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Conor tapped his fingers nervously against Evie’s arm in a counting sequence. “It was a test,” he said. “He… he set up the Forgotten. He wanted… he wanted to see what you can do. Now he knows. He knows!”
The rain reversed, sucked back up into the night. There was a roar in their ears, as if they stood at the top of a mountain. The sky flashed with strange blue lightning, and in it, they could see the imprint of a great wound-like gash that flared and faded. And then it felt as if they were falling through time, and when they landed at last, they stood in a denuded circle surrounded on all sides by a nightmarish wood where a silent army of the dead waited. A cold moon bled its glow into the thready gray clouds of a starless night sky.
A sudden breath of wind rustled the brittle leaves on the ground. The dead things in the dark whispered with reverence: “He comes! The King of Crows!”
A creature emerged from the woods, a sticklike man, with the air of a praying mantis, but the enormous blue-black feathered coat he wore gave him the bearing of a usurper king. On his head was a stovepipe hat that swirled with shadows. Lightning crackled all around him. A Gordian knot of black silk rested at the stiff, rounded collar of his shirt like an undertaker’s tie. The center was stuck through with a shining gold pin, a radiant all-seeing eye shedding a lone lightning bolt tear. There was an agelessness to the man. He might’ve stepped through any door in time. He had skin like a drought, gray and cracking. In some spots, the flesh was almost threadbare, with a diseased shine to it. Faint red veins moved across that flesh, borders shifting constantly. His fingers were long, his nails sharp and yellowed. His eyes were black as a bird’s and utterly soulless. To look into them was to feel as if you were standing at the edge of a tall cliff. Vertiginous.
He smiled. “Greetings, Diviners. We meet at last.”
THE KING OF CROWS
The night seemed to move with the frantic rhythm of an impaired heart.
Not one of the Diviners could look away from the man in the stovepipe hat. His shiny blue-black coat squawked and fluttered as if fashioned from an endless stream of furious birds pecking for dominance. As he moved toward them, he seemed to grow taller, his shadow falling across more of the land.
“Here you are: The thief. The fire starter. The object reader. The dream walkers. The clairvoyant. And the healer. Do you know who I am?”
“The man in the stovepipe hat,” Evie whispered, frightened.
“I prefer the King of Crows,” he answered. “After all, why be a man when you can be a king?”
Where the man walked, beetles pushe
d up from the ground and scuttled toward the cover of mulch. “The moment your country first sinned, I emerged, slick and formless. Born of your restless ambition. Your greed, and hunger. You, who tell yourselves a story of yourselves. Do you imagine you can rid yourselves of me? You have created me! I am you, incarnate—a new god for a brave new world. I am written into your history now. I am written into you. And oh! What a nation of glorious dreamers and devourers!”
He opened his coat. In its lining, one could see the soul of the nation: The first ships sailing into Plymouth Bay watched by wary eyes. The longhouses, buffalo hunts, and rain dances. The magnificent trains belching smoke across the miles of prairie. The pages of broken treaties fluttering down over the stolen land where those trains steamed ahead. The battlefields—redcoats and tricornered hats, the Blue and the Gray, West Point lieutenants on horseback charging braves with faces painted in symbols of black and red. There were mountains and rivers begging to be explored, and mighty oceans lapping at the rocky shores of promise. There were fences and guns, forts and reservations. The missions rising in the scrub of California. The clapboard churches springing up like kudzu. The synagogues and temples. A people in need of salvation. There were fields ringing with the call and response of slaves clapping out prayers and songs of survival, defiance felt in every stomp and shout. Dust flecking mail-order brides trussed in trousseau finery seated beside stranger-husbands on a wagon west; those same frontier women, faces creased by sun and hardship, as they worked the farm, fed the hired hands, screamed in childbirth, and sewed their dreams into the squares of quilts and hems of wedding gowns. Oil wells breaking open the earth till it bled. Town squares held together by the ley lines of polite smiles, whispered gossip, and simmering resentments. Cities humming with noise. Birth and death. Song and dance. Industry and invention. Science and magic. Greed and want. Faster and faster it swirled, blurring into a history stitched with bloody thread. It was much too bright to bear, and the Diviners blinked against its terrible light. The creature closed his coat, but what was inside still shimmered around the edges, begging to be let out.
His thin lips stretched into a mirthless smile. “How insatiable you are. I feed from your desires. From the violence you cloak in dreams. And now, I, too, am grown insatiable. I would have more. Behold, my Manifest Destiny of the Dead!”
The King of Crows swept his arm wide, a circus barker’s invitation. Behind him, restless spirits glowed like a sea of bone. They burned like hunger. Memphis saw Gabe among these dead. Gabe, with his mouth torn away. Gabe, who had once been his friend.
“Memphis…” Isaiah whispered beside him.
“I see, Ice Man.”
“But what about you, Diviners? You who bridge worlds.” The very air seemed to stutter, and then the King of Crows was in front of Theta. “Theta Knight. The fire starter. Left on a church step. You had a different name then, a name scattered to the winds.” He blew on the tips of his yellowed nails. Lightning tripped along his fingertips and died. “Such is the story in this country of scattered names and lost people hunting for the missing pieces of themselves.”
Theta felt a fierce yearning deep inside. “You… you know my real name?”
The man smiled. “What would you give to know?”
The King of Crows moved down the line and stopped in front of Sam. “Little thief. Sergei Lubovitch—ah, excuse me. Sam Lloyd. Will you always have to steal what you want? Or perhaps you enjoy going through life invisible, though I suspect you yearn for much more.”
The King of Crows grinned his rictus grin. “And what have we here? The dream walkers. How enchanting. Tell me, when you escape into dreams each night, do you imagine yourself as little gods? Does it help you escape your loneliness? Your pain? Do you feel less the misfit?” he asked Ling. “Or the unwanted son?” He looked to Henry. He shut his eyes, fingers playing the air. “Yes. I can feel your desires.”
The King opened his eyes again, fixing his gaze on Evie. “I have something you might want, object reader.”
“I doubt it,” Evie challenged, even though she did not feel brave.
The King of Crows cocked his head in two quick jerks. “Not even your brother?”
And before Evie could say another word, the man in the hat rolled his hand with a flourish. Against the thick murk, Evie saw James and the other soldiers as she’d seen them many times in her dreams: playing cards, trading jokes, lacing shoes, unaware of the terror to come. “Sometimes death is a blessing.”
“What do you mean by that?” Evie said, feeling newly afraid.
The King of Crows closed the images in his fist and threw them away. “What would you give me to know? What bargain would you be willing to make with me?” The King of Crows opened his arms, palms upturned, bobbing them gently like scales struggling with weight.
He took two elegant strides forward, his long black coattails fluttering behind him, and stopped in front of Isaiah, his smile hardening. “You see much, clairvoyant. Perhaps too much. Tell me, Isaiah Campbell, would you see your own fate writ here inside my coat?” The man in the hat toyed with the feathered edge, letting out just a bit of yellowed shine. “What would you give to change it? Or”—he cast a meaningful glance toward the rest of the Diviners—“to change the fates of others?”
