The White City (5 page)

Ray looked down again. The forest floor was empty.

The horse let out a shuddering snort as Ray beat his wings and rose higher, flapping through the branches of the cottonwoods. He ascended above the treetops. A great field of stars shone overhead. He saw the crow silhouetted against them. B’hoy squawked and swooped forward, drifting ahead on the breeze that blew above the creek bed.

Ray stretched out his wings and followed.

With B’hoy leading, Ray flew up from the tree-filled bottomlands to the ridgeline above. The shadow of the mountains, rimmed in mist, stood ghostly against night. Ray flew farther and farther, the hills drifting past below.

Then he felt his fingers clutching at empty air. His arms were now heavy and long and no longer supporting him.

B’hoy circled around, cawing ferociously. Ray felt feathers
again where his fingers had been. He flapped but was descending, as if an anchor had been tied to his waist. Waves of pain shot through his body. He tumbled. The wings returned. He drifted closer to the ground and then he felt the helplessness of his arms and legs kicking. Back and forth, he struggled between forms, feathers and flesh, spinning and toppling until he struck the earth.

He gasped as he rolled over onto his stomach, with dust stinging his eyes. B’hoy was standing before him, blinking and cocking his head.

Ray groaned, “No … I almost …”

Sweat broke out over his body, and a cold chill shook him. His stomach knotted, and he struggled to rise to his elbows. He stood weakly, staggering a moment before recovering his balance.

“Lead me back,” he whispered to B’hoy.

Ray opened his eyes. Jolie was kneeling over a cookfire, pulling bundles of blackened leaves from the coals with a stick. Ray grunted and Jolie turned.

“I thought I was exhausted,” she said, “but you have not stirred all day.”

Ray sat up, stiff but glad that the sickening effects had left him. “I did it, Jolie,” he said. “I took crow form.”

Jolie stared with astonishment as Ray recounted the events of the night. “… But I don’t know what happened. I just lost the connection.”

“You are lucky to be alive,” Jolie said as she opened the bundles of burnt leaves to reveal steaming trout.

They ate together, and Ray told B’hoy to go out and search
for the steamcoach’s position. When they finished the meal and were down at the river filling their waterskins, Jolie said, “Ray. There is something I need to tell you.”

“What is it?” He felt suddenly anxious, but he wasn’t sure why.

She took a deep breath and met his gaze. “Yesterday. In the river—”

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t have gone on like that. I was just glad you were alive.”

“I know.” She gave a gentle smile. “But what you said. About coming with you back to Shuckstack. My sisters have returned. I belong with them, you must understand.”

Ray felt his heart jump. “You’d leave?”

“I would go home,” Jolie said.

“But Shuckstack … it could be your home. We’re your friends. Your sisters … they left you! We care about you. Don’t you see?”

“You do not understand,” Jolie said, taking a deep breath before continuing. “I belong with my sisters.”

“You belong with us!” Ray shouted. “You belong with those who love you.”

Jolie’s eyes flashed. “A siren loves only her sisters! I will not wind up like …”

“Like who?” Ray asked.

“Like my mother.” She turned from the river and headed back to their camp.

“Jolie?” Ray called. “Jolie. Wait. I don’t understand.”

When he caught up with her, she was kicking dirt onto the dying coals of their cookfire. “You cannot understand,” she said.

Ray waved his arms in frustration. “That’s because you’re not letting me. I thought you cared about us—”

“I do,” Jolie said, snapping around to face him.

“Clearly you don’t,” Ray said. “You’re just like your sisters. You only care about your own kind.”

She grabbed his arm with a hard grip. “Would I be here if that were true?”

Ray looked away and pulled his arm from her grasp to walk past her. “Where’s that horse? We need to go.”

Jolie sighed. “I will find her.”

When she left, Ray closed his eyes tightly and forced Jolie from his thoughts. He linked with B’hoy and saw the rough land on the other side of the ridge beyond the creek. B’hoy was soaring low, keeping from the sight of the steamcoach. Trudging along with its belching blasts of coal smoke and steam, the steamcoach roared across the hills. B’hoy circled so Ray could see their position coming up a ridge not far away.

Ray opened his eyes. “They’ve gotten ahead of us! We’ve got to hurry.”

Jolie had Élodie by the reins. “She is exhausted. We have ridden her too hard. And look how she holds her back foot. I am not certain how fast she can go.”

Ray knelt to inspect her hoof. “A stone bruise, maybe,” he said, giving Élodie a gentle pat. “Sally’s not far. Hopefully she can get us to her before those agents do.”

Jolie frowned. She waited as Ray lit a branch of the sagebrush and dropped it into the jar before climbing into the saddle. She got on behind him and took the jar. Élodie ascended the hill up onto the ridgeline without faltering. When they
reached the top, Ray spied the steamcoach’s smoke over a series of hills to the west. He shook the reins, and Élodie began trotting.

She would not go into a gallop, but she rode up and down, over the rises, closer and closer to the steamcoach. With the mountains looming ever nearer, cottonwoods and other trees grew along the lower washes. B’hoy swooped back and forth across their path before sailing out ahead of them, keeping low to the earth. They were passing out of the barren sagebrush waste and into the eastern shadow of the Rockies.

Before long they crested a rise to see the steamcoach only a quarter mile to the south, atop a nearby ridge. Ray urged Élodie faster as Jolie kept watch on the agents.

“Ray!” she said sharply. “They have a—”

A rifle shot rang out. Élodie reared up with a whinny. Ray dropped low across the horse’s neck and raced her down from the hilltop. Jolie was watching over her shoulder, and once they were out of sight of the steamcoach, she said, “They were not shooting at us.”

Ray stopped Élodie and cocked his head to hear the shouting voices in the distance. “Are you sure?”

“The agent fired the rifle at something ahead of us,” she said. “They were not even looking in our direction.”

They got down from the saddle and crept to the hilltop. On the other ridge, the steamcoach had stopped. The agents were climbing out from the doors, pointing to something farther up the slope of the hill where Ray and Jolie hid, but not in their direction.

“What are they doing?” Jolie asked.

Then B’hoy flapped up behind them and landed at Ray’s feet with a croak. “B’hoy!” Ray growled. “They must have spotted him.”

Ray turned back to the agents. Muggeridge still sat on the driving bench, with the engine sputtering smoke, but other armed agents were spreading out slowly, searching the surrounding hilltops.

“We should go,” Jolie said, pulling on Ray’s elbow.

Ray did not move, his eyes narrowed with thought.

“Come,” she said again.

“The Bowlers think the Hoarhound is leading them to me, right? They think I have the rabbit’s foot. I’m who they’re after.”

“It does not matter—”

“It does!” Ray said. “Élodie is injured, and if we don’t do something now, that steamcoach will catch Sally before we can reach her.”

He turned back to Élodie and dug through the rucksack on the saddle to take out a piece of pemmican. Stuffing it in his pocket, he drank from the waterskin before handing it to Jolie.

“Do you think you can handle Élodie?” he asked.

“Yes. But why? What are you going to do?”

Voices grew louder.

Ray’s expression hardened. “Let them capture me.”

“What!” Jolie gasped.

He pointed toward the mountains. “I need you to go after Sally and Quorl. You know how to follow their tracks. You can find her.”

“But this is madness!” Her eyes flashed fiercely. “You are hurt by what I said, and you are not thinking clearly—”

“I’m thinking fine,” he grumbled.

“What will happen to you?”

“They won’t kill me. They want to bring me to the Gog.”

“And you will let them?”

Élodie was pulling nervously, and Ray took her reins to calm her. “Not if I can help it. We just need to hold those agents up long enough for you to reach Sally.”

“But they will know … the Hoarhound can sense the rabbit’s foot—”

“Get up,” Ray said, motioning for Jolie to climb into the saddle. “I’ll figure something out. I’ll catch up with you if I can. Just go!”

Jolie opened her mouth as if to continue arguing but instead grabbed the saddle horn and swiftly pulled herself up. She took the reins from Ray and locked him in a furious gaze, but Ray saw her hand trembling.

They stared at each other until Jolie tossed her head, scattering her windblown hair from her face, and rode off toward the trees.

Wasting no time, Ray turned to B’hoy. “We need to get their attention. Move rapidly so they won’t get a good shot and draw them back my way. I’ll head down there.” He pointed to the east, away from the direction Jolie rode, to the forest at the bottom of the hill.

B’hoy cawed and flew up to disappear over the hillcrest. Ray ran. As he reached the tree line, he heard gunfire resume. He looked back west, but Jolie had already vanished into the forest.

Shouting voices rose and the thudding and skittering of footsteps on loose earth came from beyond the ridge. B’hoy
darted downward, arrow-like above the treetops. Ray watched a moment from the shadows as the first agent’s bowler hat came over the ridgeline.

“There he is!” the man shouted.

Ray turned and ran into the forest. After a few dozen yards, he stopped and waited for the agents to arrive.

T
HE ROUGAROU FLICKED HIS HEAD UP AND AIMED HIS SILVER-BLUE
snout down at the sun-baked plains below.

“What is it, Quorl?” Sally asked, coming out from the comfortable shade of the trees and closer to the edge of the bluff.

“A gunshot.” His human-like eyes, the only part of him that still showed his true form, stared hard in the distance. “There—another. And still more. Can you hear it, child?”

Sally cocked her head, holding back her blond curls from her ear. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

“My hearing is very strong, little Coyote,” Quorl said. “I am not mistaken. They are guns.”

“Maybe it’s just hunters,” Sally wondered.

“Of one sort or another,” Quorl said.

Sally gave Quorl a worried look. “Do you mean that? Do you think we’re being followed?”

“Possibly … I have seen a strange black smoke at times in the distance behind us. It could be the locomotive that appeared at the Great Tree as we left.”

As Quorl rose, Sally quickly said, “We don’t have to go yet, do we? Why don’t you rest longer? You’ve carried me so far, and I can tell you’re weakening.”

He took a few steps. “It is not the effort of our journey that weakens me.”

“What is it, then?” Sally asked.

“As a steward of the Great Tree, I am not meant to be away from it. You know what happened to my pack when the Great Tree disappeared.”

She remembered how the rougarou had lost their true forms, transforming first bodily into wolves and then in mind as well, eventually turning viciously on Quorl, the only one of the pack who had not forgotten he was a rougarou. They would have killed him had Sally not helped locate the Great Tree in time.

“We have gone too far away from it now,” Quorl said in his grim, expressionless tone. “I feel its distance and will suffer for it. More so because the Great Tree is dying. That is why we must keep going. We must find your father if the Tree is to be healed.”

Sally looked at the slope ahead and the rugged pass leading up into the mountains. The rabbit’s foot had already led her nearly across the country. How much farther would she have to go?

She had left Shuckstack believing that only she could rescue her father. After all, she had given Nel back his leg and returned his Rambler powers. She could use the rabbit’s foot—
her father’s hand that had been severed by the Hoarhound—to help him as she had helped Nel. With his powers returned, her father could then escape from the Gloaming. He would surely be able to stop the Gog’s Machine and save the Great Tree. If only she could reach him where he was trapped in the Gloaming …

But to return his hand to him would come at a terrible cost.

Sally had discovered through her father’s book,
The Incunabula of Wandering
, that the rabbit’s foot was needed to destroy the Gog’s Machine. Mother Salagi had described it as “the light to pierce the Dark.” If she saved her father, if she gave him back his hand and his powers, the weapon to stop the Gog would be lost.

But how could she not save her father? Although she had never met him, she believed, she had always hoped, that one day they would be together. Oh, what was she to do? Sally could hardly think on it all.

“Which way?” Quorl asked.