Between the Spark and the Burn

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  I put my hand on his, and then gently, gently, pulled his fingers away. “I have to go, Luke. I have to. This is it. If they kill Brodie, I need to be there. I need to be sure it’s him. And I’ll need to be sure he’s . . .” I paused. “I’ll need to be sure he’s dead.”

  Luke met my eyes. And nodded. Once.

  “You should pack up while we’re gone,” I said to him, in a louder voice. “Sunshine, you stay and help him. When this is done, we’ll meet you at the car and then we’ll leave Inn’s End and never look back, all right?”

  And I was out the door before my brother could say another word, Neely right behind me.

  I expected the hard stares but I wasn’t prepared for them. The looks from the Inn’s End residents as we walked up the church steps . . . they cut sharper than the winter wind that blew right through me.

  No one stopped us, though.

  The church was already almost full. The only light came from the fat candles that sat on the windowsills lining the wall. Shadows crept and crawled across the stark, stark room, nothing to see but a stained-glass window depicting a pink beast, lying on its back, legs raised in the air, neck spilling blood. The stiff wooden pews were packed with families huddled and bundled up in the great, white, unheated room. It smelled like apples and snow and candles and wet wool. Neely and I squeezed into the last bench on the left, deep in the shadows, next to an elderly couple who refused to look us in the eye. Neely’s elbow brushed by the woman, and she cringed against her husband.

  The boy was by the pulpit, half hidden by the group of men. He just stood there, alone, his chin on his chest. Tangled red hair covered his face, hiding his features, and his arms were twisted behind him and tied. He wore black wool slacks and a hand-knit sweater like Pine’s. His clothes were torn in places, his pale, bare skin showing through. Dead leaves and twigs and dirt clung to every inch of him, as if he’d been living in the wild for years, running with wolves and sleeping in trees.

  I felt bad for him. I did. Even if it was Brodie. Even knowing it was probably Brodie. I still flinched at the sight of him, alone and tied up and waiting for whatever horrible thing was going to happen next.

  The candlelight rippled over his body in flickering bursts. I strained forward.

  “Is it him?” I whispered to Neely. I pressed on my wrists. They had started hurting again. “It can’t be him, though. Look how he’s standing. Brodie would never stand like that, so quiet and patient and doomed.”

  Neely kept staring at the boy. “River was here. Or Brodie. One of them, I’m almost sure of it. But—” He just shook his head, and kept staring.

  I saw Pine’s white-blond hair shining from one of the front rows. She was still wearing the scarf I gave her. There were six children next to her and an older woman that I figured must be her mother, though she looked close to sixty. I wanted Pine to turn. I wanted to see her face, to see what she was thinking about the captured boy. But she didn’t look back.

  A man stepped away from the torch-carrying group and came to stand at the front of the aisle between the two rows of pews. His shoulders were strong and wide, his pale blue eyes big and piercing and grim, not a drop of mischief or humor. His beard was thick, and soft-looking, and brown turning to gray.

  “And so,” he said, his voice booming across the room, rock solid and deep, “we have finally caught the devil that plagued our daughters these past weeks. I don’t need to tell you the horror I felt the night I heard a noise and walked into Prue’s room, just in time to see a flash of red hair slipping out the window, a string of black birds trailing behind.”

  People began to talk, loudly, all at once, telling their own stories of the devil-boy and his birds. The voices bounced off the rafters and echoed off the white walls and the room swelled with sound. The bearded man waited a few seconds, then held up his hand.

  “The question is,” he said, “what to do with him? There is no precedent for devils. Witches, yes, as you know. That is simple. Our ancestors took care of them years ago. And thanks to Pastor Walker Rose, God rest his soul, we haven’t had any since my father was young. But devils . . . this is a delicate matter, not to be rushed. Drood there wants to hang him—”

  Here he nodded at another man, a man with a bandage over his eye and several seeping sores on his face.

  “But,” the bearded man said, “as I told Drood, a hanging may not kill a devil. Burning has been suggested, though that, in my mind, is for witches and witches alone. Giver Crisp advised tipping him upside down and draining all the blood from him, as that is what we do to pigs—the idea being that devils and pigs are in the same category, so to speak. I am now opening the floor to other suggestions. Remember, whatever we do, it must be quick. And quiet.”

  Everyone was silent again. They seemed to be . . . waiting. Their expressions were obedient, but impatient and . . . eager, almost like children trying hard to be still at the end of a long day of school.

  I’d seen that eager look before.

  River . . . eyes dancing . . . jaw clenched tight . . . right before Jack’s dad slit his own throat in Echo’s town square . . .

  And then I realized, fully, what we’d walked in on. This town, these people . . . it was off. It was all off. What had Neely and I been thinking, marching right into the church like we belonged? This town was . . . wrong.

  “We will do this civilized,” the man continued, looking back at the congregation again. “You will raise your hands. Yes, Minnie Brown, go ahead—”

  “Duncan. Duncan Begg.”

  The voice was hoarse, and young, and yet still it soared above the rest of the noise in the church. It came from the red-haired boy. He had . . . changed. He stood straight now, chin up, his hair thrown back. His skin was clear, his forehead wide, his cheeks pink with that healthy glow people sometimes get from spending a lot of time outside.

  He looked right at me. Me, and then Neely, right at us, and his eyes were hurt, and dark, and scared, and sane.

  Neely’s hands, on my own, holding tight, tight, tight. “It’s not Brodie,” he said, quiet, his mouth near my ear. “It’s not Brodie,” he said again.

  And he was right. How could we have thought it was Brodie? The kid in front of us had the red hair but he was strong and young-Gene-Kelly, not tall, all-elbows-and-knees Texas cowboy.

  “Then who is it?” I whispered back. But Neely just kept staring ahead, alert, focused.

  “Duncan Begg, you’ve known me my whole life,” the boy called out as the room went pin-drop still. “You taught me how to carve a horse from a piece of white pine when I was five years old. You built my grandmother a special rocking chair to save her back in those hard years before she died. How can you stand there and say I’m this devil-boy?”

  The woman on Neely’s left, the one who had cringed away from him, made a small noise. She unwound herself from her husband’s arms, and stood.

  Everyone turned to look at her, and I flinched back farther into the shadows.

  “That is Finch Grieve, from out near Sin Hill,” the woman said. “His grandmother and me used to knit the souls of the dead together on Sundays, before her aches and pains stopped her from coming into town. He’s not the devil-boy, Duncan. Couldn’t be him there.”

  Finch turned his head, and rested his gaze on her, as did the rest of the crowd.

  “You’re saying we have the wrong boy?” Duncan’s blue eyes were very, very calm. “This is serious, Aggie Lennox. Be sure of your next words. If you are wrong, the people here won’t be kind. Revenge is owed.” He motioned to Finch. “He has the red hair, flaming red, underneath all that dirt. We found him hiding in the woods, and who hides but the guilty?”

  Aggie reached a hand behind her back. Her husband took it in his own, quick, and squeezed. “It’s Finch. It’s just Finch. He’s quiet, always been quiet, and lonely now, I should think, with his mother gone and his grannie too, l
iving all those miles out there on his own. Some would say he has a bit of the moon in him. But that doesn’t make him a devil.”

  Duncan nodded. Slow. “Do you stand by your words, Aggie?”

  A pause. Everyone looked at her, even Finch. Especially Finch.

  “I stand by my words,” she said, loud and clear. And then she sat back down, next to her husband, and leaned against him.

  Her husband looked worried. I saw it in his faded green eyes when they caught mine, before he turned away.

  Duncan gazed out over the congregation. He was reading their faces, judging their response. A hand rose. He nodded. “Yes, Didi.”

  A girl got to her feet. She was ten, maybe eleven, with thick, curly red hair flying out from her head. “The devil can hide in any man,” she said. She turned, and looked at Aggie, and at us, and there was a look in her eyes that was not child-like, not innocent.

  “The devil can hide in any man,” she repeated. “Or any boy. Isn’t that so? How do we know whether or not Finch Grieve is still as he once was? Couldn’t the devil look like Finch, if he chose? Couldn’t he look like anyone?”

  A rumbling waved through the crowd, a rumbling of “true, true, out of the mouths of babes, true, true, true.”

  Another hand in the air. Another nod.

  “What if we buried him alive? Put him back under the earth where he came from?”

  A dozen more hands raised.

  “I think we should bleed him dry, like the pigs. Pour his blood on the gravestones and—”

  “No, burning is the only way to know—”

  “You got to drown the devil out—we could tie him down with rocks and throw him in Silky Pond.”

  It was as if Aggie had never spoken.

  I shifted in my seat. My breath quickened.

  “Don’t,” Neely said, knowing what I was going to do before I knew it myself. “Don’t, Vi—”

  I was already on my feet. “It’s not him,” I cried out. My voice hit the tall angled ceiling and echoed around the church. “We came to Inn’s End tonight because we heard the devil-boy was here. He tried to kill me. He tried to kill my friends. And that . . .” I looked at Finch, and he looked at me, and our eyes held. “That. Is. Not. Him.”

  Chaos.

  Shouts and yells and whispers and echoes, what are they doing here, strangers, they need to leave, Pastor Walker Rose, leave, leave, leave.

  And above it all Duncan Begg telling people to be quiet.

  I looked behind me.

  Neely wasn’t there.

  River, where the hell did your brother go?

  “Who are you, girl? Where did you come from?” Duncan Begg’s eyes were on me now, oh yes they were.

  I couldn’t see Neely anywhere.

  I started walking down the aisle toward Duncan, and my mouth opened and words started spilling out like they’d given up hope on me and were trying to get out while they could. “The real devil-boy is named Brodie. He’s from Texas and wears a cowboy hat. He can do things with his mind, make people see things. He has red hair, just the same color red as that boy’s, but—”

  “Shut your mouth, girl.” Drood, the man with the sores, dragged the last word out, long and slow. He pointed at me, and then at Aggie, with his thick finger. “Looks like what we’ve got here is some redhead-boy sympathizers. You know what my grandmother always told me? She said witches love red hair, red as the setting sun. The redder the better. And she said they can’t stand to see a true reddie harmed. She said they’ll band together to rescue one in danger. That’s how you can catch yourself a bundle of witches—threaten to hang a reddie and they’ll come right to your door. So here’s what I think. I think we need to have a hanging tonight, and a burning, just like in the old days—”

  That’s when the yelling started.

  Aggie and her husband stood up and started backing toward the doors.

  Drood moved toward Aggie, the whole crowd moved toward Aggie.

  Maybe Brodie had left, maybe he was long gone, but the whole town was still sparked, he’d sparked them up, they had to be sparked, this wasn’t normal, even for a backwoods forgotten town with a Duncan Begg. Brodie ran and left poor Finch in his place to take the blame, that’s exactly what he would do, let some other boy get burned, oh, how that would make him laugh—

  And that’s when I saw him. Neely, slipping through the shadows, hugging the wall, moving toward Finch. I saw the ropes around Finch’s wrists fall away, and Finch’s hand reach out . . .

  . . . and I ran up, and took it, and then Pine was there, and she was pointing to a small side door half hidden in the shadows and then Pine was pulling me through and I was pulling on Finch’s hand and Neely followed behind all of us and then we were out in the snow. We ran to the side of the church and Finch bolted up the steps and shoved a thick tree branch through the front door handles just in time and the people inside began to bang and scream, and I heard the wood splinter, but then we were gone, gone, gone.

  Luke had the car running. Sunshine was sitting in the front seat and I pushed Finch into the back between Neely and me, and go, go, go.

  But there was Pine standing stock-still in the beam of the headlights, wearing her little home-sewn dress and black boots and my striped scarf.

  Hurry, Vi, hurry, they’re coming, damn it, hurry . . .

  “You can come with,” I said, quick, quick, quick, trying not to look over my shoulder at the woods spreading toward town. “You can come with us. Just—just get in. Hurry . . .”

  Pine’s gray eyes were shiny and big in the winter moonlight. “Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  And there wasn’t time, and Sunshine was screaming Vi, Vi, Vi, and I said, “Will you be okay? Will they hurt you for helping us?”

  But Pine just shrugged and shook her head and then Luke screamed, “Violet, I hear them,” and so I jumped in the car and said, GO.

  Luke threw the car in reverse and we all lurched sideways in our seats. I leaned to the side and rolled down the window—

  “Come to Citizen Kane, it’s up north, by the sea, in a town called Echo . . .” and Pine nodded quick and fast and then Luke spun the car out of the trees.

  I turned and looked out the rear window, and there they came, the people of Inn’s End, running out of the woods, sweeping Pine up in their wake, running, running straight toward us.

  But we’d already reached Witch William’s bridge and they were too damn late.

  Chapter 9

  December

  Will walked in on us. Lucas was kneeling at my feet and asking me to marry him.

  I was bad. Will was bad. Lucas was good.

  Sometimes life is that simple.

  Will stood in the doorway and stared at me, and then down at Lucas, and his eyes were full of the flash, the flash that screamed burn, burn, burn.

  Lucas, his knees by my feet, his shoulders solid and his eyes steady.

  I said yes.

  Will raged and raged and raged and raged.

  Later that night Lucas fell down the grand staircase on his way to dinner and broke his arm in three places.

  ≈≈≈

  After we crossed the bridge, after we took turn after turn after turn, we landed on a paved road again. Finch leaned into me and fell asleep, just like that. He smelled like dirt and snow and fear, but I didn’t mind. In the front seat Sunshine sat snug with Luke, her brown hair cascading over his right arm as his hand clutched the steering wheel. Neely was on the other side of Finch, looking over his red head at me, and smiling every once in a while like nothing at all had happened.

  I was still shaking and far from sleep, so I clicked on a flashlight and read the next entry in Freddie’s diary.

  But it just stirred me up, rather than calming me down.

  We hadn’t found River. We hadn’t found Brodie.

&
nbsp; But we’d saved a kid from being strung up and bled dry by a sparked-up stranger-hating town with dead birds on its doors and blood on its gravestones.

  So that was something.

  I turned off the flashlight. The car went dark except for the lights from the dashboard and the blue pre-dawn outside. Every time I closed my eyes I began to feel that it hadn’t been real, none of it, but then I’d open them again and there he was right next to me, red hair on my shoulder. My Inn’s End souvenir.

  Dawn broke, and Luke pulled over at the first sizeable town. I liked it on sight—it had so many trees squeezing between its clean streets, it seemed about to burst. We parked by the university and piled out to look for food and coffee and shake off Inn’s End as much as we could.

  The university was white and shining and beautiful and old and regal and proud, and I thought it was just the kind of college I wanted to go to and maybe I would. Someday I wouldn’t be Devil hunting and then I would have time to think about applications and pamphlets and Go Wildcats or Cavaliers or Vikings.

  There were coffee carts stationed where the sidewalks ended, still open even with the holidays, run by students that loved to talk joe. Which I’d missed doing since Gianni at the café back home had stopped speaking to me after that night with tied-up Jack and the fire in the Glenship attic. I looked around and imagined professors strolling by looking pleased with themselves and full of things to say, and kids carrying books and backpacks and wearing fat knit scarves. The sun was out and Inn’s End already seemed like a damn half dream.

  We bought coffee from three of the four carts and then sat down on the stone steps of the library. Everyone looked red-eyed and shaky and pale, but the coffee would help, soon enough. That, and the bright light of day.

  “Riddle,” I said, quiet, almost under my breath.

  Luke and Sunshine sat next to each other, their knees touching. Sunshine’s hair looked soft and pretty in the early light. Luke kept running his hand over it, like he thought so too, or like he was trying to keep her calm.