by Ted Sanders
“More,” Isabel said. At her chest, Miradel began to swell. “Quickly.”
April closed her eyes and opened herself wider. Not too wide—she couldn’t risk a whiteout—but still she felt a buzzing in her temples. The vine’s amputated stem throbbed. Surely the Mordin could sense her now. She tried not to think about it, concentrating on the beetle instead, and all at once she understood what the bug was doing. It was a female, bloated with eggs. Heavy and urgent. Vital. It was looking for a place to lay them. The need was primal and powerful and—for April—a touch embarrassing. She let it pour through her.
Suddenly she felt a tug. Not a physical tug, but a kind of mental pull through the vine, as if her thoughts were made of fabric and a burr had become snagged in the threads. A moment later, the snag pulled free, taking something with it. Her eyes flew open. “That’s enough,” Isabel said, staring down at the paper clip, which was now a flat figure eight. “Shut the vine down now.” When April didn’t react right away, still drawn by the beetle’s lovely, life-filled need, Isabel said harshly, “Shut it down, or I’ll do it for you.”
April did as she was told, yanking her thoughts away from the insect. She silenced the vine as best she could. She glanced back toward the train station. No sign of the Mordin. She thought maybe she saw a flicker of black in the sky—Arthur?
Isabel unhooked Miradel from around her neck and held it in her palm. In a wink, the already swollen sphere expanded to the size of a grapefruit, crackling audibly, its woven surface breaking open. Green light flickered within, every shade of emerald. “One second,” Isabel said, and she slipped the bent paper clip into the sphere. It dropped to the center and hovered there. Isabel held Miradel between her hands—one above and one below—her face rigid with concentration. The paper clip twisted in place at the core, glittering and weightless.
April could tell by Joshua’s face that he was as bedazzled as she was. His little mouth hung open. “What are you doing?” April whispered at the woman.
“I’m buying us time,” Isabel replied, staring intently into the wicker ball. A moment later, she lifted the wicker sphere with her top hand. The paper clip fell through a hole in the bottom of the ball. She caught it deftly and stood up. “This,” she said, holding out the paper clip, her eyes gleaming.
“What is it?”
“A decoy. A thread of your injury, spun into a loop. It’s louder than you. It’ll wind down eventually, but for now—” She tossed the paper clip high into the air, onto the roof of the garage. April heard it skitter to a landing. “We can get away while they investigate. Now let’s move.”
Isabel took Joshua’s hand once more and ran. April peeked back around the corner again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Arthur, but what she saw instead nearly froze her. The two huge Mordin were crossing the train tracks now, still distant but coming ever closer, their strides long and purposeful. As she watched, one of them stepped calmly over a bench as if it were no more than a fallen log.
April turned to run. But just then, from directly overhead, she heard a familiar crooning call. She looked up and saw Arthur perched on the roof of the garage, peering down at her. She’d been so furiously trying not to use the vine that she hadn’t even noticed him coming closer. The raven held something tight in his beak. A stick? A wire? Arthur turned his head and the fading sunlight caught the object just right—a flat and zigzagging figure eight.
“Hey!” April whispered, waving her arms at him. “Put that down!”
Arthur ruffled his feathers and crooned at her again, using only his throat so that he would not drop the paper clip. The vine practically screamed at April, tempting her to tune in to the bird, to figure out what—if anything—he intended to do. She fought off the urge as best she could.
“Listen,” April pleaded. “You can’t follow me. Not with that thing. I’m going this way. You go that way, okay?” She began to back up as quickly as she dared. “No following.”
She’d gotten thirty or forty feet away when Arthur lifted his wings and launched himself into the air, straight toward her, still carrying the paper clip. Panicked, she crouched and scooped up a handful of gravel, then hurled the stones underhand at Arthur. She didn’t want to hurt him, of course, but she needed him to go away, to go anywhere but here. And for his own safety, she needed him to drop the paper clip. The bird dodged the stones acrobatically, coming to a near stop in the air. The vine brought her an unmistakable—and so unwanted—stab of astonishment and confusion, of rejection and betrayal. She understood in a flash that the paper clip was a present. A gift for her. Unwilling to drop it, Arthur veered away and flew back toward the train tracks and out over the parking lot beyond, taking the paper clip with him.
April thought her heart would break, but she told herself there was no time to feel bad. She pushed the vine’s talk down again and turned and ran. Isabel and Joshua were nowhere in sight. Surely they hadn’t abandoned her? She ran blindly up the drive and came out into a neighborhood of cozy little homes. A voice called to her.
“April! Here!”
April turned. Isabel was crouched down between two houses with Joshua, waving frantically. April hurried over.
“What took you so long?” Isabel demanded.
“Arthur took the decoy. He flew off with it. I—” She could not bring herself to admit that she’d had to chase him off.
“Will he be okay?” Joshua asked, his eyes wide with fear.
“He’ll be fine,” Isabel said. “This is good luck. The bird will draw the Mordin away and he’ll—” She stopped and looked up at April sharply. “How many Mordin were there?”
“Two.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes. Why?”
Isabel stood. “Mordin hunt in packs of three. We need to move. Joshua?”
Joshua led the way. They walked swiftly, not quite running. He cut through the backyard and then through the playground of the neighboring Catholic school. He led them through the park, and across the nearly dry bed of Boone Creek. All the while April kept the vine silent, trying not to listen for Arthur. But every time she saw a bird bigger than a robin, she couldn’t help but look twice.
“Where are we going?” April asked. Small as the town was, she didn’t spend a lot of time here, and she was half lost now.
“The post office,” Isabel replied curtly.
“Is that where our ride is?” April asked, tired of the half answers. “Or are we going to mail ourselves into the city?”
Isabel didn’t laugh. “Our ride is waiting at the post office. She’s a Keeper like us, and she’ll take us where we need to go. We’ll be gone before the Riven even know it.”
Gone. But what about Arthur?
They walked on, Joshua in front. He never said a word, never once hesitated. He seemed totally confident in where he was going.
“I suppose you memorized the location of every post office in the country or something, huh?” April asked him after a while.
“No,” Joshua replied lightly. “Just Illinois.”
They passed almost directly beneath the town’s water tower, then headed uphill to a manmade pond. On the far side, they crested the high, grassy bank and found themselves atop a long slope covered in sickly looking ash trees. At the bottom of the hill, April recognized Route 120, the two-lane highway that cut through town. There was the funeral home, just across the road, and a few blocks beyond that, she could see the faded flag of the post office. Joshua had gotten them there much more quickly than April would have believed.
“Isabel,” Joshua said quietly, pointing, his voice a worried whisper. “Look.”
April looked, and goose bumps poured down her arms. On the far side of the highway, a monstrous figure stood in the shadows of the funeral home. A Mordin—apparently Joshua could see the creatures truly. April was pretty sure this Mordin was the same one that had spoken to her in the woods. Not only did he seem bigger than the others, he also had an arrogant bearing that gave him a distinctive air of comman
d.
Isabel growled low. “He thinks he can’t be fooled,” she muttered, as if she knew the Mordin personally. But then she gasped as another figure walked up and joined him. It was clearly one of the Riven—same pale skin, same long arms—but it was much smaller, no taller than a tallish human. This one had a distinctly feminine look, perhaps because of its long hair pulled back into a thick braid. The braid was so blond it was almost white.
Isabel grabbed April and Joshua by the arms and pulled them down onto the grass, behind the lip of the embankment. “Quiet!” she said. April was shocked to see real concern in the woman’s eyes.
“What is that?” April whispered. “It’s not a Mordin.”
“No. Another kind of Riven—an Auditor.” Isabel grimaced as if she hated to say the word. “We’re in great danger.”
Isabel’s apprehension began to seep into April’s own bones, chilling her. “Why?” she asked, as calmly as she could. “What’s an Auditor?”
“The Auditor won’t be afraid of me like the others are. Now be quiet. Be quiet and don’t move. Don’t even think of the vine—I can’t risk severing you now.”
Joshua burrowed up against April, interrupting her thoughts. “Did they see us?” he asked.
“No,” April said firmly. “They won’t find us.” But inside, she felt no such confidence. Isabel had promised to protect her, and April had gone along with it—even risking the terrible misery of severing. And now, as it turned out, Isabel seemed to be saying there were things she couldn’t protect them from.
“If they do find us,” Isabel said grimly, “run. I will fight them. I can’t promise how it’ll turn out, but I’ll try. Be quiet now. Let me think.”
They waited. They could see nothing but the square pond just below and the bare, slender branches of ash trees stretching over the water. Tiny frogs croaked among the reeds around the pond, but April kept them shut out, refusing to add even the tiniest trickle to the vine’s presence. Distantly she became aware that she could catch snippets of the Riven talking, their voices rising occasionally over the murmur of traffic. Their speech was crackling and hissing, like wet logs burning. It made April’s skin crawl. And then, suddenly, she couldn’t hear them anymore.
“They’re gone,” Joshua said, as if he too had been listening. He made as if to rise, but April grabbed his arm.
“No,” she whispered, staring into the sky.
A small black shape was gliding toward them, dropping out of the twilight. Wings spread wide, it banked gracefully and then alighted on a branch out over the water. As it bobbed its head at them, April struggled not to reach for the vine.
Arthur.
He was all right. He’d found her. But he was strangely silent, and with a creep of horror April realized why—he still held the decoy in his beak. The paper clip glinted keenly against his black feathers, presumably still broadcasting a loud, false echo of the vine’s wound.
Isabel saw it too, or perhaps sensed it. “Send him away!” she hissed urgently at April. “Tell him to go!”
But of course that wasn’t how being an empath worked, and Isabel had to know it. The vine was a one-way street. Much as she hated to do it, April would have to scare Arthur off, just as she had before. She groped desperately through the grass for something to throw. All she found was a twig, which she flung at the bird, but Arthur only watched as her sad throw fell way short. April dug into her pocket. Dog food—no good. But there was something else there, something round and smashed flat.
The bottle cap. A gift from Arthur. She wouldn’t throw it, no, but . . . maybe she didn’t have to. She looked up at the raven, at his crystal-black eyes. She looked at the shimmering water below. She looked up at the precious, shining figure eight in Arthur’s beak.
It was a gift. Another gift for her.
April nodded at him. “Yes, thank you,” she called out softly. “Thank you.”
Arthur cocked his head. He shuffled from side to side, clearly unsure what to make of the situation.
“Thank you,” April said again, making her voice as sweet as she could. This had to work. It would work. The Riven were coming.
Arthur fluffed his feathers. Through the vine, a tiny stab of happy hope. “Henkyoo,” he crooned at last, and as he spoke, the paper clip tumbled from his open beak, falling toward the water below.
CHAPTER TEN
The Hedge Witch
ISABEL’S DECOY FELL, GLINTING IN THE LAST RAYS OF THE SINKING sun. They all—even Arthur—watched the paper clip drop into the dark water of the pond with an almost inaudible plorp!
“Go, go!” Isabel said, shooing them forward. “They’ll be here to investigate in no time.”
They ran, back around the pond the way they’d come. Isabel led them over the embankment and cut left into a subdivision, parallel to the highway. Soon they were lost among the wooded backyards. Even without tapping into the vine consciously, April was aware of Arthur following them, his presence seeping up through the vine like the heat of the sun from a summer sidewalk.
After a few blocks, they crossed the highway, headed for the post office. As they crossed, April glanced back toward the pond on the hilltop and saw the massive silhouette of the tall Mordin lurking beneath the ash trees. The Auditor was at his side.
“It worked,” she said aloud.
“Of course it worked,” Isabel said without looking back. “He’s never seen that trick before. Even better, the decoy will be dying out any moment now, but the trail your bird made with it is still there. With any luck, the Riven will follow it all the way back to the train station.” She sounded so satisfied, so sure. April hoped she was right.
They walked in silence for another few minutes, Arthur keeping pace. At last the post office came into view across the street. A garishly painted van was parked out front, the only vehicle in the lot.
Isabel turned to April. She pulled April’s hair forward over the tip of the vine. “Keep it hidden,” she murmured. “She can’t know about the wound.”
April nodded, and the three of them started across the street toward the van. The driver-side window rolled down and a woman’s head poked out, her hair long and grizzled. She waved, and Isabel waved back. Faintly, April could feel Arthur watching from somewhere behind, alert to her whereabouts but distracted by a plastic wrapper tumbling in the wind. That was good—no Riven in the area.
As April drew closer to the van, however, she became aware of a new presence trickling through the vine, dour and slow and distinctly unpleasant. She stopped in the middle of the road, startled. This presence was like nothing she’d ever felt before, and she sipped at it cautiously. Definitely unpleasant, and definitely . . . old. To her great surprise, it seemed to be coming from the van. But what was it?
A passing pickup truck honked, startling her, and she hurried the rest of the way across the street. When she arrived at the van, the driver leaned out and looked April and Joshua up and down. She was wrinkled, with heavily lidded eyes, and gave off a spicy, incensey smell.
“You’re the ones, then, eh?” the woman said in a heavy British accent, her voice as leathery as her skin. “Not much to look at.”
Joshua stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’m Joshua,” he said.
The woman raised a bushy eyebrow. She nodded but didn’t take the offered hand. “Ethel,” she said.
“Ethel is going to take us into the city,” said Isabel. “She’s one of us.”
Ethel started to laugh raspily. “Oh yup,” she said. “One of us.”
“You’re Tan’ji?” Joshua asked.
“In the flesh,” Ethel said, and laughed so hard she began to cough. She sounded like she was about to lose a lung. Her nose was pierced with a braided silver hoop. Was that her instrument? “Mind you,” the woman continued, when she’d found her voice again, “I’m not one of your fancier types. I’m just a simple hedge witch.”
Joshua stepped back and grabbed April’s hand at the word witch. She gave him a squeeze back that
she hoped was comforting. “I don’t believe in witches,” April said.
Ethel lifted her eyes, almost sleepily. “And who are you?” she asked.
“I’m April.”
“Well, April, I don’t believe in love, but it’s happened to me once or twice nonetheless.”
April peered into the darkened van, trying to identify the source of the mysterious presence she felt through the vine. She was surprised to see a large bird skull hanging from the mirror. She was pretty sure it was from a raven. Meanwhile, the creature she felt was definitely not a bird. It was so cold, so dreary—so slow. “You’ve got an animal in there,” April said. “I feel it.”
Ethel’s face went sharp. Her drooping eyes flew open wide as she stared accusingly at Isabel. “An empath? You didn’t tell me you were bringing an empath.”
“Does it matter?” Isabel said.
Ethel measured April up and down once again. “Not as long as she keeps herself to herself. She might not like what she finds, after all.”
The words filled April with dread. But instead of fretting, she focused on the tug of the missing piece. Unpleasant as she was, this woman could take April where she needed to go. “I’ll mind my manners,” April said stiffly, unsure what that would even entail. “I just . . . we need to get to the city.”
Ethel frowned suspiciously. “Tell me then, love—what’s in the city that’s so important?”
“It’s the boy,” Isabel interjected with a sidelong glance at April. “He has . . . potential.”
“I see,” Ethel said, peering down at Joshua. “Looking for something, are we?”
“Yes ma’am, I think so,” Joshua replied, and the answer was so immediate and earnest that it seemed to satisfy Ethel.