CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nobody
III
The creek flowed through the narrow valley at the base of the hill on which the cottage sat. Ez cupped her hands and slurped a scoop of the clear water. It was like liquid ice. Or—well, it was liquid ice. Once she started drinking, she found it difficult to stop, and the same proved true for washing.
Ez tugged her boots off with considerable difficulty and waded out into the frigid stream. She wasn’t about to disrobe in front of Gramma Fark and Wilburn, but after she’d scrubbed the exposed parts of her body, the rest of her felt even filthier by contrast. To hell with it. Ez pinched her nose and plunged beneath the current, fully clothed.
Her nerves screamed as her blood vessels contracted. It was agony. Yet somehow, this agony came as a relief. It was a cold, clarifying pain in place of the hot, befuddled, swollen pain she’d been experiencing all day. A better pain. Ez stayed under as long as her lungs could bear, listening to the dull thunder of the water flowing all around her.
“You’re crazy,” Wilburn said, when her head finally broke the surface. He was squatting on a boulder in the middle of the stream, perfectly dry. Ez splashed him. “Hey!” Wilburn laughed. He jumped into the air and swooped away to go pester Thoralf. Gramma Fark leaned on a cottonwood, painstakingly refilling her pipe. It was an idyllic moment. A more vivid counterpoint to the grisly ritual could hardly be imagined—which made Wilburn’s tale that much harder to believe.
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It wasn’t his honesty that Ez doubted; the question was: how real was his experience? If it was really real—if strangers had actually abducted her son, taken him far away from home, and exposed him to the dangers of a live volcano, a giant serpent, and a mob of lunatic occultists—then, naturally, Ez would feel eleven-out-of-ten furious. On the other hand, if it had only been a dream… well then, no point getting herself bent out of shape. The problem was, the truth seemed to lie somewhere in the middle: it had been a dream, but one whose consequences were entirely too real. So, should Ez feel only five-out-ten furious? Not knowing left her in a state of emotional limbo.
Ez floated in the icy water until her teeth were chattering and her toes were going numb. As she sloshed ashore, her gaze slid up the hill to the ruins of the cottage, which stood in semi-silhouette against the blue-orange sky. With a pang, she realized that she had no idea where she and Wilburn were going to sleep tonight. The thought of all those twisted vexpid corpses lying in their own congealing fluids in the darkness made her ill. For a moment, Ez wished she had let the cottage burn down, memories and all. But no—no, all she really wanted was to get back to the campfire.
“T-t-tell us the rest of the d-darn story, W-W-Wilburn,” Ez said, as she shivered into her boots. “Did th-th-that volcano ever eru-ru-rupt? ” She was hoping to hear about molten lava, about smoldering, boiling magma…
“Well, yeah,” Wilburn said, “but don’t you want to hear what happened first first?”
“Darn tootin’ we do,” Gramma said sharply; only she could pack so much severity into a homespun phrase like darn tootin’. “We want every detail you can remember, Wilburn. That ritual sounds like necromancy. That’s the evilest kind of magic there is. The punishment for anyone caught practicing it in Argylon is death. I can’t believe Iddo stood by and let you—actually, of course I can believe that. He was willing to let those vexpids kill us, wasn’t he?”
“I think—” Wilburn began.
But Gramma stopped him with an upheld hand. “Pick up right where you left off,” she said. And so, as the four of them began the steep trek up the hill toward the waiting embers of the campfire, Wilburn did.