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“Fine. Fine. Octavia made a cake. Even put a little rum in it.”
“She did? What for?”
“For my birthday.”
“Gee, I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t make no announcement.”
“Well, happy birthday. You make a wish?”
“Mm-hmm,” Bill said without a hint of a smile.
“So, how old are you now, Mr. Johnson?”
Blind Bill’s shoulders shook with a silent laugh. “Feel old as Methuselah till a pretty girl walk by. Then I’m young as any man. And ’fore you ask, yes, I can tell when a pretty girl pass by even without seeing her. Go on. Get yourself some cake.”
Bill waited. He was good at waiting. When the boy returned, Bill listened to the scrape of his fork across the plate and sucked in a breath. “Been meaning t’ask you—you seen any more of that Walker woman?”
The fork stopped for a second. “No.”
“That the truth?”
“Why
you asking?”
“Well,” Bill said with a heavy sigh, “little man been acting nervous. And then he said her name in his sleep. Had the feeling he mighta seen her, maybe she got him all upset again. I know we don’t want him having more fits.”
“We haven’t seen her,” Memphis said.
Bill could hear the guilt and worry lurking in the lie. Good. Let the boy chew on it along with his cake. He grunted as he pushed himself off the settee and reached for his cane. “Now I’m a whole year older, reckon I best turn in. You rest easy, now.”
Bill tapped his way to his small room off the kitchen. He undressed down to his long underwear and felt his way over to the cot, easing his aching joints down onto it. He wondered what his face looked like now. Wrinkled, definitely. Bill could feel the veins popped up on the backs of his hands. Could feel the cold and damp in his bones. That was what happened over the long years of birthdays. For Bill, though, it had happened much quicker; with every life he’d taken for the Shadow Men, another year had been sucked away from him, stooping, bending, and, finally, blinding him. Margaret Walker had let those men take Bill away. And now she wanted to mess with the Campbell brothers? Not if he could help it. Bill had made his birthday wish: First, a healing. And then, revenge.
“Happy birthday, Guillaume,” Bill whispered to himself.
He was thirty-seven years old.
In the back bedroom they shared, Memphis watched his sleeping brother’s narrow chest rise and fall. Memphis was worried now: What if the testing was wearing his little brother out and making him worse instead of better? Isaiah had kicked his quilt to the bottom of the bed. Memphis tucked it neatly around Isaiah again. Then, unable to keep his eyes open another minute, he crawled into his own bed.
He fell into rough dreams. Dark storm clouds stampeded across the electric sky. The wind roared, rent leaves from the trees. Memphis needed to take shelter immediately, but Isaiah was nowhere to be found. The dread overflowed the dream, and Memphis whimpered in his sleep. A stroke of strange blue light cracked the roiling sky, and Memphis saw Isaiah standing at the top of a hill, lost.
“Isaiah!” Memphis shouted into the howling wind.
Lightning clawed at the clouds’ rounded gray bellies with animal ferocity. The sky slashed open. The hungry dead spilled out from the rip, their ragged edges flickering with a radium glow—an army of the dead on the march.
And there was Isaiah on the hill, shivering like a lamb, unaware.
“Isaiah! Isaiah!” Memphis shouted, wild with fear. His feet would not move. It was as if he’d been nailed to the spot.
“Brother…”
The familiar voice whispered up Memphis’s neck and made his skin crawl. He whipped his head to the right.
“Gabe,” Memphis said, for his murdered best friend was beside him, glowing just like the things that had emerged from the ruptured sky. Gabe’s eyes were gone. Flies collected in the empty sockets. The embalmer’s thread still stretched across the brutal wound of Gabe’s mouth where John Hobbes’s knife had done its demonic work. Beetles pushed their shiny heads against the frayed crisscrossed hatching at his lips and crawled out from the darkness inside, down Gabe’s gray neck.
Gabe’s raspy whisper seeped between the Xs of thread. “We are coming for you, brother. For you—and your friends. He is here. His work has begun. We will never let you stop us.”
