by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 36, Thursday 29 September
The light popped on and off like a photographer’s flash, but when my eyes cleared, I stood outside Olivia’s house. Well, I found myself about a foot in the air, right above her lawn. I hit the ground, the jolt traveling up through my knees. Ok, so I hadn’t arrived quite as gracefully as I would have liked. But give a guy a break—I hadn’t traveled for a few months.
All the lights were off in her house. In fact, all the lights in all the houses along this street were off. The street lamps let out their hazy, gray-orange light that vibrated just a little too fast for my eyes to follow, illuminating circles of pavement and asphalt, but the rest of the street hid in darkness. Above, the moon and the stars leaned in, as if eager to watch. I hurried up the stairs to the porch, rattled the handle, trying to get inside. The door was locked of course, but that didn’t keep me from leaning in on it, glancing through the window. Only my misted breath on the glass and darkness. Where were they?
I moved around the house, following the porch, testing windows. All closed and locked, keeping the Midwestern humidity out and the air conditioning in. No sign of forced entry. A sudden wave of panic reached me, and I glanced over my shoulder. What if Mr. Green was in his yard and had seen me? But he wasn’t there; the lights in his house were off, his backyard empty, the hawthorn trees standing like dark, forgotten sentinels. I moved on with my search.
The backdoor was shut and locked too. I could find no evidence that something had happened here, but the voice of the nurse at the hospital, the fact that Mike wasn’t answering his phone, these things told me something had gone wrong. What else could it be but the grower? Had our attack on his tree been thwarted somehow? Was he already making his counterattack? Or had he failed to show up when we attacked the tree because he was already doing something else—like taking Olivia and her family? Why them, though? And why Mike? Not for the first time, I wished my grandfather had taken the time to explain more about growers. What did he or she want?
I fed a little energy through the copper quickener and found myself inside the Weir’s front room. I flipped on the light, but nothing happened. The power was out. Or had been cut. Another bad sign. I threaded energy through the ground. That was the most basic tool of any quickener. A weapon or a tool, but unrefined, unfocused. Unless you were Mike and decided to use it for everything. In this case, however, it was perfect for what I needed. As soon as I put some energy back into it, the ground started to glow, until it was as bright as a sixty-watt bulb. The light shifted and slid when I moved my hand, but it let me see the front room. I moved with it like a flashlight, circling the room, then moving through the adjoined kitchen, down the hall to Olivia’s parents’ bedroom. Nothing. All empty. All without any sign of an assault.
Walking up the steps, deep breaths rattling through me, I made my way to Olivia’s room. The door was closed; she should have been in the hospital. I turned the handle, and the door popped open. Before I entered the room, I knew she wasn’t there. I dropped my hand, but the door continued to swing open, until I could look into her room from where I stood in the hallway. Nothing. Bed made, desk organized. The paintings and photos hung around the room looked the same as ever, although I noticed a new photo, one that I hadn’t seen before. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. Me talking to Mike, in the hall at school. His head was pressed against the locker, his face away from the camera, and you could only see the profile of my face, but I recognized him. I knew those lines in his shoulders, and more importantly, I knew that moment. But when had Olivia taken it?
A moment of panic. Did she know? Is that why she took the picture? Evidence of betrayal?
The idea was ridiculous, I realized. What betrayal could it be? Mike didn’t even want to be my friend, if his birthday party was any indication. There was no way Olivia could know about the delicate balancing that took place inside me. But there was something about the photo that made me question myself. The composition of the picture, the overlap of our bodies, the angles and lines of limbs and light and hair. A normal person would have seen two people standing in a hallway; there was nothing in the picture to hint at our conversation. But Olivia, with her uncanny ability to see deeper than other people, had caught something more than that, had let shadows and color and a single frame of time express a fragment of a relationship.
That realization turned my thoughts back to her, to how lucky I was to know her, to have her in my life, to know what it felt like to touch her, be close to her. The feel of her hair falling between our cheeks, of her bangs brushing my forehead. The times we had to talk. All those things were at risk of disappearing, of vanishing forever, if I didn’t act fast. The grower had to have taken her; nothing else made sense. He must have gone to the hospital while we were busy in the cemetery. I had been a fool, thinking she would be safe, that the grower would not act directly against her. I had thought he would wait, let his magic drain the life from the people who went to the cemetery.
Now, it seemed, he was going back to the old ways—blood sacrifice. That must be why he had taken Olivia and her family. Perhaps he even hoped to repair his tree. In the distance, sirens told me that the firemen were responding to the blaze that Mike and I had set. I hoped Mike’s invented quickening would be enough to make sure the tree burned down; if they stopped the fire, the grower might be able to save the tree.
And I needed to move more quickly. The firemen would be at or near the tree; if the grower were going there, he would be seen. Most likely. That meant he might be somewhere else, hiding. I let the light die in my ground, topped off my energy from an outlet in Olivia’s room—the power still worked here—and slid a thread of power into the copper traveler. In a blur of black and white spots, I found myself standing inside Mr. Wood’s sister’s kitchen.
The lights were off here, but the ambient light from the streetlamp outside slid under a thin, ruffled curtain that hung in front of a window. The light shone off the glass and polished wood of the cabinets—new cabinets, I could tell, which were distinctly out of place in the very retro kitchen. Strips of peeled wallpaper and a neat stack of paint chips on the kitchen table told the rest of the story. Mr. Wood’s sister—Melanie, one of my suspects for the grower in town—was redecorating her kitchen. It reminded me of the way my Mom would do a project, a trait Isaac had picked up from her—all very neat, all thought out, even if the plan were executed in stages. Not at all like my current frenzy of activity, practically directionless, just flailing and hoping to succeed. I threaded light through the ground, found the door to the basement, and started searching.
If Melanie was the grower, she was a very boring one. The basement held old Christmas ornaments, a patched and faded mascot suit for West Marshall—apparently in the past, West Marshall High School had been the ‘Ears of Corn.’ I was glad that phase had ended. I reached out, felt the electricity running above me, through the walls above. Nothing out of the place. Nothing to indicate a hidden room. Back up the stairs.
The main floor was empty, so when I reached the second floor—with just three doors leading off a cramped landing—I slid some energy into my copper blink. A blink is one of the most useful foci around, and one of the oldest as well. It hides you. With copper, you can fine tune that effect—blocking your visibility, or your tracks, or your scent. Gold just obliterates your presence, and that of anyone near you. That’s why it was most often used with copper—gave you more versatility, and few quickeners had to worry about hiding anyone besides themselves. I just blinked myself visibly at first, but on second thought, I added sound. This wouldn’t muffle creaking doors or steps, unfortunately, but it would mask the fall of my feet, and my breathing. And give me the advantage of surprise, I hoped.
The first door opened onto a child’s bedroom. A pair of bunkbeds against a wall painted pink. Empty, the bedcovers rumpled, almost torn from the beds. That didn’t make any sense. The next door was the bathroom. I flicked on the light here. Everything was in its place. Exc
ept—I bent down. Two viscous drops of blood, almost dried, on the yellow-check linoleum. What had happened here? Had Melanie decided to use her own family to power her magic? Was she that desperate?
I hesitated at the last door. Even with the ambient light, the landing was dark, situated above the ground floor windows. The blood, the rumpled beds. Signs of a struggle. But a very brief, almost one-sided struggle. One the other side of that door might be the monster I had been waiting to face. Something so terrible that it had made even my grandfather—mean, vicious, blood-thirsty Grandfather—so scared that he would not talk about it. And I was going to walk right in.
Dark. So dark. The first time I killed a person, it had been dark like this. Grandfather had sent me; in all honesty, he had done most of the work, although I hadn’t realized it at the time. He had tracked the woman down. A quickener who was raising sinks and trying to control them. Her experiments were getting loose all over the city, some relatively minor place in Kansas, I think. But the sinks were killing, the way they always did, and so Grandfather had decided we needed to step in.
He had sent me in alone. Into the darkness of a two-story, middle-class home. Just like this. Where the darkness blanketed me. I was too afraid to use my ground for light, sure that it would give me away. So I had stumbled through the first floor, found the basement, and I had stopped. Just like this. Unable to move. Isaac was waiting outside to help me, if I needed it, but I didn’t know this. He told me later that I took so long, he almost came in to check.
Nothing would have happened, I would have stayed there, staring at the thin, warped paneling of that basement door, until time wore the house down around me. Except the door opened, and a frumpy old woman, wearing a sweater with two large cats knitted on the shoulders, opened the door a moment later. Her mouth moved twice, in surprise. She was missing a tooth, a canine. I remember thinking that she looked kind of nice, the way an out-on-her-luck grandmother might look.
And then, Grandfather’s training kicked in. I loosed a blast of raw quickening. She didn’t even raise a shield. It ripped her almost in half, sent her tumbling down the stairs. I still remember the silence after she hit the bottom. The lazy curl of smoke from where her flesh had burned. I cried every night for months.
I was never the same.
Those memories came flooding back in, and while they still carried regret, right now, they were just a reminder of the terror that had made me freeze up once before. I was doing it again—standing there, staring at the door, waiting for it to open. Only this time, I wouldn’t find a harmless old woman waiting on the other side. A monster, a killer that made me look innocent by comparison, would come for me, and it would destroy me unless I were faster, stronger, and deadlier.
I let out a breath. Somehow, that was a tipping point. After that, I could move forward. I gathered the energy—my body had almost finished catalyzing what I had taken from Olivia’s house—and threw open the door.
A blast of light—just light, but extremely bright—and a flow of energy through the silver pusher. Stun it with the light and then catch it with the pusher. That was the plan. The brilliant flash of light didn’t reveal a monster, though. Just a bed, the sheets folded back in haste, a nightshirt hanging from a standing mirror, and a man on his side, his back to me. The pusher caught the mirror, instead of the grower I was expecting, and slammed it into the wall. Tinkling glass fell silent as it hit the thick carpet.
I flipped on the bedroom light and let the ground fade back to normal. The man. Blood stained the light blue polo. I hurried over, turned him on his side. Lacerations to the chest, as though made by a large claw, and a blow to the head that had split the skin. It looked like most of the blood was from the head wound, but it was hard to tell. What stood out to me more, though, was that this was Mr. Wood. Unconscious, bloody, but still alive. And in his sister’s bedroom.
“Mr. Wood,” I said. “Mr. Wood, can you hear me?” I felt his pulse, tilted his head.
He let out a low groan. I didn’t have the gold healing focus, but even if I had, I wasn’t stupid enough to try Mike’s inverted flows of energy. I didn’t want to spontaneously combust, thank you very much. So I just patted Mr. Wood on the cheeks, hoping to bring him back to consciousness.
“Mr. Wood, you’ve got to wake up. Mr. Wood!”
His eyes fluttered open, the way you’d see in a movie. “Oh, Alex.” He paused, his pupils dilating, his eyes moving past me. “He took them, Alex. They’re gone.”
“Who?” I said. “Who took them?”
“They’re gone.”
That’s all he would say. I dialed 911, said there had been a break-in at Melanie’s house, and then hung up the phone. There would be hell to pay trying to explain why I had been in her house in the first place, but I’d rather have Mr. Wood alive than dead, even if he was a jerk.
I started to send energy to the copper traveler, but I stopped. Mr. Wood wasn’t the grower. And apparently, neither was Melanie. What the hell did that mean? Where did I go? The cemetery? The tree had been burned down, and I’d seen no other sign of the grower there. If he had a hidden lair, how was I supposed to find it? How was I supposed to help Olivia if I couldn’t even find her.
I walked over to the bedroom window, let my forehead rest against the glass, feeling the distant summer humidity on the other side. Mr. Green’s house sat there, hawthorns waving in the darkness, and beyond it, Olivia’s house. Everything had seemed so clear. Olivia’s father had started getting sick when he started working at the cemetery. Olivia had gotten sick after spending all that time at the cemetery painting. That was the link between them.
Melanie. If she wasn’t the grower, then there was something else that explained her sickness, and perhaps her sudden recovery. I had assumed that I had been responsible, that when I had poisoned the tree, that I had been the one to send her into that coma. But if she wasn’t the grower, then nothing I did to the tree would have affected her. So what? The cemetery again. Everything led back there. It was logic, but logic that led me to a dead end. I had burned down the tree in the cemetery; they should have all recovered. The grower should have been destroyed. I should have been with Olivia right then, happy that she was recovering.
And that was the stumbling block in my logic. One plus one did not equal two. Somehow, the grower hadn’t been destroyed. Instead, he had attacked Mr. Wood’s family. He had abducted Olivia and her family. He had incapacitated, maybe killed, Mike. I hadn’t weakened the grower at all. If anything, it seemed that he held all the cards right now. But how?
Sirens told me I didn’t have much time. Mr. Wood still lay on the floor, mumbling, “They’re gone,” to himself over and over again. Something linked Mr. Wood’s family and Olivia’s. The cemetery, of course, but that didn’t explain why Olivia’s mom had been taken, or Melanie’s children. Something else that they all shared. A location, a place where they would be in the presence of the grower’s magic, where he could drain the life from them.
My eyes settled on the hawthorns, berries dark as blood. Mr. Green.
Everything clicked in a moment.
Mr. Green was the grower.