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enough to hold it. I’m going to set it down. We’ll get a better read that way anyhow. ” She set a dial the way she wanted it and carefully set the meter down on the rock. If my sense of direction served me, she aimed it at the river.
She stepped away, backwards, towards us. She held her arms out as if she were holding us back or telling us to wait for something; and when the lighted LCD on the meter began to flicker with data, she twitched her wrists as if she were conducting the information with a baton.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, yes, yes. Pick it up. Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Benny wanted to know, but even as he asked the question I was just beginning to hear it myself.
Oh so faint. Oh so light. Barely within my range of hearing.
There it was.
“Listen, Benny,” I said, my voice roughly as quiet as Dana’s. “Close your eyes and listen. Do you hear the river now?”
He did as I told him. “Yes? I think I hear it. The river—it’s a rushing, a quiet hissing. Is that what that sound is, the river?”
“No,” I murmured. “It’s not. ”
Dana raised one arm and pointed at the meter, which flickered with numbers that were meaningless to me.
“What does it say?” I asked. “Is it getting closer?”
“No,” she said.
“Where is he?” Benny raised the more direct question.
“I don’t know. But if he’s the thing making that sound, he’s stranger than anything I’ve ever met. ”
Strange. That’s what everyone who’d seen him said. Of course, most people claimed he was evil, too, but I didn’t buy it. I was willing to buy strange, but the dismal pall that the Bend played host to was not of Green Eyes’s making. I wondered what it was, though.
I’d heard people talk about the way it felt to stand at the Bend, and the sense of wrongness the place held. An old friend of mine who’d done an internship there while she was getting her psych degree had said it felt like something was unfinished, and that the Bend had become impatient, and frustrated. I hadn’t known what she meant before. Not when I’d been out there with Malachi the first time; and the second time, when I’d gone to see Kitty, it had not been so strong. “It’s growing,” I said, not about the signal the meter registered, but to conclude my thoughts.
Benny was getting nervous, much more nervous now. “What is?”
“Hush,” I said.
“Green Eyes?”
“No. The rest of it. It knows him. ”
“Now you’re just talking crazy talk,” he said, trying to infuse the words with some levity. It came out strained instead.
“Look at the meter. ” Dana moved close to it again, and stared down at it without touching it. “This is wild. ”
“We can see it fine, but we don’t know what it means,” I said, for Benny and myself. “What do those numbers mean?”
“They mean energy. Lots of it. Electrical energy, to be more precise. We’re not too close to its source yet, but it’s moving around. It’s moving, but not coming for us or anything. It’s like watching a tiger pacing, if that tiger were made of liquid. My God, what is this thing?”
“A guardian. ” Another word popped into my head, inserted by my subconscious or by some instinct I didn’t recognize. I said it out loud. “A sentry. ”
“Eden? Eden, what did you just say? Benny, darling, move your flashlight. Don’t shine it right on the meter, I can’t see what it says when you do that. ”
“Sorry. ”
“Eden, what you just said. Say it again. ”
I obeyed, because I knew that it meant something important. I said it louder, with a touch more volume than a normal speaking voice. “He’s a sentry. And he heard me, didn’t he?”
“You’ve definitely got his attention. ”
