Blind Bill was waiting up in the living room when Memphis let himself in. The old man sat on the sofa, still and quiet, in the dark. Memphis turned on the lamp. He was bone-tired and his mouth tasted of hot metal. “Evenin’, Mr. Johnson.”
“Told you—it’s Bill. You sound wore out.”
Memphis suppressed a yawn. “Suppose I am. Everything good tonight? Isaiah all right?”
“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.”
The last of the funereal thread popped free. The ragged hole in Gabriel’s face opened. Inside were two rows of serrated teeth. Gabe screamed into the storm.
The hungry dead answered in kind.
The next morning, Jericho woke before dawn. He packed a small suitcase—a few clothes, more than a few books, and his leather pouch—and left a note for Will on the kitchen table beside the war figurines Jericho had painted the past several years. The note read:
He stood in the old Bennington flat with its grandmotherly furniture, the slightly leaky kitchen faucet, and the hat rack by the front door where Will hung his trusty umbrella, and tried to memorize every smudge on the walls, every play of light across the floor. This was the place he had lived ever since Will brought him home from the hospital and the failed Daedalus program under Jake’s orders. Jericho had been abandoned. Now he was the one abandoning Will.
He left before he could change his mind.
Theta also woke before dawn. It had been a bad dream that had stolen her sleep. She scarcely remembered it now, something about fire. She padded past Henry’s empty room. He hadn’t come home yet, and she remembered that he and David were staying up late to work on new music. An envelope addressed to Theta had been shoved under her door. She rarely got mail at home. When you were an orphan, there were no newsy letters or complaints from relatives. She tore open the envelope. Tucked inside was a photograph of Theta and Mrs. Bowers in front of the Novelty Vaudeville Theater in Topeka. On the back, someone had written, The truth has found you out, Betty. Meet me Thursday. Midnight. Come alone.
There was a Bowery address printed at the bottom.
The edges of the photograph smoked between her fingers, and Theta dropped it quickly. She felt dizzy with panic. Whoever was sending these threatening notes knew where she lived! And now they wanted to meet with her. Alone. Theta wished Henry were home. She needed to talk to somebody, but who? Evie would listen, but when Evie got blotto, she had a habit of blurting out secrets. No, not Evie. If she told Memphis, he’d surely want to go with her—Henry, too. She couldn’t risk it. Besides, it was four thirty in the morning. She’d have to wait. Oh, she’d lose her mind before then. She had to get out, go for a walk. But now even that seemed nerve-racking. It wasn’t just the gossip reporters paying doormen and neighbors to keep tabs on Theta and reveal her every, possibly scandalous, move. Clearly, somebody far more sinister was watching her, too. She wasn’t even safe in her own home.