Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  “That’s the one,” I whispered. The edge of the tangerine sun peeked its head out over the ocean. The colors on the horizon were bleeding together, a vivid watercolor of rose and blue and dusky indigo. “Start at the beginning. And don’t stop ’til the very end.”

  Echo’s voice sounded like it was getting further way, but I grasped onto every word she said, refusing to let go. “There once were three siblings,” she began, “and together they controlled the sky and brought light to the world …”

  So much had changed in Boston throughout the course of one week.

  The nightly roar from Fenway Park fell silent, after the Red Sox won the World Series. Halloween came and went, as the two hundred thousand college students who lived around the city emerged for one night of costumed debauchery, before tucking themselves back into their dorm rooms. On November 1, All Saints Day, winter descended early on Boston, blanketing the streets with six inches of snow. The autumn tides swept back out to sea without even a whimper.

  Yet some things remained immovable. Gordon Atlas had been coming to this same park every day for the last week. At noon, he would sit down on a weathered park bench and wait for the miracle.

  And for the seventh consecutive day, there it was: two childcare workers from the hospital leading a pack of children through the snow. It was easy to spot the miracle because she was taller than the other kids her age.

  Echo was going to be strong and beautiful just like her older sister. That much Atlas could tell already.

  Today, she had tucked her dark purple snow pants into her galoshes. She had been confined to her hospital bed for so long that she moved awkwardly, stiffly, at odds with a growing body that was a stranger to her now. In time she would mature into it and find the same powerful grace that had made Sabra Tides so formidable and alluring.

  All because of a single petal from a single flower.

  Nine days ago, Atlas had stolen a candy striper outfit from the hospital linen closet and used it to slip unnoticed through Echo’s ward. His major concern had been formulating a plan to convince Echo to eat the Sapphire petal. He was a total stranger to her, after all. Should he tell her the truth about the wild journey he and her sister had been on to obtain the flower? Should he concoct a lie about being a doctor with an experimental treatment?

  All of these options had sailed right out the window when he’d opened the door to Echo’s room and found a miniature version of Sabra staring at him in sleepy wonder. She had the same olive complexion smattered with swatches of Irish freckles. The singular curl that dangled out from beneath her cap was the same untamable ruby red as Sabra’s natural hair color. But more than anything, Atlas could see Sabra in the girl’s emerald eyes.

  Even more surprising were Echo’s first words to him: “Let me see the tattoo.”

  Atlas had peeled back his sleeve and showed her Selene’s name, with the sparrows rushing off the end. She’d smiled, satisfied, and drank in his whole body with her eyes. “I guess we do have the same type after all,” she whispered.

  Atlas watched anxiously as Echo chewed the petal, cringing at the bitter floral taste before swallowing it down. He didn’t know what to expect, or how fast the Sapphire was supposed to work its magic. Would she immediately jump out of bed and start doing cartwheels? To his disappointment, she mumbled a weary “thank you,” closed her eyes, and fell into a deep sleep. When it was clear she was out cold for the night, Atlas let himself out.

  The rest of the story he later gathered from Calista Tides.

  The morning after Atlas’s visit, Calista had visited Echo’s room to find her out of her bed, wide awake and standing in front of the television. She stood upright, no longer hunched over from pain and nausea. A half-eaten plate of syrupy pancakes occupied one of her hands, while she used the other to flip through the channels. “Clicker’s broken,” she explained to her mother through a mouthful of flapjack.

  Overnight, her white blood cell counts had skyrocketed into healthier levels. The next day, when they took Echo in for an ultrasound, the mass that had metastasized on her liver—the one her doctors had just discovered a day earlier—had shrunk to a third of its previous size.

  On the third day, the tumor had vanished completely.

  After that, Echo was so supercharged with youthful energy that despite Calista’s protective instincts, she couldn’t bear to deny her a few hours outdoors between appointments to confirm that she had truly entered some sort of aggressive remission.

  So Atlas continued to follow through with his silent, belated promise to Sabra to watch over her sister, the miracle child.

  But if there was one lesson to be learned from Cumberland Warwick’s journal, it was that even miracles came at a price.

  And this one’s had been far too high.

  Ten days ago, after waking in a Vermont hospital bed to Sabra’s bone-chilling voicemail, Atlas had suppressed the agonizing urge to dial 9-1-1, her final orders be damned. He’d raced to the rental car dealer across from the hospital and broke every speed limit to get to Elderfield Hollow before it was too late.

  It had been high tide when he reached the coast. The sandbar was totally submerged, so he swam across the cold channel over to the stone-cut stairs. On his way through the apple orchard, he nearly tripped face-first over the corpse of a man he didn’t recognize. The John Doe had a hole through his heart and a bloody sword beside him. Atlas had no time to puzzle over this, because just ten yards away, he spotted Sabra.

  She was slumped against an apple tree, eyes shut, arms limp in the grass. There was blood everywhere, so much blood …

  As he cradled Sabra in his arms, he felt the flutter of her pulse beneath his fingers, weak and far too slow. Mad with grief, he pulled the Sapphire petal from her pocket and started to bring it up to her lips—if it was as powerful as they’d been lead to believe, surely Sabra’s grave injuries weren’t beyond repair.

  In the end, he couldn’t do it. She had offered up her life so that Echo could live. To feed Sabra the petal would be to make the last week for nothing. She would never forgive him if she pulled through. He’d never forgive himself either.

  So he picked up the phone that had fallen from her hand and called 9-1-1.

  A helicopter landed in the quad of the college an hour later. While he watched the chopper lift off and carry Sabra south to Maine Medical Center, Atlas tried to piece together a believable story for a suspicious detective, while begging them to let him follow the medevac. Between the voicemail Sabra had left him, confirmation from the hospital in Vermont that he’d been under supervised emergency treatment all night, and a severed wrist they found in the water with a Gaelic tattoo that matched the one on file for Horace Nox, they eventually cut Atlas loose, though they would call him in for questioning three times before the week was out.

  Fortunately, Nox’s reputation preceded him. When the police raided his mansion in Cohasset looking for answers, they found six riddles and a map in Nox’s subterranean chamber that corroborated everything Atlas had told them. They’d also found another murder victim, a low-level Blyss dealer with two bullets in his head, who had been decomposing in the foyer.

  Meanwhile, Sabra never woke up. Even after they stopped the internal bleeding and removed her ruptured spleen, she remained in a deep coma. When they talked to her, she showed only sporadic bursts of mental activity. Once her condition had been stabilized—whatever that meant—they transferred her by ambulance from Maine Medical to Children’s Hospital in Boston, so she could be closer to her family.

  When Atlas came to visit Sabra after her transfer, he inadvertently walked in on Calista Tides reading aloud at her bedside. They’d met twice before, when Atlas had tried to share with her the same patchwork story he’d given the police. It felt like a cheap, plastic version of the truth, but he wanted Sabra to fill in the gaps herself, if she would just wake up.

  Mrs. Tides stopped mid-sentence when he entered the room. She sheepishly held up a book of Greek myths. “Echo’s
idea. She said it helped her get better, so maybe it would help Sabra, too. What’s in the bag?”

  Atlas pulled out a black hoodie. “In case she gets cold,” he explained. “God forbid she wear something with color.”

  Calista patted him on the shoulder and offered to take a walk while he had a few minutes alone with Sabra. It was a lot more of a welcome than he’d anticipated.

  For the past twenty-four hours, Atlas had been rehearsing what he would say to Sabra when he saw her, everything he didn’t have a chance to tell her after her voicemail had wrenched his heart out of his chest. Yet as he sat beside her, taking in the awful details of the room—the plastic ventilation tube taped to her mouth, the IV in her arm, the endless rhythmic blip of the vital signs monitor—all those words evaporated.

  What came out of his mouth instead was: “This is horse shit.”

  Even Atlas was surprised by the frustration that gushed out of him, but there was no stopping it once the floodgates opened. “I am so, so furious with you. How many times?” he snapped. “How many times did you sneak away to do something dangerous without me there to protect you? Didn’t you know it would eventually catch up with you? Twelve hours—all you had to do was wait twelve hours until morning, and then I would have happily escorted you to the Hollow as soon as I could stand on my own two feet. Hell, I would have crawled alongside you if you’d asked me. It didn’t have to end this way.”

  Atlas picked up the book of Greek myths. “Do you know what a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ means? Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek king Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in battle, but his army’s casualties numbered so many that he might as well have lost. That’s what this is. Echo’s alive, just like you wanted, but think of the devastating cost. She’s already going to grow up without her brother, and now you’re going to leave her without a sister, too? What kind of half-life is that?

  “And what about me, Sabra? How am I supposed to go back to normalcy now? You can’t carve out a niche in my life that huge, and then in only a few days’ time, leave a hollow where you used to be. How dare you tell me that you ‘think you sort of love me.’ What kind of coward says that? What kind of coward doesn’t even give me the chance to say it back?” He was crying now, for the first time since Selene’s funeral. “I don’t know what the hell love is or whether you can feel it for somebody you’ve only known a week. But dammit, I would give my life just for one more week to find out. That wouldn’t be a Pyrrhic victory. It would be worth every single year that I lost.”

  Atlas stood up and leaned over Sabra. “I’m going tell you a secret. Back on the island, I knew you’d kill me if I fed you the Sapphire to try to save your life. But because I couldn’t just watch the girl I’d fallen for die while I did nothing, I gave you a sliver, where the tip of the petal had ripped loose. So at the end of the day, you have no excuse not to come back to us. Stop being so selfish and wake the hell up. There are people who need you. You owe your mother the story of how you got here. You owe Echo a proper childhood. And dammit, you owe me another kiss.” Because he was out of angry, passionate things to say and because he had a flashback to their last happy moment together on George’s Island, right before Nox had blown up their rented Sunfish, he added, “Oh, and you owe me a boat, too.”

  After his diatribe, it felt like he should storm out of the room for proper dramatic effect. Instead, he lingered awkwardly by her bed. Eventually he sighed, dropped down into the chair, and read to her from the mythology book until Calista got back.

  Now Atlas sat on a park bench, watching from a distance as Echo splashed about in the snow, making snow angels with the other kids. In the middle of a snowball fight, which the childcare workers were trying in futility to break up, Echo paused. While snowballs whizzed around her, she heartbreakingly tilted her head to the sky, searching for something, searching for someone.

  Atlas followed her gaze upward. A ray of sunlight cut through the sullen clouds. I failed you, Jack, he thought. I promised you I’d watch over Sabra, and I promised Sabra I’d watch over Echo, and I couldn’t keep both promises.

  A snowball struck Atlas on the head. He searched through the gaggle of children for the perpetrator. One of them must have a wicked arm to have thrown so far.

  When a second snowball pelted the back of his neck, he realized the cold projectile hadn’t originated from the children after all. His eyes caught a flutter of paper on the bench beside him, a crumpled receipt that must have been packed into the snowball. On the back, hastily scrawled in smeared, blue ink, were the words:

  IOU

  1 Boat.

  1 Kiss.

  Atlas bolted upright like he’d stepped on a live wire. He looked frantically around the park. And then he saw her.

  She limped barefoot through the snow, seemingly oblivious to the cold. A green hospital gown poked out the bottom of her black hoodie, which she’d drawn tight around her head. A cast covered one of her wrists.

  Atlas moved to run to her, but stopped when he realized it wasn’t him that she was walking toward. The girl in the hoodie was making a direct line for the group of children at the edge of the park, picking up speed with each passing moment.

  Across the vast field, the little girl in the purple snowsuit stiffened when she noticed the newcomer who was limping toward her. Echo took off at a run, ignoring the shouts of her chaperones and dodging the snowballs that were falling around her like mortars.

  Atlas had to hold onto the park bench to steady himself, suddenly short of breath.

  Halfway across the park, when the pain in her stitched-up stomach finally overwhelmed her, Sabra dropped to her knees in the snow. But it was no matter—Echo closed the remaining distance between them in an unstoppable, meteoric blur. Sabra spread her arms wide just in time to let them envelop her baby sister, her miracle, and never again let go.

  Notes On History and Gratitude

  One of the perks of living in Boston: If you want to write a book about history, the city has spent the last four hundred years doing all the hard work for you.

  I have done my best to remain faithful to the historical events and locales referenced throughout this book. However, I do not claim to be a historian, and this is foremost a work of fiction, so at times I have taken small liberties in the name of drama and entertainment. Some elements are entirely of my own fabrication, chiefly, the island of Elderfield Hollow, Cumberland Warwick’s journal, and the story of the Serengeti Sapphire (though if only it were real).

  I started working on Nightingale, Sing in 2012, and while many days it absolutely kicked my ass, I love this story so much that writing it has gotten me through some challenging, uncertain times, which is probably why Sabra’s journey ping-pongs between darkness and hope.

  So I want to begin by thanking my family—Mom, Dad, Erin, Kelsey, Ray, Logan, Victoria, and baby Brooke—for your love and support even when I’m being an insufferable grumble-face.

  To the city of Boston, my home. You continue to teach me so much about hope, resilience, and what it means to pick yourself back up after you’ve fallen down.

  To Ginger Clark, my wonderful agent, for your incisive big-picture revisions and your steadfast commitment to wombat advocacy.

  To Dustin Martin, whose editorial feedback helped me trim my word count from a bloated 107k to a svelte 92k. You can take a red pen to my writing any day.

  To Bernard and Lili Ozarowski for continuing to let me board at the Cat Hostel when I visit New York for “book stuff” or general shenanigans.

  To Jenn Riopel and Jill Melnyk, since our trip to the Crane Estate back in the day inspired Jaro’s first riddle.

  To Steve Dicheck, Pat Alessi, Jenn Gilpin, Chris Keenan, Jessica Angotti, Amy McDonald Maranville, Lindsey Staniszeski, Justine Martin, Alexandra Mandzak, Meaghan Samere, and anyone else who had to listen to me ramble incessantly about writing, publishing, and researching obscure New England history over the last three years.

  Oh, and to anyone who is good friends with Ben A
ffleck, my favorite director, feel free to casually mention to him what a kick-ass film adaptation this would make.

  To my favorite restaurant, Masa. I firmly believe that every author needs a watering hole where he can stare off into space and grease the wheels of creativity with a margarita.

  And because I am writing this the week before the AFC Championship Game, and because this is a book about Boston, it would be a grave injustice to end with anything other than:

  Go Pats.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karsten Knight is the author of the novels Wildefire, Embers & Echoes, and Afterglow (Simon & Schuster), though some say his writing career peaked at the age of six, when he completed a picture book series about an adventurous worm. He is a graduate of College of the Holy Cross and earned an MFA in writing for children from Simmons College. Karsten resides in Boston, where he lives for fall weather, bowling, and football season. For more information on Karsten or his books, please visit his cleverly titled website, www.karstenknightbooks.com.

  Praise for WILDEFIRE by Karsten Knight,

  Available now from Simon & Schuster

  “In an era when the young adult paranormal and urban fantasy field is blessed with an abundance of great stories and storytellers, WILDEFIRE is an exceptional standout.”

  -San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Knight has created a novel quite different from the coming-of-age/paranormal-teen reads that have glutted the market recently. Ash is a wry and interesting protagonist and the romance and gritty, violent action scenes are compelling.”

  -School Library Journal

  “Knight’s debut novel is an edgy twist on the magical boarding school theme. It’s a fun, well-written, and engaging read with a last-sentence twist.”