No one laughed.
His mother was staring at him. That same expression as before. As if Meghan Marriner were looking at her child and seeing someone she didn’t quite know, or else she was memorizing his face.
“Mom . . .” he began.
She shook her head. “Go,” she said.
CHAPTER XVIII
In the van, wearing Kate’s brother’s shirt and his own McGill hoodie over jeans, Ned did his best to focus. He had his small runner’s pack with him, would change into sweatpants and a T-shirt as soon as they hit the road east.
He’d screened himself before going out the door, so had Aunt Kim. Checking within, neither of them had sensed the presence of either of the two men—which wasn’t anywhere close to conclusive, he knew.
He’d taken three Advil and brought half a dozen more, and his sunglasses. Thinking now about how he’d felt the last time they went past the mountain dragged his thoughts pretty conclusively away from the scent of Kate Wenger on the white shirt. He felt scared.
Kate—in his blue-and-white rugby shirt and the slandered windbreaker and retro Expos baseball cap—was with Uncle Dave and Steve in the red car. Greg was driving the van. Ned’s father was up front, and Aunt Kim was beside him in back—because his aunt would be with Kate, not Ned.
Kate had worked this out, too. Detail person. Geek. Long legs. He had her written-out directions in his backpack. Front flap pocket. He’d put the rowan leaves in there, too.
Ned’s mother had stayed in the villa. He wasn’t sure why, but the hug she’d given him at the door was fierce. Fierce enough to make him more afraid.
Greg hit the remote control and led the other car through the gates. They went down the roadway towards the street. They would split after the first turn there: the red car west and north to Entremont, the van to Sainte-Victoire.
“You have your phone?” his father said, from the front seat. He’d asked that already, in the house.
Ned nodded. “Got it, Dad, yeah.”
“It’s charged?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“You’ll call if anything comes up?”
“I will.”
This wasn’t the time, Ned thought, to be hung up on sounding like an almost-adult.
“Ned,” said his aunt, “listen to me. If one of them gets to you, either one, and he orders you to stop . . . honey, you have to stop. They won’t be at their best if they decide she’s up there. Don’t assume you’re safe.”
He looked at her. “I won’t,” he said.
Won’t be at their best. One way to put it.
His father, looking back at the two of them, swore softly.
Then, a moment later, for a different reason, Greg swore, much more loudly, and hammered the brakes.
Ned looked back quickly, but Uncle Dave wasn’t tailgating. He skidded the red car to a halt behind them.
Ned leaned forward and looked out the front windshield.
“Oh, God,” he said.
His aunt was already flipping open her cellphone, speed-dialing, and then, with more urgency than he’d heard from her yet, she snapped, “Dave, do not get out! Stay in your car!”
He looked at her. His father turned around.
“No!” Aunt Kim said. “Dave, this is not for you. Stay there!”
But by then, Ned had unlocked his own door, slid it back, and stepped into the road himself.
He was really, really angry.
For an instant, he wondered why it had been so important that his uncle stay in the car. He wanted to ask, but didn’t have time. It occurred to him that there were a lot of questions you might have and never learn the answers to. He wasn’t even sure why he was in the road himself, with so much fury. He heard his father shout his name from behind. A long way behind, it seemed. He walked in front of the van.
“Hey, you!” he yelled.
The boar, blocking the road, didn’t move.
It didn’t even look at him. It was gazing past Ned, past the van, off into the woods beside the road, as if oblivious to his presence.
It really was massive. The size of a small bear, practically, with short, matted bristly hair, more grey than white. The tusks were curved and heavy. There was mud on them, and on the body, caked and plastered to the hair. The boar was dead centre in the road, and there was no way around it.
“Get out of here!” Ned shouted. “Damn it, you’re the one who showed me where to go. What are you doing?”
The animal didn’t move. It didn’t even seem to have heard him. It was as if Ned didn’t exist for it. As if . . .
Ned was about to shout again, but he didn’t. Instead he took a deep breath. Then he released his screening.
When he did that, the boar turned its head. It looked straight at him, the small, bright eyes fixed on his. Ned swallowed.
“I’m here,” he said, not really knowing what he was saying. “I listened. Figured it out. I’m going up. Let me go.”
For a long moment it was very still on that country lane. No sound from the cars behind Ned, no movement from the creature in front.
No movement. They were stuck here, blocked. And Ysabel might be up on the mountain, and time mattered. They needed to move. Feeling a hard white surge of anger, Ned brought his two hands up, palms together, extended. He levelled them at the dirt road beside the animal. He shivered. A flash of light exploded from him and struck sparks from the ground, spraying dust and gravel forward.
The boar looked at him another moment, then it turned, unhurried, undisturbed, and trotted through the ditch and the underbrush and into the trees.
“Sweet Lord,” Ned heard Greg say, behind him. “What is going on?”
Ned hustled back into the van. He pushed his door shut. “Drive!” he said. “Fast, Greg. I have a feeling it just let them know where I am. Maybe more than that.”
He checked within for the presence of the two men; found nothing. He put his screening back on.
“Why would it do that?” his father said. “Jesus, Ned. And how did you . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” Questions, no answers. “But I have to beat them there. Let’s go.”
“Does it serve them?” Edward Marriner asked. There were deep, parallel lines creasing his forehead.
“Not that creature,” Aunt Kim said.
“Then what . . . ?”
“Don’t know,” she replied. “Go, Greg.”
Greg shifted into gear, hit the gas. He ran the stop sign at the bottom, taking the corner hard to the left. At the main crossroad he turned left again. Looking back, Ned saw Uncle Dave signal and turn the other way, going just as fast.
Ned pushed off his track shoes and undid his belt, wriggling out of his jeans. Aunt Kim handed him the sweats and he worked his way into them. He put his shoes on again and laced them. Took a swig of water from his bottle. He should stretch, he knew, but it wasn’t going to happen. He took off the McGill sweatshirt and Kate’s white shirt. He pulled on his Grateful Dead T-shirt. Maybe not the very best logo for today, he thought. He stuffed the hoodie into his pack. Vera had said it would be cold on the mountaintop. Where he was headed, with the sun going down.
GREG SPOTTED the brown sign. He slowed at a slight curve, and then they saw cars in a lot beside the highway.
“Do it fast,” Ned said tersely. “Just slow down, I’m going to jump out, you keep going.”
He was having trouble talking.
He was pretty sure he was about to be sick again. Wanted to get out of the van before that happened—and his father or his aunt stopped him from going.
Advil, rowan leaves, a supernatural screening, his aunt’s bracelet. Not a lot of good, any of them, or all of them together. The world was tinged towards red again here by Mont Sainte-Victoire, where two hundred thousand people had been slaughtered once upon a known time.
He took a breath, and told himself it was not as bad as before. That there probably was some benefit from the combination of things he was using. Enough to let him function. He h
oped. He put his sunglasses on.
“Ned, you okay?” Aunt Kim asked.
“Yeah,” he lied.
His father looked back at him. Edward Marriner’s face was drawn and fearful. Ned’s heart hurt to see it. “I’m fine,” he lied again. “I can do this. I have my phone.”
Cellphones, solution to the problems of the world.
“Go!” Greg said, angling the van onto the shoulder, just behind a parked Citroën. He pushed the door-lock button.
Ned shoved his door back and jumped out with his pack. Shoved the door shut and scooted among the parked cars, keeping low.
He had no idea why he was doing this, as if someone might actually be spying on him here. It felt ridiculous, but on the other hand, after that encounter with the boar, he realized—more than ever—that he hadn’t a clue how to deal with any of this.
He took a fast look at the big signboard showing the various mountain trails, noted the symbol that marked the way to the cross at the summit, and then he started running.
One thing he could do. A thing he was good at. He was on the cross-country team, he was keeping a training log here, he could go fast for a long time.
Assuming he didn’t throw up from the pain behind his eyes.
It’s manageable, he told himself. Run through it. She’s up there. And there’s no one else who can do this.
Not that this meant that he could do it.
The trail began at a smooth slant upwards, gravelled, wide. People were coming down, some dressed for a picnic with packs and baskets, others wearing serious hiking gear, carrying sticks. He saw some kids; they looked pretty tired.
He glanced up, a long way, to the summit with its cross. The chapel would be just below that, and left. He couldn’t see it yet. He settled in, as best he could, to his pace. It was hard, because he hadn’t warmed up at all and because he felt dreadful. The smell was the worst; it was everywhere, more than the pain or the sickly red hue the world had taken on. David Letterman should do this one, he thought: Top ten reasons not to climb Mont Sainte-Victoire . . .
Through everything there was fear, a sense of urgency that kept pushing him to go faster. He checked his watch. It was supposed to be a two-hour walk-andclimb. He was going to cut that in half, or better, or break himself trying.
Unlucky thought. Pain lanced like a knitting needle behind his right eye. Ned cried out, couldn’t help it. He staggered, almost fell. He twisted to the right off the wide path, out of sight, and was violently sick in the bushes behind a boulder.
And then again. It felt as if his stomach were trying to force itself inside out. He was on his knees, leaning against the roughness of the big rock. He forced himself to breathe slowly. His forehead was clammy; he’d broken out in a sweat. He was shivering.
Another slow breath. And with it, through pain and nausea, Ned felt anger again, hard as a weapon. It was weird, a little frightening, how much rage he was feeling. He shook his head in grim denial, though there was no one to see, no one to be denying.
“Uh-uh,” he said aloud, to the mountain and the sky. “No way. Not going to happen.” He wasn’t leaving this time, he wasn’t going to call and have Greg drive him back to take a shower and lie down and have everyone in the villa tell him at least he’d tried, he’d done all he could.
It wasn’t all he could. He wouldn’t let it be. You could do more. When it mattered enough, you did more. There were stories of mothers lifting cars off kids trapped under them.
“Not going to happen,” he said again.
He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of one hand. She was up there. He knew it as surely as he’d known anything. And there was only him here, Ned Marriner. Not his aunt—whatever she’d done once, she couldn’t do it now. Neither could his uncle. His mom could treat refugees in the Sudan but she couldn’t get up this mountain in time or do anything at the top if she did. Ned was the one linked to all this, seeing the blood, smelling the memory of bloodshed.
You didn’t ask for the roles you were given in life; not always, anyhow.
He realized that he was clenching his jaw. He made himself relax. You couldn’t run that way, and he had running to do.
He swung his pack off, fished his iPod out and put the buds in his ears. He dialed up Coldplay. Maybe rock would do what bracelets and rowan leaves couldn’t.
He shouldered the pack and stepped onto the path again. He must have looked pretty alarming because two people—a husband and wife, it looked like—stopped suddenly on their way down and stared at him with concern.
Ned straightened, managed a wan smile. Popped off his buds.
“You are all right? You should not be going up now!” the woman said in French, with a German accent.
“It’s fine,” Ned said, wiping at his mouth. “Bit of a bug. I’ve had worse. I do this run all the time. Training.” He was surprised at how good he’d become at lying.
“It will be dark,” the man said, shaking his head. “And the climb is harder above.”
“I know it,” said Ned. “Thanks, though.” He put the earbuds back in, turned up the volume.
He ran. Around a curve he reached back for his water bottle in the side pocket of the pack and rinsed his mouth, then splashed some on his face without slowing down. He spat into the bushes. His head was still pounding.
Not going to volunteer for an Advil commercial, he thought.
Amused himself with that. Just a little. He was in too much pain for more. He wondered about the screening he was doing—when the draining effect Phelan and his aunt had warned about would kick in. He had no idea.
He ran, twisting through and past weekend climbers making their tired way down the mountain at day’s end. Above him, way above, he could see the big cross at the summit. He was going there, then left, down a ridge, up another, down to the right.
Or so Veracook had said.
One woman looked at her watch as he approached and gave him an admonishing sideways shake of her finger, that gesture the French loved. His mother, he thought, should take that one up.
He knew it was late in the day. He knew it was going to be windy and get dark . . . this wasn’t being done for the joy of it. Maybe he should have printed leaflets to hand out to all the finger-waggers.
He ran. After almost thirty minutes on the steady upward slant he realized two things. One was that he was feeling better. He didn’t have that overwhelming sense of the world rotting all around him. He’d hoped that getting above the level of the battlefield would help, and it seemed to be doing that. He felt like offering a prayer.
His head hurt, the world was red-tinted, even behind sunglasses, but he didn’t feel any more as if he was going to empty his guts with pain in response to putrefaction.
The other thing, less encouraging by a lot, was that there was someone behind him—and it was Cadell.
The Celt was just suddenly there when Ned did one of his quick inward checks for an aura. Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . then there he was: golden inside Ned’s mind, as in life.
And coming up the mountain.
They won’t be at their best, his aunt had said. Meaning something a lot worse than that.
She had ordered Ned to stop if they came up to him, either of them, and told him to leave. He’d known she was right about that and he knew it now. They might mean him no harm, but that was only if he didn’t get in their way. They were alive in the world to do one thing only: find her. Two hundred thousand people and more had died in a single battle between these two. What was a Canadian kid against that?
His heart was pounding, for all the reasons that had to do with running as fast as he could up a mountain, fighting pain and nausea, and pursued by someone who had so many lifetimes of white and burning need to get to the chasm first.
It had been the boar that had called them, he was certain of it.
That’s how Cadell was here. He had no idea why the animal had done it. You sure got a lot of questions in the world, without exactly getting the same n
umber of answers. In fact, there was a huge gap between the two numbers. It made him angry again. He needed that, to fuel him, drive him on, push back fear.
He looked up again. There was a wooden sign ahead, symbols on it. The sloped path gave out here to terraced, switchbacked ridges. Vera had told him this. It got harder, angling back and forth because it was steeper now. He saw people still coming down, left and right, left and right, along the switchbacks. It was going to be slower, narrower, hard to run through them. He took the first cut to the right, got out his water bottle again to drink.
His phone rang.
He fished in his pocket, saw who it was on the read-out.
“Dad,” he said quickly, “I’m okay, I’m running. Can’t talk.”
He flipped the phone shut. He was supposed to tell them Cadell was behind him now? Was it a tough guess what they’d say?
It was pretty simple, really. Way Ned saw it, if the big man didn’t catch him, he couldn’t stop him or do anything to him, right? So you didn’t let him catch you. It didn’t always have to be complicated.
He thought of letting his screening go, but he didn’t know what might hit him—flatten him—if he did. How much the screen was protecting him from the mountain. He couldn’t afford to lose any time now.
And there was the other man, too. Ned didn’t for a second imagine Phelan wasn’t up here somewhere. Probably screened, like Ned. Cadell was announcing himself, trying to frighten Ned, maybe warn him off. Phelan was just . . . coming.
Could scare you more, that thought.
It was still bright up here, the sun setting to his right, the wind picking up but blocked a little because he wasn’t completely above the trees yet. He looked back over his shoulder. There was a lake or reservoir of some kind below, glinting in the light, and another one farther beyond. He was high enough to see a long way. The view was beautiful, and he wasn’t even halfway up.
There had been a fire on these slopes, Ned saw, maybe more than one. The mountain was more bare than it looked in those paintings Cézanne had done. Time changed things, even mountains. Even a hundred years could make changes—or however long it was since Cézanne painted this peak. Was that a long time or a blink of time?