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“Fair enough.” Sister Walker maneuvered around Memphis, making straight
for Isaiah, and crouched before him. “Isaiah, you remember when you warned me about the chair?”
“Yes, Sister.” It had been a few months ago. Isaiah had been at Sister Walker’s house reading cards. He’d guessed most of them before they were turned over. On the way out, he’d taken hold of Sister Walker’s hand and gotten a strong sense that something was wrong. He saw her standing on the chair to reach into a kitchen cupboard, and then he saw her fall.
“You were right. Not ten minutes after you left, I climbed up on that chair to get some sugar and the chair leg broke underneath me. Let’s see what you can find out from this.”
Isaiah was excited and a little scared. He wanted to show off what he could do in front of the bigger Diviners so they’d see him as one of them, less of a kid.
“Memphis, I want you to sit beside your brother. The rest of you gather ’round. Let’s see if we can increase the strength of Isaiah’s clairvoyance. Okay. Put your hands on Isaiah’s shoulders… that’s it.”
“Feels as if we’re posing for a family photograph. I refuse to put on a Shriner’s hat or hold a monkey.” Evie sighed.
Sam quirked an eyebrow. “What sort of family do you—”
“Shhh, please,” Sister Walker chided. “Memphis, take hold of Isaiah’s hands. Isaiah, I want you to relax as much as you can. When you’re under, concentrate on your surroundings, look around, remember what you see. The rest of you, I want you to think about helping Isaiah.”
Isaiah was nervous. For once, he was the special one. He wasn’t just a kid. But it was scary, too. What if nothing happened? It was odd having everybody’s hands on his shoulders, too.
But slowly, he relaxed. And then he was drifting off somewhere else, like floating down a river on his back, and all around him was the mist and roar of a waterfall. The roar sucked into complete silence. Isaiah found himself on a dusty road. To his left, he saw a farmhouse with a sagging porch. Fields full of corn rotting on their stalks. Crows circled above in a mesmerizing figure eight. And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Isaiah entered the world he saw as simply as entering a new room. He could smell the wind, scented with coming rain. Beyond the farmhouse, out in an arid spot of land, an enormous tree, grayed with age, rose up from the earth like a multi-armed god Isaiah had seen in a storybook his mama got from the library one time. No leaves grew there; none looked as if they could. It was a mighty ghost of a tree. From a fat bough hung a rope swing, and when Isaiah put out his hand toward it, he could tell that it had never been used. It had been tethered to the branch with hope, but sadness hung about it now. There was sadness hanging over the whole farm. Fear, too. Something didn’t feel right. Why was he here? What had happened in this place? What was going to happen in the future?
Dust kicked up on the road ahead like a storm moving in. Isaiah thought he heard Memphis’s voice carried faintly in the blowing dust, and then he saw his brother and another man he didn’t know—a big, strong-looking man with broad shoulders and a face like an African prince. Memphis and this unknown man were whispers of bodies flickering in and out with the wind.
“Memphis? That you?” Isaiah called. But the voice and the vision had gone.
The squawking of crows drew his attention back to the porch. A barefoot girl in a nightgown stood on the warped steps. Her pale hair wanted brushing, and the peach satin bow she wore had slid halfway down, stuck in the rat’s nest of it. She looked to be about the same age as Memphis. Just like the farm, there was something a little off about her. A crop turning bad.
“I know you,” the girl whispered, and her whisper slipped inside him like a bad dream. A crow came to rest on each of her shoulders. A third settled atop her head. It blinked at Isaiah, and he gasped to see it had only one eye, right in the middle of its shiny forehead.
“Isaiah…” the girl said, as if tasting his name. “Isaiah Campbell. The one who sees. The clairvoyant.”
“Where am I?” Isaiah asked.
“Bountiful,” the girl answered. “Bountiful, Nebraska.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I see, too. Something’s coming. For you and your brother and your friends.”
Her head jerked, crow-like, toward the horizon. Down the long dirt ribbon of road, the great ball of dust had grown bigger, and Isaiah caught glimpses of sharp white glinting in the filthy gloom. There was a demonic whine in the wind, like a choir singing thousands of clashing parts—keening moans and bird shrieks and a high-pitched, whirring hiss that reminded him of cicadas in tall grass. The sound crawled into Isaiah’s chest. It made him want to run. But he wouldn’t. He had to prove to Sister Walker, Will, and the others that he wasn’t a baby. If he did good, they couldn’t leave him behind anymore.
The crows’ squawking startled Isaiah. He gasped and fell back: The girl was on the road with him! How had she gotten there so fast? He saw now that the left side of her face was like melted candle wax that had cooled into a scarred mound of flesh. She only had one good eye, too—the right—and it was so blue it was nearly silver. “They did this to us, you know. It’s their fault. They deserve punishment for their sins. Don’t tell them anything! But he wants to help us.”
Isaiah stumbled backward, away from the silvery-eyed girl. He felt dizzy with her so close. He tried to right himself. Look around, Sister Walker had told him. Remember what you see. So Isaiah looked hard: At the farmhouse. The crows. The tree with its bare, twisted limbs. The crooked mailbox, number one, four, four.
One forty-four!
He opened his mouth in a gasp and tasted dust at the back of his throat. The whine grew louder; it reverberated through his blood, calling. The girl was so close he could feel her breath. She cocked her head, studying him. “Can you feel him calling to you, Isaiah Campbell?” she asked. Her teeth were as mottled as an old piling in a drought-low river.
Who? Isaiah thought, and he knew the girl heard his thoughts.
“The King of Crows. He loves us and our gifts. And if we help him, he will give us everything we want.”
“What kind of help?”
“There’s another seer. A boy who draws. We need him. He won’t talk to us, though. But he’d talk to you.”
The girl attempted a smile, and that frightened Isaiah more than anything. Isaiah didn’t know if this was a dream or a vision of the future. He only knew that he didn’t want to be here anymore with this girl and the farmhouse and whatever lurked down the road in that dust.
