All the Birds in the Sky(46)

She got them a cab, which dropped Laurence off first. Laurence shoved a twenty at Patricia on his way out the car door and tripped over his seat belt. She watched him attack his front steps with his shins and felt something like protectiveness. She made the cab wait until he got inside his house.

*

THE WHOLE DRIVE to Sacramento, the other witches found ways to lecture Patricia about Aggrandizement. She sat in the back of Kawashima’s Lexus, watching the highway whip past, as Kawashima hectored her about making herself too important and using her power too recklessly. Dorothea chimed in every now and then with one of her jarring untruths, like, “You threw pebbles at my window, but they turned into grenades in midair.” (Dorothea was an old Catholic lady with white-streaked black hair, chunky glasses, and long calico skirts who never, ever told the truth, except maybe in Confessional.)

By the time they arrived, Patricia felt like a monster, and she kept picturing Toby’s frostbitten body, lying in the airship.

The others were doing important witch business in Sacramento, so Patricia had time to wander around in the scorching midday sun and read on her phone about the French blight, the chaos on the Korean peninsula, the new, deadlier Atlantic superstorms. All things she could do nothing about. Then her peripheral vision landed on a homeless man on the sidewalk. He was staring at her, empty Big Gulp cup in one hand. She turned and looked him over: his torn muddy coat and soiled track pants, his disease and malnourishment. His cardboard sign was so tattered and faded, nobody could decipher it. He was covered with a layer of grime, but also cobwebs and even moss. Normally, if she was out on her own, at night in the city, she would heal someone in this condition without a second thought. But Kawashima and Dorothea were nearby, and she never knew what they would consider Aggrandizement. They never gave her clear-cut guidelines. She edged a little closer, struggling with herself. This man needed her help, it couldn’t be wrong to take the initiative. Could it? She looked into his narrow dark eyes, and she could see his damaged pride, and she reached out—

She realized she was looking at the bony, ravaged face of her junior-high-school guidance counselor, Mr. Rose. She was boiling in her own skin. She nearly threw up.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Rose croaked. “I will not try to kill you. I couldn’t if I tried. You’ve grown much too powerful, and the years have ruined me. But you must know, I was doing the right thing. I saw a vision of things to come. Patricia, you will be at the center of so much pain. You will betray and you will destroy. If you had even any conscience, you would end your own life right now.”

For so long, she’d imagined this moment. When she was out until dawn night after night, she’d been rehearsing for this. Facing this bloody sadist, showing him she could not be terrorized. But she hadn’t expected him to be so helpless, literally showing his belly. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She didn’t take in what he was saying at first, about how she should kill herself—and then she had to spit on the pavement.

“Nice try,” she said. But her arms and face burned like the worst poison ivy. “Everything you ever said to me was a lie,” she told the huddled old man on the sidewalk. “That’s all you do.”

“I had assumed a witch with your power levels could tell if I was lying. Please. Please listen.” He looked up, and Patricia was startled to see tears all over his filthy cheeks. “I killed so many people, but I still couldn’t stand to look upon what you and your friends are going to bring about. Have they told you about the Unraveling yet?”

“The what?” Patricia pulled back. “Forget it. I’m not listening to you anymore.”

“You have to listen! Patricia Delfine, I know you better than anyone.” She backed up until she was up against the parking meters, and he rose from his cardboard mat, waving a bandaged finger. He breathed foulness at her. “I spied on you for months when you were a child. I parked outside your house. I listened to all your conversations, night and day. I know everything. I even know about the Tree!”

“What tree?” Patricia swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ask them about the Unraveling. Ask them! See what they tell you.”

“Oh, f*ck me.” Kawashima was approaching from the nearby hardware store, plastic bag swinging from one hand. “You have got to be joking. This *, again?”

“Theodolphus,” Dorothea said from behind him, looking at the grimy man. She managed to make just his name into the worst insult.

“You know this guy?” Patricia said.

Kawashima ignored her and said to Theodolphus, “You are just the worst, man. You’re like a bad rash. I thought we killed you a long time ago.”

“I have been as good as dead for many years.” Theodolphus Rose drew himself up, as if he was boasting. “But I needed to warn Miss Delfine here. She was my best student, once. When she was a child, I saw a vision of her grown, as she is now. A vision of destruction. I thought she should know.”

“Let me guess,” Kawashima said. “You huffed some vapors and hallucinated. Right? Visions of the future are always bullshit, and I should know, I’m the biggest bullshit artist around. Dorothea, do you want to do the honors?”

Mr. Rose was still thrashing and yelling about his vision of madness and destruction and a hole in the world. But Dorothea came closer and whispered a story, about a man she had known. He had been a maker of netsuke, those little carved figurines that Japanese people used as kimono clasps, but he was also a journeyman assassin, and some of his carvings had hidden death traps: little poison needles, reservoirs of toxic smoke. The deadly netsuke were always in the shape of a beautiful woman in a lewd pose, and you could give one to a person knowing he or she would wear it and die. Until one day the man became confused and put a lethal spring-loaded dart into a frog, that he had meant to put inside a courtesan. He then sold the frog to one of his favorite clients, who was sure to wear it that evening and who knew nothing of the man’s side business as an assassin. How could he warn his customer?