Will bush's Arc

Chapter 11 of 26

Will lay in the moss and watched the cat carry the first shard across the field. Marrow sat beside him, chewing a strip of pine bark. The sun had not yet cleared the ridge. He was about to close his eyes when Marrow went still. She lifted her chin toward the trees behind them and did not speak. Something was moving in the ferns. Not walking. Sliding. Will heard the wet drag of it before he saw the shape, a tall bunny-eared silhouette lower to the ground than a person should be, ribs pumping fast. Its head turned toward him and locked. "It smells you," Marrow said. "Loose one. It'll eat you before spring gets close." She was already pulling her uncle's satchel around. "I used the gold-green once. There's a swallow of it left. Maybe." Will's leg would not hold him. He knew that before he tried. The creature slid another body length closer, ears flat. He thought of the cat crossing the field with the shard in its teeth. Six weeks of shards. If the creature took him now, the cat would keep walking and Kate would keep finding pieces on her sill from a brother who was already gone. She would climb the hill in February to a peak that held nothing of him. "Give it to me," Will said. Marrow uncorked the flask and tipped the last of the gold-green through his mouth. It went through him like warm water finding a shape to fill. His hands came back. His bad leg came back, sore but his. He stood. The bunny-shadow lunged and he met it with both hands and drove it sideways into a pine. It shrieked, a sound like a kettle. From the treeline a boy stepped out in a dark coat, holding a small brass box to his ear. Mr. Echo. He tilted the box at the creature and something in the air bent. The shriek folded inward and stopped. The creature staggered. Marrow drove her knife up under its jaw. It came apart into wet leaves. Will stood in his solid body and breathed. Mr. Echo lowered the box. "I've been following where sound goes missing," he said. "It brought me here." He looked at Will the way a person looks at a door they have been listening at for years. "You have a sister down the hill. I know her name." Marrow held up the empty flask. "That was the last of it. You're anchored till it wears. A day. Maybe two." Will looked at his own hand, solid in the morning light, and then down the slope toward the chalet where Kate was still asleep. Two days of a body. He would not waste them sending shards through a cat. He would walk down the hill himself, with Mr. Echo, while he still had feet to do it.