Chapter 214: Gray Water Hours

Chapter 214: Chapter 214: Gray Water Hours

They took shelter in the second-floor window of a drowned bank, because Erik wouldn’t let Kai keep rowing with his hands wrapped in torn sleeves.

The skiff bumped against a brass frame where a glass pane had once been. Inside, the lobby was a flat black pond with a teller counter standing in it like an island. The ceiling was high enough to hide the sound of their breathing. Killian climbed through first, mostly because Erik had stopped trusting him near open water. His legs gave out halfway across the sill, and Erik caught him by the collar before he could slide back into the flood.

"I’m fine," Killian said into the wall.

"You’re gray."

"I’m fine. It’s just a headache."

"You vomited on the boat."

"Twice. I’m aware." He sank down against the wall and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "It’s like someone has been hammering a nail behind my left eye since the air thing. I can hold the shape of things, but I can’t feel the edges of them right now. Everything’s blurry, like trying to read in the dark."

Kai dropped onto the cold marble beside him, holding his bandaged hands palm-up in his lap like something he’d been handed to carry. The strips had stuck to the blisters. When he tried to open his fingers, he hissed through his teeth.

"Don’t," Erik said. "Let me look."

"It’s fine."

"It’s not fine. Everyone keeps telling me they’re fine." Erik knelt and unwound the cloth, slow, with his good hand. His right arm still hung half-numb at his side, the fingers answering a beat late whenever he asked them to move. Under the wrappings, Kai’s palms were a blotched, shiny red, with two blisters the size of coins already weeping. "You pushed too hard. You’ve never held a flame that long."

"She wouldn’t stop the wall."

"I know."

"I couldn’t just let it hit the boat."

"I know. That’s why I’m not yelling." Erik rinsed the cloth in the flood and wrapped it back more loosely. "But you’re done for the day. All of us are. No powers until we’ve eaten and slept, and I mean no powers at all, not even a spark to warm your hands."

"Wasn’t planning on a spark."

"You were absolutely planning on a spark."

Kai’s mouth twitched. "Maybe a tiny one."

Hrimnir had padded to the far edge of the counter and settled with his chin on his paws, ears turning slowly toward every sound. Erik felt the wolf’s attention move along their bond like a lamp swung carefully around a dark room.

They ate cold rice balls from Kai’s pack, one each and half of a fourth that Kai tried to push on Killian and Killian tried to push back. Erik drank water with a pinch of salt stirred in. It was the only remedy he knew for the shaking that came after pushing a power too hard, and he made the other two do the same. Killian choked down his portion. Color started to creep back into his face.

"Tell me honestly," Erik said. "How much of that was power, and how much was me asking you to hold the hull at the same time?"

Killian opened one eye. "The hull is background. It’s like holding a plank steady with one hand. The air pocket on the rifleman was the expensive one. Taking something apart is easy. Changing the arrangement of it without breaking it is hard, and doing it to something alive..." He grimaced. "The giant’s skin. The woman’s water. Those needed me to feel every part of them at the same time."

"So don’t do that again."

"I’ll try not to need to."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only honest one I’ve got." Killian let his head fall back against the marble. "I can do more than I could last month, but I can’t do it twice in a row. If we hit another group like that one, I’ll give you one clean move and then I’m useless."

Neither of the others argued. It was the sort of fact you didn’t thank someone for saying, only noted and carried forward.

Erik looked at the window, where the light had begun to change. The mist had gone from grey to a heavier, dirtier color, and the water outside had lost its sheen. He did the arithmetic without wanting to.

"We’re not making dusk," he said.

Kai followed his eyes. "Mom said—"

"I know what Mom said." Erik rubbed his face with his good hand. "We’ve covered maybe a third of the distance in half a day, and we spent an hour of it hiding in a bank. If we push on tonight, we do it in the dark, in water we can’t read, with two people who can barely lift a hand. I won’t do that."

"So we sleep here."

"We sleep somewhere. Somewhere better than a window we can be seen through."

"Then we’ll need to move," Killian said. "I can find us a roof. If I can get my feet under me."

"Five minutes."

"Ten."

"You say ten every time."

"And I’m right every time."

Erik let that go.

It was while they sat there, quiet, that the building spoke.

It started as a faint sound under the surface of the lobby water, a soft wet knock, like a knuckle on a door. Then it came again, nearer. The black pond shivered across its whole width, and the ripples ran out toward the walls in long, careful rings.

Hrimnir stood.

Nobody moved. Erik felt the warning surge down the bond, thin and urgent, and for the first time all day he wished his arm worked.

Something pale rose beneath the water by the teller counter. It was long as a canoe and bladed along the spine, with a flat head broader than a man’s shoulders and a mouth like a seam in rock. Two eyes the size of saucers slid past the surface, white and lidless, and turned, one then the other, toward the window.

It had followed the vibrations in through the glass. They had been sitting still for twenty minutes, and the rest had come from the splash of the rice, the clink of a canteen, the sound of three people breathing.

"Don’t move," Erik breathed.

"I wasn’t going to," Kai whispered back.

"Not you. Him." Erik’s eyes flicked toward Hrimnir, who had crept to the edge of the counter, lips peeled back from his teeth.

The creature’s tail swept the surface, and the whole lobby rocked. A wave slapped against the counter and sprayed Kai’s boots. Killian had gone completely still, one hand flat on the marble, his face blank in the particular way of someone fighting to hold down a bad feeling.

"I can’t," he said, under his breath. "Erik. If I try to touch it, I’ll black out."

"You won’t touch it."

"Then what—"

"Quiet."

The thing glided slowly along the edge of the counter, nosing at the brass. A scar crossed its flank, long and white, where something else had once tried to take it and failed. Erik watched the ripples it threw off, the angle of its eyes, the way it circled closer to the window each time.

It hunted by sound, like the dead did. It hadn’t found them yet because they hadn’t given it anything to find.

Then give it something else.

Erik reached into his coat with his good hand and pulled out the last rice ball, dense and cold in its wrapper. He turned slowly toward the far corner of the lobby, where a revolving door lay half-sunk in the flood, and threw it as hard as he could.

It landed against the glass with a flat smack and splashed.

The creature spun. Its whole body rippled and surged toward the noise in a rush of white water, jaws opening, and the revolving door shuddered under the impact. Erik didn’t wait. He grabbed Killian under one arm and hauled him up, nodding at Kai, and the three of them went out of the window and into the skiff with Hrimnir a gray streak behind them.

Kai didn’t touch the engine. He used the pole, shoving them out into the street one slow push at a time. Behind them the creature thrashed inside the bank, hunting a sound that wasn’t there.

When the building had dwindled to a dim shape in the fog, Kai let the pole drift and sagged forward over his knees.

"A rice ball," he said weakly.

"It was the last one."

"That’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever eaten."

Erik almost laughed, and the sound hurt. His arm throbbed, and his head swam from the effort of holding still. He looked at the other two, gray-faced, shaking, wrapped in torn sleeves and bad luck, and thought of the people they’d left behind who would be watching the clock. Mary would be at the window by dusk. Penelope would be beside her.

They would see the sun go down without a boat on the water.

"There," Killian said hoarsely.

Erik followed his pointing finger. Through a gap in the mist, a rooftop stood out of the flood, a flat tar roof with a rusted water tank and a low parapet. No light on it, and no smoke. Only a drowned stretch of tile and brick, and a door half-open on a stairwell that led down into the dark.

"No fire," Erik said. "No powers. Nobody talks above a whisper."

Nobody argued.

They tied off the skiff to a drainpipe, climbed up, and settled behind the parapet as the grey light thinned toward night. Hrimnir circled once, lay down across the stairwell door, and rested his chin on his paws without ever closing his eyes.

It was a long way to Alex. It was longer than Erik had understood that morning.

He pulled his coat tighter and watched the dark come down over the water, and tried not to think about the lit window he couldn’t see, five miles behind them, where someone would be waiting for three people who weren’t coming.