Authors: Chuck Wendig

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Supernatural, #Fantasy, #Paranormal, #Urban, #Suspense

The Cormorant (37 page)

“I’m not really great with a gun.”

She shrugs. “I think you’re gonna need it pretty soon.” She tosses him the gun and he almost drops it. “Hey, lemme ask – what was all this about, anyway? Kidnapping me. Taking me out to… where are we?”

“On the… on the beach. A barrier island. Just outside Blowing Rocks. Near, ah, near Jupiter.”

“And you wanted me why?”

“I thought… I thought you’d be a helluva catch if what you can do is true. Way back when I started looking into the string of bodies behind you, I thought maybe you really were a serial killer. But we found your diary in the trash, and more and more I thought maybe this thing you do is real and… I figured your gift would be a real thing to behold. For the FBI. For the Secret Service, even – I mean, shit, imagine you touch the president of the United States and see if he’s gonna be assassinated? That’s a doozy.”

“Well,” Miriam says, “a fun idea, but count me out. Because, Agent Grosky, I don’t work for anyone. Not anymore. Now give me my box. You wanna go kill Tap-Tap or see if you can get him arrested, go for it. Me, I’m walking the other way.”

She grabs the metal box.

And she leaves the agent standing there and bleeding.

SEVENTY

THE BOX

She walks for a while.

And behind her she hears the distant
pop, pop, pop-pop-pop
of gunfire. She doesn’t know what that means. She’s not sure she cares.

Though, she admits, she might be fonder of Grosky than she thinks. Because suddenly there’s a little twinge of guilt if she saved his life only to have him lose it again to a brute like Tap-Tap.

But then she remembers Goldie’s death and…

Well. Who knows how that shakes out?

She finds a place on the rocks.

The tide comes in. The tide goes out.

The sun starts its slide behind her.

She takes the box and bashes it on the rocks until the lock pops. Like an otter cracking open a clamshell.

A bag spills out from the box. Miriam grabs it, opens up, and sees that in the bag are photos and a little ratty book.

Like a diary.

She picks out the photos. A pale, redheaded woman holding a pregnant, freckly belly. The same woman pinning clothes to a line. Sitting on a gravestone. On a porch swing. Standing again in a cemetery, this time among the graves. Miriam grunts. She’s not sure what this means.

So she picks up the book.

She picks a random page and reads.

She flips back and forth between pages.

“Holy shit,” she says. “Holy. Shit.”

SEVENTY-ONE

BRUJA

It takes a while for Miriam to make it back to the Keys, to the concrete storefront with the shattered windows and the weeds grown up through the coarse sand. It’s late when she arrives.

And Sugar is there.

Sugar sits on a pile of cinderblocks around back. Sipping noisily from a Diet Coke bottle with a bent straw. She looks up to see Miriam there. Her look is one lacking surprise.

“I’m addicted to these things,” Sugar says of the diet soda.

Miriam hands her the box.

This
seems to surprise her.

“I found the box,” Miriam says. “The one you told me I wasn’t looking for. You’re right. I wasn’t. You were.”
Or maybe we both were.

“What?”

“It’s not for me. It’s for you.” Miriam, pushy as she is, reaches into Sugar’s lap and flips open the box. She fishes out one of the photos – the one of the pregnant woman cradling the belly. Then she turns the photo over. “
Dulce como el azúcar
. Written in a woman’s handwriting. Though this woman looks American, I guess she spoke Spanish OK. That’s you, right? Sugar.”

“Wait. This is my…”

“That’s your mother. And that–” Miriam taps the round, freckled belly. “–is you. There’re more photos in there. And a diary. Which was maybe for me as much as it is for you. Your mother had… powers, too. She was connected to the dead. Like me, but different. She could speak to them. The already-dead. Not quite like ghosts, maybe, but…” Here comes that word again: “Like a frequency. She could tap into it.”

“But what we do is born of tragedy.”

“Hers was, too. She lost a child when she was very young. An uncle impregnated her at the age of fourteen. Nobody would help the kid get an abortion, so she did it herself. With a hammer. And that messed her up pretty good down there and almost killed her. They told her she’d never have kids or it
would
kill her. What happened… it marked her. Like it marked me. Like it marked you.”

Sugar stands and throws her arms around Miriam.

It’s the first time they touch.

The vision sweeps over Miriam – like with Eleanor Caldecott, there’s nothing there. But this one isn’t a poisonous tide or a vicious crackle of hissing static. It’s velvet smoke. And sad whispers. And the smell of burned caramel. Sugar pulls away, and Miriam is left feeling dizzy.

“Thank you for this,” Sugar says. Tears in her eyes.

“There’s something else. Your mother said she figured out a way to… undo her power. She doesn’t say what it is but she says where she learned it. A place called Collbran, Colorado. So, that’s where I’m headed.”

SEVENTY-TWO

NAILS IN THE COFFIN

The next day, Miriam leaves two grand of the money on Gabby’s doorstep, next to a small bouquet of flowers. She doesn’t know what Gabby likes.

She doesn’t even know Gabby, not really.

But she leaves a note: “This should pay for your health insurance.”

She thinks but does not write,
I’m going to find a way over the next five years to give you a reason not to kill yourself. And I’m sorry.

She knocks. And hides. And watches as Gabby comes out and takes the flowers and the bag. Her face is swaddled in gauze and tape. But even behind the bandages Miriam can see the shock in her eyes.

Gabby looks around. She doesn’t seem to see Miriam.

But she waves anyway.

Miriam thinks:
This will not be the last time we see each other
. Saving Gabby’s life is going to be a whole other kind of challenge. She can’t kill anybody to stop this death, and yet stop it she must.

A terrifying and yet enlivening thought.

Next, Miriam picks a spot north of the Keys where she can walk, and sit on the rocks, and watch as the ocean swallows the sun.

Then she takes her phone and she calls Louis.

He does not answer, but she leaves him a message. “It’s me. I love you. I need you. And you’re going to help me get rid of my curse. Call me back. Did I mention I love you? I love you. I love, love, love you.”

She hangs up.

She sits. And smokes. And waits for him to call her back.

And just as the sun dips below the horizon and is gone, he does.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: THE CORMORANT

As always, I’m the guy who gets all the sweet, sweet credit for writing this book, but of course, that’s a ruse: lots of folks behind the curtain helped to make this story what it was.

Thanks to folks like April Kirk, Daniel Perez, Valerie Valdes, Melissa Dominic and Daevone Molyneux for helping me navigate America’s Moist Hot Land-Wang (a.k.a. “Florida”). I think some of them also wrestled gators so I could make my escape?

Thanks to my agent Stacia Decker and my wife, Michelle, for tearing this book a new one and helping me hammer it into shape.

Thanks to Joey Hi-Fi for covers that sell the books way better than my own meager prose ever could.

Thanks to the cool peeps at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn and at the supremely bad-ass Mysterious Galaxy in Redondo Beach.

Thanks to the stompy circuit-blooded warlords of Angry Robot who gave Miriam a home for the last three books.

Thanks to the Florida Keys Wild Bird Sanctuary, for doing the Bird God’s work by rehabilitating birds and for letting me get up close and personal with an actual cormorant.

Coleman or Lupy, if you’re reading this:
Eject or Die
.

And if I forgot you, then please fill your name and reason for deserving gratitude below:

“Thanks to __________________________ for that time he / she ___________________________.”

Miriam Black will be back in:
Thunderbird
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer.

He is a fellow of the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. His short film (written with co-author and director Lance Weiler)
Pandemic
showed at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. That same year,
Collapsus
– a digital transmedia drama, also co-authored with Weiler – was nominated for an International Digital Emmy and a Games 4 Change award.

He has contributed over two million words to the game industry, and was developer of the popular
Hunter: The Vigil
game line.

He currently lives in Pennsyltucky with his beautiful wife Michelle, their taco terrier Tai-Shen, and his son

(known as “B-Dub”).

You can find him at his website, Terrible Minds, where he remains busy dispensing dubious writing wisdom. Said dubious wisdom is collected in ebook form, such as in the popular
500 Ways To Be A Better Writer
.

As well as the Miriam Black series, he is the author of the Mookie Pearl urban fantasy series for Angry Robot.

terribleminds.com

twitter.com/chuckwendig

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Miriam Black Series

Blackbirds

Mockingbird

The Blue Blazes

Tomes of the Dead

Double Dead

Bad Blood

Under the Empyrean Sky