The Gypsy Morph (36 page)

“How long have you been doing this?” he asked her finally, breaking the silence.

“About six years. You?”

“Ten. I was eighteen when I started.”

“Sixteen,” she said. “I had just lost my best friend—my mentor and protector from when I was a little girl.”

“Lost mine just before I started, too. Michael. Same thing. He saved me in a compound raid, raised me, and trained me. He was the leader of a group of raiders that attacked enemy camps in the Midwest. A good man, like a father to me.”

They drove on a bit more. Logan risked a quick glance at Angel Perez, taking in her features, her dark olive skin, her black eyes and hair, her young features. Just a girl, really. He looked back at the road.

“You think we’re all that’s left?” she asked him.

He nodded, knowing right away what she was asking. “Yeah, I think maybe so. If there’s anybody else, I haven’t heard of them.”

“So this is it, huh? This . . . migration to wherever we’re going, following Hawk to wherever he’s taking us, this is what’s left?”

He nodded. “This is what’s left.”

“What if he’s wrong, Logan? Hawk, I mean.”

“He isn’t. He’s what he says he is. He’s a gypsy morph, a creature formed of the Word’s magic and sent to save what’s left of us.” He looked over at her. “I believe that.”

She studied him a moment, then nodded. “You don’t look like someone who could be made to believe something that wasn’t so. You don’t seem like you could be fooled easily.”

“Maybe. But in this case I’ve witnessed what he can do firsthand. He saved my life when I was dying just by touching me. The Ghosts say he saved their dog, too. Same way. But saving me? Well, I have to believe after that.”

“Yeah, I guess so. You have to believe in something, don’t you? Something more than what’s in front of your eyes.”

“Elves, for instance?”

She smiled, a good smile, warm and filled with mirth. “That was hard for me. Even after I found their city and was taken before their King and their High Council, I kept thinking,
How can this be? There are no such things as Elves.
But there they were, all around me.” She glanced at him. “They don’t much like us, Logan. They think we’re responsible for all the damage that’s been done, that we haven’t been good caretakers of the earth.”

He nodded, smiled back. “Can’t do much about that, can we? Not right now, anyway. Not until we set them free again. Then maybe we can learn something from them and do a better job next time around.”

Her smile faded as she looked back toward the road. “Next time,” she repeated softly. She shook her head. “I wouldn’t let them pen me up like that. I don’t care what the circumstances were. I wouldn’t allow it.” She sighed and looked over at him. “You saw it happen, didn’t you?”

“I saw. It was painless, I guess. One minute they were there, the next they weren’t. That boy—Kirisin—put them all inside the Loden Elfstone and took them away.” He shook his head. “He’s the one I feel for. He’s the one who’s responsible for them. He put them inside; he has to let them out. He has that power. But if we don’t find Praxia and get that Elfstone back . . .” He trailed off. “Well, I wouldn’t want to be him.”

“Doesn’t seem fair. Putting all this on his shoulders. He’s just a boy.” She compressed her lips in a tight line, frowning. “He didn’t ask for any of this, did he?”

“None of them did, come to that,” Logan responded. “But that’s what life does to you. It gives you a whole lot of stuff you don’t ask for and expects you to deal with it. No complaining, no excuses.”

They crossed a dry wash where the asphalt road had given way and lay scattered all about in broken chunks. The Ventra skirted most of it and crawled over the rest, big and tough and able. There wasn’t much short of a wall that could stop it. Logan loved how it handled. Maybe he liked it better than the Lightning, he thought.

“What happened to his sister?” Angel asked suddenly.

Logan felt his throat constrict.
Simralin.
An image of her face appeared in his mind, blond and smiling that crooked half smile. He shook his head. “I don’t know. She stayed behind with the King and the army that was holding off the demons and once-men. She said she was the only one who could lead them to us once they had done all they could.” He kept his eyes on the road. “We’re still waiting.”

“Kirisin is very close to her,” Angel said. “He must be wild with worry.”

Logan didn’t answer. He was thinking about his own feelings, about his own sense of loss. If Simralin didn’t make it, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He’d tried hard not to think of her, but she was always in the forefront of his thoughts. He saw her all the time, watched her smile, heard her voice, smelled her scent when she leaned close . . .

“Maybe we need to look for her, too,” Angel suggested.

He shook his head. “One thing at a time. The Loden is more important.”

“How are we supposed to find it, anyway?”

He wasn’t sure, of course. He could try using the vehicle’s tracking system, but he knew it was unreliable. No way to differentiate between the things it would pick up on the screen. He had been hoping that he would have help from Trim. Without trying to be apparent about it, he had been searching the skies for the owl, thinking that since Trim had come to him before when he needed to find Kirisin and the Elven talismans, maybe he would come again.

“We’ll find it,” he insisted without offering any more.

Eventually, they did. But not until they had driven for several hours and the sun had begun to dip into the western horizon toward the Cascades. Then, all at once, Trim appeared, winging his way out of the skies, swooping down in front of the AV, and soaring away again.

“Look at that owl!” Angel exclaimed. “It almost hit us!”

“Not likely,” Logan said, giving her a quick grin. “That’s our guide to the Loden. He’s called Trim. The Lady sent him to me when I came to find Kirisin. We just need to follow him.”

They did so, working their way down the road as the shadows lengthened and the light faded. Logan began to worry that they might be getting too close to advance elements of the demon-led army. But they weren’t yet back to where the skrails had attacked and seized Kirisin several days earlier, so he could assume that Praxia and the other two Elves had come farther than that, at least. His worst fear was that all three had been captured and taken back to the old man. If that had happened, he might never learn what had become of the Elfstone.

But within half an hour Trim took them off the road and down a dirt trail into a dry wash studded with scrub and cactus. They followed the wash for maybe five hundred yards, searching through layers of shadows and clumps of rocks and earth.

“Logan, over there!” Angel exclaimed suddenly.

He had already seen it. A pair of military jeeps sat abandoned in the center of the wash, a body hanging off the driver’s seat of one, a second body sprawled on the hood of the other, and blood splashed everywhere. More bodies lay scattered on the ground nearby. Logan made a quick count. Four, five, six that he could see. He climbed out of the Ventra, Angel a step behind him. Both held their black staffs ready, eyes searching the wash and the high banks for any sign of life. But there was none, and the runes carved into the wood remained dark. The wash was a killing ground empty of life. Logan looked at the dead, the ground on which they lay, the jeeps and the tracks they had left, taking it all in, assessing it. Then he walked over to have a closer look at the bodies. He found the two male Elves lying together, riddled with bullets from automatic weapons. The men around them were wearing a patchwork collection of army surplus and makeshift insignia. Arrows and javelins had done for them.

He walked on, down the length of the wash and around a second bend, following a flurry of footprints. Someone running away, someone else chasing. He stopped. Ahead, draped in shadows, lay a second cluster of bodies. More would-be soldiers, their bodies heaped on top of one another. The fourth was Praxia.

He knew right away what had happened. A unit of rogue militia had found the Elves. Maybe just stumbled on them, maybe saw their tracks. They shot the male Elves in a firefight. Some of them died in the process. The three survivors went after Praxia. Caught up with her here. Big mistake. She killed them all, was killed herself. No one had survived. He knew this because a survivor would have taken one of the two jeeps, and all the tire tracks stopped where the two were parked.

He moved over to Praxia. She was propped against a large boulder, eyes closed. Patches of dried blood marked half a dozen wounds in her chest and stomach. She had been shot repeatedly. She looked frail and broken, all the toughness drained away. One hand clutched a Sig-Hauser twelve-shot automatic rapid fire, clip ejected on the ground next to her. It was a favorite weapon of militia commanders. How she had gotten hold of it or even known how to use it was a mystery.

He bent down and touched her cheek, and her eyes opened. He froze, staring at the blood-streaked face. “My hand,” she whispered.

He looked down. The hand that wasn’t holding the Sig-Hauser slowly opened. In the palm lay the pouch that contained the Loden Elfstone.

Her lips moved. “Tell Kirisin . . .”

Then she trailed off, and her eyes fixed. He felt her neck for a pulse, found none. He sat back on his heels, staring at her. What must it have taken for her to stay alive this long? The fight was clearly hours old.

He took the pouch from her hand, checked to make certain the Elfstone was still inside, and then slipped the pouch into his pocket.

Tell Kirisin . . .

He stood up wearily. “I’ll tell him,” he promised her.

Angel, standing next to him by now, didn’t say anything, keeping her thoughts to herself. Logan searched Praxia’s young face. Just a girl, he thought, but she had fought and died hard. He thought suddenly of Simralin. He tried to imagine how he would feel if something happened to her.

“We’d better bury them,” Angel said to him.

He nodded. “And then get back to the camp.”

Without waiting for her response, he started toward the Ventra to collect the shovels.

TWENTY-FOUR

A
NOTHER SWELTERING DAY,
air thick with heat and steamy dampness, sky brilliant blue beneath a sun that burned white hot and implacable.

Angel Perez plodded ahead, her boots kicking up puffs of dust as she walked flats that stretched away for miles in all directions. Grasses were few and burned crisp and sapped of color, and what trees survived were withered scarecrows, their leaves in tatters. The Cascades were behind them and fading fast into the distant haze. If there were mountains ahead, they were not yet visible to the naked eye. Bluffs crested the horizon north, long stretches so distant they lacked clear definition.

No water was visible anywhere, and in the heat of the midday it felt as if there never would be.

The caravan stretched away for the better part of a mile, a collection of trucks and AVs, wagons and haulers, and people afoot. Supplies and equipment were loaded on the wagons and haulers along with the smaller children and the injured and sick. The AVs carried others, a select few who needed special attention or to whom had been assigned special tasks that required extra mobility: scouts, medics, machinists, and the like. One of the AVs just behind her, Logan Tom’s Lightning S-150, carried Owl, River, Tessa, Candle, and a couple of smaller children from the camps. The older children and most of the caregivers walked, strung out through the line of vehicles in ragged clumps. Ahead, in the vanguard, Hawk led with Cheney, Panther, Bear, Sparrow, and several handfuls of armed men and women. Trailing everyone was a conglomeration of Lizards, Spiders, and other creatures, a couple of which she could not identify, even though she had thought she had seen everything there was to see by now.

It was the whole of the refugee camp save for those who had been left behind to defend the bridge. The caravan had been on the move since sunrise, traveling north and east away from the Columbia River and up into country that had once been farmland and was now dried-out hardpan. The caravan had started out as a cohesive whole, but over the course of the morning had begun to drift apart, to break into pieces that sprawled all over the flats and had taken on a segmented look.

Angel would have liked to keep everyone much closer together. Spread out as they were, they were impossible to protect. But she had realized early on that this was the best she could hope for. Any organization beyond what she was seeing was all but impossible. Too many children, too few adults, too little discipline. They were doing the best they could, and that would have to suffice. By nightfall, they would be back together, and by morning they would regroup to begin the march anew. In the meantime, she would just have to hope that an enemy force didn’t catch them out in the open.

She glanced over at Kirisin, walking next to her, and felt her throat constrict. His face was so sad it made her heart break. She wished there were something she could do for him, something she could say. But she knew there wasn’t. He would have to get through this on his own.

He caught her looking at him and gave her a quick smile. “I’m all right,” he assured her. “Really, I am.”

She nodded, said nothing. She glanced ahead to where Hawk was leading, moving at a steady pace, looking fit and ready. Cheney slouched at his side, shaggy and insolent, big head swaying as he walked, a mass of bristling hair and muscle. She didn’t like the dog. She didn’t trust him. But he seemed to belong with the Ghosts, as independent-minded and cocksure as they were. They seemed of a piece, and she was not the one who could pass judgment on that arrangement.

Kirisin, who up until now had barely spoken two words, suddenly said, “Do you think she might have gotten away if she hadn’t been protecting the Loden?”

She shook her head. “No, Kirisin. Even without the Elfstone she wouldn’t have escaped. Responsibility for the Elfstone wouldn’t have slowed her down or changed her approach. Praxia was tough and smart, and she did the best she could. It just wasn’t enough.”