Firewing (25 page)

“Dad?” he said in alarm. “What’s going to happen?”

“It’s all right,” his father said. “Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll get you home. Wait here.”

Griffin nodded, then a chill seized the place where his heart used to beat. He hooked a wing around his father.

“Dad, don’t do it, okay?”

“It’s all right, Griffin.” Gently Shade pulled away.

“Don’t go.” Griffin was shaking, his voice weak and desperate. “I wanted to go home with you.”

“Do what I tell you now,” his father said to him firmly. “Wait here and be ready.”

Still, Griffin clung to him, wings tight around his chest, but Shade shook him off a second time, and flew before his son could clutch hold. Too weak to take flight himself, Griffin watched helplessly as his father flew away from him, higher and higher, until he was just a dark wrinkle silhouetted against the flaming canopy of the Tree.

Shade flew higher still, counting his wingbeats, wondering how much altitude he’d need. Finally he levelled off. This was good.

This would be enough. He looked down, plotted his trajectory, and then took a huge breath, held it, listened to himself, tried to feel every part of himself, as if to store it away in some place he could always find it.

I’m sorry, Marina
.

He folded his wings against his body, and pitched forward into a free fall.

Griffin saw his father plummeting, like a star flung from the heavens. The impact was almost silent, a soft final
thud
, but in Griffin’s head it exploded like thunder and left him gulping in shock. With Luna’s help he dragged himself over and looked at his father, broken on the ground, wings tangled, the bones of his wrists and fingers jutting through the membrane. There was blood around his nose and ears, matted in the fur of his face.

“Oh, no,” Griffin moaned, shambling closer. “No, no …” he repeated until the words became the sound of one long wordless moan.

There were little embers of light flaring in the tips of his father’s fur, and then, it was as if he’d been ignited. With an ecstatic burst of music, light welled up from his father’s body, swaddling him in a cocoon before separating itself from his flesh and coalescing into a swirling pillar. The sound and sight of it was so impossibly beautiful, Griffin laughed through his tears. His father’s life. What could be more alive than that symphonic blaze?

But slowly it began to lift, drifting towards the Tree, ushered by the knothole’s powerful current.

Griffin saw Yorick flutter tentatively towards the dazzling swirl, sniffing, a look almost of hunger on his face. At once Murk was beside him, wings flared in warning.

“No,” the cannibal bat said to Yorick, and the misshapen Silverwing looked ashamed and nodded, dropping quickly away.

“Griffin,” Luna was saying beside him, “you know what your father wanted you to do.”

He swallowed, knowing, but still shaking his head.

“Take it!” said Luna. “He did it for you. That’s yours.”

Griffin looked at her. “Yours, too.”

“There’s not enough.”

Griffin looked at all that light and music his father had left behind.

“There’s enough,” he told her.

They flew up to the light together, Griffin groaning with the weight of his new dead body. But the sight of his father’s life hovering there gave him the strength he needed. He made it, and opened his mouth and breathed it in: the sound and the light; and he felt it filling him and he smelled all the things he loved—the balsam, the pitch, the earth, his mother’s and father’s fur—and his lungs swelled inside him until he was coughing and choking, and his heart gave a lurch and broke into a startled gallop and suddenly all the sound was gone, and the light, too. His father’s life coursing through him.

Panting, he looked at Luna in surprise. She stared back, breath held expectantly.

“Am I?” she whispered.

“Both nice and sparkly!” Nemo shouted out happily from below.

Together Griffin and Luna swirled to the ground, and he nuzzled against her and smelled the warm scent of her fur, felt the excited beat of her heart.

“I’m alive!” Luna shouted. “I knew it! I could just feel it! It feels different, doesn’t it, right away?” She fell silent. “Thanks, Griffin.”

“I didn’t do anything. It was my dad.” He pulled himself over to his father’s body, still warm. “How long until he wakes up?”

“You didn’t take long,” Luna said. “Just a few minutes, really.”

“We’ve got time,” Nemo said. “Doesn’t seem like Zotz can harm us near the Tree.”

Griffin followed the Foxwing’s gaze to the mountains ranged around the valley. Their stone bulk throbbed angrily, as though something wanted to break free from them, but couldn’t. He settled down to wait. Gradually he felt his father’s body cool, and it seemed so still that he began to despair it could ever become animate again. How could this cold shell ever contain any part of his father?

Shade’s wings twitched, and Griffin yelped.

“Dad?”

Slowly his father’s eyes opened. For a long time he stared at Griffin, saying nothing.

“It’s me, Dad. Griffin.”

His father nodded. “Good,” he said, looking at him and Luna. Griffin could see, in his father’s weary eyes, the reflection of the glow that clung to them. “Both of you. That’s good.” He stirred, trying to gather together his broken wings.

“Heavy,” he said. “Everything feels incredibly heavy.”

“Only for a little bit,” Griffin told him, wanting to be useful, wanting to fix things somehow, even though he knew this was something he could never fix. His father’s gaze strayed to the four Pilgrims with whom he’d travelled across the Underworld.

“You should get going.”

“We’ll go together,” said Java. “I can lift you to the Tree.”

“Thank you,” Shade told them, “for helping me find my son.” Griffin helped shift his father onto Java’s back, and climbed on beside him with Luna. The Foxwing lifted off with a grunt.

Up they rose towards the knothole. Griffin lay nestled close to his father, not knowing what to say. Within minutes they’d be there.

“When—” he began, but his voice collapsed on itself and he couldn’t continue. He coughed, fought the tight grip around his throat.

“Everything will be fine,” said his father. “You and I can never really leave each other. One way or another we’ll always be together.”

Griffin nodded, feeling no consolation.

“You’ve had quite an adventure,” his father said with a grin. “I’m starting to wonder if this wasn’t some way to outdo me.”

Griffin couldn’t even laugh. “Mom’s going to be so angry with me.”

“Of course she won’t.”

“It’s my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t hurt Luna, if I hadn’t got dragged down here and made you come after me so that now—”

“Griffin. It was an accident. You did the best you could, and you brought Luna with you, and you made it to the Tree. Without my help.”

“But I wasn’t brave!” he blurted out. He didn’t know why this was so important right now, but it was. “I’m not like you. I’m a coward.”

“No,” said his father.

“I was always scared.
Always
.”

“That’s right,” his father told him. “Being scared but doing it, anyway.
That’s
brave.”

Griffin stared in surprise, and his father pressed his cheek against his son’s. “I’m very proud of you,” he said into Griffin’s ear.

“Ready?” Java asked, looking back over her shoulder at them.

“Ready,” said Luna.

Shade nodded. “I guess,” said Griffin.

The others went first—Yorick, then Nemo, then Murk, hurtling straight for the knothole and disappearing so quickly it was hard to believe they’d ever been there. Griffin held on tighter as Java too was gripped by the cyclone current and pulled in fast. He saw the blackness of the knothole race towards him, shimmer, and then—

It was difficult to keep things straight.

Speed was what he was most aware of, the teeth-rattling, eye-jarring speed as they were hurled up through the blazing trunk of the Tree. His sight, his echo vision, was a shuddering mess, and he could catch only smears of things. Java, he noticed, wasn’t even really flapping anymore; in fact, she had folded her wings in against her body. The speed made him want to scream; he wanted it to stop. He wanted
off
. They were flying straight up, and with his thumbs and claws and everything else he was clinging to his father and Luna and Java, all at once. The cool of his father’s fur, the warmth of Luna’s. They would be dashed to pieces, burned, whirled into dust!

Ahead of them, he saw a circular portal of flames, and beyond that a great network of flaming passageways, and he realized these must be the Tree’s maze of branches spreading across the sky. “Dad,” he said through his wobbling mouth. “Dad?” “I’m here,” came his father’s reply, close to his ear.

They shot up into the tangle of branches, and something tugged hard at Griffin, jarring him from Java’s back. He felt his father’s fur slip through his thumbs. Griffin looked, and his father was gone. “Dad!”

He tried to slow down, to see where he had gone, but there
was no stopping, no changing course. He was being propelled by some hurricane force, and it was all he could do to hold his own body together.

“Luna!” he wailed, for he could not see her, either.

He was being hurtled down one branch after another, shunted, smacked, twisted, until he simply closed his eyes, flattened his ears so he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He tried to hold on tightly to himself, afraid that he would die, afraid that he would never get—

Home.

Goth circled above the jungle canopy, gazing down at the ruins of the royal pyramid. In the many months since his death, the rainforest had reclaimed the heap of scorched and shattered stone, enveloping it with giant ferns and creepers and mist and leaves so that he had almost flown past. This place had once been the sacred temple of Cama Zotz and home to millions of Vampyrum Spectrum.

Keep going
, a voice whispered within him, and he flew on, south, deeper into the jungle. He stopped only to drink from a stream and feed on a nest of macaw hatchlings, and he felt his strength swelling through him. When he’d first burst out into the Upper World, he was weak as a wounded newborn. But the mere sight of familiar constellations and the homeland had invigorated him.

He flew all through the night, and just as dawn was breaking saw a gap in the misty canopy. He plunged into the forest and there, veiled by jungle, was another pyramid. He had to hack
his way through a wall of vegetation to find an opening in the upper temple. The inside was a nest of cobwebs, and he slashed his way through and roosted on the wall. Casting out sound, he saw, barely recognizable through the dust, carved markings: the jaguar, the feathered serpent, the eyes watching him from the corners of the ceiling.

He directed his echo vision lower and there, lying at the chamber’s bottom, was an enormous stone disc. Eagerly, he dropped down to it, brushing away the dried cocoons, insect husks, and years of animal droppings until the hieroglyphs flared in his mind’s eye. Round and round the disc’s surface the images ran, spiralling in towards the centre. Stars, moon, other symbols he didn’t understand. But he would.

He would study the heavens so he could predict the next total eclipse. He would wait for Phoenix to emerge from the Underworld and then mate with her to create a new royal family. And together they would finally raise Zotz from the Underworld.

Creaking wings overhead made him jerk around. “Who’s there?” he roared.

Clinging to a corner of the ceiling was a small group of Vampyrum, watching him fearfully. Goth smiled. “Do you know what this place is?” he asked them. “No,” said a young male.

“This is a temple of Cama Zotz, and this Stone contains the future. Did you know that?”

They shook their heads, bewildered.

“Then, listen to me,” said Goth, “and I will tell you about your god, and all the things to come.”

Goth spoke through the day, feeling stronger by the second.

He was alive.

Zotz was watching over him.

His life had just begun.

Griffin felt wetness against his fur and opened his eyes to find himself flapping through mist. He banked and suddenly he was out of it, beneath a clear sky jangling with stars and a full moon. The moon! He licked his mouth and tasted the water beaded in his hair: not salty this time, just right. It seemed to awaken all his senses: how thirsty he was, how tired, and how hungry.

He circled, looking all around for Luna, and then exhaled with relief when she streamed out from the same bank of mist. They flew as close together as their wingbeats would allow, and looked at the silver forest below them. The scent of it was almost too much for Griffin’s nostrils. He was sure he could smell every single tree and flower and animal within a thousand wingbeats. “Look,” said Luna. “We’re home.”

Below them was his favourite sugar maple, rising up from its little hill on the valley floor. “Still lots of caterpillars for you,” said Luna.

Griffin grinned. He would eat later. Right now, all he wanted was to see his mother, and he felt in Luna the same pulse of impatience and excitement to be truly home. In the distance he could see the peak of Tree Haven, and hear other bats in the forest, hunting. He only wished his father were making this journey with them.

With Luna at his side, he beat his wings hard for home.

Shade came out over the forest.

He had no body, no shape that he could discern.

He was just
here
.

And
here
was anywhere he wanted, just by wishing it. He glided low over the treetops and skimmed a maple leaf—not above it or
below it or near it, but
inside
it. With elation he felt his whole being enter the leaf and course through its tissue, through the tiny tributaries that carried water and food, and then down the fibrous twig which held it, and into the strong tendons of a larger branch, and then down the wise old muscle and bones of the trunk itself—and finally Shade knew what it felt like to be a tree. He slipped out through the bark back into the forest.

This was great!

He shimmered through the wings of a firefly, danced through some sleeping wildflowers, submerged himself briefly in the stream and came back up, giddy with happiness. When he passed through all these things, it wasn’t like he was visiting, it was like he was, for that moment, the thing itself, all his senses guided through it. And he could pick and choose, which suited him just fine, because as much as he’d liked the wildflower, he thought it might be a bit dull to
be
a flower forever.

The forest hummed and pulsed all around him—and he felt more alive and connected to it than he could ever remember. He became aware of the living creatures out below the full moon. He couldn’t quite bring himself to pass through the skunk—he’d do that later when he had more practice—but worked up the courage to fly through an owl, and felt its superb power and skill.

It was not merely the living he felt, either. Within every fibre of the forest, he was aware of the others, those who had died and passed through the Tree. He could not see them or hear them or speak to them, but he sensed they were all around him—in the leaves and dust, dewdrops and pebbles—and knew they were equally content.

When he saw the Silverwings, he felt a quick pang of longing. They were streaking through the forest, hunting, and they looked so superb he wished momentarily he could have a living
body again. He passed through one, and felt the familiar glee of flight, the anticipation of the hunt for insects. They were all chittering rapidly to one another, and he listened, though he had no need of their words to understand their excitement, and their destination.

Shade too felt a quickening within him, and soared on ahead of the bats … and saw before him Tree Haven. He circled once, just to admire it, and to watch all the newborns and mothers racing back to the roost, even though it was far from sunrise. Shade slipped inside, and there, in the central hollow of the trunk, was a great gathering of the entire colony, the walls and ceilings all crowded with Silverwings. The elders were roosting in the middle, and beside them were Roma and her child Luna and …

He felt himself expand with joy when he saw Marina and Griffin, talking and enfolding each other in their wings. Shade streamed towards them and embraced them both, flowing through Marina and Griffin, his mate and his son, and being closer to them than they could possibly comprehend. He felt all the things in their hearts, and became a part of them, and so the homecoming was his as well.