The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [62]
This time it was a real operator that spoke. She gave him the number. He hung up, then dialed. The phone rang twice, then a deep, twanging voice answered. Hello, you’ve got Mitchell.
Travis’s throat had nearly closed. Finally he managed to speak.
Mitchell, it’s me.
A silence, filled only with the hiss of distance. Then, Travis? Travis Wilder?
Their conversation had been short, but surprisingly not awkward. Although he had every right to do so, Mitchell had not asked where Travis had gone, what had happened to him, or where he was calling from. Instead he listened to Travis’s questions, then answered in a deep, melodious voice that made Travis think of a cowboy poet he had once heard on the radio. Unfortunately, Mitchell didn’t have much to tell. He hadn’t seen a tall man in black around town. And no, the revival tent that had popped up last October had not reappeared. Travis ran out of questions.
There’s a grave for you, Travis. Up on the hill in Castle Heights.
I know, he said simply. It was enough.
Be well, Travis. We’ll sure miss you.
Travis didn’t know what else to say. He settled for, Give Davis my best. It was Mitchell who hung up first, leaving Travis with the lonely sound of static in his hand.
While he was glad he had made the call, it had only confirmed what Travis’s instincts had already told him. Brother Cy wasn’t there anymore, in the mountains. But he had to be somewhere. That was why Travis had spent these last weeks searching for him here, in the city.
Besides, even if Brother Cy was still in Castle City, you couldn’t go back there, Travis. It’s too dangerous. That’s the first place they’d be looking.
As if that thought had somehow been a cue, Travis watched in the window’s reflection as a sleek, black SUV approached along a cross street, moving toward the corner where he stood. The traffic light changed, and the vehicle stopped as pedestrians crossed in front of it. Through the flickering screen of their legs, Travis made out the license plate: DRATEK33.
“Don’t be an idiot, Travis,” he muttered under his breath. “They’ve got a multinational corporation to run. Not every one of their cars can be looking for you and Grace.”
In what he hoped was a casual motion, he turned from the window and crossed the street with a cluster of walkers. Only after half a block did he let himself turn and look back at the intersection. The light had changed; the vehicle was nowhere in sight.
Travis shoved his hands in his pockets. He knew he should keep going; it was hours before he had to be at the hospital for the janitorial night shift. But he was tired of walking, tired of searching. He bought a cup of coffee from a street vendor, then hopped the free shuttle down to the end of Sixteenth Street. He crossed the pedestrian bridge high above the railroad tracks, then descended to a green park beside the Platte River. He sat in the middle of a bank of cement steps and watched the waters of the Platte rush by, as thin and brown as the coffee in his paper cup. He took a sip. It wasn’t maddok, but he felt a faint tingle of jittery energy seep through his veins.
He set the cup on the step, then drew a small piece of bone on a string from beneath his black T-shirt. It seemed so long ago and so far away—the day he had pulled the bone from the witch Grisla’s bag near the half-ruined fortress of Kelcior. He could still hear the hag’s rasping words.
I wouldn’t have thought you would draw that one. One line for Birth, one line for Breath, and one more for Death, which comes to us all.
At the time he hadn’t understood what the rune had meant—much to Grisla’s disgust. It was only later, when he stood in the frozen depths of Shadowsdeep—when Beltan lay dying in the blood-soaked snow, and the Rune Gate opened to release the armies of the Pale King—that Travis had finally understood the meaning of the rune. It was hope. While there was life, there was always hope.
Travis tightened his