The King of Crows

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The King of Crows Page 5

by Libba Bray


  Evie couldn’t stop herself from thinking that if she hadn’t kissed him, if she’d worked harder to make Jericho fall in love with Mabel, maybe Mabel wouldn’t have fallen in with Arthur Brown and joined up with anarchists. Maybe she’d still be alive. More than anything, Evie wished she could undo this part of her past. She wished she could stop Mabel from making such a terrible mistake.

  And now here Evie was, desperate to find Sam but thinking of Jericho’s kiss at the same time. And after what Jericho had done to her at Hopeful Harbor! What was wrong with her?

  But how could she both love and hate her uncle Will? They’d fought so bitterly about her Diviner powers. She’d wanted to let the world know—why hide such a talent? Will had insisted it wasn’t safe. In the end, Evie had told all those reporters about her object reading. She’d told them because everyone had a right to the truth; she’d told them because she wanted to be famous. Again, both things were true. She loved Will. She hated Will. She was desperate for Sam and she fantasized about Jericho. She wanted Mabel to rest in peace; she’d do anything to talk with Mabel again.

  Evie crawled over the roof’s edge onto the fire escape, descending till she was level with the window to her former bedroom. She snugged up the sash and angled her body inside. After she and Will had fought and she’d moved into a hotel, Sam had taken over her old room, until he, too, fought with Will and moved in with Henry. The pillows still smelled like him, though. If she wanted to, she could probably get a reading from this pillow and know his secrets, even secrets about her. That wasn’t right, she knew. Still, her palms itched with the temptation.

  There was a sound at the front door. From Sam’s bed, Evie could see the knob rattling. Uncle Will, she thought. No. Not Will; of course not. He was dead. Then whom? Sam? Had he found his way back like the Houdini escape artist he was? The knob rattled again, that sound followed by the thud of someone heaving their strength against it. Fear pricked inside Evie. The Shadow Men. If they came for her, she’d scream loud enough to shake the building. She grabbed a lamp from the bedside table, grateful that her gloves muted the voices inside it for now, and tiptoed to wait beside the door. Another heave and it splintered open, and Evie brought the lamp down on the intruder’s back with all her strength. The intruder stumbled forward and fell to his knees with a groan Evie recognized.

  “Jericho?” she said.

  “Hi, Evie,” Jericho whispered and collapsed on Will’s Persian rug.

  Evie helped Jericho to the table, then ran to the tap and brought back a cool glass of water, which Jericho gulped greedily. His clothes were filthy and torn, his lips chapped, and he was slightly delirious, as if he’d been wandering for days in some desert.

  “Jericho, what’s happened? Where’ve you been?” Evie asked.

  “Woods,” he gasped between gulps of water.

  “What woods? Where?”

  “Do you… anything to eat? Please?”

  Evie rustled through Will’s cupboards, trying not to think about the fact that her uncle was dead; he would never open these cupboards again. She found bread and a tin of peanut butter and made Jericho a sandwich. She took the milk bottle from the icebox, gave it a sniff, and handed that over as well.

  “Sorry. This is all there is.”

  Jericho didn’t seem to care; he polished off both like a desperate man. Evie was worried about his weakened state. If Jericho had been in the woods for a long time, it meant he’d been without his lifesaving serum, and she didn’t want to think about what that could do to him. But she also remembered vividly the last time they’d been together, and she was wary. She hovered near the door and kept her hand ready to grab the lamp if need be.

  Jericho stretched out his arms. Evie startled and reached for the lamp. Jericho saw. He knew why. The misery of it was on his face. The Übermensch serum had turned up some dial inside Jericho, and he’d attacked Evie. If Marlowe’s butler hadn’t shot several tranquilizer darts into Jericho, he would have been successful. It wasn’t his fault. He was doped up, one side of Evie’s brain said. But what if it was his fault? said the other. What if that Mr. Hyde has lived inside Jericho always, and the serum just helped him along?

  “I promise I won’t…” Jericho didn’t finish. He kept his eyes trained on his hands, which were now wrapped around the empty glass.

  Evie blushed but did not leave her place by the door. “I… I know you didn’t mean to…”

  “If I could take it back, I would.”

  “I know that,” Evie said softly.

  “I just keep… reliving that day over and over. I don’t remember much of what happened after Marlowe gave me all that serum and I ran into the rose garden and saw you and I…” Jericho gazed intently at the glass. “I’m sorry.”

  Evie’s chest tightened. She wanted to make him feel better. She wanted to keep her distance. “Never mind about that now. Won’t you tell me about the woods? Can you tell me now what’s happened to you?”

  “I… escaped. From Hopeful Harbor.”

  “Why would you need to escape from Hopeful Harbor? Jericho…”

  “I saw it, Evie. I saw the Eye.”

  The Eye! They’d been searching for clues to its whereabouts for weeks. The King of Crows had told them to hunt down the ghosts and ask them questions if they wanted to know more about the Eye. But it felt as if all they had gotten from the dead were riddles upon riddles.

  Evie left her spot by the door and took a seat across the table from Jericho. “You found the Eye? Where is it?”

  He nodded, and even this seemed to be an effort for him. “It’s not a place. It’s a machine. Marlowe’s golden machine of the future.” Jericho let out a bitter laugh, but then his eyes welled with tears. He wiped at them with his forearm. When he was ready, he continued. “Evie, he’s feeding Diviners to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This machine. The Eye. It’s… I don’t know. Almost like some sort of… telephone line to another dimension beyond this one. And the King of Crows is on the other end of that line!”

  Evie’s eyes widened. “The King of Crows is talking to Marlowe?”

  Jericho nodded. “Yes. Through the machine.”

  “What’s he telling him?”

  “That I don’t know. But it must have to do with the Eye because that machine is what’s keeping the portal between the two worlds open. It’s the reason the breach won’t close.”

  “Follow the Eye, heal the breach.…” Evie muttered. “That’s what Memphis’s mother told him to do.”

  “Marlowe has to charge the machine, though. All that uranium?”

  “Ling wondered why Marlowe needed so much uranium, why he was pushing his workers at the mines to produce so much more,” Evie said, nodding.

  Mabel had been protesting the conditions at Marlowe’s uranium mines and defending his striking workers. She’d said that Jake Marlowe wasn’t a man to be trusted. Evie wished Mabel could know that she had been right to fight against him. “So it’s uranium that makes the Eye work?”

  “No. Not entirely.”

  “What, then?”

  Jericho seemed haunted, lost. “Evie… what charges the machine, what makes it possible for him to see into that other world, is Diviner energy. Sam’s mother, Miriam, was there. I saw her! Marlowe is keeping her at Hopeful Harbor.”

  “Sam…” Evie whispered. She was worried anew for him.

  “Marlowe was talking to her while she was joined to the Eye. He said, ‘You’re the only one we’ve found who can balance the energy from the Diviners and the other side and keep the breach open.’ Remember I told you I saw Anna Provenza there?”

  “Yes! You said that the Shadow Men were dragging her off somewhere. They said she was a mental patient Jake Marlowe was trying to help.”

  “All lies. They fastened her to the Eye, and she was seeing into that other world and she was screaming, Evie, she was screaming and screaming.…”

  Evie wanted to reach out and put her hand on Jericho�
�s arm, but she was afraid the gesture would be misconstrued. In another moment, he calmed. “Miriam knew I was hiding there. She could sense me in the room and she wanted me to know”—Jericho’s voice got very quiet—“the truth.”

  Evie didn’t know why her heart was suddenly beating so very fast, or why she had the urge to tell Jericho she didn’t want to hear another word. “And what’s the truth?”

  “She said that what truly powered the heart of the machine, the source of its ferocious energy, were the souls of the soldiers of the One-Forty-Four. They’re trapped inside it somehow, caught in some sort of terrible time loop. That one horrible day during the war, when they tore a hole between the two worlds, played over and over again. The Eternal Recurrence.”

  “James…” Evie said, tears springing to her eyes. That machine was powered by pain—the pain of her brother and of every soldier who’d been in his unit. “What has the King of Crows been telling Jake Marlowe? What has he made him believe?” Evie said, more to herself than to Jericho. “We have to get him to stop this. We have to get him to understand what he’s doing.”

  “If we go up to Hopeful Harbor, he won’t even let us in the door. And I-I don’t want—I can’t go back there.”

  “He’ll be here for Sarah Snow’s memorial tomorrow night. We’ll go to him. We’ll explain—”

  “He knows! He doesn’t care. He only cares about power. He only cares about winning, no matter the cost.”

  Jericho was right, Evie knew. She hated Jake Marlowe for what he’d done, for the lives he was still ruining. But she had to get him to try to understand. If Jake Marlowe liked to count himself a winner, she’d have to appeal to the side of him that hated to lose.

  “All right,” Evie said. “Then let’s fight fire with fire. We’ll tell Marlowe that we know something important about the King of Crows. Something that will help Marlowe defeat him.”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s the bait.”

  Jericho scoffed. “He’ll never go for it.”

  “He will if we tell him that Isaiah had a vision so vital that we’re duty bound to bring it to him.”

  Jericho pondered this for a moment. “He’ll be staying at the Plaza Hotel. He takes a suite there.”

  “Perfect!” Evie headed for the telephone. “I’ll call him—”

  “Wait!” Jericho rose, and Evie backed away. Shame burned through Jericho. He would do anything to erase what had been done that day in the woods. He hoped he could earn back Evie’s trust in time.

  “I’ll telephone him. No doubt he’ll want to reclaim his prize,” Jericho said bitterly.

  “Well, he can’t have you. You’re with us now,” Evie said.

  Jericho was buoyed by a sudden ballooning of new hope. His eyes filled. He wiped them against his dirty shirtsleeve. “I’ll go make that call,” Jericho said and went into Will’s study.

  From where she was at the kitchen table, Evie could only hear bits and pieces. Jericho fed Marlowe the story along with one he concocted about the serum causing him to run away. After that, his answers were mostly along the lines of, “Yes, fine,” “That will be fine,” and “Thank you.”

  “Well?” Evie asked once he’d returned to the kitchen.

  “He’s agreed to talk with us.”

  “Well, that’s a start at least. When are we meeting?”

  “Tomorrow night. After Sarah Snow’s memorial.”

  “At the Plaza?” Evie said hopefully.

  Jericho shook his head. “He’s flying to California right after the memorial. He said we’re to come to the service and we’ll talk there.”

  Evie groaned. “I can’t believe I have to go to Sarah’s memorial. Everyone thinks she was a saint, but she was a phony.”

  “So are lots of folks. Doesn’t mean they deserve to be blown up.”

  “No. No, of course not,” Evie said. Mabel, Mabel. What had she been thinking in those final moments under the stage with the bomb? Had she known she was going to die? Was she frightened? In life, they’d shared so much. But Mabel’s death was a gnawing mystery.

  Jericho was pacing the room, just like Will used to do, and that brought a lump to Evie’s throat as well. He didn’t seem delirious anymore. In fact, he was as clear-eyed and clearheaded as if he’d just woken from a good sleep.

  “Jericho? How do you feel?”

  Jericho stopped in his tracks. “Fine,” he said, the realization dawning. “I feel… perfectly fine.”

  “And how long have you been without the serum now?”

  He tipped his head back, thinking. “Four, five days at least?” He made a fist, relaxed his hand.

  “And you were in the woods all that time, making your way back to the city. On foot. Without stopping to rest?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Jericho made a fist and flexed his fingers twice more. He really was fine. Better than fine. He felt goddamned immortal, and that confused Jericho: Jake Marlowe was repugnant in so many ways. But that same Jake Marlowe had not only cured Jericho, he’d made him superhuman. He had turned Jericho into his shining example of a superior American, the Übermensch, the Superman.

  But did Jericho want to be that Übermensch?

  Jericho craned his neck, looking around the empty flat as if truly seeing it for the first time. “Say, where’s Will?”

  Theta knocked at Adelaide and Lillian Proctor’s door. She’d never really had a family of her own, and she’d come to see the elderly sisters as adopted grandmothers. She’d grown especially close to Miss Addie, who had the sight. The Proctor sisters were descended from a long line of witches, and they had been encouraging Theta to become more comfortable working with her own power, though Theta felt no such comfort. Who could, knowing they might start a fire without meaning to? Most of the Diviners had useful powers; Theta saw hers as destructive. Hadn’t it only brought pain so far?

  She rubbed the silver locket at her neck, a gift from Miss Addie. Bloodstone, for courage. When no answer came at Theta’s first knock, she rapped at the door again, and after a moment, a pale and drawn Miss Lillian opened it a sliver. Her face was somber.

  “Oh, my dear. Come in. Quickly, quickly!”

  Miss Lillian didn’t stop to explain, so Theta followed her down the dim hallway, carefully avoiding the menagerie of feral cats at her feet. She wanted to take inventory of them to make sure that none of them had been sacrificed to divination, as she’d made the sisters promise, but there wasn’t time for that. Whatever business Miss Lillian was about, it was urgent. At last they came to Miss Addie’s bedroom. The curtains had been shut against the day. Miss Addie lay in her bed with her long gray-white hair billowing cloudlike around her face. Her eyes were open and staring straight ahead. She did not speak, and she seemed unaware of either Theta or Miss Lillian.

  “I came in this morning and she was like this,” Miss Lillian said, her voice breaking.

  “Did you call a doctor?” Theta asked, alarmed. She lifted Miss Addie’s bony wrist to check her pulse, which was steady.

  “Of course I did! I’m not simple!” Miss Lillian snapped. “He said there’s nothing physically wrong with her. She just won’t wake up.”

  Miss Addie looked peaceful enough, except for her lips, which quivered as if she needed to say something. “Is it her heart?”

  “It’s a curse!” Miss Lillian shuffled over to Miss Addie’s carved vanity. She opened the doors and removed a small jewelry box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Miss Lillian opened it. There was nothing inside. “This is where Addie kept it all, but it’s gone. It was the first thing I checked.”

  “Kept what? What’s gone?”

  “His finger. His hair. The binding,” Miss Lillian whispered urgently.

  Theta wanted to scream. Miss Addie was slowly dying, and her sister was talking in riddles.

  “Sorry, Miss Lillian, but I’m not on the trolley,” Theta said.

  “Elijah.”

  Elijah had been Miss Addie’s great love, Theta knew—killed during the Civil War
, before they’d had the chance to marry. Even at sixteen, Addie had a strong connection to the world of spirits. She knew there was a trickster spirit who could give her what she wanted, and lost in grief for her dead lover, she went into the woods to bargain with the man in the stovepipe hat. He’d promised that she could have Elijah back if she pledged her loyalty to him. Foolishly, Addie agreed. One moonlit night, Elijah returned, just as the man in the hat had promised, but he was not the Elijah she remembered—young, beautiful, fair-haired, and smiling. He was the Elijah of the dead, with the rot of the grave upon him, and now they were bound for eternity by Addie’s promise and the man in the hat’s terrible trickery.

  “He makes cruel bargains, you know,” Miss Lillian said. “Addie was horrified by what she had done. Elijah would never stop coming for her now, she knew, unless she found a way to stop him. At midnight, she dug into his grave, snipped the fourth finger of his left hand, and cut a lock of hair. Then she performed the binding spell, placing it all inside this box for safekeeping. But the man in the hat tricked her again. He got to her in her sleep, she told me. He whispered in her ear to empty the box, to ruin the binding spell. She was left with no protection from Elijah.”

  “I saw him,” Theta said. “That time in the basement.” She shuddered at the memory of the rotting ghoul coming after them. There was no stopping him. Just like Roy.

  Miss Lillian stroked her sister’s hair. “He wants to punish her. To rob her of strength.”

  “Why?”

  “She defied him! He doesn’t like that. But I suspect that he wants to keep her from you. So that she can’t protect you. Can’t teach you. She’s trapped like this. There’s no telling what he’s doing to her.” Miss Lillian’s eyes moistened again. “I’ll do what I can to keep her alive. I have my ways. But I can’t hold it off forever. And once she’s gone, there’s no hope. He will have her for eternity.”

 

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