He was beginning to despair when, on a dark still night as he thrashed awake from a particularly bad dream of the future, a tatterdemalion appeared to him, sent by the Lady, and summoned him to Wales.
CHAPTER 9
John Ross paused in his narrative and took a long, slow drink of his coffee. His gaze drifted to the curtained windows, where the sunrise burned with a golden shimmer through the bright, hard, cold December dawn.
Nest Freemark sat across from him at the kitchen table, her clear, penetrating gaze fixed on him, assessing his tale, measuring it for the consequences it would produce. She looked pretty much as he remembered her, but more self-assured, as if she had become better able to cope with the life she had been given. He admired the calm acceptance she had displayed the night before on finding him on her doorstep after ten long years, taking him in, asking no questions, offering no conditions, simply giving him a room and telling him to get some sleep. She was strong in ways that most people weren't, that most couldn't even begin to approach.
"So you went to Wales," she prodded, ruffling her thick, curly hair.
He nodded. "I went."
Her eyes never left his face. "What did you learn there?"
"That I was up against more than I had bargained for." He smiled ruefully and arched one eyebrow. "It works out that way more often than not. You'd think I'd learn."
The big house was quiet, the ticking of the old grandfather clock clearly audible in the silences between exchanges of conversation. The sun was just appearing, and darkness cloaked the corners and nooks with layered shadows. Outside, the birds were just waking up. No car tires crunched on the frosted road. No voices greeted the morning.
The boy who had come with him to Nest Freemark—the boy the gypsy morph had become only a handful of days ago—knelt backward on the living room couch, chin resting on folded arms as he leaned against the couch back and stared out the window into the park.
"Is he all right?" Nest asked softly.
Ross shook his head. "I wish I knew. I wish I could tell. Something. Anything. At least he's quit changing shapes. But I don't have a clue about what he's doing or why."
Nest shifted in her high-backed wooden chair, adjusting her robe. "Didn't the Lady give you any insight into this?"
"She told me a little of what to expect." He paused, remembering. "She gave me a kind of netting, so light and soft it was like holding a spiderweb. It was to be used to capture the morph when it appeared in the cave after Thanksgiving."
He cleared his throat softly. "She told me how the morph was formed, that it was all wild magic come together in shards to form a whole. It doesn't happen often, as I've said. Very rare. But when it does, the joining is so powerful it can become almost anything. I asked her what. A cure or a plague, she said. You could never tell; it was different each time and would seek its own shape and form. She wouldn't elaborate beyond that. She said wild magic of this sort was so rare and unstable that it only held together for a short time before breaking up again. If it could find a form that suited it, it would survive longer and become a force in the war between the Word and the Void. If not, it would dissipate and go back into the ether."
He twisted his coffee cup on its saucer, eyes dropping momentarily. "The gypsy morph is not a creation of the Word, as most other things are, but a consequence of other creations. It comes into being because the world is the way it is, with its various magics and the consequences of using them. The Word didn't foresee the possibility of the morph, so it hasn't got a handle on its schematic yet. Even the Word is still learning, it seems."
Nest nodded. "Makes sense. There are always unforeseen consequences in life. Why not for the Word as well as for us?"
Hawkeye wandered in from outside, trudged through the hallway and into the kitchen for a quick look around, then moved on to the living room. Without pausing, he jumped onto the couch next to the boy and began to rub against him. The boy, without looking, reached down absently and stroked the cat.
"I've never seen Hawkeye do that with anyone," Nest said quietly. Ross smiled faintly, and her gaze shifted back to him. "So, she gave you a net?"
He nodded. "When the gypsy morph appeared for the first time, she told me, it would materialize in a shimmer of lights, a kind of collection of glowing motes. As soon as that happened, I was to throw the net. The light would attract it, and the net would close about it all on its own, sealing it in. Immediately, she warned, the morph would begin to change form. When it did, I was to get out of there as quickly as possible because the expenditure of magic that resulted from the morph's changes would attract demons from everywhere."
"And did it?"
He lifted the coffee cup from its saucer and held it suspended before him.
He remembered how it had begun, his words as he spoke them recalling the moment. He had gone to the cave at sunrise on the day of the event, having rehearsed his role many times, having explored the grotto and its surroundings so thoroughly he could detail everything with his eyes closed. It was bitter cold and damp that day, the rains of the past two having ceased sometime during the night, leaving the chill and the wet to linger in the earth and air. Mist clung to the edges of the beach and the surface of the water in a thick, impenetrable curtain. Clumps of it had broken away from the main body and wandered inland to hunker down among the trees and rocks like fugitives in hiding. The ocean surf, calm this windless morning, rolled in a steady, monotonous whoosh onto the beach, advancing and receding, over and over in hypnotic motion. Gulls screamed their strange, challenging cries as they flew in search of food, smooth and bright against the gray.
He had once again borrowed Mrs. Staples's Chevy. It had carried him back and forth to the cavern often enough over the past three months that it probably could find the way on its own. Leaving it on the shoulder of the road where the beach access was easiest, he descended through the mist and gray and damp, a solitary hunter in the dim dawn light, and made his way back along the broad, sandy expanse to his destination.
Inside, it was dark enough that he was required to use his flashlight to find his way to the rock shelf, where he began his vigil. He did not know exactly how long he would have to wait, only that the morph would appear this day before sunset. Besides his flashlight and the spiderweb netting given to him by the Lady, he carried a blanket and a small basket of food and drink. The dead Knight's memories carried with them a clear image of where the morph would appear, and so Ross knew how to position himself.
After a time, he began to see the feeders. There were only a couple at first, then a couple more, then half a dozen, all of them hanging back in the darkened corners and nooks, eyes glinting as they kept watch. Ross was not surprised to see them; feeders were always watching him, drawn by his magic, waiting in anticipation of its expenditure. He could not think of a time when there hadn't been feeders close by, so he thought nothing of seeing them now.
But as midmorning crawled toward noon, their numbers increased, and soon there were so many he could not begin to count them. They sensed that something unusual was going to happen. Perhaps they even sensed what it was. But so many gathered in one place was not a good thing. Other creatures of magic would sense their presence and be drawn as well.
Ross rose and stalked from one end of the cave to the other, chasing the feeders back into the darkness. Their eyes winked out, then reappeared in the wake of his passing. Light from the midday sun, hazy and weak, brightened the entrance to the cave through the leafy curtain of tree branches and scrub. He peered out cautiously at the beach, open and flat and empty. There was no sign of life beyond the gulls. The ocean rolled in a low smooth surf of white noise.