"With the help of others," he agreed. "But I have carried the burden of the pot since the first day."
"And done such a good job of it, too."
He frowned, dark eyes flashing, and gestured toward the light.
"You see for yourself," he said. "She has always had a mind of her own."
Katy sighed. "That's not what this is about. It's not about trying to control what can't and shouldn't be controlled in the first place. The pot only holds her—keeps her in this world. All you were supposed to do was guard it."
"You came here to destroy it."
"Or send it back," Katy said. "But that was before she let me know that the pot's only a vessel to hold her to this world. Now I do know."
"And yet I was supposed to have intuited-"
Katy cut him off. "Yeah, you should have known. You've had the pot long enough. But you've never even tried to communicate with her."
"It is not such a simple—"
"Don't you see? You've tried to hang on to that pot for all these years, tried to keep it under your tight control, and then, when you finally realized you couldn't, you just gave up on it."
"No one else would accept the burden."
"That's not true," Katy said. "You chose to be responsible for it. Maybe if you hadn't laid such a strong claim to it, other people would have taken responsibility for it and come to understand what it really means to be its guardian. It's always been the mythic 'Raven's pot' instead of what it really is: the vessel of the Grace. Instead of thinking of it as an object of power, you should have been celebrating it, cherishing it. Thinking of it as an object of wonder instead of some scary thing that had to be hidden away."
Raven hesitated for a long moment, then slowly nodded. "I see your point."
"Except now it's too late."
They shared the sorrow of it, argument forgotten.
Kerry suddenly tugged on Katy's sleeve. "Something's happening to her …"
Katy turned and the warmth of the Grace washed over her anew.
"There's nothing … ," she began, but then her voice trailed off.
"What is it?" Raven asked.
They peered at the light, corbae and twins, and this time they could all read the wordless voice in the light. They all felt the pull of the medicine lands, the world being drawn back through the door the cuckoos had stirred open.
And there was something more.
"She doesn't have to go," Maida said softly.
Zia nodded. "Not anymore."
"But the door still needs closing."
Katy moved forward, but Jack was quicker. He stepped into the light and it enveloped him. Spreading his arms, he became …
A dark angel, winged.
A jackdaw, blue-black feathers gleaming in the light.
A shadow in the heart of the Grace that shrank to the size of a pinprick.
The amber light blinked. For one moment an awful dark swallowed them. Then the light was back. But diminishing. Leaking away. Returning to the state it had been in before the cuckoos had called her up with their hate.
They could see in her dwindling light that the door was closed, the world was safe.
But Jack was gone. Forever gone.
Turning to her sister, Katy burrowed her face in Kerry's shoulder and wept.
18.
As Hank brought his piece of the chalice toward the two Lily was holding together, he felt a sudden pull and the piece in his hands jumped toward the others, fusing with them. He had long enough to see that the chalice was whole once more, with not even a seam showing. Long enough to lift his head and exchange a surprised look with Lily, then a flare of brilliant white light blazed up from the chalice, blinding him.
"Oh, shit," he heard himself say.
His voice seemed to come from far away, as though he were talking from across the room, or from another room, or from somewhere else entirely where he didn't even exist anymore.
A deep vertigo grabbed him and held him hard. He could no longer sense the floor under his feet, the walls around him. Outside of his body the only things he could sense were the smooth warm crystal of the chalice and the blinding white light that came out of it. All other physical sensation was gone.
He tried to pull back from the chalice, but couldn't.
Tried to close his eyes against the light, but couldn't do that, either.
Then he saw something, deep in the glare. A black spot. A hole.
The sound of the wind that had accompanied the first fall of the darkness returned. Until that moment, he hadn't really thought about its having gone away.
He knew now where the sound came from. That hole. It was the sound of the world being drawn down into the hole. Drawn where, he didn't know. The hole was somewhere inside the chalice, that was all he knew.
No, that wasn't true. He also knew the hole was hungry. Not the way he thought of hunger, but a more primal appetite, what the vast canopy of space must feel when it tried to swallow the light of the stars. It was the oldest hunger there was, a desire that could never be appeased because no matter how much light the darkness swallowed, it always wanted more.
This was their fault, he thought. His and Lily's. Messing with things they had no hope of understanding. They should have let well enough be, gotten out of that room and left the pieces of the chalice lying there, just like they'd found them.
Except the door had existed all along, hadn't it? He'd heard the light being sucked into it since the darkness first fell back in the junkyard, sucking at the world's light, drawing it into itself so that the light spun like water going down a drain. And it was still going down, taking him with it.
Taking him, and Lily, and maybe the whole world along with them.
Taking …
He saw a tall dark figure walking toward the hole. The man had his back to him, but Hank recognized him by the wide brim of his black hat, by the flapping tails of his black duster and his rolling walk.
Jack.
The pull of the hole exerted an incredible force, but it didn't seem to bother Jack at all. He just kept walking toward it at a steady pace, like he was strolling from his school bus to the junkyard, getting ready to tell another night's worth of stories.
Seeing Jack was weird enough, but now he could see the hole better, too, see it right up close as though he were walking at Jack's shoulder, and it wasn't so dark anymore. Wasn't dark at all. It didn't seem so much like a hole as a door, and through it Hank could see the side of a meadowed hill with trees ranging up the sides of it and along its crest. There was a big old stone there in the middle of the tall grass and wildflowers, little flecks of mica glinting in the sun that poured down on stone, meadow, hill, trees.
He saw Jack pause, hesitate.
He wasn't expecting that either, Hank thought. Whatever Jack had thought he was walking into, it wasn't that field.
A shadow crossed over the rock and all of a sudden Hank believed in God again, because if that wasn't an angel then what was? He'd had it wrong, thinking the bird girls had been angels. This was the real thing. There was no halo and she wasn't even wearing white. But she had wings, big angel wings that rose up from behind her back that were the same russet color as her tangled hair. And she had a look in those sky-blue eyes of hers that told Hank she knew the way to heaven, because those eyes had looked upon it.
She smiled at Jack, and Hank found himself wishing somebody would smile like that at him, like she'd been waiting all her life for him to get to this place.
Jack started walking again.
There was something familiar about that angel, Hank thought. Jack had taken the angel's hand and was stepping through the door before he knew what it was. The face of that angel. She looked just like Katy. Not Katy now, but the way Katy'd look when she got older.
He wanted to ask how that could be. He wanted to call after Jack, to say good-bye if nothing else, but the hole, door, whatever it was, closed behind them, closed like the lens of a camera. Just shrank down into itself until
there was only a dot left.
Then, blink, it was gone.
And he was standing back in Dominique Couteau's hotel suite, hands still on the chalice, but looking over the top of it at Lily instead of into some strange otherworld. The wind was gone again, too, and this time he was aware of its going, but there was a rumbling sound coming up from deep underground. He looked down to see Bocephus crouched with his belly against the floor, scared for all his size. There was something in the dog's eyes that Hank had never seen in an animal before, like he had looked onto the same piece of heaven Hank had, and like Hank, he remembered and thought maybe he was never going to feel completely satisfied with anything in this world again.
"I … did you see … ?" Lily began, but couldn't go on.
Hank could tell that she was having as much trouble working this out as he and the dog were. They'd all been touched by something that was so much bigger than they were, they just couldn't seem to hold on to it, never mind figure it out. But now wasn't the time to worry about it anyway.
"Let's get out of here," he said. "Before something else happens."
He picked up the chalice, took her by the hand, and headed for the door. Like Lily, he didn't look at the bloodstained walls or the bodies of the dead cuckoos, just focused on what lay straight ahead, moving across the room and out the door, Bocephus on their heels.
They got most of the way down the hall toward the elevator when the building gave a shake, like it was clearing its head, and all the lights came back on again. They stopped, feeling off-balance. A weird hum filled the air, an uncomfortable buzzing that Hank realized was the building's electronic and mechanical functions starting up again along with the lights. Air conditioners. Electricity. The elevator, where people were moving in time again.
The elevator's doors closed before they could reach it, but not before Hank caught the shocked looks on the faces of the people in it.
Christ, we must look a mess, he thought. Blood all over our clothes, carrying this crystal chalice that they must think we stole from one of the rooms, a dog the size of a small bear padding at our side.
"We've got to get out of this building," he told Lily. "I figure we've got a minute, minute and a half tops before all hell breaks loose up here."
She looked nervously around.
"No, it's not something supernatural this time," he said. "It's just … well, you can bet the people on that elevator are going to come tumbling out of it as soon as they reach the lobby, screaming about Bo here and us all covered in blood. Security'll be hightailing it up to this floor and we don't want to be here when they show up."
"But—"
"Think about it, Lily. When they find that room full of bodies back there, who're they going to blame? It's not like we have answers that'd make any sense to them."
Understanding blossomed in her eyes. She nodded and they started to run for the stairwell at the far end of the hall. Hank counted off the rooms as they hurried by them, half-expecting one of their doors to open and some poor sap attending a convention, or in town on a holiday, to blunder into them.
But their luck held. At least in that regard.
"I don't know how much good this'll do," Hank said when they were just a few rooms away from the fire door. "They're not stupid. They'll be sending some of their people up the stairwell."
He silently corrected himself as he saw the handle working on the door. It seemed too soon, but it looked like they already had. And he'd gone and left the shotgun behind in the Couteaus' room.
He pulled Lily to a stop but Bocephus kept right on running. The fire door started to open inward. Whoever was pulling it open was about to have a couple of hundred pounds of dog at his throat. "Bo!" Hank cried. "No!"
Because it wasn't necessarily hotel security coming through that door. It might be some poor putz who decided to get some serious exercise and do the thirty sets of stairs. And whoever it was, letting Bo attack them was only going to complicate the problems they already had.
Bocephus skidded against the door, knocking it further open. The man in the stairwell lost his balance and fell back against the wall. He looked seriously rattled and Hank didn't blame him. Bocephus wasn't exactly some yappy little lapdog that you could push away with your shoe.
"It's okay," Hank started to say, but Lily had stepped past him, moving toward the door. "Rory?" she said.
Hank recognized him as soon as Lily said his name.
Rory straightened up from the wall. He gave the dog a nervous glance, then let his gaze settle on them.
"Jesus," he said. "What happened to you? Are you all right?" Hank twigged to what he meant before Lily did. It was all the blood. He touched his shirtfront. "It's not ours," he said.
"Then whose … ?"
"This isn't a good time to get into it," Hank told him. "We've really got to get out of …"
His voice trailed off as he realized that Rory was no longer looking at them, his attention completely swallowed by something in the hallway behind them. Bocephus growled and Hank slowly turned to see the biggest, baldest black man he'd ever seen filling the hall where they'd just been. With him were two pairs of twins: the crow girls who'd rescued Lily and him in that alleyway—which seemed like forever ago—along with Katy and a girl that was her exact double, except she looked a lot straighter. He remembered seeing her in the junkyard earlier. Her name was … Kerry.
He looked from her to Katy, and the angel he'd seen welcoming Jack into that other place flashed through his mind.
"I will take that," the man said in a deep voice that was as resonant as Bocephus's growls.
He plucked the chalice from Hank's hand before Hank could think to protest.
"I've never seen it in this shape," the man said.
The chalice seemed tiny as he turned it over in his large hands. After a moment, Hank realized that he wasn't so much admiring it, as trying to figure out how it was all still in one piece. Bocephus was still growling, but he immediately stopped and lowered his head when the big man gave him a sudden stern look.
"It's veryvery pretty," one of the crow girls said.
The other one nodded. "The prettiest it's ever been, don't you think, Raven?"
Raven? This was the Raven from Jack's stories? Jesus, but he was big.
Hank stuck his hands in his pockets and discovered that the statues Lily had given him were gone. He must have dropped them in the cuckoos' room. Except, looking at Katy and her twin, the pair of them dressed exactly the same as the little figurines had been, he wasn't so sure.
When he thought about where they'd all come from, appearing as if out of nowhere … His gaze went to the chalice and the strange idea came to him that they'd come out of it. He made himself look away, not wanting to go where that train of thought might take him. Instead, he concentrated on Katy.
Her eyes were rimmed with red from crying and there was a hollow look in them that broke his heart. She leaned against her sister as though she couldn't support her own weight.
"Katy," he said. "Are you okay?"
She shook her head.
"We … we just saw our father die," her sister said.
"Your father?"
That came from Rory, surprise in his voice.
Kerry nodded. "I know who my parents really were now. Jack Daw was our father."
Jack had kids? Hank shook his head. He was going to need a scorecard to keep everything straight.
"And now he's dead," she said.
Is that what we saw? Hank thought. Did we really see Jack walking into heaven?
"I'm so sorry," Lily said.
Hank nodded slowly. He couldn't imagine the world without Jack and his stories in it.
19.
Kerry had never been in the position where she'd had to be strong for someone else. Being able to do it made her guess that she was more resilient than she'd thought. Or maybe she'd just been through so much in the past few days that nothing could really surprise her anymore, though she wasn't entirely immune to b
eing taken unawares. The difference was, instead of letting traumas immobilize her, she was learning how to roll with them, to not let them render her completely dysfunctional.
Finding out that Nettie was really her mother, the mysterious Jack Daw her father, wasn't something she was allowing herself to deal with at all. It was an amazing step forward for her that she was actually able to set the confusing puzzle of her parents aside and concentrate on the more immediate concerns that couldn't be set aside.
What she really wanted more than anything was to be able to do more for Katy, only Katy couldn't be consoled.
She looked around at the others crowded together with them in the hallway. Surely someone here could help. Perhaps the crow girls would work their magic on Katy, the way Maida had helped her back at her apartment. But before she could ask them, Raven was turning his attention to Katy. Kerry shivered. Maybe he wasn't a bad guy, but he still scared her.
"Katy," Raven said.
His voice was pitched remarkably soft. But still deep. Still so resonant you could feel it vibrating way down low in your chest. Beside her, Katy lifted her head to look at him.
"I know this is not the time to speak of celebrations," he went on, "but I have been considering what you told me earlier. Of all of us, you would seem to be the best choice to guard her vessel and teach us how to celebrate her existence."
Katy started shaking her head as soon as he began to speak, but Raven handed her the chalice and it was take it or drop it. Kerry squeezed Katy's shoulders, trying to lend her sister strength.
"I … I can't … ," Katy began.
She tried to hand it back, but Raven wouldn't take it. Such a small thing in his hands, Kerry thought, so big in her sister's. Then Katy looked down at the crystal she was holding and a strange thing happened. It grew smaller, changed. The crystal darkened, became opaque, turned into a metal like tarnished silver. The goblet shape shrank in on itself. For a moment it was a formless lump in the palm of her hand, then she was holding a small, crudely rendered bird figure.
"It's a crow," Kerry found herself saying. "A crow pendant."
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