Chapter 45
The flying one perched on the sharp tip of the plow, right at its center, wings pinned to its back like a full-size gargoyle hood ornament.
The wind buffeted the thing, but it clung to the V-shaped blade, snow whirling around it.
Alfie had tried to shout it away—the monster blocked part of his view of the road—but it ignored him, just put its head back and smelled the night air.
Alfie’s throat felt dry. He could taste blood, bubbling up from somewhere inside him.
His body still felt strong, pulsing with Root’s influence, but his thoughts had turned weary and begun to stray further than before.
Root curled in the passenger seat, mouth a tight line of pain.
It tried to hide that agony, but it’d gone rigid and quiet.
The farther northeast they traveled, the more Root seemed to radiate malignant hate.
Alfie could feel it in the cab of the plow, as if this inhuman thing wanted desperately to scream, and only loathing prevented it.
“Can you still feel the boy?” Alfie asked.
Root’s gaze shifted toward him. “No,” it sneered. “But he is just ahead.”
His heart skipped. No. Root couldn’t sense Benjy’s presence any longer. The monster had admitted that the connection had become faint, but they had been traveling along this route as fast as the plow and the snow would allow because Root insisted it could still feel Benjy ahead.
Now it couldn’t. What did that mean?
“There,” Root said.
Alfie saw it, too. A vehicle up ahead in the storm. Taillights glowing.
“How can we be sure it’s them?”
Root bared its teeth, glaring suspiciously at Alfie. “Take them.”
A loud banging resounded through the truck.
Mathieu and Afua would be in just as much pain as Root, but they were celebrating, pounding their fists against the inside of the back of the dump truck.
In the glow of their headlights, Alfie watched the flying one launch into the sky, slicing through the falling snow.
It fell behind for a few seconds, taken by the wind, and then flashed past them, headed for the car ahead.
Were they really in that car? Malcolm and Violet, with the corpse of Malcolm’s mother? He hoped it wasn’t but thought it must be. Who else would be driving out here in the smallest hours of the night, in weather like this?
“Benjy’s free.”
Alfie glanced in the rearview mirror. Elias sat there in darkness, eyes gleaming, almost lost in shadow.
Like a lizard asleep in the sun, he seemed content to wait for his moment.
The glow of his eyes, the barely seen contours of his face, made him into the kind of creature that ought to be waiting beneath a child’s bed after dark, or in a closet, whispering dreadful promises.
Elias had to be in pain, too. Racked with it, contorted by it.
Perhaps that explained his silence and stillness.
The words hadn’t come from Elias, though. They’d come from the figure beside him, even more invisible back in the dark. Alfie’s brother, Joe. Dead, ghostly, loyal.
“If Benjy can be free, so can you,” Joe whispered.
Root and Elias couldn’t hear him, of course.
Alfie couldn’t be completely certain Joe’s ghost wasn’t in his head, but it was a comfort to have him there.
The Hannigan twins had never really been apart, not for long, and if Alfie could have Joe with him still, he would celebrate that no matter how it was possible.
Alfie felt his brother’s ghost there with him, but he felt his own as well. Not a ghost but nearly that. He could feel the spirit of his true self, untainted by Root’s malignance, still there in his mind. It ached for his attention.
They’d nearly caught up to the car when he saw it bump over something in the road. Alfie didn’t have time to brake, could only watch the plow blade rip it apart. The flying one’s head and upper torso slid off the left-upper edge of the blade and vanished onto the snowy road as they drove past.
Root roared and flung itself forward, slapping the windshield with an open palm.
A starburst of cracks appeared in the glass and began to grow and spread while Root slid back into its seat, fuming, groaning as its pain resettled.
Its fingers seemed to have grown longer, its body thinner.
A bit of bark that had jutted from the edge of its shoulder fell off just then, dropping to the seat beside it.
The ghost of Joe Hannigan leaned up between the seats and whispered, “Fight it.”
Alfie felt like a puppet pulling back on his own strings. He could barely open his mouth to say the things he wished to say. His foot came off the accelerator.
“What are you doing?” Elias snarled from that cramped space behind the seats.
Root sensed it immediately. It didn’t need to be told. Whatever pain clawed at these monsters, it didn’t stop Root from uttering a dry laugh. Like a cough. Like the rattle of a dying snake.
“Hit them from behind,” Root said. “Drive them off the road.”
Alfie could feel the thing digging around in his brain.
He’d seen what happened to Elias, but Alfie wasn’t one of them.
Root controlled him in other ways, but hadn’t infiltrated his body with flesh or blood.
He had to be able to fight. If he couldn’t escape Root now, with the creature in such pain, he never would.
From up ahead, gunshots echoed in the storm. A bullet shattered his side mirror.
Root dug its claws into Alfie’s right leg, puncturing wool and skin, drawing blood that trickled down the inside of Alfie’s trousers.
“Obey me.”
He intended to refuse, had the thought clear in his head, but his foot pressed down on the accelerator.
The plow charged forward, barreling along the snowy road, thirty yards behind the car, then twenty.
Alfie thought he heard a little boy screaming, the song like banshee wails whipping on the wind to reach them.
Benjy, of course. No longer in thrall, awake now to all the horror that had befallen him, and the terror about to tear them all apart.
Alfie knew he had lost his soul. Root had driven it out of him and replaced it with its own will. Root was his master now.
“No,” said the ghost of his brother.
Joe slipped up between them. Seeming to sense something there inside the plow’s cab, Root ducked its head like a coyote sniffing for prey.
“You’re really here,” Alfie whispered.
He thought of the time Joe had been struck by a car while riding his bicycle, back when they were boys. Unconscious in the hospital, he’d woken to find Alfie beside him and he’d uttered those same words. Alfie had taken his hand, given him comfort. They hadn’t needed to say anything else aloud.
“What did you say?” Root hissed.
A dozen feet from slamming into the back of the car, which the headlights now revealed as a Frazer sedan, Alfie took his right hand off the wheel and laid it beside him, hoping. He felt Joe’s hand slip into his and squeeze, and his heart eased. His breath shuddered and slipped away.
A smile creased his face as he twisted the steering wheel hard to the left.
The plow blade clipped the back of the Frazer, shooting sparks, but the car only jerked and shuddered and carried on as Alfie pounded his foot on the accelerator and the plow ripped through a guardrail.
It careened over the edge of a small bridge, nose-first into a wide, icy stream, shattering glass and crunching metal.
The impact shot Alfie through the windshield.
The last thing he heard was Root shrieking in pain and fury.
It all went dark. And so cold.
After a time—seconds or days, he could not say—he felt Joe’s hand in his again, helping him to rise.
Alfie smiled at his brother. Joe looked good. Handsome and well, eyes bright.
“You’re really here,” Joe said to him, those words again, more reassuring than ever before. For both of them.
The Hannigan brothers turned and walked off along the snow-covered stream, leaving no trace of their passage. The wind gusted, and they were gone.
Up on the road, the Frazer carried on toward Shediak as their pursuers crawled from the wreckage, climbed from the stream up to the broken guardrail, and screamed at the sky.