The Big Dark Sky (93)
He shook his head. “Surely not. If we had the technology to cross a galaxy, we wouldn’t send an expedition of one.”
“But when he uses Jimmy, when he speaks to me, it’s as if there’s no others, just him. Although . . .”
“What?”
“Earlier this evening, in the orchard, I remembered a curious conversation with Jimmy, with the thing using Jimmy, when I was eight years old. He said something about an awakening . . . a prince and his retainers who were bespelled, waiting to be awakened. He said that only he had the power to wake them.”
Wyatt felt the skin crepe on the nape of his neck. His hands were suddenly clammy, and he blotted them on his pants.
Beyond the big windows, landscape lights relieved just enough of the darkness for him to see concatenations of wind-whipped rain and willow leaves that raged across the lawn like the shapes of strange beasts seen through a suddenly thinning veil between this world and an even more hostile realm.
82
The wind-shaken pines shed dead, wet needles that were slippery underfoot. Occasionally they cast off large cones that rattled along the deer trail. When one of those struck Ophelia on the back of the head, she cried out and stumbled and nearly fell, certain that the bear had returned and loomed behind and had just taken a swipe at her. They hadn’t seen the grizzly for a while. It seemed to have gone away, as if it had followed them only until it could be sure that they were committed to this trail rather than another, which was a peculiar and troubling thought.
Another troubling thought had occurred to Ophelia about half an hour earlier, and she had obsessed on it as if it were the one rough pip on a string of smooth worry beads. Now, Colson stopped and said that they were nearly out of the woods and clicked the Tac Light and quickly swept the beam in a circle to verify their location and to confirm that the bear no longer lurked in the vicinity. When the boy doused the light, Ophelia put a hand on his shoulder and shared her new concern. “Maybe this is a mistake.”
“I know where we are,” he assured her as the storm brightened the night above the treetops. Shapes of light and shadow winged down through the interlaced pine boughs, like bright spirits harrowing fallen angels, and a judgment of thunder rumbled through the forest and out into the open land. “I memorized the trail maps before Dad and I left home. Beyond the last trees, there’s a sloping meadow to Lake Sapphire. We head west along the south shore of the lake. It’s private land, Rustling Willows Ranch, but hikers are welcome to pass through. Eventually there’s a house above the lake, the ranch house. We can’t miss it. There’ll be someone there to help us.”
“If we get there alive,” Ophelia said. “Colson, we split from the saloon in Zipporah just as Optime showed up in the street.”
“Yeah, the sun was setting.”
“If he came in there right after we left . . . how soon would he have realized that a backpack was missing, trail maps, the compass, the protein bars?”
“Obviously, he didn’t realize right away or he’d have come fast behind us, taken a few potshots.”
“Even if he saw us when we were out of range?”
“No, not if shooting was pointless. But I looked back before we started across the river and again after we got to the other side. He wasn’t there.”
“Neither of us looked back during the crossing. We were too busy keeping our footing on the rocks. While we were locked in the church, he went through the contents of those backpacks. Everything was scattered across the table in the saloon. What if he looked at the trail maps? Even if he didn’t, maybe he’s so familiar with this territory that he’d know where we were likely to go, the nearest we could find help, this Rustling Willows Ranch.”
More revelatory celestial flares and tree shadows shuddered over them. Even in those changing kaleidoscopic patterns of bright and dark shapes, Colson’s face revealed that he must be near the end of his resources, physically and emotionally. Ophelia knew she looked no better than he did. She was exhausted, soaked, cold. Her thighs ached, and a sharper pain burned in her calves, and her ankle joints seemed to be coming loose, bone scoring bone. But she had lived for a long time in search of a purpose, and now she had one—killing Optime or ensuring he went to prison for the rest of his life—and she was not going to fail either because she lacked stamina or because she didn’t think things through and so walked into a trap.
“Colson, just in case the sonofabitch is waiting somewhere along the lake, how much longer would it take if we didn’t go that way, if we stayed in the forest, just at the edge of the tree line and worked our way around to come at the ranch house from the back of it instead of the front?”
“I don’t know. It depends on the terrain, the underbrush. Maybe half an hour instead of ten minutes, which is what the lake route might take. But you don’t have much left, I can see you don’t, and your shoes must be coming apart.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got the anger for it. Rage will keep me moving all night if I have to.”
“If you go down,” he said, “I don’t have enough left to carry you. I’d have to leave you. Alone. And I don’t think the bear would follow us as far as it did and then just go away. It’s out there somewhere.”
She didn’t want to say what she said next, but she said it anyway. “So I’m alone and it comes for me. That’s better than it kills both of us, ’cause then no one’s left to get your dad out of the horror under that church.”