Tessa looked wrong. Faded. Pale. There was a smell to her, more dead than alive, a scent that prickled Wilma’s nape with fear. If she’d been a cat, she would have taken her at once to hide in some dark place. But even then, she knew that hiding would do no good.
She brought her mind back, looked up at Shannon. “We just don’t know enough about what’s going on,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to walk down the mountain, see if someone in Charleston or Lynchburg knows what’s going on.”
“That’s just it!” Shannon’s voice shook, and for the first time Wilma noticed the bruises on the young woman’s face, the tear in her plaid shirt and the scratches on her arms. “I tried this afternoon! I can’t leave town!”
Chapter Nineteen
NEW YORK
At first, consciousness did not return to Cal so much as pay a call nearby.
From the blackness, he heard others calling his name, a man and a woman. Then hands were touching him. But he felt unconnected to it, as though events were playing out in a distant room, some muffled TV show that had nothing to do with him, was none of his concern.
“Is he dead?” That was Colleen, voice tense. “No,” Doc answered. “Hold this.” Silence, accompanied by further probing. “Superficial cuts to the abdomen. . and a nasty bump to the head.”
“Can we lift him onto the bed?”
“I’d feel more comfortable on advice of an X-ray, but-”
“Yeah. Right.”
Cal felt his body lifted, deposited onto the soft mattress. Curious, this feeling of observing himself outside himself, this vague indifference.
“You’re not squeamish, are you?” Doc said admiringly.
“No,” she answered, the sound drifting away as silence reared up and emptied him.
Later, a good deal later, a damp washcloth passed over his eyes and Cal decided to try opening them. Slowly, tentatively, he lifted the lids. Instantly, light tore at him and, with it, searing pain.
Jesus, his head felt like-
Like someone had fucking thrown him into a wall. And with that, he remembered, every last terrible bit of it. Tina!
He sat up quickly in bed, and, Christ, was that a mistake. The room wheeled crazily about, and Cal had to work very hard to keep whatever was still in his stomach more or less where it belonged.
Then strong, gentle hands were on him, easing him back onto downy pillows.
“Easy there, ace.”
Cal squinted against the brutal light. A misty figure stood over him, a familiar lean efficiency.
“Welcome back,” Colleen said.
Cal licked dry lips, tried for a response, but his parched throat managed only an incomprehensible croak. She brought a glass to his lips. He gratefully managed several swallows of water.
Probing beyond the curtain of pain, Cal could feel a bandage wrapped tightly around his middle, under it raw slashes of torn flesh like parallel lines of fire. Stretching slightly, he could also discern the protesting cries of ribs that he hoped were only bruised and not broken.
Doc joined Colleen by the bedside, glowering down at Cal with an affectionate, scolding air. “If it’s of interest, you’ve got a concussion accompanied by a smorgasbord of assorted lacerations and other nastiness.” As he spoke, he lifted the lantern in the dim room, scrutinized the pupils of Cal’s eyes, made him track the flame. “We repeat this every two hours, to be sure.”
Cal could see now that he was in his own room. He tried again to speak, succeeded in a breathy whisper. “Tina. .”
Colleen and Doc glanced at each other, expressions darkening. “She’s. . gone,” Colleen said.
Cal groaned and closed his eyes. Doc touched his shoulder. “Calvin, who did this to you?”
Cal forced his eyes open. “My boss.”
“Geez, who do you work for?” asked Colleen.
“His eyes were like hers,” Cal continued. “Only he was this big lizard thing.” He could see the surprise in their faces but also that they believed him. Good. He didn’t feel up to lengthy explanations. He thought of Tina, alone with Stern, and a wave of bleakness washed over him. “Why would he take her? He could have killed us both. He must’ve thought he did kill me. What would he want with her?”
“One crisis at a time.” Doc gave a small, sad smile. “Do you know where he’d be?”
Cal looked out the window, began to shake his head but stopped himself as the pain flared. “I never heard where he lived. They could be anywhere. . ” He slammed the flat of his hand against the near wall. “I need a damn psychic!”
And it was as if the thought emerged not from himself but was presented to him as a gift. In his mind’s eye, he was back on Fifty-sixth and Fifth, in front of the Stark Building, with the gaudy, absurd figure standing before him, full of jangly conviction.
Goldie.
“It’s omens, Cal,” he had said. “Something’s coming. You keep your head low.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Change, it had seemed incredibly prescient. But looking back on it now, it could easily have been mere coincidence, the ranting of any street-corner crazy any day of the week.
If not for the other thing he had said, the phrase that had made no sense at the time. “Metal wings will fail, leather ones prevail.”
The planes had fallen out of the sky. And in the moment before Cal had lost consciousness following Stern’s attack, the sound that only now came clear, like a vast leathery bed-sheet unfurling.
Wings. Stern had wings.
Desperate, Cal ransacked his memory for the vital clue Goldie had left him, the offhand words. Then he had it: Goldie gesturing at the grate as the subway trains rumbled below. I prefer the subterranean.
Cal flung off the blankets, flailed to rise.
“Calvin, be careful.”
“You’re in no shape to do anything,” Colleen said.
“You’re right,” Cal agreed. “Now will you fucking help me?”
In the end, the heat of his certainty melted them. He felt their hands under his arms, steadying him. Somehow, miraculously, his feet found the floor.
The room was whipping about but he could force it down, tame it. There. It was better now.
He took a deep breath, forced the pain in his head back. There was no time for it.
Darkness beckoned.
“Stay here,” Cal insisted. “He’s kinda paranoid.”
He knelt by the grate with Colleen and Doc. Although it was only late afternoon, Fifth was barely populated, the stores closed up tight. The smell was worse, far worse, than it had been yesterday. A few timid passersby glanced their way curiously, then hurried on at Colleen’s challenging glare. The crossbow and quiver of arrows hung easily across her back. Cal noted she was taking the weapon everywhere now, its polished steel and wood a fierce kind of beauty. It suited her.
And she was far from the only armed person he saw. Colleen’s crowbar eased under the grate, and now the three of them put their shoulders to it, forcing the barred covering up and off the square hole in the sidewalk. They dropped the grate clattering onto the pavement, then stood over the waiting maw. A black murmur like distant ocean reverberated out of it, accompanied by a stale stink.
“This doesn’t impress me as the greatest idea,” said Colleen.
“Yeah. . sure wish I had a better one.” There was no way to track his quarry with any certainty. But whenever Cal had seen Goldie, it had been around these few blocks; they seemed to be his stamping grounds. Just maybe, when he’d gone below each night, he hadn’t gone far.
It was a place to start.
He peered down into the darkness, tightened the straps of his backpack. “Wait forty-five minutes.”
“Then?” Doc questioned.