“I’m going to ask you one more time, son,” he says.
All of them know that tone of voice and what it means. Every face in the room goes still; all eyes turn on the man about to erupt into violence.
“No,” Morgan says. He’s going to die, he thinks. Right now. Right here.
Instead, the old man swings his gun toward Ellie and shoots her full in the chest. Her chair crashes over backward and she falls to the floor, blood staining the front of her dress. Jack drops to his knees beside her, calling her name, pressing his hands against a red tide that will not be stemmed.
Before Morgan can think to speak or move, the back of Jack’s head is gone and he slumps over his sister.
“No,” Weston shouts, or means to. His voice comes out small and quavering. This can’t have just happened, can’t be happening. “I’ll do it. Whatever you want—”
The old man’s mouth stretches into a grin. “You’re too late, son.”
The gun swings toward Will, who has time to say one word—please—before he has no jaw to speak with.
“All I asked of you was for you to do your job,” his father says. “You wanted one of the others to do it. Now there are no others.”
But there is one, still. Grace. Blood in her hair, on her face, her dress drenched in it. She has left the table, is standing beside Morgan.
She lifts the shotgun, still clenched in his hands, aims, pulls the trigger. The kick startles him out of his shock as crimson blooms on their father’s chest. The old man’s jaw goes slack. The hand holding the gun sinks toward the floor. His mouth opens to say something and then he collapses.
“Coward,” Grace says.
Morgan realized he was rocking like a small child or a man insane. He could have saved them all. One shot to take out the old man before he killed anybody. Grace would have done it, if she’d had the gun. She was only a child and she’d been able to think and act.
Or he could have just done as his father demanded and agreed to be the Dreamshifter.
People were dead because of his failure to act. His brothers and sisters. Carpenter and Jenn. It was time for justice, and he knew only one way to make things right.
Eighteen
Vivian white-knuckled the steering wheel of her old Subaru, partly to stay on the road and partly to keep from bouncing off the seat. Poe, making good use of his flightless wings to keep his balance, made reproachful noises that sounded human. She didn’t blame him.
This couldn’t be called a road; it was little more than two tire tracks through the forest. Tall grasses swished along the bottom of her car. Bushes and tree branches scraped along the sides. Once she drove over something that made a long metallic screech and she held her breath, waiting for the radiator to explode or the smell of gasoline to fill the air.
At least one other vehicle had traveled here, and not long ago. The grass was flattened in the tire tracks and had not yet stood back up again. It worried her at first to think about encountering a stranger in the middle of nowhere, but then she began to notice the trailers and shacks along the way, well off the track and nearly hidden in the trees. Civilization, of a sort.
She hoped to God she’d read the map right, but even if she hadn’t she was going to keep on driving because there was no safe place to turn around and she sure as hell wasn’t backing all the way out of here. At least it was early in the day and she wouldn’t get caught out in the dark. At least she had a full tank of gas.
These were small mercies, but she clung to them.
Time swirled around her ears, sang in her veins, whispered through every cell of her body with an urgency she could not ignore. Not the winged chariot of Donne’s poem, merely drawing near, but right here and now, in your face, like a cat in the morning when you’re trying to sleep.
Something was about to happen. Maybe she could stop it, but she didn’t have much time.
Just as she was beginning to truly doubt her sense of direction and the map, the track widened and she drove into a clearing. As she had feared, she was not alone. There was another vehicle—a battered old pickup truck, dented and scratched, so mud-covered she couldn’t figure out its color. It bore B.C. license plates, which meant someone was a long way from home, and the chances of ending up in this place accidentally seemed slim.
She stayed close to the car, looking around for movement. She had no weapon on her, not even a can of bear spray. No phone. Not that there would be a signal out here anyway. A raven flew across the clearing and settled in a tree not ten feet away, peering down at her. Other than the inquisitive bird, nothing moved. Nobody appeared from out of the bushes or behind any trees, and after a long moment Vivian eased the door closed and walked over to check out the pickup.
It was empty.
She opened the passenger-side door and rifled through the glove box. The truck was registered to a Morgan Weathersby, of Trail, B.C. A litter of receipts from grocery stores and gas stations for coffee and soda covered the passenger-side floor. A coffee mug, an empty chip bag. Nothing else. No wallet. No weapons, although there was a gun rack in the back window. In the bed of the truck a couple of gas cans, strapped down with bungee cords. A backpack, complete with canteen and sleeping bag.
The raven took flight in a burst of feathers. Vivian startled, pressing her hand over her racing heart. Poe stood beside her, his black eyes following the path of the bird toward the house. It lit on the eaves, scolding something out of sight.
A heartbeat later the target of the raven’s attention emerged from around the corner of the house—a man wearing a red flannel shirt and faded jeans. Long gray hair hung in snarls over his shoulders; a grizzled beard cascaded over his breast. Vivian took an unconscious step forward. He was hurt in some way, moving in a shambling, loose-limbed gait as though something were broken and he hadn’t realized it yet.
In his hand he carried a large container, fire-engine red. He bent over at the waist, pouring liquid onto the ground, splashing it up onto the walls of the house.
Vivian’s brain registered slowly, making a delayed connection with the gas cans in the back of the pickup.
She broke into a dead run, but it felt slow-motion, like running in a dream. The man tossed the gas can toward the house, onto the sagging front porch, and stood up straight, both hands pressing into the small of his back as he stretched. He dug into his pocket and pulled something out, a small rectangular object. A motion of his right hand, and a flame burned. Matches.
Vivian found her breath and shouted, “No!”
The raven dove at the man’s head.
“Shoo, damn it!” he yelled at the bird. Shielding his head from the onslaught with his free arm, he tossed the match with the other. Flames erupted up out of the dry grass with a loud whoosh, licking hungrily at the old wood. All around the perimeter of the house the flames shot up. The front porch flared into an instant bonfire, the fire reaching in through the broken glass of a window.
“Are you insane?” Vivian shouted. She stood at a distance, helpless, the heat already reaching out to sting the skin of her face.
The raven still fussed, diving over and over again.
“Tar and damnation, you blasted bird!” Continuing to cover his head with one arm, the man dug in his pockets with his free hand, drew back his arm, and hurled something toward the hottest part of the fire.