Flock (32 page)

My car was not where I left it. Nor were there any vehicles in the spaces that had surrounded it. I searched about, tracking an almost surgical cut of destruction through the lot of cars. About five rows over, I spied a sleek black BMW and ran to it. Once inside, I only had to push the ignition button. Quoting the low crime statistics of the area and boasting of the vehicle’s remote start, my dad kept the key fob in the unlocked-car’s center console. I was thankful for both his carelessness and German engineering as I sped out of the parking lot.

I tried my mom and Stanley repeatedly, but there was no cell coverage. En route, I shuddered at every scene of carnage. Cars were upended, trees lay on their sides like fallen giants, an intact roof sat on the highway’s shoulder, and there was debris everywhere. I recognized fencing materials, car parts, a bike, a front door, and strewn clothing scattered about as if some petulant child had tossed aside her beloved dollhouse.

At the hospital, I encountered a scene of panic. Two ambulances with their sirens blaring were pulling up to the emergency bay ahead of me. A stream of cars was already filing into the parking lot, and I could see other people arriving on foot. This would be — I determined — command central for the reporting of lost ones and the delivery of both good and bad news. I hoped to discover the former as I slammed my dad’s Beemer into park. The top floors of the newer west wing, a multilevel addition, had obvious damage. As I stood surveying yet another scene of wreckage, a car pulled into the space next to mine. I watched as a frazzled mother lifted a screaming baby out of its backseat carrier and took off through the parking lot on a tear. Noticing a large gash to the baby’s leg, I fell in step behind them. Two police officers had set up a security detail, and a large sign stated
EMERGENCY ADMITTANCE ONLY, VISITORS’ ACCESS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED.
They stood aside and let the woman race past them. I took advantage of the timing and hustled through as if a member of their party.

“The emergency room is just ahead,” I shouted to the woman at the first fork in the labyrinth of hallways. While she raced forward, I turned left for the stairs to the upper levels.

Leira was on the third-floor neonatal intensive care unit, NIC, as it was called. Arriving onto the wing, I noticed shattered glass below a window and darkness, a telltale sign that power was out or being conserved. Betty, a nurse whose name had always amused me, hurried past, pushing an empty incubator. I fell in step with her.

“Are the babies all right?” I asked. “Do you know anything about my sister, Leira?”

“Everyone’s fine. This wing was spared for the most part, thankfully,” the harried nurse said, “but we’re operating on generators and trying to transfer all the little ones to the undamaged east wing until the building structure can be guaranteed.”

That didn’t sound good. I looked around as if expecting the walls to buckle or the ceiling to collapse at any moment. I followed Betty and arrived at a staging area set up near the main nurses’ desk. Leira was last in a lineup of six cribs. They must have been the babies deemed stable enough to wait while the more critical of the tiny patients — those attached to machines and gizmos — were painstakingly moved one at a time.

I hurried over to where Leira tossed in her wheeled crib. Her tiny face was screwed up tight, and she bleated like a baby lamb. I had heard the nurses before stating that the ability to cry was a good sign for the lung-compromised preemies, but something about her keening and overall coloring didn’t seem right to me. Though she was in a hospital with access to modern medical care, she required, I knew, the kind of reinforcements that only my sister Storks could provide.

Darting around a corner, I found a deserted room and — as I had one year ago in the clearing with Wade — reached deep into my ancestral skills to send out a distress call. Try to, anyway. As I’d feared and with a sickening resign, I felt nothing, was no longer in touch with my primitive instincts. I cursed Idunn under my breath and jogged back to the area where, watching from around the corner, I noticed another nurse on the phone, a landline, behind the desk. She barked some commands into the receiver and then hung up abruptly, hurrying back over to the helpless charges. After checking on Leira and her companions, she hurried along the dark corridor.

Crouching low as I scurried to the nurses’ station, I grabbed the phone and ducked under the desk for cover. If Hulda even owned a phone, I doubted it was listed with the operator, not one without ties to some kind of Stork directory, anyway. There was only one number I knew off the top of my head that would do me any good in this situation, as much as I hated to admit it.

The phone rang two times before a ragged “Hello” sounded from the other end.

“Fru Grimilla,” I said, “it’s Katla. First of all, Penny is fine. She banged up her knee, but it’s not serious. All the kids who were at the school are OK.”

Grim let out a muffled cry of relief. It was the most human response I’d heard escape her lips, ever.

“The reason I’m calling . . .” My voice was cracking, emotion splitting it into a desperate half sob, half croak. “It’s my baby sister. She’s failing, and I suspect there’s nothing to be done for her here at the hospital.” I stopped to catch my breath and tried, in vain, to compose myself. “But I believe there is something you and Hulda could do for her. At the Snjossons’ farm, where the sinkhole occurred, I have reason to suspect it’s a magical place, a vortex or whatever, and I have something that I think will help her.”

Before I could continue, Grim interrupted, “Can you get there with the child?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Waste no time,” she said. “Whatever forces have preyed upon us this evening, their properties are diminishing. If we’re to borrow from the universe’s powers, it must be done soon.”

After hanging up, I stuck my head up over the desk and scanned the area. The elevator dinged and Nurse Betty stepped off, accompanied by another nurse and an orderly, who held the door open. Betty walked over to Leira and the lineup and pulled two of the wheeled cribs toward the waiting elevator. I held my breath as she went back for another two, leaving only Leira and one other remaining. The elevator, I could see, was full; a second trip would be required. Betty watched as the door closed on the other nurse, the orderly, and the first four transfers. Needing a diversion, I crept around to the side of the desk, where a rolling cafeteria cart had been abandoned with its metal-dome-capped meals stacked one atop another, and jugs of liquids and paper-capped glass tumblers. With a swift kick, I knocked it to its side. It landed with a clatter of metal, breaking glass, and spilled liquids. I heard Betty’s “What now?” exclamation as she charged to investigate.

Moving like quicksilver, I snatched Leira up into my arms and made for the stairwell. I felt like a thief with stolen wares clutched to my chest. Bounding down the stairs, I could hear Leira’s labored breathing. She burbled as if her breaths were struggling through liquid. I recognized the sound from Afi’s fluid-filled lungs and knew it was a bad sign, a very bad sign.

Avoiding the front entrance, I turned left out of the stairwell exit and pushed through a door marked “Hospital Personnel Only.” It led to a warren of administration offices, which, after some searching on my part, led to a private exit and a staff parking lot. Running around the side of the building, I discovered the main parking lot to still be a crush of people. In the scene of all-around chaos and confusion, no one gave a wild-eyed teen and the bundle pressed to her heaving breast a second glance.

For all intents and purposes, I had already stolen a car and abducted a child that evening. What difference would it make to add the theft of a car seat to my growing rap sheet? I opened the unlocked back door of the car next to my dad’s and pulled out the infant carrier. So much for the low crime stats my dad loved to quote.

Leira felt like a bag of bones as I lowered her into the seat. I came so close to running her back into the hospital. What possible proof did I have that this would work? Surveillance information from Operation Vision Quest? A message from Idunn? She was hardly the most reliable of sources. I still couldn’t decide if she was a thief or a hero. And who had I turned to at this most vulnerable of moments? Grim! Another whose motives toward me were as murky as a mud pit.

Should stunt drivers ever be needed in northern Minnesota, I could boast experience. No curb or lawn was off-limits in my roundabout path from the congested parking lot to the road. Leira, the trooper, wheezed in reaction but didn’t cry.

As I drove from Pinewood to Norse Falls, I was only slightly relieved to notice the effects of the storm diminishing. Pinewood had clearly taken the worst of it, but Norse Falls hadn’t been entirely spared. Trees were down, as were utility poles and streetlights, power was out in all the surrounding homes and businesses, and debris littered the road.

I tried my mom, Stanley, and Jack on my cell. No luck. The towers must have suffered damage, too. I pulled down the long gravel drive to Jack’s farm, cutting my lights and hoping to avoid the notice of his parents. I was disappointed not to see Jack’s truck out in front of their home. It meant he was probably out looking for me.

My dad’s car was, again, surprisingly nimble over the rutted farm road, though I could hear Leira’s pained gurgle with every pothole we navigated. When I finally pulled up alongside the sinkhole, I let out a hack of nervous relief. I quickly gathered Leira to me, noticing in the car’s dome lights that her face had a bluish quality to it. She wasn’t getting enough oxygen; we didn’t have much time. I held her to my chest and ran.

As I approached the rim of the sinkhole, an area still roped off with yellow tape and orange cones, something moved in the shadows off to the side. My heart skipped a beat and then leaped with joy as I recognized first Grim’s tall, gaunt form followed by Hulda’s short, hunched figure.

“She’s not breathing.” I gasped for air myself, overcome with the passage of precious moments.

“Hand me the child,” Hulda said with authority.

I did so, noticing Leira’s thin face was purplish now, and she wasn’t moving.

Hulda removed a shawl from around her shoulders and laid it on the ground. She then gently eased Leira onto it, and both she and Grim fell to their knees.

“We need to grind the seeds, the carpel, from this apple,” I said, removing it from my pocket.

A look passed between Hulda and Grim. They clearly questioned the source of the offering. Hulda then nodded to Grim, who dragged forth her medicine bag, the one she had used once upon a time to heal Jack’s burns. She opened it and removed a mortar and pestle. Meanwhile, with the sleight of hand of a magician and the skill of a surgeon, Hulda sliced the apple in half with a pocketknife and lifted out the five-pointed carpel. Grim was at the ready with the pestle and pounded at the small brown specimens, no doubt envisioning it was my head she was pummeling to a pulpy mash. She had that look in her eyes; one I recognized well.

When the seeds were ground, Hulda scooped the paste onto the tip of her baby finger and, opening Leira’s mouth, ran the substance along her gums and tongue. Nothing happened. I choked with fear and anger. Hulda and Grim proceeded with an eerie chant. Whatever it was, it made the funereal screech of a murder of crows sound light and snappy.

Then, sitting back on her heels and raising her arms to the sky with one final appeal to whatever or whomever she and Grim were beseeching, she bent down, took a deep breath, and blew one blasting puff into Leira’s tiny blue lips.

I saw her chest rise and fall like bellows, after which her mouth trembled and her entire body flinched as she gasped and sucked in air with two or three rattling breaths. And then she wailed with all the subtlety of nails on a chalkboard. Never had anything sounded so wonderful.

I thought of what the nurses had said about the ability to cry being a good sign, and I choked in my own attempt to take in air with everything else: disbelief, gratitude, relief, and joy.

“Praise be,” Hulda said, falling forward in exhaustion.

“Too close. Much, much too close.” Grim tsk-tsked and shook her head back and forth, but she dropped her arm across Hulda’s shoulders in a display of camaraderie that took me by surprise.

Hulda and Grim weren’t the only ones who were exhausted after the ordeal. I felt faint and weak; even my arms seemed too heavy to support and swung like thick chains at my sides. I was so out of it, in fact, I barely registered the fact that from behind, someone had thrown their arm around my waist in support. Jack. I had no idea how long he’d been there or where he’d come from, but it didn’t matter. He was there and, as usual, had my back. But the ordeals of the evening hadn’t been without their costs, even to him. His face was gray and tightly drawn, and he slapped at his biceps as if trying to get some circulation going.

“So it’s true, then,” Hulda said, shaking her head sadly. “You’ve both lost your powers.”

My head snapped up. Although it was as I had suspected, this was confirmation. “I . . . It . . . How did you know?”