Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith

Author:Tara Bray Smith [SMITH, TARA BRAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316022552
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2010-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

III

CHANGELINGS

CHAPTER 13

NEVE CLOWES SLEPT THE WHOLE WAY back to Portland, her forehead forming a filmy spot of warmth and grease against the Masons’ Jetta window. Nix zipped up the jacket — Dr. Mason’s — he’d given her and covered her cold hands with socks, making sure her boots were laced and her cuffs were rolled down. His gestures were tender, and with each he thought of Ondine, whom he knew he had abandoned. She’d have to understand. He’d explain everything later. Now he needed to help Neve — and Jacob.

Nix didn’t actually think the words “He needed to help the humans,” but they were there anyway.

He tried to give Neve water, but it just dribbled out of the side of her mouth, coiling around her bare neck like a translucent snake, and she coughed and sputtered, not really waking up. Nix wiped the water from her mouth, making sure her nose and her throat were clear. He’d learned to do these things from Finn at the squat. It was how people choked, Finn told him. How they most often died when they were OD’ing. Doing these things felt good, or at least real.

The moon at the lip of the window, the low music he was playing (a Bill Evans CD was still in the car, from Mrs. Mason): these things made him feel grounded, actual, intact. Nix even found himself tapping one of Evans’s silky melodies on the steering wheel, keeping time with the clicking orange road markers and an occasional pine outlined against the black-blue sky.

It was a familiar feeling, this getting used to things. He had done it many times before. Even as a child, when he first started having his visions. It was the perpetual truth of his existence, the one thing he could count on. Eventually he would take in stride whatever strangeness the world threw his way.

The Evans CD came to an end. Nix was still tapping. He thought about Ondine. She knew him. At least one person understood a little of what he had experienced. Ondine, he trusted. Now to find himself locked in this situation with her, and — he almost tripped on her name — Morgan D’Amici of all people. The girl’s intensity threw him. How unlikely that the three of them would be bound together here, in Portland, in this place, next to these hills.

The mountains. What is in them? He recalled again what his grandfather had communicated silently to him those days on the water. They rose up black and still in the moonlight, massive and ancient, surrounding Portland. He thought back to something he remembered the woman in the black coat saying: We inhabit the Ring of Fire, and Nix knew instinctively that she meant these mountains. But who was “we”? And what, exactly, did “inhabit” mean? He shouldn’t have left so early, but he had to, for Neve’s sake.

He had heard one name just as he left, Novala. Was it a place? An actual place, with a geography,

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