Chapter 7
The wind was a mournful ghost wailing over the Hudson. It scraped over the black waters and dragged up mouthfuls of anguish, so the dark night was a mourning marrow of midnight lamentations.
The boy.
Where was the boy?
The wind churned the water and shoved at the waves, calling his name.
Boy?
Boy . . .?
The wind had followed the solange-eyed one into death, but it hadn’t been able to follow the boy into his watery grave. Where had he gone that the wind couldn’t follow? Why couldn’t the wind—a powerful, cunning, wondrous being—follow the boy where he went?
It had promised to always look after him. To be human enough for the boy. To be his wind.
Why couldn’t it find him?
Once, the boy had asked, “Wind, why are we born?”
The wind had shoved the boy’s chin, knocking against him playfully. The boy, when he was young, had often asked pointless questions.
He’d smiled at the wind’s chiding and stared at his tightly folded hands. “Ah. I see. We’re born so we can die. I suppose the only choice we have is who we die for. Right, Wind?”
The wind wasn’t so sure about that. It had lived since wind was spoken into existence. It had been born with the moon and the sun and the shooting of cosmic rays over the flat, vacant expanse that became this earth.
Death ignored the wind, and for eons, the wind had ignored death.
The wind scraped over a cresting wave and tasted the knife edge of the curving water. It peered at the moonlight reflecting in the opaque depths, calling out, Boy?
How long would the wind search? It didn’t know.
There was no time. There was only now. And now was the heavy weight of funeral shrouds and cloaked despair.
How long would it last? Perhaps forever.
In the confessional closet of its midnight grief, the wind admitted it may mourn forever.
Could the wind mourn? Could it feel?
Feelings were human things. They were beneath something as wondrous as the wind. Yet the wind had made itself into something new for the boy. Perhaps this hollowed-out, echoing, anguished moor feeling was what happened when the wind allowed itself to love.
Because if the wind could love . . . it could grieve.
And if it could grieve, it could weep.
The wind had always wondered at the taste of tears. They were a distillation of a human’s soul, captured in a dreadful longing of bleeding salt and spirit.
At the beginning of the world, the wind had tasted night and day, sun and stars, water and earth.
Human tears tasted just like those first cosmic waters.
It was as if when a human cried, they were trying to return to the time before the beginning, when they were still an unspoken song, an unborn ideal. Tears were their mournful plea.
The wind never wished for things that couldn’t be. But it wished, just this once, for tears to shed. If it could love, then why couldn’t it cry?
Wasn’t love the preceptor of tears?
It wanted to spill the tears of its spirit over the world.
Instead, it swept rain-soaked mists over the Hudson.
It blew a mournful fog through the shadow canyons of the city’s buildings.
It flew to the heavens and gathered warm rain to fall in giant, weeping drops onto hot pavement, groaning taxis, and hunched pedestrians.
The boy.
Its boy.
It created a mournful choir of rain and fog and mist for its boy.
Perhaps it would mourn until the rain flooded the city and buried the forest of buildings so they were only branches reaching out of a swamp.
Perhaps it would mourn until the oceans rose and shrouded the streets in salt water.
Perhaps it would mourn until all of humanity mourned with it.
Sometimes, the wind visited the girl and asked, Where is the boy?
But she didn’t know either. And the girl tasted like the rocklike one now.
There were violets still, but there was also cold granite and the metallic flavor of unending pain.
The scent of pain was carved into her, like a relentless river’s harsh grooves worn deep into a rocky canyon.
The wind witnessed the setting of her sun and the descent into darkness.
It rose and fell on her quick, panicked breath as she lay in Hell Gate’s underground tomb.
The wind had spread over her like a thin sheet and tried to comfort her as the boy had once asked it to do. It couldn’t save the girl—it never could—but it could blanket the frightened, rapid beating of her heart.
The wind witnessed the cold, rocklike flood crawling through her veins and petrifying her heart. When her pulse finally slowed, she tasted of stone and ice. She had no tears. Not for the boy. Maybe not for anyone.
If the wind weren’t an intelligent, cunning, masterful being, then it might believe the girl was exactly like the rocklike one now.
But the wind could enter locked things. It could sweep under doors; it could find tiny crevices; it could fly on dust motes and sneak through keyholes and twist through locks. The wind knew what the girl was doing. She was keeping a secret. The wind would keep it with her.
The girl would mourn in secret.
The wind would mourn in fog and rain and moaning gusts.
Perhaps forever.
The wind circled over the black water and climbed the jagged, rain-slicked cliffs, its moans echoing over the jutting rock and splashing back toward the Hudson. It dragged itself over the crumbling graveside dirt of the cliff’s edge and slid along thorny vines and kudzu-choked trees.
The wind tugged itself across the root-cracked sidewalks lining the river forest and the city edge.
A red-tailed hawk dove through the fog. It appeared on silent, ghostlike wings, an apparition.
The wind sliced through its talons, and the hawk shrieked.
A wet-furred mouse skittered under a crushed aluminum can, and a rat dove into the flooding sewer.
The hawk veered, and the wind caught the current under its wing, gliding higher.
Below, a man snapped closed his black umbrella and ducked into the small light of his apartment building.
The wind paused and ceased its wailing.
What was that?
The wind stretched, reaching toward the noise.
It was a sharp cry of fear. A desperate, pleading noise.
Was it . . .?
Yes.
It was the quick rushing of running feet. The pounding, the flight, the fear.
The wind knew that cry.
The wind knew that voice.
The cry pierced the thick fog and speared the wind, causing it to perk up and twitch to hear more. It listened intently to the sounds leaking through the mist-shrouded streets.
“Please,” the voice begged. “Please. Please. Please.”
The voice was heavy with running breaths. Chased and chasing breaths. The “please” was an exhale.
The wind sped away from the river and rushed through the dark, brick building-lined streets. It gushed through puddles, flew over a lone taxi’s hood, and blew the dense fog from its path.
This far north, this far into the night, the streets were quiet.
What came out after midnight?
Rats.
Cockroaches.
Predators and the prey they hunted.
The wind forgot to mourn. It forgot to weep. It chased the sound of pounding feet.
There!
The wind blew into a narrow alley. Stagnant, dark, wet, hot. This alley was a sharp wedge stuck between three brick buildings that had been sandwiched together a century ago. A dead end.
It smelled of crumbling brick, rusted metal, rotting garbage, and the rat that had died in heavily sprinkled poison.
The wind whipped through the alley’s narrow opening and shoved at the two men facing off in the dark.
It buffeted the men. They ignored it, focused only on each other.
That was fine. Humans always ignored the wind.
The one—“Please”—was sweat-soaked, wide-eyed, and shaking. He backed away from the other, tripping over a broken sack of garbage. His back hit the redbrick wall. He stopped, trapped.
The wind rode over his stumbling, racing pulse, and made a questioning noise. Are you all right?
It was the innocent one. The Jersey Devil’s son. The wind had been there the night this one was conceived. It was a night of hate and terror and horrifying things, but this innocent one had come out of it.
The wind never wondered how a being so innocent—half-human, half-creature—could be born from hate. It had happened so often over the centuries that the wind didn’t wonder about it at all.
He had large, velvet-soft brown eyes. Soft brown hair as fluffy as the white wisps on the end of a cattail. A quick, ready smile, and a heart as tender and fragile as the first shaking steps of a newborn fawn. The girl loved him, but that had never been enough to make the wind care.
The innocent one was more of a curiosity. How could a being so innocent survive in Hell Gate? He was like an injured fawn limping through a den of ravenous, rabid wolves. How long could his fragile light shine in the deep, deep dark?
Not long, the wind thought. But here he was, still as fawn-like and trembling as the day he was born.
The innocent one flinched when his back hit the wall, and his fingers curled into the bone-dry mortar between the bricks. He dragged in a sharp, gasping breath, and sweat slicked down his skin.
The wind bounced over his drumming pulse and rode on his fear-soaked heartbeat. His forearms bulged and twisted, and the tendons in his arms snapped. Claws pierced the skin of his fingertips, his father’s form racing to the surface and fighting to break free.
There was blood on the innocent one. The wind hadn’t noticed the faint copper smell over the stench of the alley. But there it was. Cuts covered his arms, his hands. Long, thin slices cut across his back, his legs, his face, even the bottoms of his feet.
How?
Why?
The wind shrieked and shoved at the man stalking the innocent one. Even with a powerful gust, the man kept coming. He twisted his hand, and a blue fire sword appeared in his grip. It lit the dark, and blue shadows flew over the dark alley.