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“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Alan stubbed out the cigarette as Francis entered the garage.

“You can smoke. I don’t care.”

“I shouldn’t. I’m going to stop anyway.”

Francis picked up the half-smoked pack and the little yellow Bic from their repose on the bumper of Ol’ Betsy, took a cigarette, lit it, inhaled deep, and blew the smoke into the frigid room.

“For Christ’s sake. You smoke?”

The boy shrugged.

“I shouldn’t let you smoke.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just a thing. It’s bad for you.”

“Lots of things are bad for you. Besides, I don’t smoke. I’m just having a cigarette.” He took another drag. “What? They gonna arrest you for smoking with a kid?”

Alan chuckled at the irrefutable logic.

“You okay, Francis?” he said.

He shrugged. “Okay enough.” He brought the cigarette to his lips. The ember flared like a dying sun.

The boy’s gaze never left him, as though his life story was inscribed on his face, and the text glowed in the shadows.

“Are you okay, Alan?”

The question lingered heavily. He wanted to answer it, to say that yes, he was okay, and everything would be okay. He managed to shrug.

He extended two fingers. Francis placed the cigarette between them. He took a long drag, blew the smoke overhead, and handed the cigarette back.

“Last,” said Francis. “I ain’t ever gonna smoke again.”

Breaking this taboo with a strange boy in a strange place, and that strange feeling creeping into him like he was in the sanctuary of a church and something beyond his fathom was expected of him.

Francis dropped the cigarette on the cement and stepped on it. “So,” he said, “it’s pretty outrageous, enit?” He swept his hair behind his ears.

“What is?”

“Everything. It’s always fucked up.”

“We’ll figure something out.”

A cry came from inside. They both looked at the door that led into the Jiffy Stop. Gwen was helping Bridger treat his son’s wounds. The ointment burned.

“I need to help Ty.”

“What can you do for him?”

“I can help him hide.”

“Did you bring him here?”

“No.”

“Were you in his dreams?”

“The Dreamer. I’m pretty sure it was her.”

“Her?”

“Yeah. She’s very powerful.”

“Where is she?”

“White Owl says she’s hiding in a pocket of the Veil. The hunters want her pretty bad.”

“And you think she showed Ty how to get here?”

He nodded. “She wants to bring them all to me. I don’t really know how it works. White Owl knows better. She could tell you.”

“Where is White Owl?”

Another shrug. “Maybe she’s hiding too. Or maybe she’s dead.”

“Why would she be dead?”

“Seriously?” Francis stared at him like he was an idiot with a shrink’s knack for dispelling doom.

“Ty, is he… special?” Alan changed the topic.

“Yeah. He’s a Maji.”

“And what is a Maji? What exactly?”

“They have abilities,” said Francis.

“Like a superpower?” asked Alan.

Francis nodded sincerely.

“What is Ty’s… ability?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. He’s got to figure that out by himself. But whatever it is, it’s strong, cause they’re hunting him. They want him bad—dead or alive.”

“And the people at the concert, were they all Maji?”

“Yeah,” piped the boy. “Well, most. Not you or Deputy Wolf or Mr. Verona, but you are now!”

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“I’m a Maji? How?”

“You heard the music,” Francis said plainly.

Alan mimed a sorcerous gesticulation. The room remained dark and cold and void of magic.

Francis shook his head in disappointment. “That’s not how it works. Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.” He patted Alan’s shoulder.

A tightening sensation grew in Alan’s chest. The music. He closed his eyes. It was vague, distant, and dreamlike. “How many Maji are out there?” he asked.

“I don’t know… many, I think.”

“And you think you’re going to help them all?”

“I’ve got to. It was faster with the guitar. Music touches multitudes, White Owl says. But I can help Ty. It has to be tonight. They’re coming for him.”

The boy touched his arm. “Alan, do you mind?”

“What, Francis?”

“Can you hold me? If it’s not too outrageous.”

“Hold you?”

“I’m scared. A little.”

“It’s not outrageous. Come here.”

He opened his arms, and Francis climbed into his lap the way a child much younger would have done for a parent. He pulled in his gangly limbs and curled into the nest of Alan’s body. He could feel his heart pounding and smell the apple shampoo from the Jiffy Stop bathroom that was dispensed through a canister on the wall. The boy hadn’t been raised with physical affection. He couldn’t envision White Owl cradling him for the closeness of love.

Outrageous? So much had already been outrageous starting… starting when? Starting—he thought back hard over the past few days—starting the night Paul Murphy had called him to tell him about a kid in D-Pad who needed help. But maybe it had been before that, long before that, maybe on a cold, January night years ago. Out in a field crusted with snow. The coldest night in a hundred years in Montana, and crystal clear. There had been a moon throwing its silver light upon the tragedy… maybe that was when—at least for Alan—it all got weird.

Francis’s hand was on his chest, the weight of the young teen pushing him down into the memory, and he tried to pull up away from it, like an animal fallen into quicksand fighting for its last breath before submersion. It was too vivid. He wouldn’t go there. Couldn’t go there. It no longer had merit, no longer held any importance. He pushed the memory down and tried to drown it. Consciously forbade it to resurface.

Francis sat up in his lap. “It’s okay. You don’t have to,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry, Francis. It hurts.”

The boy was quiet. He gripped tight to his shoulders. But he was slipping off. He was too big, really, too grown for this kind of affection. Yet, he held tight.

I wish you were my dad.

What?

The garage was quiet. Naught but the voice of his own damaged heart.

“I’m gonna go help Ty,” said Francis.

Suddenly, the weight was gone from his arms and his legs, and the cold seeped in.

Francis was standing near him.

“Okay,” said Alan.

“Can you watch over us? The other people shouldn’t see. I don’t have my guitar, so I have to do it a different way… a dangerous way. It’s how I lost Amy.”

“Of course, Francis. I’ll watch over you.” He reached out and brushed his fingers through the boy’s long dark hair, tucking it behind his ears, the left one with a pointy helix like an elf.

This is how it could have been.

“When it happens, the hunters will know. They’ll be able to see the nexus, and they will come here. We’ll need to run.”

----------------------------------------

It was snowing heavily again. Nash, Little Joe, and Bridger were outside preparing the dilapidated semi for their flight. Gwen was downstairs, sitting behind the counter in Little Joe’s chair with his shotgun on her lap. The Greta sat on a bar stool across from her, rocking back and forth, silent as ever.

Francis had instructed him to put down a bed of white sheets in the shower room, light four candles at the four corners of each wall, then turn off all the lights.

The boys waited by a pinball machine, and when the room was ready, Francis led Ty and Alan inside and closed the door.

“Stand by the door. Stand guard,” he said to Alan. A seriousness was with him. His hands twitched, and his head rolled in a circle as if he had a pain in his neck.

He pulled Ty down onto the blankets. They sat facing each other, the gold of the flames casting shadows across their faces.

“Don’t be scared,” Francis said.

Alan felt that Francis was speaking to both of them.

“Witness, Alan, and when it’s time, wake us up.”

Francis pulled Ty’s t-shirt off over his head. The room suddenly smelled of medicine. Ointment glistened where the wounds had been salved, as if the boy were made of some dark porcelain that had shattered and been glued back together. Next, he pulled at Ty’s loose shorts, which came off and were tossed against the wall. Francis stood and shed his own clothes, kicking them away before sitting back down.

“Do you know the name of your hunter?” he said.

Ty shook his head. “I didn’t know they had names.”

“Yeah, they all have names. What do you remember first about him?”

“I don’t think it’s a him. I think it’s a her.”

At this, Francis nodded in complete understanding. “Yep, lots of them are girls.”

“She… she has a claw here.” Ty held out his right hand, indicating an arc extending from his index finger. “It’s long and sharp.” His voice had faded to a nearly inaudible whisper.

“What color is it?”

“It’s black.”

“I see.” Francis touched Ty’s chest and closed his eyes. He began to slowly rock back and forth. “She’s known as Black Claw in the Den.”

The candles flickered. Alan felt a cold breeze pass over him.

“Gertrude, that was the name her mother gave her! She’s very old. She’s been a hunter for a long time. She’s the leader of a pack.”

Francis tilted his head up to stare at the ceiling of the truckstop shower room. There was a silence. Alan felt it in his mind and the slow beat of his heart. He feared ever breaking this silence, ever knowing what was on the other side.

“YEA AHH Ahhh ahhh YEA Ahhhh!”

It was a cry, a call, an invocation that shook him, made him hold the wall for support, made his skin prickle, and tears spill from his eyes. And even when silence prevailed, the song remained in the ambiance.

“I’m tired,” said Ty. He lay down, and Francis alongside him, chest to chest, face to face, as if they were breathing each other’s air, and the room became humid, like a swamp at the closed-off heart of a jungle.

Alan’s brow was wet, along with his hair and clothes.

The storm came as a secret wind rustled the awns of the prairie, sensed but rising, rising, and then exploding with a fury into a vast and starless night, pulsing, reverberating, inundating, smashing against his ears.

“No!” Ty cried out. He arched his back, every muscle in spasm, his rigid abdomen like the shell of a tortoise, his skin wet with sweat.

Alan slammed his hands over his ears lest they explode from the sound. Louder, louder still, and no escape. All surrounding, all penetrating, it dominated—the one and perfect note. And then…

Silence.

The boys lay side by side, their skin tones contrasting in the candlelight. The lines of Ty’s cuts were ablaze with an incandescent fire moving inside him, and Francis bled scarlet onto the sheets. They were asleep.

Alan fought the draw of somnolence and braced himself against the door. He would not sleep. He would stand guard.

The shower walls evaporated. He was among the dozens of rail lines at a train station. A platform full of people waiting to embark. In the distance, the growing speck of a locomotive.

Suddenly, a woman jumped several feet to the tracks below. She was African American, beautiful, with a full, voluptuous build. Ty ran to the edge and yelled for her. She didn’t turn or open her eyes. The train was coming. She spread her arms. The boy screamed. The moment of impact. The boy leapt, but his body had grown light, and his arms became wings. He was flying high above the city, lifted by a hot and rising wind. There was no pain up here, only the wind and his body in flight.

The candles burned low, almost out.

“Francis, wake up.” Alan shook him. “Francis, wake up.” The boy turned over. The blood had dried. “Ty, wake up. Ty.” Ty opened his large, brown eyes.

Alan worked the sheets out from under them, bunched them up, and opened the door. There was Gwen. He threw the sheets at her feet and closed the door.

He started the shower.

Ty took care of himself. His wounds no longer bled. But Francis needed help. Alan washed him gently, dabbed him dry with a clean towel, applied the salve, bandaged the lacerations, and helped him dress.

“We need to get out of here. They’re coming,” Francis said. He fell against Alan, gripping him for support.