She thought about it a moment. The gypsy morph was a child, a newborn less than thirty days formed, and as a four-year-old boy, it might be necessary that he be reassured and won over. She hadn't done that. She hadn't even tried, feeling pressed and rushed by Ross. The morph might need her badly, but needing and trusting were two different things entirely.
"All right," she said.
"Good." He lifted away from the bridge, straightening. "Now I will explain my reason for asking to speak with you. It is simple. I am your friend, and I came to say good-bye. I am the last of the Sinnissippi, and I have come home to be with my people. I wanted you to know, because it is possible I will not see you again."
Nest stared, absorbing the impact of his words. "Your people are all dead, O'olish Amaneh. Does this mean you will die, too?"
He laughed, and his laugh was hearty and full. "You should see your face, little bird's Nest! I would be afraid to die with such a fierce countenance confronting me! Mr. Pick! Look at her! Such fierce resolution and rebuke in her eyes! How do you withstand this power when it is turned on you?"
He sobered then, and shook his head. "This is difficult to explain, but I will try. By joining with my ancestors, with my people, who are gone from this earth, I do not have to give up my own life in the way you imagine. But I must bond with them in a different form. By doing so, I must give up something of myself. It is difficult to know beforehand what this will require. I say good-bye as a precaution, in the event I am not able to return to you."
"Transmutation?" she asked. "You will become something else."
"In a sense. But then, I always was." He brushed the matter off with a wave of his big hand. "If I leave, I will not be gone forever. Like the seasons, I will still be in the seeds of the earth, waiting." He shrugged. "My leaving is a small thing. I will not be missed."
She exhaled sharply. "Don't say that. It isn't true."
There was a long silence as they faced each other in the graying winter light, motionless in the cold, breath clouding the air before their intense faces. "It isn't true for you," he said finally. "I am grateful for that."
She was still fighting to accept the idea that he would not be there anymore, that he would be as lost to her as Gran and Old Bob, as her mother and her father, as so many of her friends. It was a strange reaction to have to someone she had encountered only twice before and had such mixed feelings about. It was an odd response no matter how she looked at it. The closest parallel she could draw was to Wraith, when he had disappeared on her eighteenth birthday, gone forever it seemed, until she discovered him anew inside her.
Would it be like that with O'olish Amaneh?
"When will this happen?" she asked, her voice tight and small.
"When it is time. Perhaps it will not happen at all. Perhaps the spirits of my people will not have me."
"Perhaps they'll throw you back when they find out you talk in riddles all the time!" Pick snapped.
Two Bears' laughter boomed through the empty woods. "Perhaps if they do, I will have to come live with you, Mr. Pick!" He glanced at Nest. "Come, walk with me some more."
They retraced their steps down the ravine toward the bayou, then along the river bank where the woods hugged the shoreline, the dark, skeletal limbs crisscrossing the graying skies. The air was crisp and cold, but there was a fresh dampness as well, the smell of incoming snow, thick and heavy. The Rock was frozen solid below the toboggan run, and there would be sleds on the ice by nightfall.
When they reached the edge of the woods and were in sight of the wooden chute where it opened onto the ice, Two Bears stopped.
"Even when I am with my people, you may see me again, little bird's Nest," he said.
She wrinkled her nose. "Like a ghost?"
"Perhaps. Are you afraid of what that might mean?"
She gave him a look. "We're friends, aren't we?"
"Always."
"Then I have no reason to be afraid."
He shook his head in contradiction. "If I come to you, I will do so as my ancestors did for me in the park fifteen years ago—in dreams. They came to you as well that night. Do you remember?"
She did. Fifteen years ago, her dreams of the Sinnissippi had shown Gran as a young girl, running with a demon in the park, feeders chasing after her, a wild, reckless look in her dark eyes. They had revealed truths that had changed everything.
"There is always cause to be afraid of what our dreams will show us," he whispered. One hand lifted to touch her face gently. "Speak my name once more."
"O'olish Amaneh," she said.
"No one will ever say it and give me greater pleasure. The winds bear your words to the heavens and scatter them as stars."
He gestured skyward, and her eyes responded to the gesture, searching obediently.
When she looked back again, he was gone.
"Just tell me this," Pick said after a long moment of silence. "Do you have any idea what he was talking about?"
John Ross came down the hallway to the living room and found Bennett Scott sitting in a chair reading a Sports Illustrated while Harper colored paper on the floor. The gypsy morph knelt on the couch and stared out the window as if turned to stone.
Bennett looked up, and he asked, "Where's Nest?"
She shrugged. "Out in the park, talking with some Indian."
A cold space settled in the pit of his stomach. Two Bears. He leaned heavily on his staff, thinking that it was all going to happen again, a new confrontation between the Word and the Void, another battle in an endless war. What was expected of him this time? To unlock the secret of the morph, he knew. But if he failed...
He brushed his thoughts aside, finding they spiraled down into a darkness he didn't care to approach. He thought back suddenly to the Fairy Glen and the Lady, to his last visit there, and to the secret he had discovered and could never share with anyone. Thinking on it made him suddenly weary of his life.
"Are you all right?" Bennett Scott asked him.
He almost laughed, thinking that he would never be all right, thinking the question strange coming from her. "Yes," he said, and walked into the kitchen.
He had poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and was halfway through it when the doorbell rang. When it rang a second time, he walked to the kitchen entry and looked into the living room. Harper was in her mother's lap, a storybook in her hands. Bennett glanced up and shrugged indifferently, so Ross limped down the hallway instead.
When he opened the front door, Josie Jackson was waiting.
CHAPTER 12
It had been fifteen years since they had seen each other, but it might just as easily have been yesterday. Physically, they had changed, weathered and lined by the passing years and life's experiences, settled into midlife and aware of the steady approach of old age. But emotionally, they were frozen in time, locked in the same space they had occupied at the moment they had spoken last. Their feelings for each other ran so deep and their memories of the few days they had shared were so vivid and immediate that they were reclaimed instantly by what they had both thought lost forever.
"John?" Josie said his name softly, but the shock mirrored in her dark eyes was bright and painful.
She was older, but not enough so that it made more than a passing impression on him. Mostly, she was the way he remembered her. She still had that tanned, fresh look and that scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her blond, tousled hair was cut shorter, but it accentuated her face, lending it a soft, cameo beauty.
Only the smile was missing, that dazzling, wondrous smile, but he had no reason to expect she would be inclined to share it now with him. When he met her, the attraction was instantaneous and electric. Even though he knew that a relationship with her would be disastrous, particularly one in which he fell in love, he let it happen anyway. For two days, he allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to have a normal life, to share himself with a woman he cared about, to pretend it might lead to something permanent. Together, they spent an evening in Sinnissippi Park at a picnic and dance. When he was attacked and beaten by men who believed him someone other than who he was, she took him home, washed him, bandaged him, soothed him, and gave herself to him. When he left her in the morning for a final confrontation with the demon who was Nest Freemark's father, walking away from her as she sat in her car looking after him, he had thought he would never see her again.