The Silent Strength of Stones (27 page)

Presently I calmed. How could I help Evan? Sneaking up on cabin five, I might be more of a liability than an asset. And he had told me not to, anyway.

Without his
fetchkva
, I didn’t have to obey Evan, though.

I contemplated Pop, I wished he could do something. He had been bossing me around for years. But he couldn’t even see these guys if they didn’t want him to, and if my voice, not even trained, worked on him, probably the Keyes could order him around with impunity.

I thought about Willow and Lauren. I figured if there was anything they could do on Evan’s behalf they would have already done it. Or maybe they were working on something now. I couldn’t think of any way to get in touch with them that didn’t involve sneaking up on Lacey five.

I thought about Megan. I imagined knocking on the door of Lacey cabin nine, waking her up, and asking her to come with me to Lacey five and help Evan. Suppose she said yes. What could she bring? She could do CPR, and she had a pretty elastic mind when confronted with the unbelievable. That was cool, but it was hardly offensive capability. Probably it had been smart of her to bow out of all this before it got any weirder than what she had already witnessed.

There had to be something I could do to help. I wished I could think of it. I wondered if a gun would do any good. Somehow I doubted it, even though I knew where Pop kept the shotgun and some shells. The Keyes would probably make me shoot myself.

Tired and discouraged and cold, I got to my feet and headed toward Lacey five. Whatever happened to me, at least I would know that I had tried to help. I could gather information, if nothing else. I had always thought information could save me.

Just ahead of the final crook in the path, I dropped to my hands and knees. The pine-needle-carpeted dirt was cool against my palms, but not cold. I crept a little way and collapsed, feeling strange, as if the ground was pulling me harder than it usually did. I pushed up again, wondering if this meant something, trying to work it out in my head, coming up empty. I kept crawling, wishing my second sight or whatever it was was something handier, like night vision. I put my hand on a twig and winced as it snapped.

Slowly and carefully, I made it around the side of cabin five to where I could see in through the French doors into the living room.

They were all gathered around the table the way they had been that afternoon when Evan introduced me to them. They all wore dark colors this time instead of their fake tourist clothes.

Evan sat hugging himself across from the fireplace and staring up at Uncle Bennet, who held something tight in his left hand and gestured with his right. Faintly through, the half-open French doors I could hear him: he would speak a phrase, gesture, touch Evan’s forehead. Each time he touched Evan’s forehead, my cut thumb throbbed in sympathy. Evan would blink each time, and each time he opened his eyes afterward, they looked a little duller, their golden dimming to brown.

At first, Willow cried “no” every time Uncle Bennet spoke. Then Elissa went and stood behind her and put hands on her shoulders and whispered into her ear, and Willow settled into unnatural stillness.

I thought about rushing the doors. I thought about how useless it had been Saturday afternoon by the pool when I tried to interrupt Bennet while he was locking Evan into human form.

Bennet kissed Evan’s forehead, patted him. Evan closed his eyes and did not open them.

Hot fury bloomed in my chest. I stood up ... and ran back into the forest. This was the worst thing I had ever seen: it was like watching a car wreck from a distance, seeing people destroyed before my eyes, and not being able to do anything about it. In my years as a watcher I had never seen anything else I so much wanted to step into and change, anything else I had felt so completely incapable of fixing. I might as well jump in the lake now and not come up.

They wanted rocks? I would get rocks. I would throw them. Maybe that would mess things up. I ran upslope off my path to a place where a tumble of jagged rocks lay, grabbed some, hugged them to my chest, and tried to run back down to the cabin.

But the plants wouldn’t let me through, and the rocks grew heavier and heavier while I held them. I kept pushing downslope and the plants kept walling up in front of me, until I ended up heading deeper into the woods, following whatever path the plants left open to me. At last I put the rocks down and just stumbled whatever direction was open.

Presently I realized I knew where I was going, and I walked faster. I came to the clearing and climbed little rocks up onto Father Boulder. Treetops oceaned in the night above me, and the stars looked small in the dark sky. I felt far away from everything that mattered to me, but I was too tired to fight the forest anymore. I wished I knew how to send my mind out and do something with it, the way the Keyes could do things long distance like unbind me from Evan and pull him back into their web. Willow had promised to teach me things, and Mom had offered to teach me things, but I hadn’t had time yet to learn. Now even the forest was fighting me.

Maybe if I got some rest and waited for daylight, I could figure something out I could hardly imagine falling asleep, though, I felt so angry and helpless. My mind raged ’round and ’round in circles, pushing at facts, not finding any give: the Keyes were stronger than I was and they could do what they pleased; I had no weapons and no armor.

I lay on the rough sandy skin of Father Boulder. At first I was really cold against this huge cool stone, but presently I started feeling warmer. Gradually my mind slowed and settled. The fire in my arm eased. I felt like I was sinking into a warm, gritty soup. I curled up and fell asleep.

In the dream it was night, and I was sitting neck deep in sulfur-smelling warm mud, talking to a looming dark shape that looked like a big unpopped bubble floating on the mud’s surface. “Do you know what you want?” asked the bubble. Its voice was almost too low to hear and had a sandy, gritty quality to it. I couldn’t figure out where the voice came from: nothing on the bubble’s surface changed. Then again, everything was dark and I couldn’t see well.

“What I want?” I said.

“Do you know what you want? That is always the question.”

I had the feeling I had been hearing this question for a long time—years, maybe. At least as long as I had lived at Sauterelle Lake. The answer changed. When I was younger the answer might have been something like a package of Twinkies, a ride on a horse, a new bike. I could remember hearing the question, casting out a net into the blackness in my mind, and finally fixing on something or other. Often enough when I narrowed down the focus and said what I wanted out loud, the bubble would give me a feeling like a smile and say it couldn’t give me that. For a couple years, what I had wanted was Mom. When I had said that, always hoping that the bubble had the power to give me what I wanted, it would answer me with sad silence, a communion of sorrow. The mud would hold me as though hugging me, and I found some comfort in that.

Did I know what I wanted? Even when I did know, the bubble hadn’t given it to me. Maybe it was waiting for me to want the right thing.

I had the feeling that lately I had been answering the question with, “I don’t know.”

“Do you know what you want?” asked the bubble.

I closed my eyes and thought. And then I knew. Peering at the bubble, I said, “I want to rescue Evan. I want to get his snow crystal away from those people so they’ll have to stop hurting him. I want him to be able to do what he wants. I want Willow to be able to do what she wants too, even if she wants to stay with them.” I thought about Willow and Evan’s dead little brother, and how the mystery of it had warped both of them so that they had to be sent away from home. I couldn’t want for that never to have happened, because if it hadn’t, I would never have met them. And anyway, I had the feeling that the bubble couldn’t do a really big want like that, either. It hadn’t been able to bring Mom back, and their little brother was a lot farther away than Mom had been. “That’s what I want,” I said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” said the bubble. It sounded deeply satisfied. The mud grew a fraction warmer.

“Can you help me? I don’t know who else to ask.”

“I can help you. You have to decide how much you want this, though.”

“How much?” I couldn’t think of a single other thing I wanted inside the moment of the dream. “I want it a lot.”

“If I help you, everything will change.”

“Will Evan still be Evan? Will he be able to go back to being a wolf? Will Willow be able to say what she wants, do what she wants?”

“Yes.”

“Will they be free from the Keyes?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I want.”

We sat silent together with the mud between us.

“To accomplish what you want,” said the dark bubble eventually, “you have to act, too. Watching is no longer enough.”

“That’s okay. I want to act. I can’t stand not being able to do anything about this.”

“Evan will not change, and Willow will not change, but you will change.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask anything else about this. I had been prepared to turn into a poodle or a chihuahua for no other reason than the amusement of someone else. This was much more important. “Will it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“What do I change into?”

“My son.”

I didn’t know how to deal with that, and I didn’t know what it meant. I had more than enough parents. But then, Father Boulder had always been ... a father to me, in the same way the lake was like a mother. How different could this be? “What do I have to do?”

“Put your head under the mud.”

“But—”

“Put your head under the mud.”

“But I won’t be able to breathe.”

“That’s the only way I can help you.”

I sat in the mud’s enveloping warmth and thought about that for a while. If I died by drowning in mud, I’d be letting down Pop and Granddad and Evan and Willow and even Mom. If I didn’t duck under the mud I could go home and open the store at nine, and life would go on, only with a wound where my relationships with Evan and Willow were, and acres of worry. Or I could go to Lacey five and plead with the Keyes, but I had a pretty clear idea that that wouldn’t do any good, only get me in deeper trouble.

If I did duck under the mud there was a chance that Father Boulder could help me. I couldn’t imagine how. But he had never lied to me about anything.

I thought about Evan being marched away under someone else’s power, locked up by people he didn’t trust so that they could teach him how to behave. I thought about Willow, having to watch this happen to him. I thought about Mom, who had escaped the cage of her first family, and then escaped the cage she had made of her second family, and who was finally learning not to build cages. I thought about Pop, wanting everything to stay the same, maybe finally figuring out that it wouldn’t, accepting Evan into our lives one way and then another, capable of more change than I had suspected.

I thought about me. Willow had come, and Evan had come, and everything had changed. I loved it. I wasn’t ready to let go of either of them, no matter what the Keyes wanted. I didn’t want things to go back to the way they were before.

I took a deep breath, gripped my nose between thumb and forefinger, and ducked my head under the warm, sticky mud. For a little while it felt great being surrounded by solid warmth; I’d never felt it on my face before, kissing against my lips and eyelids, crowding into my hair. I felt like I was floating inside a hug.

It crept into my ears. I shook my head, but that didn’t stop it. Finally I stilled myself. I hadn’t been able to hear anything, anyway ... until my ears were full of mud; then I could sense that things were going on around me, sending the vibrations of movement to where I could almost hear them. Nothing was happening close to me, though; I knew that through my skin and my ears.

Presently my breath got stale, and I breathed it out. It formed bubbles and rose away from me, I tried to follow it and swim up to the surface to get more air, but I didn’t know which direction to swim; I was weightless, no clues from gravity. I thrashed around, the mud embracing my every move, giving way and filling in, inescapably friendly.

Finally I had to open my mouth and nose, and the mud came in, heavy and slow. It tasted a little like chocolate and a little like sulfur. It came down my throat and into my nose instead of air. I swallowed it because I needed to swallow something. I tried to choke, but I couldn’t even cough, just felt my chest and throat spasming. I thrashed, trying to drive the mud back out. There was nothing to hold on to. There was no way I could fight. Everything in the world was mud.

I saw whole galaxies of purple and pale green stars on the insides of my eyelids. I felt like my head was about to explode.

Then it did explode. My whole body exploded. Pieces of me went everywhere, and the mud embraced them all.

Hurt like hell at first. Slowly, the pain faded. Ultimately, being dead was very restful.

I opened my eyes and looked up at blue sky with pine tops, and speckled gray sandstone around the edges of the view. I pulled long cool draughts of air into me, wondering how my head could still be on my body, and how I could still have lungs, or for that matter, eyes to see with, since I could remember what it felt like having them pop. With each deep breath I felt my way into my body, hands and feet, arms and legs, head, chest, back, butt, everything. I was alive.

I was alive, and the world smelled and tasted slightly different. Blue looked bluer. Green almost glowed. The gray and white stone of Father Boulder reminded me of something else.

Flesh.

I put my hand against the rock and felt humming life under the surface.

I closed my eyes for a little while, then opened them and studied myself. I was still wearing whatever I had thrown on last night—turned out to be jeans and a worn flannel shirt of Pop’s I had found for Evan in the trunk in the attic—and I was still curled up on top of Father Boulder, only there was something different about my position. Stone pressed against me from more directions than just down.