Legacy (38 page)

“That’s not my brother,” Peter said.

I put my head down. “I know.”

“But at the same time, it is.” His eyes filled.

“I know.”

“We can live here . . .” He looked at the smoldering building. “. . . until . . .”

“Okay.”

“Not you. Just Eric and me.”

“Oh, goodie!” the Darkness exclaimed. “The moron’s body will last all of an hour out here in the open.” His skinny legs jiggled wildly.

“He wants me to kill him.”

“Yes. Then he can move into your body.”

“He thinks that if he annoys me enough, I’ll off him.”

“I guess he comes from a world where that’s normal.”

“He comes from
this
world, Katy.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “We created the Darkness, remember? It’s made up of our own evil impulses.”

“Well,
we
didn’t. Someone else did. That all happened long ago.”

“That’s what you all say,” the demon inside Eric taunted. “If all the evil in the world happened long ago, I wouldn’t be here today.” He smiled sweetly. “You re-make me every hour, you good people of the earth. I live everywhere at once because of you. In all modesty, I am the greatest entity in the history of the universe, thanks to you and your quietly horrific natures.”

The boy sat back in the tree, the ancient, evil intelligence of the Darkness gleaming from behind Eric’s eyes. For once it had spoken the truth.

We sat in silence, all three of us, for a long time as the rain slowly put out the fire and the cabin was reduced to a blackened, smoking wreck. I no longer cared that I was soaked and dirty and that half my skin had been scraped off my body. All I was conscious of now was how tired I was. Tired and hopeless and out of ideas.

I remembered Eric’s last drawing, showing a monster standing over the bodies of two dead people. I knew now that Peter and I were those people.

The future can be changed,
my great-grandmother had said. Our only chance of survival would be to get away from here, but I knew Peter wouldn’t be willing to leave his brother. Neither would I, come to think of it.

All three of us had come down a long road that ultimately led nowhere.

“How’re you doing?” I asked finally. It seemed weird to be having such a pedestrian conversation under the circumstances, but in the end, there was nothing more to say.

“Oh, just great,” Peter said. “Couldn’t be better.”

“You don’t have to be cynical. At least your boat got here in one piece.”

Peter snorted. “It stopped being in one piece about five minutes into the storm.”

“Oh?” I remembered the violence of that storm. There was no way anyone could make it across that water without a boat. “How’d you get here, then? You didn’t swim, did you?”

“No. I doubt if I could have swum it alone, let alone with . . .” He regarded the puppet-boy in the tree. “. . . him.” He shook his head. “After the boat broke up, all I could think to do was to tread water with Eric—or whatever that thing is—on my shoulders. He’s the one who got us here.”

“How?”

“With your precious magic,” he said angrily, covering his eyes with one trembling hand. “I wish we’d drowned,” he whispered. “In the middle of the ocean, the Darkness couldn’t have gone into anyone else. We’d both have disappeared. That
was the original plan. Hattie’s plan, mine. I should have stayed with it. I tried . . .” He broke down and sobbed. “I tried, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill Eric.”

I moved up beside him and kissed him. “You were right,” I said as gently as I could. “Death isn’t the answer.”

“No?” he asked bitterly. “Can you think of another?”

I wanted to say yes, because there was something,
something
, in the back of my mind.

“A song . . .” I said uncertainly.

“The ‘Song of Unmaking’?” He jerked his hand away from mine. “We already saw how far that got us.”

“The dog,” I said, straining to remember. “Even the dog knew it was wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked irritably.

Whatever small mental thread I was trying to grab on to slipped away. “I don’t know,” I said. “There just seemed to be something about remembering who we were and . . . madness.”

“Yea, madness!” cheered the voice inside Eric. “Say, guys, I’m hungry. Or rather,
this
is.” He grabbed his wrist with his other hand and shook it.

“Save us from our madness,” I recalled.

“As if anyone could,” Eric said. “Hey, what does this wretched infant eat, anyway? Baby food? Yuck.”

“Lady of Mercy . . .”

“Give me pablum or give me death!” Eric shouted.

“That was it.
Lady of Mercy, save us from our madness
. It was a prayer or something.”

“Starving here,” the Darkness shouted, his voice nasal and trombone-like. “Or do you want this worthless bag of bones to drop dead? Works the same way, you know, stab me or starve me.”

“He’s not worthless,” Peter said hotly. “My brother’s been pushed back so far inside that monster that he can’t ever come back.”

“I don’t believe that.” I walked toward the boy in the tree. “Eric,” I said softly. “Eric, it’s Katy. Remember me?”

“Remember me?” he repeated mockingly. “Do you think I’d let that happen again? You just got lucky.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“Back at your house I summoned Eric by calling his name. He came through the Darkness to answer me.”

“I thought you were just waking him up.”

“No. A name is a powerful thing. That’s why couples have to speak their true names before becoming handfasted. It’s like offering your self, your real self.”

“That trick only works once, missy.” Eric pointed his index finger at me.

Suddenly something slashed across my cheek. I screamed with the pain. When I looked down, there was blood dripping onto my shirt.

“Katy!” Peter shouted, rushing over to me. He touched my face, and his hands came away covered with blood. “Leave her alone,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Why should I?” Eric answered. There was a swooping sound, and then something fell at my feet.

It was a bald eagle in the prime of its life, its magnificent eight-foot wings splayed across the sandy soil. I bent over to examine it, but it wasn’t wounded. It just seemed to be dying, like the Cory’s Shearwaters, for no reason.

“How could you do that?” I whispered.

“Let’s hear it for Eric, the mighty hunter,” the boy sneered.

Peter stalked toward him.

“Peter, no!” I called. “It’s Eric!
Eric
!” I ran up to him. “No matter how far inside he’s buried, your brother is somewhere in there.”

“How about a little less psychobabble and a little more shut up?” the Darkness said. “Cook the bird. Make yourself useful.”

He’s tired,
I thought. Magic exhausted him as much as physical effort. Once again, Eric’s body prevented the Darkness from doing its worst.

“Sweet, Katy. Dear, sweet, stupid Katy,” he said.

I sucked in air as the idea struck me full force. I felt as if I’d been slapped across the face.
Who wouldn’t love someone named Katy?
I remembered the voice, deep and strange and . . . silver . . .

A safe, harmless, powerless name.

“The true name,” I said.

“What? Katy, you’re bleeding.”

“Shhh. I need to remember something.”

“The magic lies in being able to walk through the Darkness without being changed by it.”

“How is that possible?”

“By knowing who you are.”

I took the boy’s hands. He didn’t have enough physical strength to break my grip.

Peter tried to stop me. “Katy . . .”

“I am Serenity Ainsworth,” I said.

Peace fell over me like a cloak. I had spoken the true name. Not Eric’s, but my own. By speaking it, I acknowledged my entire lineage, my place in the world, and my destiny. My name was not who I wished to be, but who I really was, whether I liked what that represented or not. And with it I was calling forth what Eric really was, beyond the Darkness, beyond even the brain-damaged child with his broken body. I was calling to Eric Shaw in his pure, undamaged state, the Eric whom I knew still existed. “Come to me, Eric,” I said, feeling the compelling power of my voice.

The boy grunted, struggling to snatch his hands away from mine.

“Walk through the Darkness, Eric. If you know who you are, it can’t harm you.”

“Let . . . let go!”

“You are not the Darkness. Speak your name, Eric.”

The Darkness screamed, terrified.

Peter came up to us and put his arm around his brother. The boy flailed violently against us, but his muscles, even artificially enabled by magic, were too frail to fight us for long.

“Speak your name.”

The creature opened its mouth and exhaled breath so foul that it made me gag. It spit in my face.

“Don’t let go, Peter,” I said.

The Darkness focused its eyes on me until I felt my skin burning.

“Eric,” I said, trying not to respond to the pain. “Say it!” I told Peter. “Say his name.”

“Eric . . .” Peter repeated weakly. “I can’t do this, Katy.”

“You
can
.”

“There’s blood running down your face.” He reached out a hand to touch me.

“Don’t let go,” I said. “Eric, come to us. We love you. Come toward the love.”

My head felt as if it had been split by a cleaver. I almost let go myself, but then I felt Peter’s hand over my own, and Eric’s little body trembling beneath my fingers. I tried to live within that sensation, making it grow around me like a bubble until there was nothing else in the world except for the love we felt for each other. Us three, and the music from the Meadow. I could hear it again, the same song, the perfect harmony of sounds made by the trees and the wind, of rushing water and the slow turning of the earth. This was the music that Dingo the dog had heard and had added his voice to. It was clear for me now, as pure and strong as the silver light from the moon above.

The rain had stopped.

“
Lady of Mercy
,” I sang. “
Save us from our madness . . .
”

“What are you doing now?” Peter asked, bewildered.

“
Let us see the truth . . .
”

Eric thrashed between us.

“Let us see the truth . . .”
I was forgetting.
“. . . the truth . . .
”

The little body I was holding shuddered, twisting in agony. Tears poured out of my eyes and mingled with the blood from the wound on my cheek, then dropped onto Eric’s convulsing chest, over his heart.

“
Let us . . .
”

“Eric,” the boy whispered, and a calm fell over us all.

“
Let us see the truth of our sublime divinity
,” I remembered. I remembered everything. “Peter, we need to get him back to the Meadow.”

He disengaged from me, his eyes hard. “I won’t let my brother burn!” he shouted.

“I know,” I said. “I know. Listen to me.” I put my hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “I think there’s another way.” I took a deep breath. This was hard. “I can take his place,” I said.

He blinked, confused. “What?”

“It’s what saved Henry Shaw. He never killed himself. The witches performed the ‘Song of Unmaking’, and . . . and his wife walked into the fire.”

“His
wife
?”

I nodded. “It was what she wanted.”

“How do you know?”

“On the way over here, I had a . . . well, I guess you’d call it a visitation. From Ola’ea. Or her ghost. She told me how Henry Shaw was freed from the Darkness. It was through the ‘Song
of Unmaking’, the real one, the one she taught me. That and Henry’s wife, Zenobia.”

“So you’re saying that someone can die instead of Eric, and the spell would still work?”

“Yes.
I
can.”

He sat back. “No, Katy,” he said. For the first time in months, I saw Peter’s face relax into an expression of perfect peace. “That will be my privilege.”

“No, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh, yes it does. You perform the spell. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Listen—”

“No, you listen.” He held me close. “This is what I’ve been looking for, praying for. This is how we save Eric. This is how we keep the Darkness’ prophecy from coming true. This is the answer, and you know it as well as I do.”

“Oh, God, Peter. This wasn’t what I wanted.”

“It was what
I
wanted. All along.” He kissed me, deeply, passionately. “Thank you.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Ap—ap—ap . . .” Eric’s eyes fluttered open again, revealing his open, innocent gaze.

“Buddy?” Peter whispered.

The little boy threw his arms around him. He looked at me. “Kaaay?” He cocked his head, puzzled at my misery. I dried my tears with my dirty forearm and tried to smile for him. He crooned sleepily and reached out to touch the cut on my face. It had stopped dripping blood, but it still throbbed painfully. I pulled away from him. “Kaaay,” he breathed softly.

I loved him.

“We need to leave now,” Peter said, picking Eric up in his arms. “Before the storm picks up again.”

“H—how?” I asked, hiccupping. “How’ll we get there?”

“Low tide. We’ll walk.”

“
Walk
? Across the bay? Is that possible?”

“I think so,” he said. “Actually, I’ve never done it. Maybe it’d be best if you stayed here, and—”

“I’m going with you,” I said.

“I could call the Coast Guard as soon as—”

“I said I’m going!”

“All right, all right,” Peter said placatingly.

I didn’t say anything else. If Peter was willing to die, I at least owed him the respect of my silence.

“Now, you stay with us, okay?” Peter charged Eric. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Eric nodded broadly. “Hom?”

“That’s right, little brother. We’re going home.”

Home, to the fire that would kill the person I loved most in the world. To save the person
he
loved most.

“Buh,” Eric said, waving his arms frantically. It took me a moment to realize he was looking at the dead eagle on the ground.