Someplace to Be Flying (59 page)

Lifting his head, he looked for the source of the light.

It wasn’t hard to find. The tall towers of the Harbor Ritz were pulsing amber-gold. As he watched, the light swelled into the shape of an enormous hardwood tree-an oak, or an elm, with broad spreading branches and a seriously huge canopy. You could still see the hotel through the tree, but as the light continued to stretch upward, the thirty-story building began to look like a child’s toy in comparison.

“Jesus,” he said. “Would you look at that.”

But his companions’ attention was already fixed on the scene. Lily’s reaction seemed to be a lot like his own-relief that there was finally some real light to combat the oppressive dark, mixed with a good dose of awe as to the shape it was taking. Hank would have thought that the others, since they were supposed to be these magical beings themselves, would be taking this latest piece of strangeness pretty much in stride. Instead, they looked like they’d just found out that Elvis was not only alive, but a couple of hundred feet tall and wearing a halo.

They’d all stopped walking and were just staring up at that tree of light. Brandon blew out the oil lamp and set it down on the pavement at his feet. When he stood up again, he went right back to being as mesmerized as the rest of them.

“It’s so beautiful,” Lily murmured.

Hank nodded. He turned to Margaret, who was standing closest to him, Brandon’s shotgun held loosely in her hands.

She’s going to drop that, he thought and took the shotgun from her. She made no protest. Didn’t even seem to be aware that he’d taken it.

“What do you see?” he asked.

It had to be more than he could.

For a long moment she didn’t answer and he thought she hadn’t heard him.

“A forever tree,” she said just before he could repeat the question. “Made of the light of the long ago.”

“The long ago?”

She nodded, not taking her gaze from it. “That was the light that was waiting for us when Raven first called the world up out of the medicine lands.”

Hank glanced at Lily but all she could do was shake her head. It was making no more sense to her.

“And is it a good or bad thing?” he asked. “Us seeing it like this, I mean?”

“It’s not good or bad,” Margaret said. “It just is.”

The others nodded in agreement, but nobody added anything to explain the puzzle. The corbæ seemed to be good at that. Hank gave the source of the light another considering look.

Okay. It was a forever tree. Whatever that meant.

“What do we do now?” Lily asked.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” Hank replied, “but I’m going on.”

Lily nodded, but nobody else responded. Hank looked down at Bocephus, sitting on his haunches, also staring up at the source of the light.

It even had the dog spellbound, he thought, but then Bocephus shook his head and made a rumbling, querulous sound deep in his chest. Hank followed his gaze to see what had distracted him.

“Heads up,” Hank said.

Only Lily looked away from the big glowing tree to see what Hank and the dog had already noted. They were no longer alone.

In some ways, nothing had changed. The buildings were all still dark. Cars, buses, cabs, delivery vans … nothing was moving. The drivers and passengers remained immobile in their vehicles. Pedestrians were still frozen in the positions they’d been in when the world went strange.

But now dozens of people had joined them on the street, all of them looking up at the glowing tree that lit the skyline and was banishing the dark that had swallowed the world earlier. Slowly they started walking toward the waterfront. Hank waited a beat, then took Lily’s hand and they started walking again as well. Bocephus immediately fell into step beside them. When they’d gone a half-dozen steps, Hank looked back to see that the corbæ and Ray were following.

With the stronger light to guide their way, they made much better time than they had coming from Stanton Street. It only took them a few minutes to reach the Harbor Ritz, where a large crowd had already gathered. Hank estimated there were at least two or three hundred, maybe more. They appeared to come from all walks of life. Men, women, and children. Black, white, Asian. Everybody with a drop of animal blood in them, he figured.

There was little conversation and no one paid much attention to them, even when they made their way through to the front of the crowd. Hank craned his neck. This close, the glowing tree was beyond impressive. He stared up until he got a crick in his neck, then made himself look at the building itself, enclosed by the glow. Katy was in there somewhere.

He gave the crowd a once-over. No one was making any effort to get any closer or trying to get in. He didn’t blame them. The whole situation was completely out of his experience as well. But he didn’t see that he had a choice.

“I’m going in,” he said.

“There’s no point,” Margaret told him.

He glanced at her in surprise. This was the first comment she’d offered freely since the tree appeared.

“Katy’s in there,” he said.

She nodded. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. It’s out of our hands.”

“But-“

“Trust me, Hank. All we can do is wait.”

Hank shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” Brandon said. “But we’ve been here before- when the world began. That light is the place the music comes from. You can’t mess with it. You can’t talk to it. So what’s going inside it going to do?”

“What do you mean it’s where the music comes from?” Hank asked.

“It’s where everything comes from,” Brandon said. “Music. Art.”

Chloë nodded. “Intellect. Dreams.”

“Hope,” Ray put in. “Compassion.”

“Heart,” Margaret added.

“So tell me this,” Hank asked. “What kind of heart would I have if I just left Katy in there on her own without trying to get her out?”

“The light won’t harm her,” Chloë said.

Hank turned to her. “You know that for a fact?”

Chloë hesitated for a long moment.

“No,” she said finally.

“So I’m going in.”

Hank walked toward the building, Bocephus padding along at his side. Lily waited a heartbeat before she started to follow. Margaret caught her by the arm, her strong grip holding Lily back. Hank paused, turned to look at them.

“You don’t have to do this,” Margaret said.

But Lily shook free. “Yes, I do. The only reason Hank got caught up in all of this is because he stopped to help me. I can’t let him go on now by himself.”

Hank was going to tell her that it was okay, she didn’t have to come, but Margaret spoke first.

“He’s going in because he’s worried about Katy,” she said, “and Katy has nothing to do with what’s going on.”

“But I do,” Lily told her. “Remember who handed the pot over to the cuckoos. If it weren’t for me, if I’d just held on to it better or hidden it or something, none of this would be happening.”

“You didn’t know.”

Lily glanced at the building. “What are you so afraid of?”

“It isn’t fear,” Margaret said.

“Then what is it?”

Hank nodded. He wouldn’t mind knowing that himself, since however this conversation turned out, he was still going in.

“Do you believe in God?” Margaret asked.

Lily looked confused. “I … I’m not sure. I guess so. Or at least I believe there’s something, some kind of spirit or force. But when I was a kid I believed in God.”

“So you can remember those feelings you had about God when you believed in him?”

“Sure.”

Margaret pointed to the light. “Going in there for us would be like the child you were meeting God.”

“Oh.”

Hank looked at the building, then back at Lily. When he held out his hand, she walked over to him and took it. With the dog at their side, they went up to the revolving doors of the hotel, pushed on them, then stepped through.

Into the light.

“Oh my goodness,” one of the Aunts said.

Rory looked up from the steps where he and Annie were sitting. He still didn’t know which was Eloisa and which was Mercedes. But one of them was pointing south, toward the lake.

He stood up to get a better look. “It’s some kind of light,” he said.

As he watched, the distant glow took the shape of an enormous tree that almost seemed to fill the entire skyline above the roofs of the neighboring buildings.

“Not just any light,” Annie said, coming to stand beside him. “That’s the light from the first day-what Raven brought across from the medicine lands to make the long ago.”

“It looks like a tree.”

“That’s the way it looked back then, too.”

Rory gave her a considering look, then walked slowly over to the idling cab. Reaching in, he turned off the engine and the headlights. The sudden silence was eerie. The dark came washing in on them, but it was only their eyes adjusting to the change of light. After a few moments he realized that he could see as well as he normally could in the twilight.

“We have to go,” one of the Aunts said.

The other nodded.

“But Rory won’t be able to keep up,” Annie said. “And,” she continued, “he can’t take the car because the streets are probably even more blocked up downtown than they are here.”

The Aunt who’d first spoken shrugged. “But that’s where the others are.”

“Let him take his pedal bicycle,” said the other one.

Annie nodded. “Good idea.”

Rory went up the steps to the back door and brought his mountain bike out of the shed where he stored it. When he had it down on the lawn, he looked at the three women.

The Aunts leapt into the air, arms outspread. Instead of coming back down on the ground, the way he would have if he’d tried to do that, they shrank, were transformed, kept rising, and two small crows-no, he corrected himself numbly, they’re rooks-were circling above his head, under the boughs of the elm.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, staring up at them.

He turned slowly to Annie.

“You didn’t really believe me, did you?” she said.

“Well … that is … I just thought it was … um, some kind of metaphor… .”

Annie laid the palm of her hand against his cheek. “Don’t freak out on me now.”

“I …” He cleared his throat. “I won’t.”

“Good.” She smiled and stepped back, making a motion toward his bike. “So let’s go.”

Rory slowly straddled his bike. He looked south, to that giant tree of light that rose up from somewhere near the waterfront, then back at Annie. But she wasn’t there anymore. A blue jay had joined the two rooks in the air above him. Seeing they had his attention, the rooks flew out of the yard, southward. The jay dropped down to land on the handlebars of his bike.

“Uh … Annie?” he managed.

The bird scolded him until he set the bike in motion and started down the lane. The rooks were no longer in sight.

I’m going insane, Rory decided.

He really didn’t see another logical explanation.

“What does he mean, about the world coming to an end?” Kerry asked.

Katy gave her sister a sympathetic look. Kerry looked scared and Katy couldn’t blame her. By all accounts, Raven wasn’t exactly the easiest of the corbæ to warm to and while he might look like a Buddha, he added a grimness to the image that the statues of the real Gautama Buddha never portrayed. When you put that up alongside his stern pronouncements, uttered in that deep bass rumble of his voice, it was hard not to be nervous around him. Though he didn’t seem to faze the crow girls at all. “Oh, don’t pay attention to Raven,” Maida said. Zia nodded. “He just loves to sound dramatic.” “The more dramatic the better.” “As if the world would end on his say-so.” Maida shook her head. “As if.”

Raven shot them a dark look, obviously intended to silence them, but all it did was make them giggle.

“It would not be my decision,” he said. He nodded toward the Grace. “But hers.”

That quieted the crow girls.

The reactions of the corbæ surprised Katy. They all seemed to be, if not nervous about the Grace the way Kerry was, nevertheless very much in awe. But what surprised her more was that none of them seemed to know why the Grace had gathered them to this place.

“That’s not why she’s here,” she told them. Dark corbæ gazes settled on her.

“The cuckoos broke her vessel,” Katy explained. “And because of that a door’s opened and it’s drawing her back.” She gave them an apologetic look. “One of us has to accompany her-to close that door after her-or the whole world’s going to get sucked out through it.” “How can you know that?” Raven asked.

The resonance of his voice made it feel as though her ribs were vibrating against each other. She felt Kerry’s fingers tighten on her own. Raven made her nervous, too, but she was too stubborn to let it show. Her way of dealing with it was to be more aggressive. “How can you not?” she shot back.

Raven frowned. “The light has no voice. She doesn’t speak.” “Not in words exactly,” Katy said, “but that doesn’t mean she isn’t communicating.”

It was hard to explain. When she quieted the inner chatter of her own thoughts and let the warm, amber-gold glow swell inside her, she simply knew what the Grace wished to express.

“I have never heard of such a thing,” Raven said. “So that makes it a lie?” Katy asked. “I did not-“

Katy made a movement with her free hand toward the figure of the woman in the light.

“Tell her about it,” she said. “Not me. I didn’t come here to argue with you.”

For a long moment no one spoke.

“The door,” Jack asked finally. “What does it open into?” “To …” Katy had to think a moment. “What you call the medicine lands.” “But without her … if she’s drawn out of the world …” Jack’s voice trailed off.

Raven turned to the crow girls. “Was I so wrong? Without her light, the world might as well cease to exist.”

He’s like me, Katy realized. He doesn’t fit in either. The difference was, he wanted to take everything with him when he went.

“That’s not how she puts it,” Katy said. “The world will be different, that’s all. Not over. We’ll just have to make our own grace.”

Raven gave a short, humorless laugh. “And what a world it would be if its grace were to be dependent on the good nature of its inhabitants. Every year the world becomes more dour, more hateful. Kindness has become a myth.” Katy regarded him thoughtfully, trying to understand why all the animal people held Raven in such esteem. He was certainly large enough, with a big voice, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of compassion in him. Maybe he’d been asleep for too long. Maybe he’d forgotten what it was like to live, to care about other people.