Blackwood (14 page)

  "I hear the voices of dead people," he reminded her. Had he ever heard the voice of her cracked grandmother? Not that he'd been able to distinguish individual voices. He pictured the cream envelope that held his gram's letter – he hadn't been brave enough to open it yet. He'd planned on asking Miranda to read it with him later.

  The Manns Harbor Bridge and the waters of the Sound were coming up fast in the distance. Perfect rows of tall trees flanked the highway, the sign that bid visitors farewell just ahead. It was a postcard view.

  Miranda angled the car off before they reached the bridge. She pulled into a parking lot bordered by sand. There were some rocks, a bench, and a tree prettily arranged beside the snatch of beach, and then the bridge itself, launching over the greenish blue water. A cluster of purple birds on the beach took off at their arrival, rising from the sand in a shuddering wave of wings.

  "What are you planning to do?" he asked.

  "Stay here. I don't want you to get hurt."

  She left the car. He jumped out to follow her, catching her on the sand. The wind tossed her hair in a storm as he grabbed her shoulder and spun her to face him.

  "You never went on a field trip?" he asked.

  She whispered the answer so low the breeze almost stole it. "Never. He wouldn't sign the slips."

  She wasn't crazy. She was just
acting
crazy. He understood the things in your own mind that could make you push the world away, flailing.

  "I support your crazy plan," he said. "I think you
should
try."

  Her eyes narrowed. "You do?"

  "We need to know exactly what we're dealing with. Roswell helped – at least I think he did – but he admitted he doesn't know everything yet. It'll be an experiment. And if you can leave, then you'll feel better, right? Having an escape route?"

  She was still wary, still waiting for him to disappoint her. But she nodded.

  He said, "We should just take the car across the bridge. Together."

  "No, I'm not risking you getting hurt. I'm going on foot."

  Miranda whirled and crossed the small slice of beach that remained, continuing without pause over the grassy patch next to the bridge. He stayed right behind her.

  She didn't hesitate so much as brace herself when she reached the white line at the edge of the actual highway. Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath, and then she stepped onto the road. One deliberate step, followed by another…

  He checked her progress over the side. The next step would be the one that took her off the mainland, over the water of the Sound. How precise were curses anyway?

  A sob ripped from her throat.

  He trotted to her side. "What's wrong?"

  "Oh god…" Fear etched her features, but she moved forward. A baby step. She trembled in the wind breaking across the bridge.

  Seven steps, then eight. What if the story about her grandmother was true?

  "Phillips, it hurts. It
hurts
," she said. Misery and pain filled her voice. Then, she howled. The scream was like knives stabbed her.

  She stumbled, lifted her foot…

  Before she could complete the tenth step, Phillips grabbed her and hauled her back to the edge of the bridge.

  She barely fought. Miranda was breathing so hard he worried that her heart would burst, worried that it already had. What if the curse could do anything it decided to?

  "Miranda, talk to me."

  "It stopped when you put me back here." She wailed, "I can't leave."

  He was desperate to do something to help her. A yellow SUV drove by with its horn blaring and Phillips flipped it off, which made him feel marginally better. He steered Miranda over the barrier, afraid she'd dash back onto the bridge if they stayed near the highway.

  "I can't leave," she said again, tearing loose and kicking the sand. "I can't fucking leave this place."

  
No frak. This is bad.
"Miranda, I'm sorry…" He reached out to her.

  "You're sorry," she said, laughing that crazy laugh from the car.

  But she shuffled closer to him. He caught her, hands on her shoulders, steadying her.

  She went on, "Do you believe Roswell? Witchcraft plans, immortality, my family cursed since the start of the colony?"

  "I wasn't sure before, but… Yes. Now I believe it. We have to do something – and leaving is off the list."

  She pushed against his chest, leaving her palms flat against it. There were noises in the background: a few cars, birds flapping and calling overhead, trees rustling in echo of the water. Phillips barely heard them. The sadness in her face was too much.

  She said, "I can't leave. You can. You made it off. Why would you ever come back here? What if Mary Blackwood
was
evil, and I am too? And that's why I'm cursed? What if our family deserved everything we got?"

  He slid his hands down her arms and back up them. He was desperate to stop the pain, to bring her back to being Miranda. The fighter. He tugged her closer by her shirtsleeves, meaning to kiss her.

  She let him bring her in close.

  He was winning her. For a moment, he was winning her, until she shoved him away.

  He fell to his knees, hitting the sand hard. A keening sound came from his throat that he couldn't stop. But Miranda wasn't the reason he fell. What pushed him down and down and down was far worse.

  The voices had returned with hurricane force and ripped his senses apart.

13

Criminal Grace

Miranda couldn't believe what she'd just done.

  Phillips had stayed with her even though she was acting balls-out crazy, and she'd paid him back by shoving him to the ground. Full-on rejection when she didn't
want
to reject him.

  Her flare into anger in Roswell's library, the way she drove here, the – god, frak –
true
stories she confessed to about not being able to leave the island, insisting on walking out onto the bridge… She'd come
this
close to telling him about seeking fantasy escape routes after her mom died. But all that paled next to what had flooded from her mouth after the childhood stories were proved right. It was nothing next to pushing him away.

  One thing she knew: none of those actions or words belonged to her. Or maybe they poured from some small part of her, but it was a part she'd never willingly let take control.

  Sand swallowed her feet and she had to pull them free to kneel before him.
What if he never tries to kiss me again?
She wouldn't blame him.

  Only after her initial horror passed did she see Phillips was in pain. Only then did she hear the low noises from his throat.

  
Oh, frak.

  His head slumped into his chest. She gently shook his shoulder. His face lifted a fraction, enough to show that his eyes were squeezed shut. The wrinkles at their edges were wounds slashed into his face. He cried out with the anguish of a torture victim.

  "Phillips?" She did her best to tamp down her panic.

  He tipped forward and rolled onto his side, forming an untidy ball on the sand. His eyes stayed closed as he rocked into the grainy embrace of the ground beneath him, hands rising to shield his ears from sounds she couldn't hear.

  "It's the voices," she said. "The voices came back, didn't they?"

  Miranda had no clue what to do. This was the kind of thing she should have brought up in polite conversation with Sara earlier.
What do I do if your son suddenly goes spirit tuning fork again?

  She petted his shoulder with a tentative hand and he grabbed it. She detected a slight tug, or thought she did, and – despite how strange it felt – lay down beside him, pressing her body against his in the sand. The hand gripping hers moved to re-cover his ear. His body trembled against hers. She held on, afraid that if she let go he'd be gone forever.

  "Home," he said, after a while.

  And so she had to let go, to get up so she could help him off the sand. She stumbled then froze, gazing out at the water.

  The tall black ship sailed toward her. Three black sails of varying sizes swelled in the wind. The ornate symbols stitched on them in gray clearly bore Dee's mark. What had Phillips called it? Right, the
monas hieroglyphica.

  The immense shadow the ship threw across the water nearly tricked her into thinking it was real. Real in the way she was real, the sand was real, Phillips was real.

  The shadow shifted and billowed like the black sails. They needed to get out of here.

  Turning away from the phantom ship's menacing glide, she bent and pulled at Phillips' arms until she got one over her shoulder. "We have to get up now," she said, and he managed to climb to his feet.

  He leaned heavily on her. A low moan escaped his lips. "Home," he breathed.

  She rotated them in a slow circle, not comfortable leaving the black ship and its shadow unobserved. "Do you see it?" she asked, searching the horizon.

  But there was nothing to see. A bridge, calm waters, a brilliant blue sky.

  No wonder old John White always seemed so cranky by the end of the play, looking for something and finding nothing.

  Crossing the ten feet to Pineapple took an age with their clumsy tandem footsteps. "We're never going to be in an Olympic team for anything that requires synchronization," she told him. He was unresponsive, but she talked at him to ease her nerves, like he was in a coma and the doctor had said it might help. Sand coated them both in a fine, scratchy second skin.

  "We could be in the freak Olympics," she said, depositing him against the rear passenger door. "Well, I don't have any actual skills. No, no, that's not what I mean. I have skills, but not like you have skills."

  Sand clung to his eyelashes, his eyes still closed. He looked like he was asleep standing up.

  "If there
was
a freak Olympics," and she got the door open and slipped her arm around his side to help him ease into the seat. She clumped his feet over the edge so he was in the car, "maybe we could get training so we didn't suck so much at this."

  On impulse, she reached out and brushed sand from his cheek, softly from his eyelashes. They fluttered against the pressure and he opened one eye. Bloodshot ringed the brown iris. "Miranda," he said.

  "That's me," she agreed, glad he was in there somewhere. "I'm taking you home."

  Careful not to get some limb of his caught, she shut the door and scurried around to her own side and into the driver's seat. "Not that you're going to change the subject that easily. We really need more practice. If we're going to medal."

  "Music," the word a moan.

  "I see how it is," she said, "trying to shut me up."

  But she turned on the used CD player she'd installed in Pineapple's dash – one of her prouder moments – and cranked the volume. Neko Case howled about red bells. Deep red bells. Polly had given her the album.

  Miranda drove, grateful she could stop talking. She needed to think.

  What Roswell had shared with them was on the crazy side, but she couldn't deny how much being on the bridge had hurt. She'd counted her own steps until the pain forced the numbers out of her head. Her feet had burned like she'd walked into a furnace – like she was a girl forced to dance in hot iron shoes, a mermaid forced to split her tail and walk on land. Fairy-tale level was the only description that captured it.

  Which meant magic wasn't so crazy. Not when you factored in the leaping birthmark, the missing people, and John Dee's symbol.

  How her father had died was important. Phillips had said so, and maybe his dad would have learned more. Roswell's theory might explain some things, but it didn't explain everything. They knew more than he did now.

  She looked over at Phillips. His neck crooked back, eyes shut, mouth moving in silent accord with the lyrics or the voices in his head. The intensity of the pain had faded from his expression, at least.

  
He's in no shape to help you though.

  "My turn," she said.

When she reached Phillips' driveway, the first thing she noticed was the unfamiliar vehicle parked beside Chief Rawling's cruiser. The hulking black SUV gleamed like invisible hands polished it constantly to remove any speck of sand or dust. Miranda watched too much TV not to know what it meant. There were federal agents inside the house. Maybe they already knew who'd murdered her father – the rush autopsy might be complete. She turned off the car, the swell of Neko's voice dying so abruptly that the silence made Phillips moan.

  "You stay here," she said, making a split second decision. She wouldn't subject him to the prying eyes of strangers when he was like this.

  Smoothing her hair and T-shirt, she walked to the front door. Sure, she wanted to know if the missing pieces of the puzzle had been found, but first she needed Phillips' mom to help get him inside. The door opened before her second knock.

  Chief Rawling looked around, and without asking for Phillips said, "Come inside, Miranda."

  "Chief, I… Is Sara…" Miranda tried to banish the memory of him interrupting them the night before.

  "She's in here."

  He left Miranda no choice except to follow him across the creaking planks of the floor. The footfalls of his heavy-soled work shoes echoed. Sara sat on the floral couch in the living room, an unusual primness in her posture.

  Across from Sara, on the love seat, were the expected agents. A man and a woman in nearly identical dark suits – he was young but already bald, her graying hair was slicked back into a knot at her neck. The tight quarters of the love seat forced them to sit close together, and their spines were stick-straight to compensate for the lack of room. Miranda decided that TV got feds half-right, based on these two. They were serious and intimidating, but neither was attractive enough to inspire fanfic anytime soon.

  "Um, hello…" Miranda lingered in the doorway as Chief Rawling pulled out a spare wooden chair near the wall for her to sit in, then returned to the sofa beside his wife. The feds watched her with interest. She asked, "Sara, could I talk to you alone for a minute?"