Chapter 28
Violet sat up straight, blinking hard to remind her eyes to remain open.
It startled her to find sleep so near. Without fighting it, she would have nodded off already.
After all they had been through, she thought her racing heart would keep her awake.
Instead, as shock and fear and desperation subsided, her body wanted to force her to recuperate.
It had been only half an hour since they’d passed through that town, but she didn’t know how much farther she could go without sleep.
“How long till sunrise, do you think?” she asked.
Malcolm sat up straighter behind the wheel. She wondered if he might be drifting off as well.
“A couple of hours, I guess. It already looks a bit blue on the horizon.”
“Should we stop somewhere? Find some cover until the sun comes up?” she asked.
Jennie had been rustling around in the back of the minibus. Now Violet heard the splinter of wood as she tore the lid off the damaged crate. Malcolm whipped his head around, peering into the shadows back there.
“What are you doing? She’s supposed to stay in the crate.”
Violet turned in her seat for a better look. She watched as Jennie reached inside her coat and produced a small cloth pouch, then loosened the drawstring that held it closed.
“What I should’ve done the minute we put her back here,” Jennie said. “I’ve got an old injury in my back and it was screaming at me, so I let it calm down a little first.”
Malcolm glanced in the mirror again, fingers flexing on the steering wheel. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“She’s sprinkling something into the crate,” Violet said. “Some kind of dust.”
“No mystery,” Jennie replied. “It’s ground garlic, dried sheep’s blood, and powdered bone from the hands of a woman who could heal with her touch.”
Malcolm seemed at a loss. Violet took a breath, trying to put together Jennie’s words, because she couldn’t find a way to make them fit into anything she’d ever heard or experienced.
She watched as Jennie sprinkled the powder into the crate, onto the canvas into which the undertaker had sewn Maggie’s corpse.
Jennie pried her fingers into an opening, tugged out a lock of Maggie’s hair, then produced a Zippo lighter and lit that lock of hair on fire. Flame curled upward, pluming with acrid, black smoke. The flame burned out in seconds, but the smoke lingered.
“Quit that shit,” Malcolm said. “You must be out of your damn mind.”
Jennie maneuvered back into her seat, tucking the lighter and the little pouch back inside her coat. “Why don’t you tell me why I just did what I did, little brother?”
Violet glanced at him. Did he know the answer?
“If I had to guess,” Malcolm said, “you think they can follow her, like a dog on a scent, and you think whatever you just did is gonna throw them off the trail.”
“See?” Jennie said, smiling in the dark. “You know more than you think you do. Or at least you understand, even when you say you don’t.”
“It’s a guess.”
“Some of it’s instinct, and some of it’s that you remember things you don’t realize you remember. Sight, or insight. It doesn’t matter how. I just need you to stop fooling yourself that you’re making this trip just because of a promise you made.”
“Yeah? Why do you think I’m doing it?” Malcolm asked.
“You know it has to be done, that’s why. You can feel it.” Jennie dug the lighter out again, followed by a pack of cigarettes, one of which she lit. Its tip glowed orange in the dark, reminding Violet of the raven out beneath the willow tree, waiting for Maggie to die.
Jennie exhaled smoke, but also a fog of breath. The sky might be lightening in the east, but the temperature had turned much colder.
“That powder,” Violet said. “What you just did. That was magic?”
“Not magic,” Jennie said, taking a drag on her cigarette.
“Not the way you mean it. I’d like to say it’s witchcraft, but I’m not a witch like my mother was.
Anyone who knows what they’re doing can follow the recipe and put that powder together.
It’s the best I can do, but with luck, it will do the trick. ”
Violet nodded slowly. A day ago, she would have made light of such a statement, despite her mother-in-law’s reputation around Elkhart.
Every town had at least one old woman that local children claimed was a witch.
Now it all seemed so possible, as if she had been living in the dark her whole life and someone had just turned on a light that illuminated all the things she’d never before known were there.
She glanced at Malcolm. The Volkswagen bumped through a pothole, and he didn’t react at all. Though his eyes were open, he seemed as if he had gone somewhere else.
“Is it true?” Violet asked.
He shot her a plaintive look. “What do you want me to say? That I believe it? Of course I do. How could we have gone through this night and not believe it? As for what I knew before all of this, it’s hard to say.
I never let myself think about it very much.
The world tells me there’s no such thing as witches, and it always felt safe to tell myself that, even if it never really felt true. ”
Malcolm hesitated, glanced at his sister, and then back at Violet. “You still don’t hear it? Billie Holiday?”
Violet stared. “You hear it now? This minute?”
He nodded, eyes back on the road. In the dashboard light, he looked dreadfully pale.
Jennie leaned forward, one knee on the floorboards, poking her head up between them. “This is probably the right time to talk a little more about them.”
Violet knew she meant the monsters.
“Whatever you know,” Malcolm agreed. “Whatever can help us get through this.”
“They’re ancient,” Jennie said. “The one with the tree roots in it might be a thousand years old, or older. They’re terrifying, I know—strong and savage—but it could be far worse.
They’re weakened right now, in horrible pain, but they’re fighting through that pain for one reason and one reason only—to stop us from burying Maggie’s body in Shediak. ”
“But why?” Violet asked. “Why do they care so much what happens to Maggie?”
Malcolm glanced back at Jennie. “She did this to them, didn’t she? Whatever’s causing this pain?”
“They’ve been underground for centuries,” Jennie said.
“They dug themselves in deep, blinded by pain, and they’ve hibernated all this time, waiting for her to die.
Maggie put a curse on them that affected the whole country, maybe the whole continent, and when she died, her curse started to unravel.
If we can get her buried in the place she was born—the place she spoke the words of the curse—she told me they’ll still be bound by it.
But if we don’t, the curse will break. Their pain will be gone.
They’ll be free to prey on anyone, anywhere, and to make more like them—the way they did with Elias. There will be hell to pay.”
“These things,” Malcolm said. “They’re vampires?”
“Maggie always called them the Morák, but they’re so old that they go back to a time before there were names, or words, or language. Before there were people.”
Violet studied her, fascinated. “How do you know all this?”
Jennie gave a bitter laugh. “There are a few things you can do when the person who means the most to you in the world decides she’s not interested in you anymore.
You get kind of broken. Some people search for someone else to give them meaning.
Some people discover their own purpose. And some people spend their lives looking for a way to prove the one they love made a terrible mistake, that they’re worth the attention they crave. ”
Malcolm exhaled. “Christ, Jennie. Is that really why you’ve been gone all this time? Just to prove something to Maggie?”
Jennie stared at him for several long seconds. She gave him a brittle smile, and then went back to the original topic as if she’d never strayed from it.
“The Morák are the reason legends about vampires exist, so if you want to call them that, I won’t argue. They’ll kill us just as quickly no matter what we call them.”
Violet shrank in her seat, sliding down, shoulders sagging.
Jennie’s inner conflict had spilled out, and she would have been glad to help—to embrace her and listen to her pain.
But she could barely wrap her mind around the revelations her sister-in-law shared as if they were nothing, as if such truths were universal instead of shocking, and deeply unsettling.
It felt as if the impossible had inflated and begun to take up all the space inside the minibus, and she had to make herself smaller to allow room for it.
She forced herself to sit up. Even laughed a little. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to take all of this in, but it’s ridiculous. If Maggie created this curse you’re talking about, she’d have to be born in the seventeenth century, or there would be records of these monsters.”
Violet shot a sidelong look at Malcolm, then turned in her seat again and stared at Jennie, not trying to hide her hostility toward this absurdity.
Jennie shrugged. “Probably earlier, really.”
“Earlier,” Violet repeated. She shook her head. “It can’t be.”
Malcolm reached across the front seat and took her hand. He gave it a gentle, reassuring squeeze and held on. Violet waited for Jennie to say more, and when she didn’t, Violet turned and sat quietly, staring out the windshield with a numbness growing and spreading inside of her.
Long minutes passed. How long she would never know.
Then Malcolm slowed a bit and craned his neck to get a better glimpse of the road ahead. They were ascending a steep hill, and the sky seemed to have lightened even more. The dark indigo of the eastern horizon had turned a richer blue.
“Almost dawn at last,” Jennie said, just before they crested the hill.
Only as they came over the top of the hill did Violet notice the light had been pulsing. A pair of police cars blocked the road, flashing lights turning the lonely stretch of pavement a ghostly blue.
Malcolm hit the brakes hard enough that Maggie’s canvas-shrouded corpse smacked against the inside of its broken crate.
“What do we do?” Violet asked. “If we stop now—”
“If we end up in a jail cell, we’ll never get Maggie to Shediak by the next sunrise,” Malcolm said.
The policemen were shouting at them, guns drawn.
Jennie opened the back door. “If we let them shoot us, it’s all over, anyway.”
Malcolm swore under his breath, kissed Violet’s knuckles, and released her hand. “Close your door, Jen.”
Jennie started to argue. Malcolm slammed the gearshift into reverse and floored it. The minibus groaned as it leaped backward. Violet could hear cops shouting to one another, taken by surprise. Jennie jerked forward, slid to the floor, fighting to keep arms and legs inside the Volkswagen.
“Are you crazy?” Jennie shouted as gunshots cracked the air around them. Something plinked into the nose of the VW bus, and a crack formed in the windshield.
Roaring backward, they reversed down the hill, out of sight of the roadblock and the path of those bullets. Violet saw the blue lights shifting, moving, and knew the police cars would be after them in seconds, and those engines were much faster than their sluggish bus’s.
“Not crazy,” Malcolm said intently. “I’m a soldier. Sergeant Rose drilled a few things into me. Honor and loyalty, no question. But the one that got me home alive was the third one—survival.”
He cranked the steering wheel, and the minibus slewed sideways, backing onto the soft shoulder of the road, flattening one of the rhododendrons planted there. Malcolm braked and turned to Violet.
“Take that shotgun and jump out right now. Take cover. Don’t let us burn the whole day in a jail cell.”
Jennie started to question him again, but Violet understood. They didn’t have time for questions. She grabbed the shotgun and threw open her door, slid out, and barely had time to slam the door before the tires were spinning in patchy grass and then heading down the road.
The first police car flew over the top of the hill, no siren, blue ghost lights flashing.
Violet dove behind the intact rhododendrons.
She watched as the minibus slowed, the doors opened, and Jennie and Malcolm stepped out with their hands up.
The second police car skidded to a halt while the officers were climbing out of the first one, guns drawn.
Shouting ensued, but as soon as the cops realized they weren’t getting a fight, Malcolm and Jennie were cuffed and put into the back of the second car.
One of the officers opened the back of the minibus. Bathed in flashing blue light, he began to unlace the heavy ties on the canvas shroud. Violet could tell the moment he realized what he’d found, because he stepped back as if something had bitten him.
“Jesus Christ!” the cop shouted. “Marty, come and look at this! The sick freaks are driving around with a dead lady in the back!”
Their shock unspooled in a strange sort of slow motion, but after that, it wasn’t very long before the two police cars drove away, their prisoners in the back of one car, Maggie Wise’s corpse in the trunk of the other.
They left the darkened VW minibus on the side of the road, presumably for someone to retrieve later.
Violet gazed down the road, back the way they’d come, and wondered how long it would take for Root to catch up to them.
Root, and Elias, and however many others there were.
She didn’t know where the cops were taking Malcolm and Jennie.
The nearest town, she figured, but how far might that be?
And how long would it take to walk there?
How long till sunrise?
She stared at the horizon a moment, then ran to the minibus and looked inside.
Several wires stuck out of the steering column.
Malcolm had stripped the protective sheath off them, and she knew he’d twisted them together to start the VW.
It looked as if the police had tugged them apart to stop the minibus.
She set the shotgun on the seat and studied those wires.
Violet had never tried this before, but she’d watched Malcolm do it.
She worried about electrocuting herself or doing something that would damage the engine instead of starting it up, but when she twined the wires together, the engine coughed and turned over, settling into a purr.
Don’t let us burn the whole day in a jail cell, Malcolm had said. And he was right about that. Shediak was probably a seven- or eight-hour drive. She needed to get the police to set the Wise siblings free, no matter what stood in her way. The trouble was that she had no idea how to begin.
In the sky not far behind her, something caught sight of the minibus and followed along for a few seconds before it flew faster, passing overhead and beyond, still searching.