He crouched on one knee, feeling the wet sponginess of dirt mixed with pine needles and leaves and sticks. Now I’m a real Injun. He put his face down and inhaled. It smelled like his childhood: sweet and thick and mineral. What was this if not real?
The beating in his chest slowed.
The woman in the long black coat had grayish eyes. Her hair was black, pulled back, ringed by a single line of silver. She was small and older. She had been pretty once and carried a cane in her right hand. He’d have to identify her eventually. She’d be charged with murder.
Someone scuffled on the path behind him; a hushed male voice floated around the trees, more like an odor than a sound. Nix turned. Whoever it was hadn’t rounded the bend. He strained. The voice was familiar to him, its rasp, its conspiratorial tone.
Without thinking he slipped behind a tree, pressing his back to it, feeling its rough striations. He felt for the last of the dust in his jacket pocket and reminded himself that he hadn’t taken any that morning. Or had he? Was this withdrawal? Was this a hallucination? If it was, he was still in it. It wasn’t going away. Nor, Nix recalled, did any of them, no matter how much dust he took. All that crap about forgetting: Nix didn’t forget anything. Daddy Saint-Michael and him on a boat on the glassy sea, his mother sitting in Koloskov’s singing, I can’t stand the rain, her idea of a joke. The smell of buses and public bathrooms and death. The hallucination that was his life.
He could make out the soft shuffle of two pairs of legs and he pressed closer to the trunk; the passersby approached. The single voice had gotten clearer. Nix could make out the barest hint of a higher voice, too: light, girlish. He was afraid to peer out beyond the trunk to see who it was, but words slowly took shape.
“Here, pet. Eat it. You’ll feel better.”
Nix cringed. He knew what was being offered. The man’s voice was thin and reedy, placating yet aggressive. The girl with him moaned.
They paused beyond the tree. Nix placed himself so that he could get a partial view.
He could see only the backs of their heads, but in the moonlight he knew immediately who he was looking at. That receding corn-husk hair. The squat neck. The red jacket. He would have known that fucking jacket anywhere. And the girl next to him, whose slight shoulders Tim Bleeker bearishly grasped, whose little sock, Nix noticed, had dropped sadly on her thin ankle. Not embracing, but pulling her closer, weighing her down so that she had to lean on him to stay up; that pathetic little thing was Neve.
Nix didn’t need to think much before he stepped out of the woods toward them.
MORGAN D’AMICI BIT THE KNUCKLES of her pointer fingers to keep from smiling. Hard. Or at least, she thought, hard enough for it to hurt. She liked a bit of physical unpleasantness every once in a while. Some might call it pain. But pain was so messy. Anything taken to an extreme was unpleasant. A little bit of pressure — combined with that ice cube feeling of sharpness — it kept one’s will strong. It kept one from slipping — Morgan cleared an imaginary strand of hair from her brow — into messiness. Cloudy thinking. The miserable in-between.
She took a breath and tipped her chin up, looking straight at the empty stage. Already people had started to dismantle it. So that was what had accounted for the jury-rigged nature of the Ring of Fire. The gathering had to be broken down quickly, in case something went wrong. Which, tonight, it most certainly had.
Morgan had been at the outskirts of the mysterious circle when it had started to shift. She had watched the pillar rise: the stakes hammered into the ground, the cloth-wrapped spokes lying like ribbons on an Easter bonnet. She had spoken to no one and no one had spoken to her. Her experience with the freak in the parking lot had prepared her. When that boy from San Francisco came around with dust, Morgan had taken it willingly, despite her bad experience in Eugene. Something very out of the ordinary was occurring and she wanted to take full advantage of it.
When the Flame left the stage and took up their posts at the pillar with the others, Morgan almost swallowed her tongue. She was that excited.
Exidis, they had chanted. The word she had been trying to remember all those weeks after Ondine’s party. The one Moth had whispered in her ear.
Just before the lightning struck, balls of electricity, many-colored orbs, like giant sparkling Christmas balls, burst from the stem of the pillar and tumbled to earth, rolling willy-nilly through the pulsing crowd. Not among them. Through them. Through their bodies: in one side, out the other.
That only one died seemed a miracle. When the bolt came, it was as if the sky had parted and delivered a pure blast of unimaginable cosmic heat straight to the center of the earth. The entire structure of the ring — for that’s what it was, Morgan deduced from looking at its unshrouded shape, a rather primitive superconductor ring — flashed blue, then red, then dirty orange, its human attachments frizzed off like so many burnt husks.
The others were struggling to awaken. The woman in the black coat had emerged from the crowd, giving brisk orders for someone to call 911, and had then spoken directly to her. Or so it had seemed. For the crowd had parted around three lone bodies as soon as the chanting started, and Morgan had understood, in an instant, the answer to so many questions: Why she’d been attracted to Ondine Mason. Why Nix Saint-Michael had shown up at their party that night. Why all of them were in the mountains together. But now Ondine was passed out, having danced pathetically right in front of her, and Nix — whom she’d spotted earlier at the edge of the crowd casting his eyes around as if he were looking for someone — was nowhere to be seen. Not that Morgan much cared.
“Listen closely,” the woman had said. “Starting now.”
So she did. Morgan always had been good at following orders.
“You are called a changeling.” Her voice was metallic and raspy, like a bell rubbing against a cheese grater, and she spoke quickly, without ceasing, so Morgan had to concentrate to remember the terminology.
“Your human body is used to hold what you truly are, which is not of this world, nor of humanly conceivable proportions. You belong to another dimension: Novala. The never-ending, the one. The everything and nothing. Your time in the human world, everything you’ve known thus far, is but an intermediate state in your ultimate evolution. What you have just witnessed is the exidis of a group of your kind, leaving their bodies and entering their true home. We call it Novala. New Land. Be advised. These are all simplified ways of understanding what is beyond any human’s ken.”
That’s when Morgan saw James Motherwell, whispering something to the woman before he progressed to Ondine.
“The ring is a superconducting vortex. At its center is cold fission. Lightning is used to power the conduit, liquid nitrogen to keep it cold. The exidis takes immense energy and preparation and that is why we are here. The ring is your cocoon. You will be reborn into Novala as a being of such unimaginable power and greatness there are no words to describe its awesome totality.”
Here her voice softened.
“Soon you will know it. You will see it. You will come so close….
“Human life is ending. You have already witnessed its initial corrosions. Is Novala a safe place? Should we doubt it? You have a chance to join the existence of a higher plane. The fay. The one. The ever changing and immutable. We have been with you through all time. The bodies you inhabit are our conduits. You, the changelings, are chosen for your fitness and intelligence and energy.”
Her voice became colder, though her eyes remained quiet. “You have only a year to learn and organize. There will be those who will try to disrupt your progress. Family, friends. They will ask why you seem different. Why you seem, perhaps, oddly happy. Or sad. You must tell no one. You must live as you have lived. You are safe in your ring. After your body reaches its mature state, which is soon, the pressure of the inhabitation will start to wear on it, and it will rapidly deteriorate. If your corpus dies before the exidis, your fate will be of the harshest proportions.”
She paused. Morgan held
her breath.
“Study well the exidis and the laws of the fay. The boy’s fate you saw tonight” — for the first time the woman cast her opaque eyes down — “could have been averted. Each of you has a monitor. A ringer. You probably already know him.” She stopped and Morgan saw her eyes dart around, as if looking for someone. “A person who can read the health and fitness of your human corpus and advise you of its life force. Remember that your ringers are there to help you. Use them well.”
Ringers? But before Morgan had a chance to wonder, she took up again.
“The police and the ambulance will soon be here. Before then we will disperse.” She flicked her eyes to Moth, now back at her side. “You will want to know if you have ‘powers.’” The cold look resumed. “And you will find out. Your guide will help you. Remember that you must not allow your body to be harmed. There are chaotic, insidious forces out to hurt you. Changelings who have chosen the path away from their one fate. One is familiar to you already.
“You will know us by this mark.” And here she held up her wrist, upon which Morgan could make out a small tattoo of an X, the same one she had seen on Moth, the same on the rabid girl in the parking lot. “It is tattooed upon us after our initiation, and the radiation from the exidis completes its design. There are those in the world who have it. Humans. It means they were once inhabited. You will know the completed design when you see it. You mustn’t speak to them or show them your own sign. They have no memory of the experience. They have no memory they had once gone through the ring of fire.
“I am Viv. I am a scion. We are the bridges between changelings and fay. We stay in the world longer, and the threat of elimination is greater for us. Do not think that you will see us often. We come out rarely for fear of the evil ones.
“Cutters,” she whispered, and for the first time Morgan felt the full weight of the woman’s obdurate gaze.
“The humans over there.” She looked in the direction of the young men and women trying to rouse themselves. “They will soon awaken. You will not speak to them. You will allow them to be led back to their homes by their guides. They will wake up and believe that this was all a strange, singular experience. A party. Which, until ten minutes ago, it was. This is the effect of the dust that was given to you at the beginning of the night, and that will again be given to you at your exidis. You will take nothing in between.
“Finally.” Here the woman who called herself Viv looked behind her, at the stage. “The pet there. She is human.” The blonde was still standing, big and vacant, and Viv looked away. “The changelings used to have a practice of keeping uninhabited humans in bondage, under the influence of dust, for their …” She paused and searched for the word. “Enjoyment. This is absolutely forbidden. That girl should not have been here tonight.”
With this she turned to leave. Moth was at her elbow, leaning in, whispering. Around Morgan, order was resuming. She knew the woman must have been giving them time to take in what they had just learned, and of course she would need to check on what was happening with the dead boy in the ring.
The dead boy in the ring.
The people on the ground around the pillar were starting to rise, and Morgan knew instinctively that she should not be nearby when they woke up. The red-haired girl — their guide, she reasoned, or a ringer — was attending to each, gesturing with hands pointing at the sky, then hugging them. Others huddled around. The members of the Flame — for that’s why they had looked familiar, Morgan realized — searched in the half dark for their things. Another young man, a roadie type, had jumped onto the stage and was collecting backpacks. The blonde with the dreads from the parking lot was still there, staring at Morgan but keeping her distance. She didn’t see Nix. And Ondine, head in her hands, had made it to a fetal position. Nearly everyone else was gone. Morgan knew she should be, too.
She needed a moment to think.
A pretty face in the mirror. That’s what everyone thinks I am.
She crouched on the still-wet earth, then drew her legs to her chest and wrapped her thin arms around them.
“Tooth fairy,” she whispered, and laughed.
She had been right all along. She was different from other people. All those … mortals, with their Odor Eaters and their rotting teeth. She would be — the word seemed smaller than the feeling it inspired — a scion, like Viv. No, instead of Viv.
Though she knew she was getting ahead of herself, an early memory sprang before her. It had been tucked away somewhere, from a long-ago venture into the forest. She must have been younger than twelve, for the trees rose up high around her. A bird — her adult eye named it a falcon — circled above, looking for prey. Morgan could feel its hunger, its cold heart, the thin stream of air through its dagger beak. Each feather ruffled and the fine hairs on Morgan’s girlish arm distended in sympathy. She sensed and smelled and swooped. Another bird, helpless under an uncaring sky, had crossed its path. In a vicious instant the falcon had dived, caught the other in its talons, pierced its breast, and killed it.
K.A., she thought suddenly. Morgan pictured him, and a cold burning in her sinuses started. What was he, then? Were they related? Were they blood? She recalled the words Viv had used, still strange on her tongue: Changeling. Ringer. Corpus. There were so many questions. Who would answer them for her? Moth? The night of the party seemed far away. She shoved him and her brother out of her mind. Her mother, too, though it was painful. Yvonne and her out-of-date coats and slutty sundresses and cheap shoes.
Then she lit on it, as a child might on a toy she did not want to share. A half-formed word Viv had spoken at the end, in a tone so low it seemed it had oozed from the volcano around them. The ones who were evil, chaotic. The ones who were out to get them.
“Cutter,” Morgan pronounced half audibly, and pushed herself up from the rocky ground.
AT THE EDGE OF THE STAGE, Moth felt in his pockets for the keys to the car he’d driven. He was already thinking of what was next: the first moment he’d be able to talk to his ring. What would he say to them? He looked at the dissipating crowd, a scene he was so familiar with after his years in training. He was anxious to do things right, to avoid the mistakes his own guide had made, and that anxiety made him more jittery than usual. He scratched his chin where his beard should have been, jingling the keys in his pocket.
“Stop fidgeting!”
Viv scrutinized the younger man. Nothing on her face moved. She stared, her hand on the stick she always carried, but never leaned on, rather grasped, as a fighter would.
“Where is your head?”
Moth looked at his boots, then up again, trying to meet her eyes. The scion made him nervous, but he tried to quiet himself by running his thumb over the edge of the keys.
“Attend to what I say.”
Viv, intense and steely, was nevertheless not haughty. Her authority came from somewhere more rooted, some deep, certain place that allowed her to fixedly stare at the young man she was now addressing, calmly, precisely.
“You have been doing very well, Moth. You have made …” She rolled the stick in her right hand as she looked for the words. “Marked improvement. The responsibility has been good for you. You’re lucky. You might have been left behind. You know who I’m referring to.”
Though Viv was paying attention to the activities around her — the humans were gathering now; Moth could hear them asking about their friend, whose body had since been taken to the road — she kept her eyes locked onto his.
“Look at me.” He did. “Did they check his sign?”
Moth nodded. “Yes. Still the X. The exidis was not complete.”
A shadow passed over the woman’s face, but she recovered herself and resumed.
“What happened to that corpus is not your responsibility. As we speak, the new ringer is about to depart the gathering, having missed most of the first lesson. That cutter he is drawn to is more powerful than either of us acknowledges. No one has been able to track him, even though we know he is here, wi
th the girl. There is an active ringer here, Moth. Need I remind you? And though yours does not yet understand his power, Bleek does. Had I known Nix would be so” — Viv stilled her twisting cane — “flighty, I might have been able to intervene in such a way that at least he would have been able to hear the first lesson. Now he is leaving, and the burden will be on you to transmit the information that he missed.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Not to mention to make sure he gets home alive.”
Moth bit his bottom lip. His arms were crossed in front of him in bottled frustration. He seemed to want to say something, yet he remained silent.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, a brief but strong tremor.
“I will not tell you that you are forgiven,” Viv continued. “You have not earned it yet. Since the failure of your ring, you have been a model changeling: your actions just and true, your intent pure. But how is it that you managed to elude eliminating Bleek? How is it that he is here now, pet in tow, to disrupt a peaceful gathering of our tribe, a welcoming of the new changelings? How is it that this area, your territory since birth, has stayed mysterious enough to you that you did not know a cutter was gathering power in your presence?” She blinked, the intensity of her stare deepened, and Moth coughed.
“I don’t — I don’t feel well. I’m feeling sick. I’m tired. The schedule —”
“The schedule nothing. You are allowing your human traits to dominate you. You must be stronger. Your will must be more aligned, you must be clear and leave off what belongs to your corpus. You are not human, Moth. You are fay. Nothing humans have is what you want.” Viv abruptly pulled a slender stiletto from the folds of her billowing black coat. She held it in her palm for a moment, as if balancing it, then smoothly, with one deft movement, flipped the blade in her hand and drew it across Moth’s cheek. He looked down; a purple-red slash carved into the bone below his left eye. It welled a moment, threatening to spill.
Betwixt Page 16