Stop that.
This was more than just a storm. This was the end of Galveston as they had known it. At least they had the Seawall between them and the Gulf, but with Odessa dead, nothing now remained to hold back the tide of magic. Sloane could feel it running through Galveston’s streets, sense it in the way Sly dwelt in her even when she wasn’t wearing her mask. Out there in the darkness, Momus moved across the face of the waters, pregnant with miracles.
Outside the wind grabbed at the shingles and slammed the shutters back and forth, trying to smash its way into the house. Sloane’s bedroom felt terribly small, a wooden box she and Scarlet had hidden in, shaken and hammered by the storm. A blast of lightning filled the room with sudden shadows, and instantly thunder was detonating around them, rattling the picture frames on every wall. Sloane’s foot froze on the treadle of her machine. She willed herself to breathe calmly and eased her foot back down. Steady, steady. She ran out the last seam on her improvised dress and held it up. Lightning flashed, outlining it. “Come here, Scarlet. I’ve got something dry for you to wear.”
Scarlet didn’t move. She was standing with her nose pressed against the French doors that led out to Sloane’s verandah. The verandah faced inland and thus was protected from the storm by the whole bulk of the mansion. Lightning flared again. Sloane had a momentary vision of palm trees bent double in the wind, fronds boiling, blurred by rain. She imagined the hurricane spinning off a tornado, their roof yanked off with a tremendous rip like a bolt of cloth tearing. Scarlet blown into the sky like a red leaf.
Reluctantly the little girl backed away from the French doors and let Sloane pull off her damp dress. Her skin was white as shells. Sloane pulled the green tunic over her head, watching a cloud of fiery red hair emerge through the neck hole, then Scarlet’s fierce green eyes, sharp nose, thin red lips. “You have to learn not to make the sheriff angry,” Sloane said.
“He shot Aunt Odessa!”
“He’ll do the same to us if we give him reason,” Sloane said, smoothing the doll’s hair.
Scarlet slapped her hand away. “He’ll shoot me whether I’m nice to him or not. I’m not human.”
Somewhere downstairs one of the windows exploded. They both whirled and listened. Servants ran through the house, shouting for planks and nails to cover the gap. “You can pass for human, if you try,” Sloane said.
“I don’t lie,” Scarlet said contemptuously.
“You should,” Sloane said. “I do.” She rummaged in her oddments drawer and found a black hair ribbon for Scarlet to wear as a sash, cinching the tunic around her tiny waist. “If you were my daughter, that’s the first thing I would teach you.”
“I’m not.”
“Call it ‘tact’ or ‘diplomacy,’ but it’s lying just the same, and there are lots of times we need to do it.”
“Grandfather never lies.”
“He is big. He doesn’t have to,” Sloane said. “We are small. And when you are small, my dear, so much of the world is bigger than you. You can’t always get what you want by fighting. Sometimes you have to be cunning, or devious, or, God help you, polite. The world likes that in a girl, trust me.” She tied a cute little bow in Scarlet’s improvised sash. “Don’t you look sweet! Won’t that nasty little jabbing hairpin of yours come as a shock!”
The doll looked at her. “You’re tricky,” she said at last.
You bet. Look how I fooled my mother, ho ho. Sloane closed her eyes. It was good to have a bit of Sly’s selfish daring buzzing in her blood, but she would have been even happier to have the blessed blankness back. Sly’s grin was never quite this fragile. It was so much easier to be her when you didn’t care.
Gently Sloane held Scarlet by her bony shoulders and said, “Listen!” Timbers groaned in the attic. The servants shouted and cursed downstairs. Rain battered on the roof and sluiced onto Sloane’s verandah. A blast of lightning struck so close the flash seemed to burst through the house, fierce actinic light spraying between each board in the walls. Then thunder smashed over Ashton Villa like a breaking wave. Sloane felt Scarlet jump and quiver between her hands. “Hear that?” she said, locking the girl’s eyes with her own. “There are things in this life you have to hide from.”
Scarlet stared back at her, white-faced.
The peal of thunder died away, replaced by others farther off, and the roar of the wind. “Shh, honey, it’s all right,” Sloane murmured, picking the girl up and holding her in her lap. For once Scarlet offered no resistance. “I’ll take care of you,” Sloane said. Oh, yes. Like I took care of Jane and ’Dessa. “Believe me,” she said. Her eyes ached, but she refused to cry.
FOUR hours later a sudden calm fell. Scarlet cracked open the French doors to the verandah. “Definitely a hurricane,” Sloane said. “The eye must be passing over us. Hey, don’t go out there. You’ll get your feet w—” But Scarlet had already slipped outside. Before Sloane could react, the girl hopped onto the iron railing around the verandah and then, quick as a cat, jumped up out of sight. The scrabble of small hands and knees sounded faintly through the ceiling.
Sloane clapped a hand over her mouth. Screaming would alert the guard Kyle Lanier had stationed in the hallway outside her room. Biting her lip to keep herself quiet, she ran out onto the balcony, turned, and looked up at the roof. Crouched on all fours. Scarlet looked back over her shoulder with a fierce grin. “Coming?” the girl crowed.
“Get back this instant!”
Scarlet scrambled up the shingles. Ashton Villa’s roof had a very gentle pitch to it, no more than ten degrees. Beyond the roof ridge the sky was impossibly clear and filled with stars. The rainwater puddled on the balcony felt cold on Sloane’s bare feet. Scarlet reached the ridge and looked back. “Hurry up!” she called, waving.
A wide ornamental gable jutted out over the balcony. Scarlet had jumped to it from the wrought-iron railing. No human child could have made that leap. Sloane clambered cautiously onto the rail. It pressed painfully into her feet as she crouched on it like an unhappy gargoyle, one hand pushing hard into the brick wall of the house for balance. She looked down and then wished she hadn’t. Three stories below, a moving sheet of water lay where the lawn ought to be. Lamplight from what must have been the kitchen shimmered on the floodwater. Either the rain had come so fast it was standing in the yard, or the ocean itself had come up over the Seawall and overspread the Island.
Horses were screaming in the stables out back.
Sloane straightened out of her crouch, swaying, and grabbed the rain gutter with her right hand. Next, a quarter turn of her upper body, so she was facing the gable. She leaned forward, braced her elbows on the roof, and pulled upward as hard as she could. Her feet left the railing and she was dangling above the verandah. That’s when she discovered she wasn’t strong enough to pull herself up. Leaning forward she could get most of her chest on the roof, but she couldn’t swing her left knee up over the edge. Wet asphalt shingle grated under her forearms as she hung in space, ungainly as a frog on a trapeze.
The calm was broken by a stray gust of wind. This faint omen of the hurricane’s return sent a lightning bolt of panic through Sloane and she scrabbled desperately up. The next thing she knew she had her hips on the roof. Blind terror, she thought, gasping. The best medicine.
She crawled to the roof ridge on her hands and knees. Scarlet was waiting for her. “Isn’t this great?” the girl cackled.
“Oh, fabulous.” Sloane considered throttling the little brat, but her hands were still shaking. She lay on the roof, trembling. When she could force herself to look around, she saw her island in ruins. Even here along Broadway, Galveston’s spine and highest point, water had crested over the sidewalk like a flooding river, drowning flower beds and lapping at the porch steps of the great Victorian mansions. The wind had hurled the head of a palm tree through the Jacksons’ bay window and pulled up the giant live oak in front of John Browning’s house to throw it through his roof, cracking it open like an egg. The stumps of palm
trees, their heads ripped off by the gale, lined the boulevard like broken masts.
Farther away, where the houses were smaller and the water higher, the damage was far worse. The air began to fill with wails and cries. A house with water up past the first story was burning fiercely on the second, smoke and light pouring from the attic windows. Ruptured gas line, no doubt. Horses were screaming throughout the city. Stables smashed, cows and pigs squealing and drowning.
Sloane got her breath back and grabbed for Scarlet, who avoided her easily. “Get back inside! The eye could pass at any time. You’ll die if you’re caught out in this!”
Scarlet went scooting along the roof ridge, quick as a monkey. “I’m going to the Carnival.” She dropped over the front gable to land with an audible thump on top of the two-story iron porch at the front of the house. Sloane crawled after her, swearing. When she reached the front gable she peered over, gripping the edge of the roof so hard her knuckles stood out, white as dice in the dim light. She could just see the top of Scarlet’s head as she swarmed down an iron pillar at the side of the porch.
It should have been easy for Sloane to lower herself over the gable and drop to the top of the porch, but that area had never been intended to be used as a deck, and there was no railing. Sloane was so worried she would fall backward over the edge that when she finally gathered the courage to ease herself over the gable and drop, she pitched forward as she was landing and smacked her head painfully into the brick wall of the house.
Now she was on top of the pink iron double-decker porch above the front door. She wiped her forehead on her sleeve and then lowered herself down the same pillar Scarlet had taken. The whole wrought-iron porch was festooned with ornamental grillwork that her mother had thought ridiculously fussy. Tonight Sloane blessed every curlicue and cornice for the hand- and toeholds they provided.
In three minutes she was lowering herself into the prickly rosebush growing at the base of the porch. Scarlet was already wading away from the house in floodwaters up to her waist. Sloane splashed out and grabbed the girl, jerking her roughly up into her arms. Scarlet kicked and writhed. Sloane caught the girl’s hand just as she was reaching for the long hairpin she had used to stab Kyle Lanier. “Do it and I’ll break your arm,” she said. Her voice was low and shaking with anger. “This is not a game. You cannot run away from me. I will take you to the Carnival if I can. But you cannot run away from me again.”
Sloane strode forward, jerking Scarlet along with her. “You don’t have to hurt me,” the girl said. Sloane grunted and shifted so the girl was on her hip, her arms wrapped tightly around Sloane’s shoulder. “Was that a lie, when you said you would break my arm?”
“I hope so,” Sloane said.
Another gust of wind came up. Twenty-three stumbling, splashing blocks lay between Ashton Villa and Stewart Beach at the end of Broadway. We’d better be fast, Sloane thought, wading forward with one arm around Scarlet. Splash soaked her clothes, and for the first time in months she felt chilled. More and more people were coming outside. Children clustered on porches, whispering and staring at the devastation left by the leading edge of the hurricane. Wives held propane lanterns or oil lamps while their husbands furiously nailed boards across east and south facing windows. Many of the Broadway mansions were crowded with servants and relatives and even strangers off the street; more of these were trickling in all the time. A steady stream of refugees was floundering up to Broadway from the drowned piers of the back bay, and the poor residential neighborhoods farther south, where the wind had hit first and hardest.
Refugees began to clamor at the doors of the fine Victorian manors along the boulevard. The Jacksons and Jim Ford had their doors open and all their lights on, beacons guiding the battered and homeless to shelter. Bless them, Sloane thought as she floundered on through water up past her knees. But some of the mansions were dark, and armed men stood at others, warning off looters and vagrants.
Everyone watched the sky.
At the mouth of 18th Avenue the body of a drowned horse shifted gently in the flooded street. Sloane hurried on, jostling amongst the draggled refugees, scrambling over or around the toppled palms and live oaks blocking the sidewalk. With a shock she realized that the streets were full of revellers. As she passed 16th Avenue she saw a stilt-walker a block away, staggering like a drunken crane through the flooded street. Someone ran into his leg as she watched. He tumbled slowly backward, arms windmilling, and disappeared in a splash of spray.
Momus had set Carnival loose. The magic Jane and Odessa had tried so hard to keep at bay was sweeping back into Galveston on the wings of the storm.
A cat-faced woman jerked on Sloane’s arm. Sloane searched for the reveller’s name. Lianna, that was it. The cat-headed woman was wearing a badly ripped evening gown of emerald silk, now marred by water stains that would never come out. What a waste. Her slip was splattered with mud and worse. “Hey! Sly! I’m a friend of Vinnie Tranh’s. You played poker with us.”
“There’s blood on your muzzle.” Sloane had to yell to be heard over the noise of the crowd splashing through the streets.
“Flying glass,” Lianna shouted back.
Scarlet wriggled in Sloane’s arms. “Keep going! We have to see Grandpa!”
Sloane started to splash forward. Lianna loped beside her, her feline face screwed up in distaste at having to bound through the water. She licked a trickle of blood off her muzzle with a long pink tongue. “Mind if I come, too? I got nowhere else to go.”
Sloane grunted and tried to run faster, floundering through the water as the wind gusted up again, shaking fat raindrops out of the live-oak leaves. The crowd milling in the street grew abruptly more desperate, climbing up on mansion porches or pounding on doors. A tree had crushed the dome of St. Patrick’s, and a horde of refugees had obviously spilled out of it to surround Randall Denton’s place, the opulent Bishop’s Palace. A stick arced out of the mob to smash one of Randall’s windows. A shotgun blasted back from the porch. Someone screamed. The mob fell back, knocking Sloane down. She scrabbled up, spitting out a mouthful of water. Scarlet clinging to her like a monkey. The rain started coming down harder.
We’re not going to make it, Sloane realized. And oh, my God, Stewart Beach is below the Seawall. Christ, what have I been thinking?
“Keep going!” Scarlet yelled.
“We’re not going to make it!” Panic tightened in Sloane’s stomach. The wind picked up again. She turned and floundered desperately for the lights blazing from Randall Denton’s mansion.
Randall stood on his front porch, holding a mob of refugees at bay with his antique Purdey double-barreled shotgun. “Get the hell back!” he yelled, waving the gun in a jerky arc across the line of faces staring at him. “Private property, damn you!” Lightning branched down from the southern sky, then a terrible pause, then the shuddering rumble of thunder. The eye of the hurricane was passing. The back wall of the storm swept toward them, swallowing the stars as it came. Cold rain began to fly again.
“Here it comes,” Sloane whispered.
The crowd surged forward. Randall blasted a shot into them and a woman fell kicking and struggling into the water. Sloane kept waiting for her to scream, but she didn’t, just thrashed and thrashed. It was hard to tell if she was hit or just scared. A stink of gunpowder eddied through the air. The rising wind made Randall’s bathrobe whip around his legs as he chambered another round. “Who’s next!”
The crowd pulled back. Sloane took a breath and stepped forward. The wind gusted and she almost fell. “Randall! Randall! It’s me, Sloane!”
“The hell it is!” Randall jerked the gun around and trained it on her chest.
“Listen to me!” Sloane still clutched Scarlet in her right arm. Her left she held up over her head. With her arm raised she knew her thin cotton shirt would be clinging to her breasts. Sly knew how to play this hand. “Randall, please! Let me in. You know me.”
He squinted into the darkness. “Sloane?”
/> She stumbled forward. “Randall, thank God! I thought I was going to die out here, with them.” She was now clearly in front of the rest of the crowd, inching away from them with every step.
“Bitch!” someone yelled. A rock or stick hit the back of her head, hard. She yelped and stumbled forward, almost dropping Scarlet. Randall let off another blast from his shotgun. Sloane couldn’t tell if anyone behind her was hit. She didn’t turn around. The rain was roaring down now, churning white spray from the sheet of water covering the lawn.
“Randall!”
He waved her up the steps with the gun. “Come on! The rest of you filth STAY BACK!”
Sloane broke into a stumbling, splashing run toward the house. She wished she still had Ace’s useful .32. Another bolt of lightning exploded over the Gulf. In the blinding instant of illumination, Sloane saw a dark figure at the end of Randall’s balcony. It was a Prawn Man, perched motionless on the porch rail, staring out to sea. Then the lightning faded, and the Prawn Man was gone. Thunder rolled in like a shock wave, rattling the shutters of the Bishop’s Palace.
Randall pumped his casings and chambered another round. “Sloane! Jesus, it is you! Who’s the kid?”
“My niece.” Sloane put Scarlet down and limped up the steps. “Oh, Randall!” she said, and she threw herself into his arms. He grabbed her around the waist, still brandishing the shotgun in his right hand.
“Come on!” he said, backing toward the door.
“Oh. Randall, thank God!” And then, bending within the circle of his arms, Sloane bit him as hard as she could just above the right wrist. He screamed and dropped his gun. In a flash Scarlet grabbed it and shoved it over the edge of the porch into the water. The crowd swept forward. Sloane pushed Randall back toward his front door. “Come in! Everyone!” she yelled. The mob roared and surged forward. “No fighting! There’s room for everyone! Even you,” she added, shoving Randall into his own foyer.