed her wounds together and filled her mind with song to drown out the background wash of pain.

Raz slumped on the dais. Tara leaned against a wall, shadows trembling around her, bleeding and exhausted but whole. The reporter, Jones, was trying to help Aev stand. Shale lay still; stone around him decayed to dust as his wounds knit. Nor was he the only Stone Man—she corrected herself—the only gargoyle in need of healing.

The demonglass steamed away. Large pieces endured longest, like gutter snowdrifts in new spring.

She felt her fellow officers climb the tower, gray beetles swarming around obstacles, leaping from windowsill to windowsill. They crested the tower and joined her, a chorus of which she was but one voice.

—see to the wounded—

—stone for the gargoyles—

—bandages—

Ten blocks away a train of ambulances wailed through the night, a Blacksuit crouched atop each.

As the Blacksuits arrived, Jones rose to stand between them and Aev. “These people are hurt. They need help.” A note of defiance on “people
.
” She thought the gargoyles and Blacksuits were enemies.

Justice considered possible responses, settled on the truth, and settled on Cat to deliver it.

We understand,
she said.
We will protect them. They are part of us, after all.

*   *   *

Jake opened the door before Matt could drive home the key. Donna's voice issued from Peter's bedroom, which was the girls'—“Is that your dad?”—and Jake stood aside. Hannah sat on the couch, strangling a pillow. Simon brought her a glass of water from the kitchen. Her fingers unclenched slowly. No one had cleared the dinner table yet. Tomato sauce streaked the flatware red.

Ellen lay on the bed in Peter's room. Donna sopped sweat from her face and forehead with a rag. “She went stiff at the table. Cried out. They're eating her—that's what she said.” Ellen mumbled a word Matt could not catch. Donna pressed the cloth to Ellen's cheek. “Scared the boys to all hells.” Her, too, though she didn't say as much.

Claire walked to Ellen's side and offered Donna her hand. Donna passed her the rag before Claire remembered to say “Please.” She got “Thank you” out okay.

Matt went to the kitchen for water and brought a glass back. By the time he returned, Claire had pulled Ellen upright in bed. Ellen shivered despite the heat. Donna found her a shawl, a black cable-knit thing her mother made that smelled of the cedar chest where they stored it. The girls spoke in a low voice. “Do you need us?” he asked Claire, and after a hitch of hesitation she said, “No.”

Donna wanted to stay, he could tell, but she left. “We'll be in the next room.” They cleared the table together. He spooned pasta into a tin lunch box for tomorrow, made another box for Donna, and left the rest in the covered casserole dish. He washed and she dried. “How was the hospital?” Donna asked.

“Corbin spoke.” He ducked the sponge in soapy water, scoured the steel pan clean, and passed the pan to her. “But he's in a bad way.”

“We're helping the girls, at least.” She dried with a coffee-colored dish towel.

“You should have seen Claire this morning. She can run the whole business by herself.”

“How old is she?”

“Seventeen.”

“How old were you when you ran the stand alone?”

“About that age.”

“There you are.” The dish rack's silverware basket was full. She emptied it to make room for the spatula. “I know it's no business of ours, but they're under our roof now, for however long.”

“I should have asked you before I brought them home.”

“We're fine for a few days, though it's tight quarters. Had to sit Jake on an end table at dinner. But the girls keep to themselves.” Silverware rattled as she hipped the drawer shut. “I think it was harder for them to come here than for us to take them.” A cry issued from the next room. He turned from the sink with sudsy hands.

In the living room, Jake was chasing Hannah around the couch with a toy thunder lizard; she was running, and laughing, and turned to hit him in the face with her pillow.

*   *   *

By the time Cat finished her interview, Raz was gone.

The explanation took longer than she expected; Jones asked the right questions. Justice supplied memories and words Cat lacked. The other Suits cleaned up: drove Tara, protesting, to a hospital, and the gargoyles to nearby buildings where they could safely drain the stone to heal themselves. The tower roof was crumbling, and most of the gargoyles too hurt to fly. The Suits carried them.

But Raz—when Jones broke off their interview, Raz had disappeared.

You're hurt, the Suit whispered to her. Get to a hospital. You've done enough for the evening.

Where did he go?

Justice integrated and sifted the Suits' perceptions. Memories not hers melted as she clutched for them.

She remembered climbing crumbling walls, the vertigo of seeing herself in conference with Jones, tending the wounded and the dead. And there, Raz rose and shambled down the dark stairs. As far as the Suits guarding the tower's base could tell, he never came out.

I have to find him.

No, Justice said. You need a medic. Now.

Hells with this. Cat was off duty. She let the Suit go.

Pain hit her from nine directions at once. The sky dimmed, and the air chilled-warmed-chilled again, her skin unsure what to feel after so long inside the Suit.

Cat walked to the dark stairs because she could not run and lurched down winding steps shafted with moon- and streetlight through fresh cracks in the walls.

Raz lay in a nest of rubble at the tower's base. His clothes were torn, and his skin intact. He was very still.

She'd seen him gutted at least twice on the tower, and hamstrung once, healing almost as fast as demons could hurt him.

She limped over concrete and broken rock to sit by his side. “Raz?”

No answer.

A millipede scuttled up his pant leg. She brushed it away. The wound in her side pulled beneath her hand. She needed a hospital. Dust rained down. “Got to get you out of here. Place isn't safe. This isn't how you bite it.”

His chest spasmed. “Bad—” Coughing. He raised his hand but could not quite reach his mouth to cover it. “Bad choice of words.”

“Scared me for a second there.”

Another shiver in his chest. They didn't need to breathe—he didn't need to breathe—but the voice box still worked the same. “Me, too.”

“We should—” The ruined tower spun a sundial's revolution over her. “We should get out of here. Building's breaking down. Can you walk?”

“Don't think so.” His lips moved so slowly they must have weighed as much as continents, and fangs tipped between them. “Glad you found me.”

“Here, I can—” She reached for the chain around her neck, for Justice.

He grabbed her hand before it could close. “Not her,” he said. “We need to talk.”

“This isn't the time.”

“It's never the time.”

“I can't carry you out alone.” His neck was cool as a marble column. “You took a claw meant for me.”

“It didn't hurt.”

“Let me say thank you, dammit.” She felt his chest swell and contract against her side. “You're breathing.”

“Old habits,” he said. “Hindbrain knows you're hurt, tells you you need air. Instinct. Doesn't help.”

“Story of my life,” Cat said. “Old instincts that don't help.” She slid her arm around his shoulders and tried to pull him up. They made it halfway together, then slipped and hit the rock hard. Raz laughed.

“I'll put on the damn Suit,” she said. If she pressed her back against this big rock, bunched her legs under her, and pushed up with them as she leaned—

Before she could try, Raz caught her arm. She cursed. “Fuck did you do that for?”

Red unblinking eyes fixed hers. His way of moving reminded her of cellar insects, so still when seen, but look away for half a moment and they're gone.

He was hungry and hurt and so was she.

Points showed between his lips.

She nodded, then said, “Do it,” to make her meaning clear.

He drew close to her. Her veins sang for the sharp pain and the spreading joy. She wanted to become a candle, a bonfire in the dark.

His tongue flicked her cheek, rough and dry, more like a cat's than a man's. It lapped blood from the cut on her forehead, the slenderest of tastes. He swallowed, and that swallow rippled through his body. She felt her self drawn into him—no desperate, fiery whirlpool but a tide receding to leave a slant of sparkling saturated sand.

He drew back. She thought she should say something but couldn't think of words to match the moment. Too many were questions, and could wait. The roof creaked. She grabbed his shoulder. The firmness of her grip surprised her. “Let's go,” she said.

They lifted each other to their feet and, leaning, limped from the tower.

*   *   *

By the time Ellen emerged from Peter's room, Hannah had beaten Jake three times at checkers—their détente involved Jake not minding when Hannah won, and Hannah not minding when Jake marched his toy thunder lizard through the victorious checkers, devouring errant disks in a frenzy of dagger-toothed revenge. Matt hadn't expected his youngest to get on with the Rafferty girl, but perhaps he wasn't threatening—or maybe Hannah just liked lizards.

The apartment settled as they all prepared for sleep. Through the wall his bedroom shared with Peter's, Matt heard Hannah and Ellen talking in low voices like the bubbling of a fountain. Donna held him, and he held her back.

“You're right,” he said.

She pressed her face into the side of his head and hummed satisfaction. “Call for a mason. Set this occasion down in stone.”

“I say that a lot.”

“Not out loud.”

“The girls need space. Seeing Corbin in the hospital like that—he's sick, has been the last three years, since June left.”

“Sleep, Matt. There will still be problems in the morning.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” he said, but kissed her, said he loved her, and heard her say she loved him back. He waited on his back. His wife's breathing slowed. The ceiling was an unmapped territory.

Soft ghostlight glowed in the crack beneath the bedroom door: Claire, reading, in the living room.

“Claire, go to sleep!”

Ellen's voice.

The light shut off with a click, and they slept.

 

36

The next morning's dawn found Matt and Claire returning from their rounds. Their golem cart plodded up the long low ridge, beyond which Alt Coulumb's towers peaked. A flash of color cut across the road from tree to tree, and somewhere, something sang a sweet song.

“Beautiful bird,” Claire said.

“The singer or the flier?”

“Both.”

“The singer's not a bird. It's a gracklet.”

She turned to Matt. “What?”

“Spider-lizard kind of thing. Mimics birdsong. You can tell because of the hiss before it sings.”

“Do I want to know why it mimics birdsong?”

“Guess.”

“Gross.”

“Circle of life,” he said, and hummed a few bars of a mystery play song. “Gracklets are good for the forest. They keep the bird-mind from eating people.”

“Now you're just making fun of me.”

“It's in the history books. The first Old World settlers came to Alt Coulumb after a plague hit the city, around the fall of the Empire in Telomere. Before the plague, locals used rallybirds to talk with people a long way off, because the birds' minds tie together. In plague years, the birds escaped, bred uncontrolled—and the more there were, smarter they got. Millions of them lived in the forests at the height. They'd eat crops ripe for harvest, pick a man's flesh from his bones if they wanted.”

“And the gracklet?”

“A trader went to Southern Kath and found that even though the coastal jungle near Ajaia's land was full of wild rallybirds, they didn't get so smart. She asked around and learned that gracklet kept the birds in check. Their song breaks up the bird-mind, and then they eat the birds. The trader, she went into the heart of the forest and came back with a chest full of gracklet eggs. Planted them in the Geistwood, and here we are today.”