nineteen.
The shadows came in through the trees at a slant, hinting that daylight was leaving.
They would have to escape the covert soon, before dark arrived.
Marsden stepped over a gnarled, mossy root that stuck out from the ground like a finger from a grave. Likewise, Jude lifted the detector high enough to keep it from catching. Already, they’d mastered the odd dance the covert required for them to make it through while still being thorough—the contrived coordination of invading troops, the dogged determination of escaping ones.
It was their second search in three days, and it seemed as if they’d come to some kind of agreement with the covert. The anguished land agreed to let them in, but they would not be allowed to stop, nor go back, nor rush ahead. What happened, happened; the covert would decide what it would finally give to them, and when.
Time warped within that ancient wooden fence enclosing them from the world. Hours, like moments; moments, like days. It was like the story of Persephone, who was tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds, each seed cursing her to a month in the underworld. As the goddess ate those blood-red seeds, so Marsden’s great-great-uncle had spilled his family’s blood onto the covert’s soil, and prisoners were born anew to them.
“Man, Rig coming in this deep?” Jude swung the detector over the wild ginger at their feet, the endless spools of spice. “As a kid? I bet most adults wouldn’t come this far. Kind of amazing what you can convince yourself to do when you really want something.”
Marsden thought of her mother convincing herself right out of her own ability. How Star had called her a coward for doing it. They’d argued about it once, and Marsden had been in the same room, the almond cookies her grandmother had brought for her gone tasteless on her tongue. You’re so full of fear there’s no room for anything else, Star had whispered harshly to her daughter. Fear of this town, of yourself.
“He was probably still really scared,” she said to Jude. “He just wanted to bury that tin even more.”
“It made him brave. Braver than I was at that age.”
“You were just a kid. You shouldn’t have had to be brave.”
“Rig said Dad had a bad temper, even when my mom was still around,” he muttered, swirling over a patch of clover. As usual, there were no bees in sight, the insects permanently shy of the covert. Their instincts had long ago warned them to stay away, to instead drink only from clover grown in light, grown from soil without traces of tragedy. “Later, having two kids to raise on his own didn’t help it.”
“Your mom died when you were just a baby, didn’t she?” It’d been cancer that had taken Isabel Ambrose, its ugly pull stronger than any of that of the covert.
“When I was three. I can’t remember much—I need pictures to see her face. Apparently, she hated it here—back East, she was Isabel Ambrose, but in Glory, she was the black lady married to the guy who used to have a good job, you know?” He shrugged. “My dad tried—small things, like he picked out the cherrywood flooring in the house to match what we had before—but that’s just . . . surface stuff. Rig missed her all the time. I guess I got off easy, not remembering her.”
Marsden held a tree branch to the side so it wouldn’t smack him in the stomach as he followed her through a thick knot of pines. “I think we forget for a reason. If you remembered every single bad thing that ever happened to you, you’d never stop being sad.”
Her words had been impulsive, almost embarrassingly revealing, and she wished she could take them back—they came too close to spelling out her secrets. How she was trying to hear the dead just to prove it wasn’t her fault her father was gone. How that had made her say yes to Jude digging up the covert, but it’d been on top of feeling guilty about being a skimmer.
“When I think about Rig being brave for my sake, the worst part is it was because he didn’t have a choice.” Jude swept, the detector a slow arc of silver. “My being around meant he had to be brave, all the time. What a damn heavy load for a kid to have to carry, right?”
She took the detector from him, felt the high buzz of it in her bones as she took over. “It’s—you don’t question a load when you’re the only one who can carry it.” Wynn had always been hers, and only hers, to watch over—there’d been no one else. Only in her weakest moments, or her angriest, did Marsden sometimes let herself resent it. She wondered if it’d been the same way for Rigby. She saw the image of his eyes in the library again, how shuttered they’d been as he held Jude. Rigby, can you hear me? Are you here with us, anywhere? You weren’t evil for sometimes wanting to run away on your own, only real.
“I asked Roadie once if he thought Rig was going to hell, handful of covert dirt dumped into his pocket or not.” Jude plucked a vine of ivy off a trunk as he passed. “He said he didn’t even believe in God, so how could he believe in hell?”
She didn’t know what she believed. Because what kind of God would allow for a place like Glory, like the covert? “Do you agree with him?”
“I kind of have to, don’t I?”
She led them over more patches of wild ginger, the plants’ fragrance sitting on their tongues, the biggest component of their air. There was the occasional ping on the sensor that turned out to be coins or screws. And as they walked, her thoughts went from God to spirits. To the otherworldly. Special abilities had no place in reality now, not with technology what it was.
But her family owned the covert, in a town where most of its folk still believed in guaranteed passageways to the afterlife. She grew up listening to Star tell her stories about ghosts and mediums and the dead as though they were the most normal things in the world. She’d never talked to anyone outside of family about their ability to hear the dead. But most of Glory knew anyway, just as thinking of Leo Ambrose naturally led to thoughts of booze and a short temper. But unlike Jude’s family’s history, that of Marsden’s was an older kind of knowledge, part of the town’s very roots, from Duncan and his gun to Star Liu’s death to Shine’s shunning of her own dark magic.
Marsden slid Jude a sideways glance.
How much did he know? Or believe? If he ever guessed how often she stood in the covert, listening and trying not to fail again, would he ask her to listen for Rigby? What would he say if she told him she already was, but for her own reasons, too?
“Hey.” He stepped up on a small outcrop of rocks, slid back down. He stuck his hands in his shorts pockets and looked nearly sheepish. “Yesterday, after the Burger Pit, I went to see Theola down at her café.”
Marsden stopped walking, and he did, too. In her hands, the detector ran on and on.
Theola Finney. A reader of tea leaves and her grandmother’s best friend when Star had been alive. Theola used to let Marsden pick out free muffins and juice from behind the counter of her café whenever Star dropped by with her.
Shine had kept her daughters away from the fortune-teller after her mother died. She warned them the old lady was full of strange stories, her head a nest of dangerous lies. That she would only try to fill their heads with those same lies if they weren’t careful.
The tactic merely half worked. Wynn, by nature, was more curious than scared—being warned off Theola so consistently only made her enjoy walking past the café whenever she could, eager for a chance to speak to her grandmother’s mysterious friend. As for Marsden, who did do her best to stay away from Theola, her avoidance had nothing to do with Shine’s reasons at all and everything to do with her own.
Her head was home to all her secrets.
She could never risk someone peeking inside.
“You went to see Theola Finney?” she finally said. “The town psychic?”
“Yes. Also the closest thing this town has to a resident witch, apparently.” Jude stilled and then shifted his feet on ground made treacherous with its slippery layers of ginger plants. “I don’t mean your grandmother was a witch, though. Since, you know, they hung out together.”
Marsden wasn’t surprised he knew about Glory’s hearer of the dead and its psychic being friends. The fact was just one more piece of town history.
And do you think my mother is a witch, too? Me? Do you think me and Wynn can hear the dead, too? What else have you heard?
“I didn’t know you were into the psychic scene,” she said.
“I don’t know if I am, to be honest—it all seems kind of ridiculous and pretty hokey most of the time.” Fear flashed across Jude’s features, before slowly fading. “But this is Glory—nothing’s impossible.”
Her grip tightened on the metal detector until her hands hurt. She swept low over weeds that were full of thorns. “You went to get your fortune read?”
His face flushed, obvious even in the falling light that turned his wavy hair a dense black. “No, I went because . . . I wanted to see if there was enough of Rig left in me that she could read him still. If she could look into my head and see him there, so she could tell me why he did what he did.”
“But, Jude, I don’t think—”
“I know, I know. I just figured I might as well ask. She told me right away she couldn’t, so not to waste my money with a reading.”
It would have been a waste. Theola was clairvoyant, her mind a tool that she used for a sixth sense, the same way one used a nose to smell. Reading leaves, or staring into someone’s eyes, she could tell the future, dig into the past, figure out things in ways that defied logic and science.
But being clairvoyant didn’t always mean one could do all these things. And as far as Marsden knew, Theola had never claimed to see into the past, or to be able to read still-living minds as a gateway into those of people already gone.
And that was what Jude so badly wanted.
His disappointment must have been crushing.
“But Marsden?”
“Yes?”
“Then Theola told me something anyway—and it made me run.”