Chapter 43
By the time they crossed the state line, Violet was shivering so much her teeth hurt.
She’d been cold before Maggie ripped up the roof.
Now she sat huddled in the passenger seat with her legs drawn up beneath her.
She knew they couldn’t go any faster, figured it was half a miracle that Jennie had gotten them this far without putting them over a bridge or into a ditch.
But they had a few hours to go, and she had to deal with the frigid air until they arrived in Shediak.
At least she could pull her hands up inside her coat—Jennie’s were pale and thin as icicles on the wheel.
Malcolm had fallen mostly silent since Maggie had risen for the second time.
Now he stared out the window, reaching over occasionally to wipe snowflakes off his mother’s face.
They were all quiet now, and still, but none so still as Benjy.
The monsters couldn’t track him—Jennie had seen to that—but she wondered if Root could see through him, could hear their voices.
Did the monster know what they’d been through, what had happened to Maggie?
Another thought had been haunting her every time she looked at the boy.
The grin was a mask of evil, but it was puppetry, and Root the puppeteer.
If even Maggie—dead, transforming—could hold on to the core of herself, what did that mean for Benjy?
Was he trapped inside himself, aware of all that transpired?
The idea broke her heart. The child would never be the same.
She slid her hand out from inside her sleeve and reached into the back seat, brushing snowflakes from his hair and face.
“Careful,” Malcolm said. His expression suggested she’d gone a bit crazy. “Want him to bite your fingers off?”
“He’s not one of them,” she argued.
“Right now, he’s a tool. A weapon. Don’t let the quiet fool you.”
“Then let’s take that weapon away.”
Violet loved the way Malcolm reacted when she made him think in a way he hadn’t been thinking before. Surprised and delighted in equal measure. In his life, he’d become so used to relying only on himself that he never seemed quite sure what to do with partnership.
“What do you have in mind?”
Violet stared at the boy’s disconcerting smile. “It’s still hard for me to think about all of this as real.”
“After all we’ve seen?”
Shuddering, she drew her hand back into her coat. “I know in my heart it’s real. But my head’s trying to reject it. Witchcraft? Vampires—whatever your mother wanted to call them? And the idea that you’ve got this in you.”
“The old fire.”
“That. Yes.” Violet turned fully around to kneel on the seat, looking over the back at Malcolm.
There’d been so much fear, so much pure surviving, that she’d put aside her feelings for a time.
But now it was quiet, for however long they had, and she looked at him with fresh wonder.
His kindness had been the first thing she loved, and then the openness of his heart, his courage, his gentleness.
This wasn’t a perfect man—if such a thing existed—but even an ordinary man could be good.
He could look at her with those dark eyes and see her, and love her back, not caring about the nightclub or her life before him, not even caring she’d married his prick of a brother.
But now it turned out Malcolm wasn’t ordinary at all, and Violet didn’t know what to make of that.
“You feel it in you. I can see that,” she said.
“Maggie might have laid out that song for you like putting cheese in a mousetrap, but it only worked because this fire is part of you. When we get to Shediak, you’ll need to figure out how to use it pretty quickly.
Maybe there are words that go along with it, but Maggie said it’s about intention.
So I think you need to practice before we get there, so you know what it feels like to …
I don’t know, to call up that old fire.”
“Practice how?”
Malcolm had moved his mother up onto the middle of the seat again, tried to make her as comfortable as possible.
It seemed obscene to pose a corpse that way, but she’d been moving and talking not long ago, and might start talking again at any time, so it would also have been cruel to leave her down on the floor at Malcolm’s and Benjy’s feet.
“It might be hard to concentrate back there, but it’s not as if we have time to pull over,” she said.
“The snow’s let up a little bit,” Jennie said, the first words she’d spoken in a while. “But even so, we have no time to waste.”
Violet pointed at Benjy. “I was thinking you could practice on him.”
“Practice how? I can’t practice burying him.”
“Like I said, you need to figure out how to call on that fire. What it feels like. I don’t think it matters what you do with it. So I’d like you to try to break the hold they have on Benjy.”
Malcolm looked over at the boy.
For the first time in hours, Benjy moved of his own accord. He swiveled his head to stare back at Malcolm, grin widening, tip of his tongue poking out.
“Good luck with that, peanut!”