She resisted the urge to touch him. She was his wife now, and that was different. She was supposed to take responsibility for the fact that he had to be at the hospital at six if he was going into surgery at seven, not wake him up and ask him what he was dreaming. She slowly lowered herself beside him, then lay on her back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind fluttering the leaves of the maple outside the window until they made no sound.
After a time, she sensed from the way that the trees around her kept revising their shapes until she got them right that she was in a dream. It was night, and low, thin clouds made the moon a small ball with a rainbow ring around it. She didn’t like the dream, but when she tried to fathom why that was, she found she had already known the answer before she had wondered. It was because the place where she was standing was familiar. She had not moved. She was still on the ground where Carey’s house was going to be built some day.
She felt uneasy as she looked toward the street, because she saw only a narrow gap in the trees. There was no use trying to walk and find her way home, because if the path was there, the road was not yet on top of it, and the forest still stretched like this from the ocean to the Mississippi, and from the tundra to the Gulf of Mexico.
Jane tried to fight the growing sensation that she was being watched. She tried to force herself to be rational. This might be the Old Time, but that didn’t mean there were such things as witches. There were no witches. If there ever had been, they had disappeared from the earth before Jane had been born. But her own memory told her she was lying.
She had been in the courtroom in Atlanta when the judge had looked past little Max Curtin, who sat behind the table that came up nearly to his chin, not seeing his pale face and thin bird-bones showing he hadn’t just fallen down a lot but had not even been given enough to eat. The judge could see no grounds to take him away from his cousin. But the cousin had heard the words, and turned around quickly to gaze at Max Curtin’s face, and the cousin’s eyes had glowed, not only in triumph, but because he was drinking in the sight of the terror and despair that showed in the little boy’s face. The Grandfathers would have taken one look at the cousin and known he was a witch.
She could feel the Workers of Evil were out there, feel them turning their attention to her. She had been thinking about them, and they had heard her thoughts, and now they were looking up, their faces vacant but alert. They were somewhere in the forest, and they began to turn and move toward her. She could feel the emptiness that was in them begin to fill up with excitement, anticipation. They were concentrating on her now, thinking about how happy she had been, and how easily that could be taken away from her. And they were coming.
Jane caught herself worrying about Carey sleeping unprotected in his bed, and she felt a jab of alarm. She had to force herself to hide him in the back of her mind, where they would not find him. She turned her attention to the witches. As long as she concentrated on them, they would see only their own reflection in her mind. There had seemed to be dozens of them when she first had thought of them, all pricking up their ears to search the air for her. But now she saw that they had winnowed themselves down to just two. Because they stood for all witches, they had to be a man and a woman.
There were footprints on the path, so sooner or later it had to lead to a place where people lived. Jane set off and followed it, then worked up to a run. It was hard for Jane to run on the trail at night, and she was ashamed of how clumsy she had become. She had been lazy for the past three months, and she began to get winded after only a hundred yards. Her foot hit the edge of the path, where it was higher, and she tripped. She gave a little gasp of surprise, and she knew it had reached the man and the woman and told them she had been flushed from hiding.
Although they were far behind her, only now reaching the clearing where she had started, she had no trouble seeing them. The man burst through the bushes, breaking branches and trampling the brush at his feet. He saw the path. He hunched over and stared down to read it for fresh tracks. He leaned forward on his knuckles, and his heels came up like those of a runner at the starting blocks. He grinned with a horrible emotion that looked like appetite, and his grin changed him. His lips kept moving, curled upward, and his bared teeth seemed to grow. His heavy jaw thickened, and he sprouted hair along his back, and then his haunches and arms. His small, black eyes lost none of their intensity as he started to move along the path on four feet.
The woman was quiet. She seemed to materialize out of the forest without moving a leaf, as though her feet didn’t quite touch the ground. She stood still for a few breaths, listening. Jane didn’t let herself think about what the woman was sensing about that place, but it was why Jane was trying to draw her away from there. The woman didn’t hurry. She watched the man lumbering away down the path, growing bigger and heavier, his claws now long and black and the fur thick and impenetrable. He was a wolf.
The woman smiled to herself and held her arms up, her long, graceful fingers fanned out, made longer by her pointed nails. She looked up at the moon glowing through the clouds, ringed with the faint colors of the spectrum, and as she did, she seemed to rise. Her fingers were impossibly long now, her neck was elongated to look upward, and her face in the moonlight was beautiful and ghostly. The bright, liquid eyes opened wider.
Jane could see the fingers were the shafts of feathers, and she watched the feathers spread along the woman’s forearms and then all the way to her shoulders. The woman’s skin glowed white and smooth and flawless, and she had a soft, shapely grace that made Jane not want to turn her attention away. The arms were definitely wings now. The woman’s white neck seemed to curve, stretching up toward the moon, and Jane’s heart beat faster—a swan! In the old stories, swans were never evil. As soon as Jane allowed herself to feel hope, it expanded in her chest and she almost cried with joy. The female apparition wasn’t a witch at all. She was probably some powerful woman asleep somewhere, who was now entering Jane’s dream to help her. Jane had acquired an ally, a sister.
But the woman’s face had not stopped changing. The eyes kept growing bigger and brighter, and now they seemed to ignite, to burn with a light from inside that looked like fire. Suddenly the woman ducked forward in some wrenching physical reflex like a retch. Her shoulders shrugged, her neck shortened, the flesh of her feet shriveled and left only curved talons. She was no longer human. She gave the great wings a flap, and she soared into the dark sky. She was an owl.
Jane was stung with shock, and in a few seconds the hurt threatened to soften and degenerate into heavy-footed despair. She strained to run harder, staring at the darkness ahead to discern the deeper black of the trail ahead of her feet, the empty air between the trees that could show her the way.
Jane could hear the wolf behind her and to her right, his body lean and hard but heavy, crashing through the underbrush. He knew the path because he was a human, and he was cutting across the curves. Jane stepped off the path and ran to the right, into the cover of the forest. She had to go more slowly now, slipping through thickets, sliding down inclines and then straining to scramble up the next rise, tiring herself just to get to level ground again. At the bottom of a steep, rocky hill she found the beginning of a stream. She turned with it and trotted for a few hundred paces, splashing along the stony creekbed until she came abreast of a rocky ledge and pulled herself up onto it just because it was difficult and the wolf would expect her to avoid it. Then she shifted her course toward the path, and in another mile she came out onto it again. She knew she had fooled the wolf. Her feet seemed light, running on the clear, even ground.