Four Summoners Tales Part 31

"You announced that you'd be overstepping, and by G.o.d,

you kept your word. Now you need to go, Sky."

"Ezekiel-"

"I don't want you here!" he roared, pushing away from the sofa,

crowding her backward into the hallway. "Get out of my d.a.m.n house!" Skyler's hands were shaking and her chest rose and fell in short little breaths as she glared at him.

"You don't get to . . . ," she began, tears welling in her eyes. "I only wanted to-"

His face a mask, Zeke stared at her. "Go. Now."

Skyler nodded slowly, wiping at her tears, and then turned and left, slamming the door behind her. Zeke went to the door and laid his hand on the wood, listening to the growl of her engine starting up. The ice in his gut-in his heart-was the only thing protecting him, and he invited it deeper inside him, wanting to be cold.To be frozen.

He could hear her tires on the driveway as she turned the car around and he wanted to go after her, to kiss her and let her cry with him. But if he went after her, then he would have to admit that she was right, and then where would he be?

4.

The following night, Enoch pa.s.sed out the pipes. Each of the bereaved who had gathered in the MagicWagon- one mourner for each of the twenty-three people murdered on October the twelfth-received one; none had declined Enoch's offer. They gathered in a haphazardly formed circle on a gravel path that ran through what was called the New Field, the modern part of the cemetery where the recently dead had been buried. Enoch moved wordlessly amongst them, reaching into a burlap sack and producing yellowed bone pipes similar to the one that Vickers had played in the diner the day before.

Vickers stood at the edge of the road, not far from the crypt where his wife had been buried, but she wasn't inside that marble tomb any longer. Martha now stood with her husband, clad in a flowery dress and a light green sweater and wearing a widebrimmed hat that hid much of her face from view. Somewhere between dead and alive, it was as if she were ashamed of herself, but she held her husband's hand, and though Zeke knew it might have been the moonlight, he thought that her skin looked less pale than it had the day before, as if some of the pink health had returned to it.

Enoch paused in front of Zeke and rooted in the burlap sack, which made a rasping noise as he drew out the next pipe. Zeke hesitated before accepting the instrument, but Enoch narrowed his eyes in suspicion until he took it.The pipe might have been human bone, but it had been carved and shaped so that it was difficult to know for certain, and Zeke chose not to examine it too closely. It had three holes in the top and otherwise had no markings.

Clutching the pipe in his hand, nursing the icy numbness inside him for his own sake, Zeke glanced around at the others-friends and neighbors and near strangers-and found that most of them wore expressions as blank as his own to mask their grief and hope and doubt.

Several yards away,Aaron Monteforte leaned against the trunk of a ma.s.sive, dying oak tree with his arms crossed and an almost petulant air about him, as if he thought no one could understand his grief. With twenty-three dead in a small town, everyone in Lansdale had lost a friend or family member in that ma.s.sacre. There was nothing special about Aaron's grief and, Zeke knew, nothing special about his own . . . except that it was his. His pain. His rage. His loss. His daughter, G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

Aaron tended bar at the Blue Moon but looked more like he ought to have been the bouncer, with a weight lifter's build and reaper and angel tattoos on his thick biceps, brown hair to his shoulders and a perpetual scruff that couldn't rightly be called a beard. Several years before, Aaron had spent the summer as a hand on the ranch and Zeke knew he ought to go over and say something. But what could he say that he hadn't already said four months ago to Aaron and everyone else who'd lost someone that night? That he was sorry? They were all f.u.c.king sorry.

Still, he managed to catch Aaron's eye for a moment and gave a solemn nod, just to say, Hey, man, you're not alone. After a second of recognition, Aaron returned the gesture.The kid had lost his sister,Trish, who'd been twenty-five and unmarried, and he had chosen to be her proxy. That was how Vickers had referred to them all, "proxies," just folks stepping in to do a deed on behalf of those who couldn't do it themselves.

When Enoch reached Aaron, the big man with the tattoos and the muscles took the pipe and knelt to pray with it clasped in his hands. When Enoch held a pipe out to Linda Trevino, she backed away, shaking her head.

"I can't," she said. "No, Jesus, I can't."

Lester strode over to her, took her firmly by the arm, and

brought her to Enoch. "You will," he said. "You already agreed. It's all of us or none of us.Are you going to take this chance away from everyone because you're afraid?"

She spun on him, stared into his weathered face. "Aren't you?"

Only the wind spoke. Otherwise the cemetery was silent.

"We all are," Zeke said at last, quietly but clearly.

Linda stared at him with wild eyes."But he won't even tell us-"

"Take it, d.a.m.n you!" Mrs. Hawkins snapped. "Just take it or you might as well be killing them all again!"

Linda sucked in a breath as if she'd been punched in the gut. Shaking, she took the carved length of bone from Enoch, who moved on to young Tommy Jessup and then Arturo Sanchez and to a man Zeke knew only as Mooney, a salesman from the medical supplies company who had brought his new bride to the music festival and then lost her to a bullet only a week and a half after they'd been wed.

The last two pipes in the sack went to Lester and to Harry Boyd, the owner of the oldest of the five ranches that surrounded Lansdale. His boy, Charlie, had been twenty-one and the spitting image of his father, with ginger hair and a freckled face and a lanky, awkward build. Harry looked as if he might be sick when Enoch offered him the pipe, and the gathered mourners held their collective breath until he accepted it.

They had all agreed before, but this was the moment when it felt to Zeke that a bargain had truly been struck.The air around them turned cold, and when a gust of wind rustled the branches of the trees in the cemetery, he shivered.

I'm here, bud, he thought. And I'm not running.

It had almost been a prayer, and he wondered if Savannah could hear it, or if she felt the love he had for her.

Enoch moved to the center of their ragged human circle, ignoring those who wept or who had gone so pale that Zeke feared they might faint.The little man-hoodoo conjuror, Skyler had called him-glanced around the circle and then reached into his pocket, taking out a small metal tin, which he opened to reveal the glitter of metal and then pa.s.sed on to Zeke.

"These are pins.Take one and pa.s.s them along until everyone has one."

Zeke did as he'd been told, giving the tin to Lester before looking at Enoch. "What now?"

"Now you stick yourself with the pin," Enoch said, his eyes a stormy gray. "Don't be gentle. When you're bleeding well enough, you can toss the pins aside, and then write the name of the one you've lost on the pipe in your own blood. It's got to be the name you called them, the name in your heart, not the name they were born with."

"Blood ritual," Arturo Sanchez muttered. "Blasphemy."

"What did you expect, Artie?" someone said.

Zeke glared at Sanchez. "Blasphemy is murdering twentythree people, not loving them so hard you'll do anything to have them back."

Zeke tucked the pipe into his pocket and then thrust the pin into the index finger of his right hand, jabbing hard and giving the pin a little jerk to make sure the tiny wound would not seal itself up too quickly. When he'd dropped the pin, he took out the pipe with his left hand and scrawled small, crude letters onto the bone in bright crimson, turning it in his hand so that her name encircled the pipe and so that he could fit all of the letters.