Winds of Hell

The wind rushed through my window with a force so powerful it took everything on top of my desk with it. Books and papers, even my backpack, twisted in the air, swirling like a tornado trapped in a bottle. The towers of shoe boxes that lined my walls crashed to the floor, sending everything from comic books to my bottle cap collection from first grade flying through the air. I grabbed hold of Amma, who was so tiny I was worried she might get picked up with everything else.

“What’s happenin’?” I could hear Link yelling from somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t see him.

Abraham was standing in the center of the room, his voice calling into the churning black vortex. “To those who have brought destruction into my house, I invite chaos into yours.” The wind circled around him without even catching his coattails. He was commanding it. “The Order is Broken. The Door is Open. Arise, Ascend, Destroy!” His voice grew louder. “Ratio Fracta est! Ianua Aperta est! Sugite, Ascendite, Exscindite!” Now he was shouting. “Ratio Fracta est! Ianua Aperta est! Sugite, Ascendite, Exscindite!”

The swirling air darkened and began to take shape. The hazy black forms jerked out of the spiral, as if they were climbing their way out of the vortex and hurling themselves over the edge, into the world. Which seemed pretty disturbing, considering what they were hurling themselves into was the middle of my bedroom.

I knew what they were. I’d seen them before. I never wanted to see them again.

Vexes—the Demons that inhabited the Underground, void of soul and shape—erupted from the wind, curling into dark forms that moved across my plain blue ceiling, growing until it seemed like they would suck all the air from the room itself. The creatures of shadow moved like a thick, churning fog, shifting in the air. I remembered the one that had almost attacked us outside Exile—the terrifying scream when it reared back and opened its jaws. As the shadows grew into beasts in front of us, I knew the screaming wouldn’t be far behind.

Amma tried to wrestle free from my arms, but I wouldn’t let go. She would have attacked Abraham with her bare hands if I’d let her. “Don’t you come into my house thinkin’ you can bring a world a evil through one tiny crack in the sky.”

“Your house? This seems more like the Wayward’s house to me. And the Wayward is exactly the person to show my friends the way in, through your tiny crack in the sky.”

Amma closed her eyes, murmuring to herself. “Aunt Delilah, Uncle Abner, Grandmamma Sulla….” She was trying to call the Greats, her ancestors in the Otherworld, who had protected us from the Vexes twice before. They were their own force to be reckoned with.

Abraham laughed, his voice carrying above the hissing wind. “No need to call up your ghosts, old woman. We were just leaving.” I could hear the rip begin before he dematerialized. “But don’t worry. I’ll see you soon. Sooner than you’d like.”

Then he ripped open the sky and stepped through it. Gone.

Before any of us could say a word, the Vexes shot out my open window, a single streak of black moving above the sleeping houses on Cotton Bend. At the end of the street, the line of Demons divided in different directions, like the fingers of a dark hand wrapping itself around our town.

My room was strangely quiet. Link tried to navigate around the papers and comic books settling on the floor. But he could barely stand still. “Man, I thought they were gonna drag us down to hell, or wherever they came from. Maybe my mom is right and it is the End a Days.” He scratched his head. “We’re lucky they’re gone.”

Amma walked over to the window, rubbing the gold charm she wore around her neck. “They’re not gone and we’re not lucky. Only a fool would think either.”

The lubbers buzzed underneath the window, the broken symphony of destruction that had become the sound track of our lives. Amma’s expression was just as broken, a mix of fear and sorrow and something I’d never seen before.

Unreadable, inscrutable Amma. Staring out at the night.

“The hole in the sky. It’s gettin’ bigger.”

There was no way we could go back to sleep, and there was no way Amma was letting us out of her sight, so the three of us sat around the scarred pine table in the kitchen listening to the clock tick. Luckily, my dad was in Charleston, like he was most weeknights now that he was teaching at the university. Tonight would’ve sent him back to Blue Horizons for sure.

I could tell Amma was distracted because she cut Link a slice of chocolate pecan pie when she cut one for me. He made a face and slid it onto the china plate next to Lucille’s water dish. Lucille sniffed it and walked away, curling up quietly under Amma’s wooden chair. Not even Lucille had an appetite tonight.

By the time Amma got up to put on the water for tea, Link was so restless he was banging out a tune on the place mat with his fork. He looked at me. “Remember the day they served that nasty chocolate pecan pie in the cafeteria, and Dee Dee Guinness told everyone that you were the one who gave Emily the Valentine’s Day card no one signed?”

“Yeah.” I picked at the dried glue on the table from when I was a kid. My pie sat untouched. “Wait, what?” I hadn’t been listening.

“Dee Dee Guinness was pretty cute.” Link was smiling to himself.

“Who?” I had no idea who he was talking about.

“Hello? You got so mad you stepped on a fork and crushed it? And they didn’t let you back in the cafeteria for a whole six months?” Link examined his fork.

“I remember the fork, I think. But I don’t remember anyone named Dee Dee.” It was a lie. I couldn’t even remember the fork. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the valentine either.

Link shook his head. “We’ve known her our whole lives, and she totally ratted you out in third grade. How could you forget her?” I didn’t answer, and he went back to tapping his fork.

Good question.

Amma brought her teacup to the table, and we sat in silence. It was like we were waiting for a tidal wave to crash down over us, and it was too late to pack or panic or run. When the phone rang, even Amma jumped.

“Who’d be calling this late?” I said late, but I meant early. It was almost six in the morning. We all were thinking the same thing: Whatever was happening, whatever Abraham had let loose on the world—this would be it.

Link shrugged, and Amma picked up the black rotary phone that had been on the wall since my dad was a kid. “Hello?”

I watched as she listened to the caller on the other end of the line. Link rapped on the table in front of me. “It’s a lady, but I can’t tell who it is. She’s talkin’ too fast.”

I heard Amma’s breath catch, and she hung up the phone. For a second, she stood there holding the receiver.

“Amma, what’s wrong?”

She turned around, her eyes watering. “Wesley Lincoln, do you have that car a yours?” My dad had taken the Volvo to the university.

Link nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It’s a little dirty, but—”

Amma was already halfway to the front door. “Hurry up. We’ve got to go.”

Link pulled away from the curb a little slower than usual, for Amma’s sake. I’m not sure she would’ve noticed or cared if he’d skidded down the street on two wheels. She sat in the front seat, staring straight ahead, clutching the handles of her pocketbook.

“Amma, what’s wrong? Where are we going?” I was leaning forward from the backseat, and she didn’t even yell at me about not wearing my seat belt. Something was definitely wrong.

When Link turned onto Blackwell Street, I saw just how wrong.

“What the he—” He looked at Amma and coughed. “Heck?”

There were trees all over the road, torn from the ground, roots and all. It looked like a scene from one of the natural disaster shows Link watched on the Discovery Channel. Man vs. Nature. But this wasn’t natural. It was the result of a supernatural disaster—Vexes.

I could feel them, the destruction they carried with them, bearing down on me. They had been here, on this street. They had done this, and they’d done it because of me.

Because of John Breed.

Amma wanted Link to turn down Cypress Grove, but the road was blocked, so he had to turn down Main. All the streetlights were out, and daylight was just beginning to cut through the darkness, turning the sky from black to shades of blue. For a minute, I thought Main Street might have made it through Abraham’s tornado of Vexes, until I saw the green. Because that’s all it was now—a green. Forget about the stolen tire swing across the street. Now the ancient oak itself was gone. And the statue of General Jubal A. Early wasn’t standing proudly in the center, sword drawn for battle.

The General had fallen, the hilt of his sword broken.

The black sheath of lubbers that had covered the statue for weeks was gone. Even they had abandoned him.

I couldn’t remember a time when the General wasn’t there, guarding his green and our town. He was more than a statue. He was part of Gatlin, woven into our untraditional traditions. On the Fourth of July, the General wore an American flag across his back. On Halloween, he wore a witch’s hat, and a plastic pumpkin full of candy hung from his arm. For the Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill, someone always put a real Confederate frock coat over his permanent bronze one. The General was one of us, watching over Gatlin from his post, generation after generation.

I had always hoped things would change in my town, until they started changing. Now I wanted Gatlin to go back to the boring town I’d known all my life. The way things were when I hated the way things were. Back when I could see things coming, and nothing ever came.

I didn’t want to see this.

I was still staring at the fallen General through the back window when Link slowed down. “Man, it looks like a bomb went off.”

The sidewalks in front of the stores that lined Main were covered with glass. The windows had blown out of every one of them, leaving the stores nameless and exposed. I could see the painted gold L and I from the Little Miss window, separated from the other letters. Dirty hot-pink and red dresses littered the sidewalk, thousands of tiny sequins reflecting the bits and pieces of our everyday lives.

“That’s no bomb, Wesley Lincoln.”

“Ma’am?”

Amma was staring out at what was left of Main. “Bombs drop from the heavens. This came from hell.” She didn’t say another word as she pointed toward the end of the street. Keep driving. That’s what she was saying.

Link did, and neither one of us asked where we were going. If Amma hadn’t told me by now, she wasn’t planning to. Maybe we weren’t going anywhere specific. Maybe Amma just wanted to see which parts of our town had been spared and which had been forsaken.

Then I saw the red and white flashing lights at the end of the street. Huge pillows of black smoke poured into the air. Something was on fire. Not just something in town, but the heart and soul of our town, at least for me.

A place where I thought I would always be safe.

The Gatlin County Library—everything that meant anything to Marian, and all that was left of my mother—was engulfed in flames. A telephone pole was wedged in the middle of its crushed roof, orange flames eating away at the wood on both sides. Water was pouring from the fire hoses, but as soon as they put out the fire in one place, another ignited. Pastor Reed, who lived down the street, was throwing buckets of water around the perimeter, his face coated in ash. At least fifteen members of his congregation had gathered to help, which was ironic, considering most of them had signed one of Mrs. Lincoln’s petitions to have books banned from the library they were trying to save. “Book banners are no better than book burners.” That’s what my mom used to say. I never thought there would come a day when I’d actually see books burning.

Link slowed down, weaving between the parked cars and fire engines. “The library! Marian’s gonna freak. You think those things did this?”

“You think they didn’t?” My voice sounded far away, like it wasn’t mine. “Let me out. My mom’s books are in there.”

Link started to pull over, but Amma put her hand on the wheel. “Keep drivin’.”

“What?” I figured she was bringing us here because the volunteer firemen needed help pouring water on the rest of the roof so it didn’t catch fire. “We can’t leave. They might need our help. It’s Marian’s library.”

It’s my mom’s library.

Amma wouldn’t look away from the window. “I said keep driving, unless you want to pull over and let me drive. Marian’s not in there, and she’s not the only one needin’ our help tonight.”

“How do you know?” Amma tensed. We both knew I was questioning her abilities as a Seer, the gift that was as much a part of her as the library was a part of my mom.

Amma stared straight ahead, her knuckles turning white as she clutched the handles of her pocketbook. “They’re only books.”

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. It was like she’d slapped me in the face. But like a slap, after the initial sting, everything was clearer. “Would you say that to Marian—or Mom if she was here? They’re a piece of our family—”

“Take a look before you lecture me about your family, Ethan Wate.”

When I followed her eyes past the library, I knew Amma hadn’t been taking stock. She already knew what we’d lost. I was the last one to figure it out. Almost.

My heart was hammering and my fists were clenched by the time Link pointed down the street. “Oh, man. Isn’t that your aunts’ place?”

I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words.

“It was.” Amma sniffed. “Keep drivin’.”

I could already see the red glare of the ambulance and fire engine parked on the lawn of the Sisters’ house—or what used to be their house. Yesterday, it had been a proud, white, two-story Federal, with a wraparound porch and a makeshift ramp for Aunt Mercy’s wheelchair. Today, it was half a house, cut down the center like a child’s dollhouse. But instead of perfect arrangements of furniture in every room, everything in the Sisters’ house was upturned and torn apart. The blue crushed-velvet sofa was lying on its back, end tables and rocking chairs pushed up against it, as if the contents of the house had slid to one side. Frames were piled on top of beds, where they had fallen off the walls. And the eerie cutout faced a mountain of rubble: wooden boards, sheets of plaster, unidentifiable pieces of furniture, a porcelain claw-foot tub—the half of the house that hadn’t survived.

I stuck my head out the car window, staring up at the house. I felt like the Beater was rolling in slow motion. In my head, I counted what had been rooms. Thelma’s was downstairs, in the back, closest to the screen door. Her room was still there. Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy shared the darkest room, behind the stairs. And I could still see the stairs. That was something. I ticked them off in my head.

Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy and Thelma.

Aunt Prue.

I couldn’t find her room. I couldn’t find her pink flowered bedspread with all the little tiny balls on it, whatever they were called. I couldn’t find her mothball-smelling closet and her mothball-smelling dresser and her mothball-smelling rag rug.

It was all gone, as if some giant fist had come down from the sky and pulverized it into dust and debris.

The same giant fist had spared the rest of the street. The other houses on Old Oak Road were untouched, without so much as a fallen tree or broken roof shingle in their yards. It looked like the result of a real tornado, the way it touched down randomly, destroying one house while leaving the one next door perfectly intact. But this wasn’t the random result of a natural disaster. I knew whose giant fist it was.

It was a message for me.

Link guided the Beater to the curb, and Amma was out of the car before it even stopped. She headed right for the ambulance, as if she already knew what we were going to find. I froze, my stomach churning.

The phone call. It hadn’t been the greater Gatlin gossip grapevine, reporting that a twister had destroyed most of town. It had been someone calling to tell Amma that my ancient great-aunts’ house had caved in and—what? Link grabbed my arm and pulled me across the street. Practically everyone on the block was crowded around the ambulance. I saw them without seeing any of them, because it was all so surreal. None of it could possibly be happening. Edna Haynie was in her pink plastic hair curlers and fuzzy bathrobe, despite the ninety-degree heat, while Melvin Haynie was still wearing the white undershirt and shorts he had slept in. Ma and Pa Riddle, who ran the dry cleaner’s out of their garage, were dressed for disaster. Ma Riddle was madly spinning her hand-cranked radio, even though the power didn’t seem to be going out and reception didn’t seem to be coming in. Pa Riddle wouldn’t let go of his shotgun.

“Excuse me, ma’ am. Sorry.” Link elbowed his way through the crowd, until we were on the other side of the ambulance. The metal doors were open.

Marian was standing on the brown grass outside the open doors, next to someone wrapped in a blanket. Thelma. Two tiny figures were propped up between them, skinny whitish-blue ankles peeking out from under long, frilly white nightgowns.

Aunt Mercy was shaking her head. “Harlon James. He doesn’t like messes. He won’t like this one bit.”

Marian tried to wrap a blanket around her, but Aunt Mercy shrugged it off. “You’re in shock. You need to warm up. That’s what the firemen said.” Marian handed me a blanket. She was in emergency mode, trying to protect the people she loved and minimize the damage—even though her whole world was burning up a few blocks away. There was no way to minimize that kind of damage.

“He’s run off, Mercy,” Aunt Grace mumbled. “I told you, that dog’s no good. Prudence must a left the dog door open again.” I couldn’t help but look to where the dog door had been, and now the whole wall was missing.

I shook out the blanket and tucked it gently around Aunt Mercy’s shoulders. She was clinging to Thelma like a child. “We have ta tell Prudence Jane. You know she’s crazy ’bout that dog. We have to tell her. She’ll be angrier than a June wasp if she hears it from someone else first.”

Thelma gathered them in her arms. “She’ll be fine. Just some complications, like the ones you had a few months back, Grace. You remember.”

Marian looked at Thelma for a long time, like a mother checking out a child coming in from the yard. “You feeling all right, Miss Thelma?”

Thelma looked almost as confused as the Sisters usually did. “I don’t know what happened. One minute, I was dreamin’ about a fat piece a George Clooney and a hot date with some brown sugar pound cake, and the next thing I knew, the house was comin’ down around us.” Thelma’s voice was shaky, like she couldn’t find a way to make sense of the words she was saying. “Barely had time to get to the girls, and when I found Prudence Jane…”

Aunt Prue. I didn’t hear anything else. Marian looked at me. “She’s with the paramedics. Don’t worry, Amma’s with her.”

I pushed past Marian, feeling my arm slide through her fingers when she tried to grab it. Two paramedics leaned over someone lying on a stretcher. Tubes hung from metal poles and disappeared into my aunt’s frail body in places I couldn’t see, covered with white tape. The paramedics were hooking bags of clear fluid onto more metal poles, their voices impossible to hear over the chaotic chatter of voices, sobs, and sirens. Amma knelt next to her, holding her limp hand and whispering. I wondered if she was praying or talking to the Greats. Probably both.

“She’s not dead.” Link came up behind me. “I can smell her—I mean, I can tell.” He inhaled again. “Copper and salt and red-eye gravy.”

I smiled, in spite of everything, and let out the breath I was holding. “What are they saying? Is she gonna be okay?”

Link listened to the paramedics leaning over Aunt Prue. “I don’t know. They’re sayin’ when the house fell she had a stroke, and she’s unresponsive.”

I turned back to look at Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace. Amma and Thelma helped them into wheelchairs, waving off the volunteer firefighters as if they didn’t know the men were really Mr. Rawls, who filled their prescriptions at the Stop & Steal, and Ed Landry, who pumped their gas at the BP.

I bent down and picked up a piece of glass from the rubble at my feet. I couldn’t tell what it had been, but the color of the glass made me think it was Aunt Prue’s green glass cat, the one she’d kept proudly on display next to her glass grapes. I turned it over and saw it had a round red sticker on it. Marked, like everything in the Sisters’ house, for one relative or another, when they died.

A red sticker.

The cat was meant for me. The cat, the rubble, the fire—all of it was meant for me. I stuck the broken green glass in my pocket and watched helplessly as my aunts were wheeled toward the only other ambulance in town.

Amma shot me a look, and I knew what it meant. Don’t say a word and don’t do a thing. It meant go home, lock the doors, and stay out of it. But she knew I couldn’t.

One word kept fighting its way back into my mind. Unresponsive. Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy wouldn’t understand what it meant when the doctors told them Aunt Prue was unresponsive. They would hear what I heard when Link said it.

Unresponsive.

As good as dead.

And it was my fault. Because I couldn’t tell Abraham how to find John Breed.

John Breed.

Everything snapped into focus.

The mutant Incubus who had led us into Sarafine and Abraham’s trap—who had tried to steal the girl I loved, and had Turned my best friend—was destroying my life one more time. My life and the people I loved.

Because of him, Abraham had unleashed the Vexes. Because of him, my town was destroyed and my aunt was nearly dead. Books were burning, and for the first time, it wasn’t because of small minds or small people.

Macon and Liv were right. It was all about him.

John Breed was the one to blame.

I made a fist. It wasn’t a giant fist, but it was mine. So was this. My problem. I was a Wayward. If I was supposed to find the way—to be there for some great and terrible purpose, or whatever it was Marian and Liv had said the Casters would need me to lead them into or out of—I had found it. And now I had to find John Breed.

There was no going back, not after today.

One ambulance pulled away. Then another. The sirens echoed down the street, and as they disappeared in front of me, I started to run. I thought about Lena. I ran faster. I thought about my mom and Amma and Aunt Prue and Marian. I ran until I couldn’t catch my breath, until the fire trucks were so far behind me that I couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.

I stopped when I reached the library, and stood there. The flames were gone, for the most part. Smoke was still streaming into the sky. The way the ash swirled in the air, it looked like snow. Boxes of books, some black, others soaking wet, were piled in front of the building.

It was still standing, a good half of it. But it didn’t matter, not to me. It would never smell the same again. My mother, what was left of her in Gatlin, was finally gone. You couldn’t unburn the books. You could only buy new ones. And those pages would never have been touched by her hands, or bookmarked with a spoon.

A part of her had died tonight, all over again.

I didn’t know much about Leonardo da Vinci. What had the book said? Maybe I was learning how to live, or maybe I was learning how to die. After today, it could go either way. Maybe I should listen to Emily Dickinson and let the madness begin to make sense. Either way, it was Poe who stuck with me.

Because I had the feeling I was deep into that darkness peering, about as deep as a person could be.

I pulled the piece of green glass out of my pocket and stared at it, as if it could tell me what I needed to know.