Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [165]
“Gypsy morph.”
“Gypsy morph. But I don’t know anything more now than I did before. I don’t have any idea at all what it is I’m supposed to do. Or what everyone thinks I’m supposed to do.”
“You have visions. Candle said so. You have dreams about the boy and his children. Maybe that’s some of it.”
Hawk sat motionless, staring off into space, his thoughts unspoken. He was working it through, trying it on for size, but not finding anything that fit.
Logan could see it in his face, in the shifting of his eyes. He was a boy sitting in a cell waiting to die, and this latest madness was too much for him.
Why he didn’t seem to know who he was or what he was supposed to do surprised Logan. He thought it would all be made clear once he found the morph. Logan wondered suddenly if there was something he had forgotten.
Then, abruptly, he remembered. He gathered up the bones and held them out.
“Take these. If you are the morph, they belong to you. They are your mother’s bones. They might help you remember.”
Hawk looked at the bones, then at him, and shook his head. “I don’t want any part of them. I just want you to take them away.”
“If I do that, what will happen to you then? They’re going to kill you.”
Logan kept his hand outstretched. “And Tessa. What about her?”
The boy said nothing for a long time, sitting back, looking at nothing.
“She told the judges that she was carrying my child,” he said finally. He looked up again, meeting Logan’s gaze. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.” He shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose. None of it matters. Even if I am who you say, even if the bones are my mother’s, it doesn’t change what’s going to happen to me or to Tessa.”
“Or to the Ghosts?” Logan asked. “They seem to believe in you. The boy and his children. They mentioned that right away when I told them I was looking for the gypsy morph and what the morph was expected to do. They say you are a family. What happens to them?”
“I don’t think I can do anything for them.” Hawk’s words were laced with bitterness. “I can’t save them or Tessa or anyone. I can’t even save myself from this.”
He looked at the floor again. “Or my child, if there is one.”
Logan gave him a minute, and then said, “Take the bones. Hold them. Let’s see if they give you any answers.”
“No,” Hawk repeated. Then his eyes lifted and met Logan’s. They stared at each other for a long time. “All right,” the boy said finally. “Give them to me.”
Logan leaned forward and dumped the bones gently into the boy’s palm. Hawk looked at them, a glimmer of whiteness against the dirt-streaked flesh of his hand. Then slowly he closed his fingers over them.
Logan waited expectantly.
“Nothing,” Hawk said finally. “It’s all a . . .”
Then his eyes snapped wide, his mouth fell open in shock, and his slender body went rigid, his muscles cording, straining against what was happening to him. Logan started to intervene, then checked himself. Better to let this play out. The boy was shaking now, his body jerking in whiplash fashion. He was trying to say something, but the words came out as small whimpers. He clasped the fist that held the finger bones to his breast, hunched over as if to find a way to absorb the bones into his body, and began to rock forward and back.
“Hawk?” Logan whispered to him.
A white light bloomed from the center of the boy’s body, a small blossom at first, and then a bright cloud that all but enveloped him. Logan backed away despite himself, edging toward the darkness, not understanding why, but feeling that his presence was invasive and perhaps even dangerous. He watched the light steady and then begin to pulse in a rhythm that matched the rocking of the boy.
Hawk continued to make indecipherable sounds, lost to everything about him, gone completely into whatever catharsis the bones had generated.
The rocking and the pulsing continued for a long time, and then died away in an instant, leaving the boy hunched over like a fetus, pressed down against his