A blush stains Tony’s jaw. “Hey, don’t worry about that. You’re doing me the favor. Otherwise, I’d have nothing to do but listen to the radio, and all they talk about are those murders. Can you imagine that poor kid finding—”
“How about we eat inside?” The last thing she wants to dwell on is death, especially murder. “It’ll be warmer and we won’t mess up your car.”
“Too late,” Tony says, throwing a rueful glance. The Camry’s backseat is strewn with clothing, crumpled fast-food bags, three shoeboxes of cassettes—mostly Lloyd Webber musicals (if Rima hears “I Dreamed a Dream” one more time, she might be forced to hurt someone), a wheezy old cassette recorder, vintage comics like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, and a couple Lovecrafts with nightmare covers of gruesome monsters boiling with tentacles.
She laughs. “How about we don’t mess it up more than it is already? Those comic books must’ve cost a fortune.”
“Um, no, I paid regular price, but it’d be nicer inside, yeah.” Tony’s grin is hesitant, but when it comes, his whole face lights up. With his mop of brown curls and light blue eyes, he’s really pretty handsome.
“Great,” she says, and reaches for the door handle.
“Hang on.” He depresses the master lock on his door. “The power locks are all screwed up so you can only open them from my side. I keep meaning to get them fixed.”
Crossing the lot, she spots the birds: five very large, glossy black crows ranged round a rust-red truck slotted beneath a gnarly, naked maple. Four crows brood on a trio of low-hanging branches, their inky talons clamped tight. A fifth teeters above the grinning grill like a bizarre ornament.
She knows, instantly. Death—very recent, very strong—has touched that truck. Like the crow floating above Tony’s Camry, the birds are a dead giveaway, no pun intended. The more there are, the closer they come to a house or car or place, the more violent the death. One bird, she can handle. Times when whole flocks blanket the roof at the Goodwill, she takes a pass. And forget cemeteries.
“You okay?” Tony tosses a look at the truck. “What?”
“Nothing.” He doesn’t see the crows. No one normal ever does. Still, as she hurries inside the rest stop, she holds her breath. She doesn’t actually believe that old saw about breathing in dead spirits, but there’s always a first time for everything and she has enough problems.
Just as she’s about to turn into the ladies’ room, a hard-faced kid in baggy, olive-green fatigues cuts a sharp dogleg. “Hey,” she says, pulling up short. “Watch it.”
“Say what?” He whirls, incredibly fast, his fists coming up. The kid’s pupils are huge, black holes rimmed with a sliver of sky blue. Then he spazzes, blinking away from whatever horror show he’s watching. “Oh. Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—”
“Hey, Bode!” Another kid, also in olive drab, stands at a table in the fast-food joint. Even at this distance, she spots the angry sore pitting the left corner of his mouth, and the kid’s so meth-head jittery he could scramble a couple eggs.
“Hey, Chad,” Bode says. And then to Rima: “I got to go.” Before she can shrink back, he puts a hand on her arm. “You sure you’re okay?”
His touch is volcanic, atomic, so hot she can feel the death cooking into her flesh. “Oh, yeah,” she says, faintly. “I’m good.”
As soon as he lets her go, she bolts into the bathroom, making it to a stall just in time. Later, as the taste of vomit sours her mouth, she hangs over the bowl—lucky for her, no one died on that seat—and thinks about Bode. The guy’s touch was mercifully brief and fragmentary, but she’d seen enough. Ten to one, he’s that truck with the death-crows. The real question is who, exactly, is dead?
Because when Bode touched her, he changed. Just for an instant, but enough so she saw Bode’s head—
5
“OH, HECK,” SAID Tony.
Rima blinked back to the here and now. “What?”
“The truck’s gone,” Tony returned grimly.
“Maybe there’s a turnoff.” Something sparkled then, and she squinted through the snow frothing the windshield. Way off to the right, there was a sharp glint—glass?—and something very black and formless floating over the snow. “Is that …?” She almost said smoke, but the word died halfway to her teeth.
Not smoke.
Crows.
And, in a crush of splintered trees, an overturned van.
PART TWO
THE VALLEY
LIZZIE
Whisper-Man Black
ONLY MOM POPS out of the barn, and she is screaming: “Get in the car, get in the car, just get in the car!” Mom hauls Lizzie down the porch steps, practically throws Lizzie into the front seat. She thrusts the memory quilt into Lizzie’s lap: “Hang on to that; don’t let go, no matter what!” Mom’s hand shakes so bad the ignition key stutters against metal, and she’s sobbing: “Oh please, oh please, oh please, come on, come on, come on goddamnit, come on!” She lets out a little cry as the key socks into place and the engine roars.
Then they are moving, moving, moving, going very fast, racing after their headlights, her mother hammering the accelerator. The force slams Lizzie back against the seat; her teeth come together—ka-chunk—and her tongue screams as the taste of dirty pennies floods her mouth. But Lizzie is too scared to cry; she is absolutely silent, quiet as a mouse, as the car fishtails, kicking up gravel rooster tails.
We’re never coming back. She clutches her memory quilt in both hands. The glass might be magic, and those stitches as strong as her mother, but Lizzie’s life is unraveling. I’ll never see my house again. I’ll never find Marmalade.
She cranes over her shoulder. Peering through the rear window is like seeing a movie through the wrong end of a telescope. She watches as their farmhouse, Wisconsin-sturdy and built to last until the end of time, recedes. To the left and across the drive, the big prairie barn hulks in the gloom, and that is when her sharp eyes pick out the pulse of a weird orange glow that is very, very wrong.
“Mom!” she says, urgently. “Mom, the barn’s on fire!”
“I know,” her mother says. “I set it.”
“Mom!” A blast of horror rips through her body. “We’ve got to go back! We’ve got to get Marmalade! We’ve got to find Daddy; we have to save him!”