Blackwood (24 page)

  Phillips tapped his fingers together. "You've always been a crackpot, haven't you, Doc? Yeah, that's it. You think you won't be a crackpot anymore if you actually manage to resurrect history."

  "I'm not a crackpot." Roswell's voice was clipped. "And I've already resurrected 'history.' One hundred and fifteen people, to be exact."

  Right. Souls of one hundred and fourteen settlers inhabited the bodies of the returned, plus John Dee inside her father. There might have been others – Miranda wasn't clear on whether Mary Blackwood or Phillips' ancestor counted in that number. But these were the one hundred and fourteen people that history had bothered to record as missing.

  Miranda said, "Which means you're now killing one hundred and fourteen other people."

  "Well, in fairness, your father had to be killed for this to work, and technically the others are still alive. You've seen them for yourself."

  Sara's breath hitched, shuddering in and out. As Miranda maneuvered to check her pulse, her breathing returned to a more normal, if shallow, pattern.

  "She's OK," Miranda said. The words were a promise.

  Sara Rawling had to stay alive, even if it killed Miranda.

  
Phillips will never be much of a poker player
. His body was too expressive. She couldn't see his eyebrows, but his fingers clenched. "What's wrong with my mom?"

  "I knew you had the weapon," Roswell said. "It was obvious, once I considered it, that the Blackwoods would have it secreted away. And then fail to keep it safe, like they're destined to fail at everything." He paused. "Sorry if that sounds harsh."

  Roswell had demanded she hand over the gun first thing. There had gone her bargaining chip. She'd planned to trade it to Dee in exchange for Sara's health. She wouldn't have handed it over until Sara was back to normal.

  Roswell sure loved the sound of his own voice. "At any rate, the first stage is blackening," he said. "Gunpowder – sulphur, potassium nitrate, and charcoal. They used to call it black powder. Phillips had a hint of it around the edges at the courthouse, and that was when I began to suspect. Then, albedo, the whitening stage. Purification. Salt, chalk. The third is rubedo – well, we will all see that effect together. It is the Great Work. Only
he
knows its secret."

  Next to her, Phillips sighed again. "This really is all about alchemy?"

  Miranda watched the edge of Roswell's face as it angled into an approving smile.

  "Nicely done, Phillips. Such a bright one, you are."

  "What do you mean?" Miranda asked – asked Phillips, not Roswell. "I thought the alchemy stuff was all turning straw into gold. I thought Dee was magic."

  She tilted her head toward Phillips. Inches separated their faces. His criminally long eyelashes were so close she could have counted them. She'd almost expected him to forgive her in the library, in those last moments they were alone.
I'm as crazy as Roswell.

  "Magic and science," Roswell said, "have never been in opposition the way we think of them now. Dee knew that and found the key to uniting them. To finally fulfilling the alchemist's greatest ambition–"

  "Making the first home chemistry set?" she interrupted. She wouldn't give Roswell the satisfaction of holding court.

  "Eternal life."

  He said it with a huff. She was getting to him.

  "Yawn," Miranda said. "Phillips? Will you explain? I like it when you explain instead of Doctor Crackpot."

  Maybe she shouldn't be rude, but she couldn't think of any good reasons why. Phillips' lips tilted up in approval.

  "Be my guest," Roswell said.

  "You've got a funny idea of guest," Miranda said, and was rewarded with another puff of exasperated breath. Bone shot her a look over his shoulder, unreadable.

  Phillips cleared his throat, flattened his palms together. "Alchemists were always looking for some kind of edge they could scheme out of the natural world. Making base metals into gold, sure, but their other great project was figuring out the secret to eternal life. Of course," Phillips rolled his eyes, "they should have known that eternal life is the opposite of natural. Why would nature provide a process to do that – it's a dream, nothing more."

  "It's real enough," Roswell said, "the greatest discovery ever made. Does your mother look unaffected?"

  Miranda realised what Phillips was doing – he was trying to make Roswell doubt that the process would work.

  "She doesn't look
immortal
," Phillips said, quietly. "Is a failed experiment worth all this death?"

  "The experiment won't fail, my boy," Roswell said. "I'm sorry your mother had to be a part of this, sorry you did. But this is my life's work. No one in my family has ever gotten this close to bringing him back."

  "What family?" Miranda asked.

  "John White's, of course," Roswell said.

  Phillips head dropped. "Whitson – White's son. That's why you had access to his private letters."

  So Roswell was related to John White. She pictured the stick-in-the-mud who overacted the part. Figured.

  Flashing lights ahead distracted her. A smattering of police cars were pulled off next to the roadway, a few cops milling around outside. No one else in the car had spotted them yet. If she could just keep Roswell talking, distracted, maybe they'd get flagged over. Phillips' dad would help them.

  "Why did you bring him back?" she asked.

  "To finish his own life's work, the greatest work of all," he said, like they'd approve if they understood. "None of those people were doing anything with their lives. They weren't. Not like what he and his followers can accomplish."

  Phillips said, "Lives aren't measured like that. Every person gets their own. One. Alchemy honors nature, and this is unnatural. It won't work."

  She hadn't missed Phillips sitting up straighter before he spoke, and she knew he'd seen the cops too. Roswell
would
notice them, but would it be too late? Morrison Grove wasn't that far, which meant the officers were at the entrance to Fort Raleigh and the theater. Odd place for a roadblock.

  It wasn't a roadblock. As the car got closer, she saw it was just a cluster of police at the lip of the parking lot. A couple of TV trucks too. Hard to say what they were doing there.

  "Dad–" Bone said.

  "Down," Roswell barked. "We're too close to fail now. Put your heads down." When they didn't react, he said, "Your mother is in a very precarious state."

  He sounded like a nasty professor threatening a bad grade, but they couldn't afford to ignore him. Miranda and Phillips draped forward over Sara's body, ducking below the lip of the window.

  The flashing lights reflected on the window glass and tan leather upholstery, and Miranda held her breath, hoping for capture.

23

Costumes

No one stopped them. The sand covering Miranda's sneakers might as well have coated her tongue. Her mouth was desert-dry.

  She was going to see her father.

  It wouldn't be her father. Not really. But the body would be his, would move and breathe like he still inhabited it. A lie dressed up like a miracle. She'd never forget the sight of him on that metal table. He might not have been the perfect TV dad, but he didn't deserve to have Dee wear his skin like a new suit.

  Miranda and Phillips unfolded from hiding as Roswell took the right into the Grove's parking lot and selected one of the few open spots. The packed lot was a sharp contrast to the few abandoned cars left in a lonely tic-tac-toe that had been there the day before.

  Roswell braced his hands on the steering wheel. "Dee's soul was waiting there for me. Hundreds of years he'd been past the boundary of our reality, and yet he slipped out of death like an egg from its shell, and into that man's body. He understands how to unite the esoteric and the natural in a way the world has never seen before. He's used them to beat death. Think of the research we can do, the advances to be made."

  "Research?" Phillips snorted in disgust. "You are the worst amateur historian ever. Eugenics, anyone?"

  "Perhaps research isn't what I mean, but
knowledge,"
Roswell said.

  Beside his father, Bone hadn't moved, gazing out the window toward the rental units that made up the Grove. Something in the set of his jaw made Miranda suspect he'd been subjected to a number of these self-serving pep talks.
Poor Bone
. Her sympathy was genuine, if not total.

  "Knowledge," Roswell said, "is all we have. All that separates us from lower animals. It is the basis of civilization."

  "Bull
frak
," Miranda said. "It's for power. If you're pretending this is about something else, even to yourself, then frak you, you delusional murdering excuse for a nutty professor."

  "I'd applaud if I could," Phillips said.

  She wriggled her wrists. "I understand."

  "This is bigger than any individual one of us," said Roswell. "He will build a shining city of light and knowledge. The New London. You'll see–"

  But he stopped, and Miranda felt sure that meant he didn't know if they'd see. He didn't know exactly what Dee had planned for them. Maybe they weren't going to see anything for much longer.

  She looked at Phillips, stung by the fresh reminder that Roswell didn't matter so much anymore. He was just a henchman, the equivalent of the armed guard who opened the door to a bad guy's office on some backwater planet on
Firefly
. The mastermind behind everything, the man who'd defeated death, was the one wearing her father.

  Getting out of the car was awkward because of the lack of skills Roswell and Bone had in dealing with captives – particularly when one was out cold. Miranda thought about old movies where people had to cart around someone unconscious and played it for laughs. There was nothing funny about Sara's white features, about how dead she looked.

  Even Bone was surprisingly careful when he lifted her limp body from the car. Miranda was thankful for that, anyway. Otherwise, Phillips would have needed immediate payback. And she wanted him busy generating one of his grand schemes to end all this, to crack Dee's stolen shell and send him back to Eggsville.

  It didn't feel like something a traitor would want. Still.

  Dr Roswell headed for the trail that led through the trees to the houses. Miranda and Phillips marched behind him. They didn't try to escape. All paths would have led here eventually. Bone trailed them, his steps landing heavier with Sara's weight in his arms.

  Dust particles flew in the millions wherever sun pierced the canopy of trees. What did they call twilight on movie sets? Right. Magic hour. Ha.

  This was Miranda's chance to test Phillips' assumption, to see if she could sway Bone to their side after all. She caught Phillips' questioning glance when she slowed, notched her head for him to go on ahead. He nodded and hurried to catch the none-the-wiser Roswell.

  Miranda spun to face Bone. He was paler than usual, if not as chalky as the woman he carried. He wore another Tarheels shirt, this one with long sleeves pushed up to the elbow.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Bone, I just want you to know that I understand why you've treated me like you have. If it wasn't me, it would have been you."

  Him with his crazy dad, him with no mother, him getting mocked.

  "But I don't believe that's all you have in you," she said. "You're not just your father's son."

  He blinked at her. She didn't need him to respond right away, so she trotted back to rejoin Phillips. Roswell continued to barrel ahead, in a hurry to get to his alchemical crush.

  The trail was damp, though Miranda couldn't recall the last decent rain they'd had, and leaves stuck to the packed earth. The trees' shadows made the trail dark, and the houses were quiet given the number of cars in the lot. Being in the Grove when it was full of people and hearing such silence was worse than seeing it deserted had been. She didn't even hear any birds singing to each other. The forest could have been dead.

  A rich throaty bay pierced the quiet. She'd know that lonely howl anywhere.
Sidekick.

  She darted around Roswell. "Stop…" he called, but Miranda loped clumsily on, her tied wrists at her waist. She tracked the howl through the open door of Polly's. She stopped just over the threshold, uncertain how to proceed.

  Her father stood in the middle of the common room. He was bent, a hand curled in the fur of Sidekick's neck.

  The coffee table had been moved along with most of the other furniture, turning him into a circus master at center ring. Women Miranda vaguely recognised crowded the edges of the room, sitting in chairs that must have been raided from a variety of kitchens. Their backs were hunched over some task. Needles flashed in their fingers, sweeps of gray fabric draped across their laps. They were sewing. Several of them looked up, but none set their work aside.

  Meanwhile, Sidekick struggled and whined against the fingers of the man in the suit. If she'd harbored the smallest doubt that her father was really gone, she knew for certain that he was now. Her dad might have complained about "that fool dog," but Kicks adored him, and he'd quietly rewarded that with belly scratches and the occasional table scrap. A piece of bread, a crumble of bacon.

  The worst thing was that the man before her was a perverse picture of the sober, cleaned-up version of her dad she'd wished existed a thousand times.

  John Dee gazed at Miranda through her father's face. "Mary," he said.

  Well, maybe not the worst thing.

  Dee gave her father's head a slow shake, and released his grip on Sidekick.

  Her dog scrambled to her, nails scraping the hardwood floor. He cowered beside her in a way that made her ache. Tail between his legs, ears and head down. As if he'd done something wrong.

  Kneeling, she buried her face in Sidekick's fur, managing to loop her arms over his head to hug him in spite of her tied wrists. He shivered against her. Dee's footsteps came toward them, his approach measured.