Chapter 7
Liam got to her first.
He went down on his knees in the wet grass and got his hand under her head before it hit the ground, and her whole weight came into his palm, and she was so light, so much lighter than she had been in Minnesota.
"Chloe. Chloe."
Nothing.
Her eyes were half open and rolled up and her breath was coming in short shallow scrapes.
"Isaiah, help me."
"I'm here." Isaiah was already there, on the other side, wedging his coat under her shoulders. "I'm here, I've got her."
And behind them, boots on gravel.
Liam looked up.
Rennick was standing over them.
He had come across the beach in four strides and he was looking down at the unconscious girl in the grass with an expression Liam could not name, and it was not triumph and it was not greed and it was not even calculation.
It was fear.
"What is she," Rennick said.
"She's my friend."
"That's not what I asked."
"She's my friend." Liam did not stand up.
He did not let go of her head. "She took a bullet through the side four days ago freeing a mooring line so I could live, and she washed up in this cove half dead, and she has been burning with fever ever since, and she is my friend, and if you put a hand on her I will kill you where you stand."
Rennick did not move.
"She knew about the carving," he said.
"Yes."
"She's never been within three hundred miles of that door."
"No."
"Then how—"
"Because something's been talking to her!"
Liam was on his feet now, and he had not meant to be, and he was shouting into the face of a man twice his weight and he did not care.
"Because there is a thing in those trees that has been standing outside a concrete wall for eight months learning everything about everyone in it, and it has got into her head, and it has been in there since the moment she went into the water, and it is using her mouth to talk to you."
The beach was completely silent.
Rennick's eyes went, very slowly, past Liam's shoulder.
To the willows.
They stood in a gray wall at the top of the beach, wet and silver and still, and the fog moved between the trunks, and the chimes hung motionless in the windless morning.
"I know about the trees," Rennick said quietly.
"Do you."
"I lost two men in them in November." He was still looking. "I've never been able to say what happened to them and I've never once come back here after dark, and I told my crew it was because of the tides and every one of them knew I was lying."
He looked back down at Chloe.
"And you're telling me it's got into a girl."
"I'm telling you," Liam said, "that in the last five minutes it told you exactly what it wanted you to know, at exactly the moment it wanted you to know it, and if you believe you're the one who's been running this conversation, you're a fool."
Rennick took a step back.
He actually took a step back, and Liam watched a man who ran sixty people and forty fighters look at a dying girl in the grass and be afraid of her.
"She said there's a code," Rennick said.
"Yes."
"Is there?"
"Yes."
Rennick let out a long breath through his nose.
"Then you and I," he said, "are going to have a very careful conversation, because there is a man coming north with a barge full of powder to blow that hillside into the sea, and you have just told me that he is going to bury the only thing on this coast worth having."
"Rennick," Nell said.
"Not now, Nell."
"Rennick, listen."
Something in her voice made every head turn.
Nell Rook was standing at the edge of the beach with her scarred face turned up toward the willows and her body absolutely rigid.
"The chimes," she said.
Liam turned.
And he heard it, and he did not understand what he was hearing, and then he did, and the bottom fell out of the morning.
The chimes were moving.
Not all of them. A line of them, running through the trees from the north end of the beach up toward the path, bones and tin and glass and old bright spoons, and they were moving in sequence, one bunch after another, a rippling clatter travelling through the willows from left to right.
Something was walking that line.
Something with weight.
"Eight months," Nell said. Her voice was very far away. "Eight months and it has never moved a single chime."
"It's not the thing," Liam said.
"What?"
"It's not the thing, Nell, the thing doesn't have hands." Liam was already moving, already reaching for the rifle, already turning to face the trees. "That's what you told me. It doesn't leave a print. It doesn't bend a reed. It has never once touched anything in eight months."
"Then what's in my trees?"
"People," Liam said.
Rennick's head snapped around.
"Kessel," he barked. "Sound off. Where's Kessel?"
One of the Sawtooth men, a lean one with a scar across his lip, went white.
"He's on the boat," he said. "You put him on the boat, you said one man on the boat at all—"
"Then who's in the trees?"
And that was when the shooting started.
It came out of the willows all at once, from the north end, and it was not a volley. It was worse than a volley. It was disciplined. It came in pairs, two shots and then two more, a rolling steady work of gunfire from men who were not in a hurry and did not expect to be shot back at.
The first pair took a Sawtooth man standing by the fuel cans and put him on his face in the gravel.
The second pair took Petyr's garden fork out of his hands and blew a hole in the crate behind him.
"DOWN!" Liam roared. "EVERYBODY DOWN!"
Chaos.
Twenty-two fishermen and ten Sawtooth men and one beach, and every person on it went in a different direction at once, and Liam got both hands on Chloe's door and hauled it sideways behind the overturned crate Rennick had been sitting on,
and Isaiah threw himself down on top of her and covered her head with his arms.
"Stay on her!" Liam shouted.
"I've got her!"
"Stay on her, Isaiah!"
Liam went flat behind the crate and brought the Winchester up.
And made himself stop.
Two seconds. That was all he gave it. Two seconds of lying in the gravel with his heart trying to come up his throat and rounds cracking overhead, and he made himself look, the way Tom had taught him without ever once saying he was teaching him anything.
Work the read. Every time. Especially now.
Muzzle flash in the trees. Left to right, spread across sixty yards of the willow line, at the north end, above the beach.
Count them.
Four flashes. No. Six. Six shooters in the tree line, working in pairs, and they had the high ground and the cover and they had come down that chime line in the fog while everyone on the beach was staring at a dying girl.
They had been waiting for the meeting to happen.
"Rennick!" Liam shouted. "How many men has the Shore got in Sound country?"
Rennick was down behind the longboat with a rifle he had produced from somewhere, and he was bleeding from a splinter above one eye.
"That's not the Shore!" he shouted back.
"What?"
"That's not the Shore, that's Ballard, look at the coats!"
Rennick's face was a mask of pure fury and something underneath it that Liam recognized instantly, because he had felt it himself on a rain-swept dock a week ago.
"They followed me! They followed my boat down the coast and they've been sitting in your trees all night, Nell, they were in your trees while we were talking—"
Another pair of shots.
A Sawtooth man screamed and went down in the shallows.
"They want the same thing you want," Liam shouted.
"They want to make sure I don't get it!"
Liam put his eye to the scope.
The Leupold pulled the tree line in close and made it real, and there they were, gray coats and dark faces in the willow shadow, and he found one crouched behind a trunk with a lever gun and he put the crosshairs on the middle of him.
Fifteen rounds.
You fire it when the shot is certain and the need is real and not one second before.
The need was real.
Liam let out half his breath, and the Winchester roared, and the man behind the tree went backward into the fog and did not come out of it.
Fourteen.
The gunfire from the trees stuttered.
Just for a moment. Just for a second and a half, because six men who had been shooting into a panicked crowd with total confidence had just heard something come back at them that was not a shotgun or a rake, something enormous, something that made a sound like a door slamming in the sky,
and one of them was down.
Liam worked the bolt.
He was already moving the glass, already hunting, and he found a second one breaking cover, running crouched from one trunk to the next, and he led him half a body and fired.
The man dropped.
Thirteen.
"What is that?" Rennick was staring at him from behind the longboat, and there was something close to awe on his broken face. "What in God's name are you shooting?"
"Get your men behind the boat!" Liam shouted. "Nell, get your people into the water! Behind the bar! The bar, Nell, get behind the gravel bar!"
"They'll drown!"
"They'll drown less than they'll get shot!"
Nell Rook did not argue.
She was up and screaming orders in that flat carrying voice and her people were moving, going flat, going low, going into the cold shallows behind the long spine of the bar where the gravel rose up out of the water and made a wall, and Liam covered them.
That was the word for it and it was the first time in his life it had ever applied to him.
He covered them.
He lay behind a crate on a gray beach at the edge of the world and he put rounds into the tree line, one at a time, slow, deliberate, and every single time he fired, the men in the willows stopped shooting and got behind something.
Twelve.
Eleven.
That was what a .338 did. Not the hitting. The sound of it. It went through the fog and it hit the trees and it told six men in gray coats that there was something on that beach that would kill them from four hundred yards away and there was nowhere in those willows that was far enough.
Ten.
"Liam!" Isaiah, screaming, from under Chloe's door. "Liam, your count!"
"I know my count!"
"Liam, ten—"
"I know!"
And then Rennick was beside him.