“Can’t kill me quite so easily,” Sally said. “O’Brien’s guard must have been down if they took him without a fight.”
“Veronica gave us-”
“Trix!” Sally snapped. “Do you want to find what you came looking for, or not?” With that, she went up the stairs, Martha following behind her.
Trix stared after them for several seconds, then hustled to catch up. They emerged in a corridor, but half a dozen steps took them into the front of the house, where a silent battle raged in the front rooms and through the open door.
The Shadow Men-the horrible wraiths who had paced her through the devastated city-were locked in combat with the spindle-limbed No-Face Men Sally had summoned. The two sides were at war, grappling in utter silence, tearing at one another with ghostly claws. Their flesh, flayed and ripped, seemed like gray cotton batting but dissipated like smoke in the air. They throttled one another, sailing across the rooms, crashing through walls as though they themselves were solid and the twin collided cities were some haunted ghostland.
Trix faltered, astonished by the scene unfolding around her, but then fear and good sense got her moving and she hurried, praying that she would not be noticed. As thought caught in Sally’s wake, several of Veronica’s wraiths turned to pursue her, only to be snagged by the long talons of their enemies, whose flickering static faces were brutally blank. One of the No-Face Men opened its mouth-a gaping, saw-toothed maw of oil-black nothing that looked like a hole torn in the curtain of the world, on the other side of which anything might be lurking. It swallowed the Shadow Man’s head, biting it off with a silent snap of its jaws. The Shadow Man turned to smoke, drifting and fading in seconds.
There were several dead people on the floor, heads caved in from being smashed against walls or floors, limbs broken. Despair filled the hollow places inside Trix. These people had come to the Oracle for help in making sense of the collision of the cities, or to find those they had lost in the madness. The others who had come to Sally were gone now, scattered by the bloodshed and the sight of the wraiths. They had run for their lives. But others would come, just as Trix had gone to find Veronica when Jenny and Holly had gone missing. They would be in danger.
Another Shadow Man reached for Sally, and a No-Face Man latched on to it from behind, tearing away strips of its flesh as if it were made of cotton candy.
Sally ran out the door and into the street, pulling Martha behind her. Trix ran out after them, realizing that she had been holding her breath since the basement. She exhaled, turning around in fright. There were Shadow Men and No-Face Men in the street, too, but only a few.
“Go,” Sally told Martha, giving her a little shove. “Donnie will be all right if they find him soon. But you’ve got to hurry.”
“Thank you,” Martha said, backing away. “Oh, my God, thank you.” She fled then, and for a moment Trix wished she could follow.
Sally turned and glared at Trix, one hip cocked. In her sneakers and jeans and Miley Cyrus T-shirt, the little girl would have looked almost adorably precocious, impossible to take seriously, were it not for the pain and wisdom in her eyes. “Now, you,” she said. “Come with me. Don’t stop for anything.”
Sally turned and started to run. Several people who had obviously come looking for her tried to stop her, calling to her, but she ignored them and ran on. Trix kept up, avoiding places where the pavement was cracked or broken, lamenting that she could not stop to help a group of people frantically moving rubble away from a collapsed synagogue.
“Where are we going?” Trix asked, panting, as they rounded a corner, jumping onto the sidewalk to avoid the water that gushed from a broken hydrant and the wreckage of half a dozen cars that were mashed together in the street.
Sally shot her a hard look. “Somewhere they won’t be able to follow you.”
“Me?” Trix asked. “They’re after you.”
Sally turned right to avoid the road ahead, where an office building and an old music hall had tried and failed to co-exist, and debris blocked the street. “Yeah, they’re after me. But they’re following you. Veronica marked you with something her Shadow Men can always find, and whatever it is, it broke down the wards and safeguards I’d put on my house. It must have done the same to Peter O’Brien’s bar, if they were able to get in there after him. But there must have been more. Did you hand him anything from her?”
“A letter.”
Sally nodded. “Hobbling hex. Easily done, if you know how.”
“Enabling those things to attack him?”
“O’Brien would have been slowed, his ability to fight back reduced. And he’d have known what was happening.”
“So it is our fault,” Trix said softly, and Sally said nothing to disabuse her of that notion.
Trix’s legs hurt from running. Her chest burned from effort and her mind whirled as she tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. She thought of O’Brien opening the envelope, swearing when he found the black-spotted page. He must have known in that moment that danger was approaching.
Trix felt herself swept along in Sally’s wake. What could she do now? How was she supposed to find Jenny and Holly? And what about Jim? They were moving farther and farther away from Jenny’s parents’ restaurant. If Jim went looking for her at Sally Bennet’s address, he would find nothing but dead people.
“My friend-”
“Later,” Sally said. “First, we get somewhere they can’t find us. Then we get that mark off of you.”
Trix gasped. “Mark on me?”
“The Shadow Men are following you somehow.”
“But she never touched me,” Trix said, thinking back to her brief time with Veronica, wondering.
“Doesn’t matter. Did it somehow, and it needs removing. Then I have to stop that bitch from doing to your Boston what she’s done to mine!”
“And killing you,” Trix said.
Sally slowed down, out of breath, getting her bearings. She looked at Trix. “That, too,” she agreed. She glanced back and Trix followed her gaze. There was no sign of the Shadow Men, but if Trix was really marked, they would find her again as soon as they got away from Sally’s No-Face Men.
Her heart ached, but not from exertion. In all of this madness, with the stakes so high, how would she ever find Jenny and Holly?
“Hey,” Sally said, reaching out to touch her. “I’ll find them. Whoever you and your friend are looking for, I’ll find them, and get you out of here. We’ll all be safer with you back where you belong.”
Trix felt relief wash through her, but then she frowned. She didn’t understand why Sally would bother to help her in the midst of all this.
An angry sneer lifted one corner of the little girl’s mouth, and suddenly Sally seemed much older, almost cruel. “I’m going to send you back with my own mark on you,” she said. “And with my No-Faces on your trail. I won’t let them kill Veronica, but they can punish her. Imprison her. Keep her from trying this fucking shit again.”
Trix stared at her in wonder. Ten or eleven years old, but so much older than her years, Sally Bennet had it all figured out. She might not be able to turn back time and prevent the horror and devastation that had hit two Bostons tonight, but she knew how to stop Veronica from making it any worse. And Trix and Jim would get Jenny and Holly back in the bargain.
“Just tell me what I need to do,” Trix said, hopes soaring.
“For now?” Sally said, grim and dark-eyed. “Just keep up.”
She started running again. Trix took a deep breath and ran after her, putting her fate and the fate of those she loved in the hands of a little girl. But she knew she had no choice. Jenny and Holly were out there, somewhere, in the ruin of two cities. The survivors of those two Bostons, and the people of Trix’s own city… they were all now depending on Sally Bennet.
When he saw Jenny shrink away from him, all of Jim’s strength fled. For an instant, hope had raced through him like adrenaline fire, but then he had seen the lack of recognition in her eyes and knew that when she looked at him, she saw a stranger. This wasn’t his Jenny.