I didn’t have any choice. As soon as he told me to go I turned toward the door. But I was desperate myself now. Knotting my fists, I held myself where I was. Urgently—so urgently that I could hardly separate the words—I breathed at him, “Have you looked at Kristen recently? Really looked? Haven’t you seen what’s happening to her? You—”
Root stopped me. He had that power. Reese had told me to go. Root simply raised his hand, and his strength hit me in the chest like a fist. My tongue was clamped to the roof of my mouth. My voice choked in my throat. For one moment while I staggered, the greenhouse turned in a complete circle, and I thought I was going to be thrown out of the world.
But I wasn’t. A couple of heartbeats later, I got my balance back.
Helpless to do anything else, I left the greenhouse.
As I crossed the foyer toward the front door, Reese shouted after me, “And stay away from my sister!”
Until I closed the door, I could hear Mortice Root chuckling with pleasure.
Dear God! I prayed. Let me decide. Just this once. He Isn’t worth it.
But I didn’t have the right.
On the other hand, I didn’t have to stay away from Kristen. That was up to her; Reese didn’t have any say in the matter.
I made myself walk slowly until I was out of sight of The Root Cellar, just in case someone was watching. Then I started to run.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the heat just kept getting worse. After the cool of Root’s mansion, the outside air felt like glue against my face. Sweat oozed into my eyes, stuck my coat to my back, itched maliciously in my dirty whiskers. The sunlight looked liked it was congealing on the walks and streets. Grimly, I thought, If this city doesn’t get some rain soon it will start to burn.
And yet I wanted the day to last, despite the heat. I would happily have caused the sun to stand still. I did not want to have to face Mortice Root and Reese Dona again after dark.
But I would have to deal with that possibility when it came up. First I had to get Kristen’s help. And to do that, I had to reach her.
The city did its best to hinder me. I left Root’s neighborhood easily enough; but when I entered the slums, I started having problems. I guess a running man dressed in nothing but an overcoat, a pair of pants, and sidesplit shoes looked like too much fun to miss. Gangs of kids seemed to materialize out of the ruined buildings to get in my way.
They should have known better. They were predators themselves, and I was on a hunt of my own; when they saw the danger in my eyes, they backed down. Some of them threw bottles and trash at my back, but that didn’t matter.
Then the sidewalks became more and more crowded as the slum faded behind me. People stepped in front of me, jostled me off my stride, swore angrily at me as I tried to run past. I had to slow down just to keep myself out of trouble. And all the lights were against me. At every corner, I had to wait and wait while mobs hemmed me in, instinctively blocking the path of anyone who wanted to get ahead of them. I felt like I was up against an active enemy. The city was rising to defend its own.
By the time I reached the street I needed to take .me over to 21st, I felt so ragged and wild I wanted to shake my fists at the sky and demand some kind of assistance or relief. But if God couldn’t see how much trouble I was in, He didn’t deserve what I was trying to do in His name. So I did the best I could—running in spurts, walking when I had to, risking the streets whenever I saw a break in the traffic. And finally I made it. Trembling, I reached the building where Reese and Kristen had their apartment.
Inside, it was as hot as an oven, baking its inhabitants to death. But here at least there was nobody in my way, and I took the stairs two and three at a time to the fourth floor. The lightbulb over the landing was out, but I didn’t have any trouble finding the door I needed.
I pounded on it with my fist. Pounded again. Didn’t hear anything. Hammered at the wood a third time.
“Kristen!” I shouted. I didn’t care how frantic I sounded. “Let me in! I’ve got to talk to you!”
Then I heard a small, faint noise through the panels. She must have been right on the other side of the door. Weakly, she said, “Go away.”
“Kristen!” Her dismissal left a welt of panic across my heart. I put my mouth to the crack of the door to make her hear me. “Reese needs help. If he doesn’t get it, you’re not going to survive. He doesn’t even realize he’s sacrificing you.”
After a moment, the lock clicked, and the door opened.
I went in.
The apartment was dark. She’d turned off all the lights. When she closed the door behind me, I couldn’t see a thing. I had to stand still so I wouldn’t bump into Reese’s sculptures.
“Kristen,” I said, half pleading, half commanding; “Turn on a light.”
Her reply was a whisper of misery. “You don’t want to see me.”
She sounded so beaten I almost gave up hope. Quietly, I said, “Please.”
She couldn’t refuse. She needed me too badly. I felt her move past me in the dark. Then the overhead lights clicked on, and I saw her.
I shouldn’t have been shocked—I knew what to expect—but that didn’t help. The sight of her went into me like a knife.
She was wearing only a terry cloth bathrobe. That made sense; she’d been poor for a long time and didn’t want to ruin her good clothes. The collar of her robe was soaked with blood.
Her nosebleed was worse.
And delicate red streams ran steadily from both her ears.
Sticky trails marked her lips and chin, the front of her throat, the sides of her neck. She’d given up trying to keep herself clean. Why should she bother? She was bleeding to death, and she knew it.
Involuntarily, I went to her and put my arms around her.
She leaned against me. I was all she had left. Into my shoulder, she said as if she were on the verge of tears. “I can’t help him anymore. I’ve tried and tried. I don’t know what else to do.”
She stood there quivering; and I held her and stroked her hair and let her blood soak into my coat. I didn’t have any other way to comfort her.
But her time was running out, just like Reese’s. The longer I waited, the weaker she would be. As soon as she became a little steadier, I lowered my arms and stepped back. In spite of the way I looked, I wanted her to be able to see what I was.
“He doesn’t need that kind of help now,” I said softly, willing her to believe me. Not the kind you’ve been giving him for ten years. “Not anymore. He needs me. That’s why I’m here.
“But I have to have permission.” I wanted to cry at her, You’ve been letting him do this to you for ten years’ None of this would’ve happened to you if you hadn’t allowed it! But I kept that protest to myself. “He keeps sending me away, and I have to go. I don’t have any choice. I can’t do anything without permission.
“It’s really that simple.” God, make her believe me! “I need somebody with me who wants me to be there. I need you to go back to The Root Cellar with me. Even Root won’t be able to get rid of me if you want me to stay.
“Kristen.” I moved closer to her again, put my hands in the blood on her cheek, on the side of her neck. “I’ll find some way to save him. If you’re there to give me permission.”
She didn’t look at me; she didn’t seem to have the courage to raise her eyes. But after a moment I felt the clear touch of grace. She believed me—when I didn’t have any particular reason to believe myself. Softly, she said, “I can’t go like this. Give me a minute to change my clothes.”
She still didn’t look at me. But when she turned to leave the room, I saw determination mustering in the corners of her eyes.
I breathed a prayer of long overdue thanks. She intended to fight.
I waited for her with fear beating in my bones. And when she returned—dressed in her dingy blouse and fraying skirt, with a towel wrapped around her neck to catch the blood—and announced that she was ready to go, I faltered. She looked so w
an and frail—already weak and unnaturally pale from loss of blood. I felt sure she wasn’t going to be able to walk all the way to The Root Cellar.
Carefully, I asked her if there was any other way we could get where we were going. But she shrugged the question aside. She and Reese had never owned a car. And he’d taken what little money was available in order to rent a truck to take his last pieces to the gallery.
Groaning a silent appeal for help, I held her arm to give her what support I could. Together, we left the apartment, went down the old stairs and out to the street.
I felt a new sting of dread when I saw that the sun was setting. For all my efforts to hurry, I’d taken too much time. Now I would have to contend with Mortice Root at night.
Twilight and darkness brought no relief from the heat. The city had spent all day absorbing the pressure of the sun; now the walks and buildings, every stretch of cement seemed to emit fire like the sides of a furnace. The air felt thick and ominous—as charged with intention as a thunderstorm, but trapped somehow, prevented from release, tense with suffering.
It sucked the strength out of Kristen with every breath. Before we’d gone five blocks, she was leaning most of her weight on me. That was frightening, not because she was more than I could bear, but because she seemed to weigh so little. Her substance was bleeding away. In the garish and unreliable light of the streetlamps, shop windows, and signs, only the dark marks on her face and neck appeared real.
But we were given one blessing: the city itself left us alone. It had done its part by delaying me earlier. We passed through crowds and traffic, past gutted tenements and stalking gangs, as if we didn’t deserve to be noticed anymore.
Kristen didn’t complain, and I didn’t let her stumble. One by one, we covered the blocks. When she wanted to rest, we put our backs to the hot walls and leaned against them until she was ready to go on.
During that whole long, slow creep through the pitiless dark, she only spoke to me once. While we were resting again, sometime after we turned on 49th, she said quietly, “I still don’t know your name.”
We were committed to each other; I owed her the truth. “I don’t either,” I said. Behind the wall of the past, any number of things were hidden from me.
She seemed to accept that. Or maybe she just didn’t have enough strength left to worry about both Reese and me. She rested a little while longer. Then we started walking again.
And at last we left the last slum behind and made our slow, frail, approach to The Root Cellar. Between streetlights I looked for the moon, but it wasn’t able to show through the clenched haze. I was sweating like a frightened animal. But Kristen might have been immune to the heat. All she did was lean on me and walk and bleed.
I didn’t know what to expect at Root’s mansion. Trouble of some kind. An entire squadron of security guards. Minor demons lurking in the bushes around the front porch. Or an empty building, deserted for the night. But the place wasn’t deserted. All the rest of the mansion was dark; the greenhouse burned with light. Reese wasn’t able to leave his pieces alone before his show. And none of the agents that Root might have used against us appeared. He was that sure of himself.
On the other hand, the front door was locked with a variety of bolts and wires.
But Kristen was breathing sharply, urgently. Fear and desire and determination made her as feverish as her brother; she wanted me to take her inside, to Reese’s defense. And she’d lost a dangerous amount of blood. She wasn’t going to be able to stay on her feet much longer. I took hold of the door, and it opened without a sound. Cool air poured out at us, as concentrated as a moan of anguish.
We went in.
The foyer was dark. But a wash of light from the cracks of the greenhouse doors showed us our way. The carpet muffled our feet. Except for her ragged breathing and my frightened heart, we were as silent as spirits.
But as we got near the greenhouse, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. I was too scared.
I caused the doors to burst open with a crash that shook the walls. At the same time, I tried to charge forward.
The brilliance of the gallery seemed to explode in my face. For an instant, I was dazzled.
And I was stopped. The light felt as solid as the wall that cut me off from the past.
Almost at once, my vision cleared, and I saw Mortice Root and Reese Dona. They were alone in the room, standing in front of a sculpture I hadn’t seen earlier—the biggest piece here. Reese must have brought it in his rented truck. It was a wild, swept-winged, malignant bird of prey, its beak wide in a cry of fury. One of its clawed feet was curled like a fist. The other was gripped deep into a’ man’s chest. Agony stretched the man’s face.
At least Reese had the decency to be surprised. Root wasn’t. He faced us and grinned.
Reese gaped dismay at Kristen and me for one moment. Then, with a wrench like an act of violence, he turned his back. His shoulders hunched; his arms clamped over his stomach. “I told you to go away.” His voice sounded like he was strangling. “I told you to leave her alone.”
The light seemed to blow against me like a wind. Like the current of the river that carried me away, taking me from place to place without past and without future, hope. it was rising. It held me in the doorway; I couldn’t move through it.
“You are a fool,” Root said to me. His voice rode the light as if he were shouting. “You have been denied. You cannot enter here.”
He was so strong that I was already half turned to leave when Kristen saved me.
As pale as ash, she stood beside me. Fresh blood from her nose and ears marked her skin. The towel around her neck was sodden and terrible. She looked too weak to keep standing. Yet she matched her capacity for desperation against. Reese’s need.
“No,” she said in the teeth of the light and Root’s grin. “He can stay. I want him here.”
I jerked myself toward Reese again.
Ferocity came at me like a cataract; but I stood against it. I had Kristen’s permission. That had to be enough.
“Look at her!” I croaked at his back. “She’s your sister! Look at her!”
He didn’t seem to hear me at all. He was hunched over himself in front of his work. “Go away,” he breathed weakly, as if he were talking to himself. “I can’t stand it. Just go away.”
Gritting prayers between my teeth like curses, I lowered my head, called up every ache and fragment of strength I had left, and took one step into the greenhouse.
Reese fell to his knees as if I’d broken the only string that held him upright.
At the same time, the bird of prey poised above him moved.
Its wings beat downward. Its talons clenched. The heart of its victim burst in his chest.
From his clay throat came a brief hoarse wail of pain. Driven by urgency, I took two more steps through the intense pressure walled against me.
And all the pieces displayed in the greenhouse started to move.
Tormented statuettes fell from their niches, cracked open, and cried out. Gargoyles mewed hideously. The mouths of victims gaped open and whined. In a few swift moments, the air was full of muffled shrieks and screams.
Through the pain, and the fierce current forcing me away from Reese, and the horror, I heard Mortice Root start to laugh.
If Kristen had failed me then, I would have been finished. But in some way she had made herself blind and deaf to what was happening. Her entire soul was focused on one object—help for her brother—and she willed me forward with all the passion she had learned in ten years of self-sacrifice. She was prepared to spend the last of her life here for Reese’s sake.
She made it possible for me to keep going.
Black anguish rose like a current at me. And the force of the light mounted. I felt it ripping at my skin. It was as hot as the hunger ravening for Reese’s heart.
Yet I took two more steps.
And two more.
And reached him.
He still knelt under the wingspread of th
e nightmare bird he had created. The light didn’t hurt him; he didn’t feel it at all. He was on his knees because he simply couldn’t stand. He gripped his arms over his heart to keep himself from howling.
There I noticed something I should have recognized earlier. He had sculpted a man for his bird of prey to attack, not a woman. I could see the figure clearly enough now to realize that Reese had given the man his own features. Here, at least, he had shaped one of his own terrors rather than merely bringing out the darkness of Mortice Root’s clay.
After that, nothing else mattered. I didn’t feel the pain or the pressure; ferocity and dismay lost their power.
I knelt in front of Reese, took hold of his shoulders, and hugged him like a child. “Just look at her,” I breathed into his ear. “She’s your sister. You don’t have to do this to her.”
She stood across the room from me with her eyes closed and her determination gripped in her small fists.
From under her eyelids, stark blood streamed down her cheeks.
I pleaded. “I can help you. Just look.” In the end, he didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to. He knew what was happening.
Suddenly, he wrenched out of my embrace. His arms flung me aside. He raised his head, and one lorn wail corded his throat:
“Kristen!”
Root’s laughter stopped as if it’d been cut down with an axe.
That cry was all I needed. It came right from Reese’s heart, too pure to be denied. It was permission, and I took it.
I rose to my feet, easily now, easily. All the things that stood in my way made no difference. Transformed, I faced Mortice Root across the swelling force of his malice. All his confidence was gone to panic.
Slowly, I raised my arms.
Beams of white sprouted from my palms, clean white almost silver. It wasn’t fire or light in any worldly sense; but it blazed over my head like light, ran down my arms like fire. It took my coat and pants, even my shoes, away from me in flames. Then it wrapped me in the robes of God until all my body burned.
Root tried to scream, but his voice didn’t make any sound.
Towering white-silver, I reached up into the storm-dammed sky and brought down a blast that staggered the entire mansion to its foundations. Crashing past glass and frame and light fixtures, a bolt that might have been lightning took hold of Root from head to foot. For an instant, the gallery’s lights failed. Everything turned black except for Root’s horror etched against darkness and the blast that bore him away.