Angel Fire East

  Nothing human …

  He tossed Allen aside, and the realtor collapsed in a crumpled heap, head lowered between his shoulders like a broken fighter as he struggled to his hands and knees, Kathy racing over to kneel next to him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  The big man wheeled on Nest. “Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”

  He came at her, and she hit him with another jolt of magic, eyes locked on his. This time he slowed, staggered slightly by the force of her attack. The kids were still screaming in the background, some of them calling to her to run, to get away, thinking she was paralyzed with fear and indecision. She stood her ground, watching as Kathy tried in vain to pull a battered Allen to his feet.

  The big man snarled at her, an animal sound, a deep, throaty growl that brought Wraith right up into her throat, so close to breaking free she could see the tiger striping of his wolfish face and feel the thick, coarse fur of his powerful body. She backed away, trying to keep him in check. If she failed to do so, everyone would discover the truth about her. Whatever else happened, she could not permit that.

  “Joy to the world!” the big man howled as he lumbered toward her. “Joy to the world!”

  “Twitch!” a voice shrilled.

  The big man stopped as if he had been reined in by invisible wires, jerking upright, his strange, misshapen head lifting like a startled bird’s.

  “You come right into this house!” the voice ordered. “You are so bad! I mean it! Right now!”

  On the porch stood a solitary figure bundled in a heavy coat and scarf, frizzy red hair sticking out all over. It was the young woman who had introduced herself at church that morning, the one called Penny. At the sound of her voice, the giant slowly turned away and trudged back toward the old house. Nest took a deep, calming breath as the screaming behind her died away into hushed whispers and sobs.

  The young woman stood aside as the giant lumbered past her sheepishly and disappeared inside. Then she came down the porch, shaking her head in exasperation.

  “Nest, I’m really, really sorry about this.” She came up and took Nest’s gloved hand in her own and held it. “That’s my brother. He isn’t right in the head. He doesn’t mean any harm, but he doesn’t know how strong he is.”

  She looked over at Allen, who was finally climbing back to his feet. “Are you all right, mister? Did he hurt you at all?”

  Allen Kruppert looked as if he had just climbed out of a working cement mixer. He tried to speak, coughed hard, and shook his head.

  “I think he’s okay,” Kathy offered quietly, bracing him against her with both arms wrapped tightly about his bulky form. “That was a very scary thing your brother did, miss.”

  Penny nodded quickly in agreement. “I know. I should have been watching him more closely, but I was upstairs working. My grandmother answered the door, but she is so old and feeble she can’t do anything with him. He just pushed her aside and came out.” She looked quickly from Nest to the Krupperts. “He just wanted to play. That’s what he thought all this was about. Playing.”

  Nest gave her a brief, uncertain smile. She had the oddest queasy feeling. Penny seemed sincere in her apology, but there was just a hint of something in her voice that suggested maybe she wasn’t.

  Nest glanced up at the house. “Do you live here, Penny?” she asked conversationally.

  “Sometimes.” Penny’s red hair gave her the look of something that had shorted out. Her green eyes glittered. “Right now I’m just visiting.”

  “With your brother?”

  “Yeah. With Twitch. We call him Twitch.”

  “Is it your grandmother who belongs to the church?”

  Penny shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “What is your grandmother’s name?”

  Penny smiled. “I better get back inside, Nest. I don’t like leaving Twitch alone after an episode. You know how it is. Thanks for coming by with the church group, though. It was really nice of you.”

  She walked back up the steps and through the broken door, closing the windowless frame carefully behind her. Nest watched until she was gone, then gave the windows a casual sweep as she swung back toward the others.

  The interior of the house had gone completely dark.

  She helped Kathy get Allen back in the Suburban, settling him into the passenger seat and buckling him in. He insisted he was all right, and it seemed he was. The youth group was noticeably subdued, and there was talk of calling it a night. But Allen wouldn’t hear of it. There were four more names on the list, including the Northway Nursing Home. All those people were counting on them. Allen wasn’t the sort to let anyone be disappointed on account of him. He insisted they finish what they started.

  It was nearing ten o’clock when Nest finally got home. Everyone else, Allen included, seemed to have put the incident on West Third behind them, but she was still uneasy about it. Two encounters in one day with Penny Whoever-she-was seemed a bit of a stretch for coincidence and two encounters too many in any case. The whole business troubled her, particularly since it had forced her to confront anew what it meant to employ her magic as a weapon. It was something she had hoped never to have to do again. Tonight’s incident suggested her thinking was incredibly naive.

  She walked up the drive and slipped in through the back door. There were lights on, but the house was quiet. Hawkeye was curled up on his chair in the kitchen, the one he had adopted for this week anyway, and he did not even open his eyes as she passed through. She left her coat, scarf, and gloves in the hall closet and eased down the hall to the den, where the television was playing. Bennett was dozing in her grandfather’s big leather easy chair.

  She opened her eyes as Nest entered. “Hi,” she murmured.

  “Hi,” Nest replied, sitting at the desk chair. “Harper asleep?”

  Bennett stretched and yawned. “About an hour ago. She was pretty worn out.” She stood up. “Me, too. I’m going to bed. Did Reverend Gask ever catch up with you? He was here earlier.”

  Nest went cold, her whole body stiffening. She had forgotten to warn Bennett about Gask. But then, what could she have said? “No, he must have missed me.”

  “He said he was here to pick you up. He wanted to come in, but I told him I couldn’t let anyone in someone else’s house. I hope that was all right.”

  Nest responded to the wave of relief that washed through her by giving the other a big hug. “You did good.”

  “Thanks.” Bennett trundled toward the door. “Oh, I almost forgot. He was looking for someone named John Ross, too. Said he thought he was staying here, but I told him I didn’t think so.”

  “You told him right,” Nest assured her, growing angry again with Gask. “Go on to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Alone, she sat thinking anew of John Ross and Findo Gask and what their conflict meant. Gask was not going to give up. He would keep coming around until he found Ross and whatever it was that he thought Ross was hiding from him. Demons are persistent. Time means nothing to them; they operate on a schedule as foreign to humans as life on Mars. She had dealt with demons half her life, and she had a pretty good idea what she was in for.

  She got up and turned off the television, then sat down again, staring out the window into the darkness. At times like this, she wished Gran was still alive. Gran, with her no-nonsense approach to life’s problems and her experience with the ways of demons and forest creatures, would know better than she how to deal with this mess. Gran might have some thoughts about what to do with Bennett and Harper, too. Nest would have to try her best to think like Gran and hope that would be enough to see her through.

  After a time, she went out into the kitchen and made herself some dinner. She ate a small portion of the leftover tuna and noodle casserole and drank a glass of milk, sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the ticking of the clock and to the whisper of her scattered thoughts. It wasn’t as if John Ross wouldn’t show, she realized. Too much of what Gask had told her suggested he would. The pro
blem was what to do about him when he did. Or, more specifically, what to do about the fact that he was coming to find her, which was really the only reason he would come back.

  She shook her head at the idea. So much time had passed with no contact between them. What would bring him to her now? What did he need?

  Surrounded by memories of her past, of a childhood and girlhood linked inextricably to him, she searched in vain for an answer.

  She was still awake at midnight when the knock on the front door came. She had turned off most of the lights and moved to the living room. She was sitting there in the dark, staring out the window once more, her thoughts drifting through the frosty landscape of the park. She was not sleepy, her mind spinning out possibilities that might explain the day’s events, her magic alive and singing in her blood with strange energy. Sitting there, working her way through the past to conjecture on the future, she found herself wanting to do what Gran had done as a girl, to go out into the park and run with the feeders who lived there, wild and uninhibited and free. It was a strange feeling, and she was mildly shocked by the idea that after all she had gone through to escape her grandmother’s past, she was still somehow drawn to it.

  The knock brought her to her feet and scattered her thoughts. There was never any doubt in her mind as to who it was. She walked quickly through the darkness of the living room to the hallway, where a solitary light glimmered weakly from farther down the corridor. The porch light was on as well, but she never even bothered to look out the peephole. She knew who it was. She knew who it had to be. She simply opened the door to confirm it, and there he was.

  “Hello, Nest,” he said.

  He stood in the halo of the porch light, clear-eyed and expectant, looking younger and fitter than when she had seen him last in Seattle, ten years ago. She was astonished at the transformation, and immediately suspicious of what it meant.

  A small, slender boy of maybe four or five years stood at his side, honey-colored hair tousled and shaggy, blue eyes bright and inquisitive. He stared at her with such intensity that she was momentarily taken aback.

  She looked from the boy to Ross, and for just a moment Findo Gask’s dark warning whispered from the closet in the back of her mind to which she had consigned it. She stood at the edge of a precipice, and she could feel a tremendous mix of attraction and repulsion roiling within her. Whichever way she turned, whatever choice she made, her life would never be the same again.

  She cracked the storm door wide open. “Come on inside, John.” She gave him a warm smile. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Monday,

  December 22

  Chapter 8

  After he awoke from the dream of the Knight on the cross, John Ross began his search for the gypsy morph.

  It wasn’t so much the Knight’s words of advice that guided him in his efforts. He had forgotten those almost immediately, shards of sound buried in the wave of emotion he experienced on seeing that the Knight bore his own face. But in the Knight’s eyes, in eyes that were undeniably his own, he found a road map he would never forget. In a moment’s time, that map became indelibly imprinted on his consciousness. All the Knight’s memories of where and how the gypsy morph could be found were made his. To recall them, to remember what they showed, he need only look inside himself.

  It was early summer when he set out, the weather still mild almost everywhere. In Pennsylvania, where he began his journey, the air smelled of new grass and leaves, the green beginnings of June fresh and pungent. By the time he reached the west coast, the July heat had settled in, all scorched air and damp heat, thick and barely breathable, an ocean of suspended condensation bearing down with suffocating determination. On the colored weather charts that appeared in USA Today, seven-eighths of the country was shaded in deep reds and oranges.

  The sole exception was the Pacific Northwest, where Ross had gone to await the morph’s coming. In Oregon, where he would make his preparations, the heat was driven inland by the breezes off the ocean, and the coastal bluffs and forests west of the Cascades stayed green and cool. Like a haven, the windward side of the mountains gave shelter against the burning temperatures that saturated everything leeward to the Atlantic, and the coast was like a world apart.

  John Ross knew what he had to do. The crucified Knight’s memories of what was needed were clear and certain. He could not tell if the dream had shown him his own fate, if he was the Knight on the cross and he had witnessed his own death. He could not know if by being told of the morph he was being given a second chance at changing his own life. To accept that his dream had allowed him to step outside himself completely in bearing witness to the future he was working so hard to prevent, he must conclude that there was an extraordinary reason for such a thing to happen because it had never happened before.

  It was easier to believe that seeing his own face on the crucified Knight of the Word was a trick of his imagination, a deception wrought by his fear that he would fail as this other Knight had failed and come to a similar end. It was not difficult to believe. The odds against his successfully capturing and exploiting a gypsy morph were enormous. It had been done only a handful of times in all of history. The methods employed and the differing results had never been documented. There was no standard procedure for this. But if necessity was the mother of invention, John Ross would find a way.

  The stories of gypsy morphs were the stuff of legends. Ross had heard tales of the morphs during the twenty-five-odd years he had served the Word. Mostly they were whispered in awe by forest creatures, stories passed down from generation to generation. When the consequences of an intervening magic were particularly striking, either for good or evil, it was always suggested that it might have been due to the presence of a morph. No one living, as far as Ross could tell, had ever seen one. No one knew what they looked like at the moment of their inception. No one knew what they would turn out to be because no two had ever turned out the same. There were rumors of what they might become, but no hard evidence. One, it was said, had become an antibiotic. Another had become a plague. Gypsy morphs were enigmas; he had to be able to accept that going in.

  What John Ross knew for sure when he went to Oregon was that whoever gained control over a gypsy morph acquired the potential to change the future in a way no one else could. It was a goal worth pursuing, even knowing it was also virtually impossible to achieve. He had little working for him, but more than enough to know where to begin. The crucified Knight’s memories had told him the morph would appear in a low-tide coastal cave on the upper coast of Oregon near the town of Cannon Beach three days after Thanksgiving. In those memories he found a picture of the cave and the landscape surrounding it, so he knew what to look for.

  What his dream of the crucified Knight had revealed to him was not so different from what his dreams usually told him—a time and a place and an event he might alter by his intervention. But usually he knew the details of the event, the course it had taken, and the reason things had gone amiss. None of that was known to him here. He did not know the form the gypsy morph would take when it came into being. He did not know how to capture it. He did not know what would happen afterward, either to the morph or to himself.

  It was reassuring in one sense to have it so. Not knowing suggested he was someone other than the Knight on the cross, their resemblance notwithstanding. But it was odd, too, that the Knight’s memories ceased with the moment of the morph’s appearance, as if the slate afterward had been wiped clean or never come into being. Clearly the Knight felt he had failed in his attempt to secure the morph’s magic and unlock its secret. Was this because he had failed even to capture the morph? Or was it because he was hiding the truth of what had happened afterward, not wanting Ross to see? There was no way for Ross to know, and speculation on the matter yielded nothing.

  Cannon Beach was a small, charming oceanfront town a little more than an hour directly west of Portland. Bustling with activity generated by the annual appearance of summer vacationers, t
he town’s shops and residences were clustered along a bypass that looped down off Highway 101 to run parallel to the edge of the ocean for about three miles. A second, smaller town, called Tolovana Park, which was really less town and more wide spot in the road, occupied the southernmost end of the loop. Together the two communities linked dozens of inns, hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and vacation cottages through a tangle of shingle-shake and wood-beam restaurants and fast-food emporiums, souvenir and craft shops, art galleries, and clothing stores. There was a theater, a bakery, two wine shops, a gas station, a general store, a post office, and a whole clutch of real estate agencies. To its credit, Cannon Beach seemed to have resisted the pervasive onslaught of name-brand chains that had invaded virtually every other vacation spot in the country, so that the familiar garish signs touting burgers and tacos and chicken and the like were all blessedly missing.

  Ross arrived on a Sunday, having caught a ride west out of Portland with a trucker hauling parts for one of the lumber mills. He was dropped five miles inland and walked the rest of the way to the coast on a sunny, pleasant afternoon. It was still light when he arrived. Cannon Beach was so busy that Ross judged it impossible to differentiate Sunday from any other day of the week. Vacationers thronged the streets, pressing in and out of the shops, eating ice cream and chewing fudge, with shopping bags, small children, and dogs in hand.

  Carrying his duffel and his backpack, he limped down the sidewalk with the aid of his black walking stick, the sun glinting off its bright surface and etching out in shadowed nuance the rune carvings that marked its otherwise smooth surface. He looked a transient, and the impression was not far from wrong. He was not indigent or bereft of hope or purpose, but he was homeless and rootless, a citizen of the world. He had lived this way for twenty-five years, and he had become used to it. His service to the Word required that he travel constantly, that he be able to respond to his dreams by moving to wherever they directed him, that when he had finished acting on them he be prepared to move again. It was a strange, wearing existence, and if he did not believe so strongly in the work he was doing, it would have quickly done him in.