There, where his connection to you and this dreaming is strongest, you can call him across and he’ll have no choice but to come.”
“Think of the dead,” John said. “Think of all those who might yet die at his hand. If you die, all he has to do is find another artist with the potential to be a maker. Your kind are rare, I’ll grant you that, but not so rare that he won’t be able to track down another—Barb, for one.”
Think of the dead, Isabelle thought. She turned to look at the door of her bedroom. Kathy was alive somewhere beyond it—either in the living room or in her own bedroom. Sleeping, probably, at this time of night. But maybe still awake, propped up in her bed with the inevitable book or notepad on her lap.
If she could only see her one last time ...
“All right,” Isabelle said. “I’ll go with you to the studio and I’ll try to call him to us. But first I’ve got to do one thing.”
John put his hand on her arm as she started to rise. “This is dreamtime,” he said. “Not the past. Not the reality you remember of how things should be on this night, at this time. You might not find what you’re looking for.”
“I still have to try,” Isabelle said. “I have to see her. Even if she’s just sleeping. All I want to do is look at her and see her being alive again.”
John let his hand drop. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said.
Isabelle stood up. Crossing the bedroom, she paused with her hand on the doorknob.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
But in the end, John had to go looking for her.
As she waited for Rolanda’s friends to arrive, Rosalind wandered aimlessly through the ground-floor rooms of the Newford Children’s Foundation. On Rolanda’s desk she came upon a small oil painting that she recognized as Cosette’s work. It was crudely rendered—Cosette always seemed to be in such a hurry to get the image down—but powerful all the same. As powerful in its own way as any of Isabelle’s work.
Rosalind laid down her ever-present book to pick up the painting and study it more closely. She remembered what Cosette had told her about Isabelle.
Just as John had always insisted.
Could it be true? Had they spent all these years yearning to be what they could never be instead of embracing what they were?
And was that such a terrible thing? What were blood and dreams anyway but another way of describing aspirations and mortality? She and the others were certainly mortal and they were filled with hopes and ambitions. They had talent. Bajel’s poetry didn’t lack heart. Nor did the sculptures of found objects that Paddyjack constructed high in the trees and barn rafters back on Wren Island. Cosette’s art was rushed, but not without emotive potency.
And who could truly say that one of them couldn’t become a maker? When one considered how rare the potential for the gift was in human beings, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that none of them had the talent.
None of them so far. That, she realized, would not make Cosette particularly happy, but it was probably closer to the truth than Cosette’s belief that all it required were dreams and a red crow beating its wings in one’s chest.
Rosalind set the painting back where she’d found it and retrieved her book. Holding it against her chest, she walked toward the front of the building once more, more troubled than she’d care to let on—even to herself. When she reached the door, she looked out at the city street through the small leaded panes. She’d never liked the city the way that Cosette and John did, didn’t even care to be enclosed by the walls of a building. Give her the solace of the island any day, the wind in her hair and the open sky above.
Needing to breathe, if only the noisy pollution of a city night, she stepped out onto the porch. Relief from the claustrophobia she’d been feeling was immediate. Relief from the troubling thoughts that had risen was not nearly so easy to achieve.
Have we really wasted so much of our lives? she couldn’t help but wonder. Could we not at least have tried to live for the moment the way Paddyjack does?
Out of his company for no more than a few hours and already she missed the little treeskin. She looked across the street, trying to imagine where he was, which building housed his gateway painting, how he was faring in his own guard duty. He’d be unhappy, too, but not for entirely the same reasons.
His needs were simpler. He’d miss the island and he’d be lonely. And frightened.
He had every right to be frightened. Her own fear was constant, for all that she’d hidden it so successfully from Cosette and her new friend Rolanda. What she wouldn’t give to have John here with her tonight. Nothing frightened him. Not the fact that they might not be real, not Rushkin or his creatures, nothing. Or was he merely an even better actor than she?
Rosalind sighed. She turned to go back inside, pausing when she heard a scuffle of footsteps on the sidewalk. Her heart leapt for one moment when the man first stepped into the light. She thought she’d called John to her, simply by thinking of him. But then she saw his companion, recognized her from Cosette’s description, and realized who it was that she faced. Rushkin’s creatures had come.
Panic reared up in her. She tried to keep her features expressionless, but she couldn’t hide the shock she felt when she looked at John’s doppelganger, this Bitterweed. Prepared though she’d been, it was too much of a jolt to see him in the flesh. The resemblance was beyond uncanny. It was perfect.
She managed to recover enough before they reached the porch to school her features to regain their impassivity.
“That’s far enough,” she said.
They paused there on the walk to look at her. The girl, Scara, regarded her with a feral intensity, but Bitterweed only shook his head, as though regretting what must come.
“Don’t make this harder on yourself than it already is,” he told her. “What?” she asked. “Dying? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to discuss when death is the only option you offer me.”
“You still have a choice,” Bitterweed told her. “You can die hard or easy.”
“That’s not worth a reply.”
“Christ,” his companion said. “Can we cut the crap?”
She started to move forward, but Bitterweed caught her arm and held her back.
“Now, Scara,” he said, reproachfully. “We can at least be polite about this.”
He looked to Rosalind and gave her a shrug as if to say, What can you do? He was trying to be charming, she realized, the way John might have, but he couldn’t pull it off the way John would have. The gesture only made him seem more pathetic to her.
“At least she’s honest,” she told the doppelganger.
“Who gives a shit what you think?” Scara said. She turned to Bitterweed. “What’re you screwing around for? Look at her. She’s all by herself and she’s not about to stop us.”
It was hard to be brave, Rosalind understood then. She’d often felt impatient with Isabelle for not standing up to Rushkin, but confronted now with the reality of her own terror, she saw how courage could so easily slip away, leaving you with nothing to hold but your fear.
“The only thing that really pisses me off,” Scara went on as though Rosalind weren’t even there, “is how that black bitch took off and left her on her own. I wanted a piece of her.”
“Why dontcha try taking a piece outta one of us, homegirl?” a new voice asked.
Neither Rosalind nor Rushkin’s creatures had heard the newcomers arrive. Rosalind felt a surge of hope that was quickly dashed as a half-dozen figures moved into the light. These were supposed to be her protectors? she thought. What had Rolanda been thinking of? The oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But then she realized that while they might look like children, they were as feral in their own way as Bitterweed’s young companion.
They were dressed simply in T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, baggy shorts and hightops. Their faces ranged from cherubic to acne-scarred. They could have stepped directly from a schoolyard recess. It was the weapons and
