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“What’s your power?” Lupe asked Jericho.
“Super strength.”
“Ohhhh,” the girls said in unison.
Lupe threaded her arm through Jericho’s. “He’s taken, ladies.”
“We didn’t mean to put you in harm’s way by keeping secrets,” Jericho said to the others. “We just needed help.”
Lupe rested her head on Jericho’s shoulder. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Ten miles down the road, they found a service station. As the attendant filled the tank, Lupe asked if he’d heard anything about a town called Beckettsville. “I don’t keep up with the news,” the man said. “If it doesn’t concern me, I don’t concern myself.”
“You might want to think twice about that,” she said, handing him the money.
They drove toward Chicago. It was getting dark. After the earlier excitement, the girls had gone to sleep. Jericho relieved Doc at the wheel so he could get some rest, too. Ling came to sit in the seat behind him.
“You jake?” she asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t they fight back?”
“I don’t know,” Ling said. “It was almost as if…”
“They were waiting for us to do it?” Jericho finished.
“Yes.” Ling felt queasy. Something was fighting to take shape inside her head.
“You said that energy can’t be created or destroyed, right?” Jericho said.
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sp; “Right,” Ling said. “But it can be transferred.”
“Transferred,” Jericho repeated.
“Maybe our energy went to them,” Ling said, thinking aloud. “Maybe every time we obliterated one of them, they absorbed our power, and it only made the whole stronger. Jericho, I think the dead are starting to develop Diviner powers.”
Jericho thought back to the night of the Casino restaurant and the ghosts’ peculiar words: You did this. “Ling, where did you get the idea to annihilate the ghosts in the first place?”
It was the first time they met the King of Crows at the asylum. He’d told them to destroy the ghosts, Ling remembered. No. That wasn’t precisely what he’d said. Words mattered, she knew. What he’d said to them was that power lay in information—both in what was told and in what was held back. Will and Sister Walker had kept the truth from them, and it had carried a price.
But what else? Ling concentrated, trying to bring up more. The King of Crows had asked if they’d felt a surge of power when they dispatched the dead. Ling had been the first to answer honestly: Yes. It was intoxicating to blast apart the dead, nearly primal. She shut her eyes, trying to recall his exact words. She could see him preening before them. His smudged, tattered cuffs peeking out from his coat. Memphis’s sad mother standing behind him. The rain. Conor Flynn and Luther Clayton moments before the King and his dead claimed them.
His words. His words. Words were important.
“‘Did they not tell you that with each wraith you destroy, your powers grow?’” she repeated now. And only as she said it aloud did she realize what a twisty bit of word gaming it was. Did they not tell you. No, Will and Sister Walker had not told them that. Because, she realized just now, it wasn’t true. In fact, after their initial intoxication, the Diviners felt weakened and sick… and vulnerable. And when Theta wanted to know if the King of Crows was actually asking them to destroy his ghosts in a bid to get information from them, he’d given a trickster’s smile and said, “I ask nothing. Your choices are yours alone.”
You did this.
Your fault.
This is your doing.
How could they have been so foolish? He’d baited them to give up their power to him and his dead, and they’d fallen into his trap so easily.
