فصل 11

CHAPTER 11

A COIL OF BLACK

THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED on the fourth floor. An older couple joined the Coopers as a waiter pushed a linen-covered room-service cart past in the corridor. As the doors shut, the old man looked down at his arm and scratched off a large scab, which drifted to the elevator floor.

“Did you see that?” Aidan asked Sarah.

“Aidan!” said Natalie, horrified, looking between Aidan and the man.

“Not that, Mom!” said Aidan. He cupped his hand and whispered in Sarah’s ear, “That room-service waiter who just went by—he wasn’t wearing a coat.”

“So?” said Sarah.

“The guy carrying the tray on our floor had a big coat on. He was a doorman, not a waiter!”

Sarah frowned.

“He was heading toward our room,” said Aidan.

The old man reached toward another scab; his wife slapped his wrist.

“Mom,” said Sarah, pretending to search through her backpack, “do you have a hairbrush?”

“No,” said Natalie. “You know I never carry one.”

“Can I go back to the room and get one, please?”

“You can make it through breakfast without worrying about your hair,” Tom said testily.

“Please, Mom?” Woman to woman. It usually worked.

“I don’t see any harm,” Natalie said. “Just hurry up, please.”

The elevator doors opened; they had reached the lobby.

“I’ll go with her and make sure she doesn’t drag it out,” Aidan said.

“Keep her moving,” Tom said, as he and Natalie followed the old couple out of the elevator. “I’m starving.”

Aidan punched the button for the fifth floor. As the doors closed, he said, “What do we do if he’s in our room?”

“We make him leave,” said Sarah. “We can’t let him get the box.” She drummed her fingers on the elevator door. “Come on,” she muttered.

The elevator reached the fifth floor. They ran down the hall. There was a room-service tray on the carpet outside their room. The door was shut.

Aidan snatched a butter knife off the tray.

“As if you’re going to use that,” said Sarah.

“He doesn’t know that.”

Sarah removed the room card from her backpack, slipped it quietly into the slot, took a deep breath, and withdrew it. The door light turned green. She pulled down the handle and pushed the door open.

The doorman was bent over, searching a lower drawer in a dresser. He stood and turned toward them. His face was expressionless; his eyes were vacant, dominated by huge black pupils.

“What are you doing?” said Sarah. Aidan moved next to her.

The doorman said nothing.

The door closed behind them.

“This is our room,” said Sarah. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

The doorman took a step toward them.

Aidan gripped the butter knife. Sarah took a step back and opened the door. “Please leave right now,” she said, gesturing toward the hallway.

Another step. The doorman was a yard away from them, next to the desk lamp. Aidan looked down and gasped.

“Sarah,” he hissed. “He doesn’t have a shadow.”

Sarah would have screamed, but she never had a chance. The doorman, moving with impossible quickness, leaped forward and shoved her out into the hall. He then seized Aidan before he had time to react and shoved him out after her.

Aidan stabbed the butter knife into the closing crack and blocked the door from shutting completely. He leaned against the door, trying to force it open, but the doorman had his full weight against it.

“Help me!” Aidan shouted.

“We need to get somebody up here fast,” said Sarah. She looked around frantically, then spotted a fire alarm a few yards away. She ran to it, opened the cover plate, and yanked the lever down. Instantly, a blinding white light flashed overhead and a very loud, very annoying alarm began sounding.

Downstairs, Tom was just raising his steaming coffee cup to his lips, anticipating the first sip, when he heard the alarm. All around the dining room, guests looked up from their breakfasts. A hotel employee trotted past the entrance, then another. A voice coming from the direction of the reception desk called out, “Fifth floor.”

Tom and Natalie exchanged looks.

Oh, no…

“S…a…r…a…h!” Aidan shouted.

She ran for the door, leaped in the air, and kicked it hard with her karate-trained right foot. The doorman was thrown back onto the floor, banging his head hard on the corner of the desk as he went down. He lay on the floor, apparently stunned, moaning.

Aidan ran past him to the bed. “Grab it!” he shouted to Sarah, at the same time yanking the bedspread off the bed and onto the fallen doorman. The doorman, recovering, kicked at it to get it off, but was tangled just long enough for Sarah to reach for the box behind the television and make for the door, Aidan a step behind her. Sarah shoved the box into her backpack.

A few yards down the hallway they nearly ran into two men in gray suits, one with a walkie-talkie—hotel security.

“Excuse me!” Aidan said. “One of your doormen pulled the fire alarm and then barged into our room!”

At that moment, the doorman appeared at the doorway. His dead, coal-black eyes met Sarah’s for a moment, then aimed at her backpack.

“There he is!” Sarah shouted, pointing. The doorman turned away and began walking quickly toward the stairs at the far end of the corridor.

“Hey, you! Stop!” shouted the man with the walkietalkie.

The doorman, not looking back, started running. The two security men started after him, but the doorman had a big lead and his pursuers were slowed by hotel guests responding to the alarm, pouring from their rooms into the corridor.

“They’re not gonna catch him,” said Aidan.

“Come on,” said Sarah. “We’ll take the elevator.”

They reached the elevators and joined a crowd of people pushing their way on. Although hotel guests were not supposed to use the elevators in case of a fire, no one was obeying the rule.

“What are we doing?” whispered Aidan.

“Following him,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“To see where he goes. I want to know who’s after us.”

“I’m not sure I do,” said Aidan. The doors opened in the lobby; Sarah pushed her way out, with Aidan behind.

“There!” she said.

The doorman, in a crowd, was walking briskly, purposefully, not looking back. Most of the hotel guests were outside now in a milling throng of hundreds on the sidewalk, with more streaming across the lobby and out the front entrance. But the doorman veered right, toward a side entrance. Sarah followed about twenty feet behind him with Aidan, reluctantly, on her heels.

The doorman started across a street, walking directly into the path of a taxi, which swerved to avoid him, its driver yelling something unpleasant. The doorman paid no attention, continuing across the street and into the park above which Sarah and Aidan had flown the night before. Sarah stopped on the sidewalk, watching.

“Where’s he going?” said Aidan.

“I don’t know,” said Sarah. “It’s like he didn’t even hear that taxi…”

The doorman walked toward a huge oak, its branches lush with leaves. When he reached it, he stopped. For thirty seconds he stood motionless.

Then a raven landed in the tree.

Then another.

Then a dozen more.

And still more, and more, and more. Hundreds more. The tree was black now, its branches bending under the weight of the huge black birds.

Aidan put his hand on Sarah’s arm.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Sarah stayed where she was, her eyes fixed on the scene.

Suddenly, the tree came alive as the birds, moving as one fluid mass, rose from the upper canopy of the tree in a coil of black, like an enormous snake. With a roar of beating wings, the coil arched upward and then swiftly curved down, engulfing the doorman in a tornado of black feathers. The only sound was of beating wings. Then, as swiftly as they had descended, the mass of birds began to rise; the top of the mass again began to form a snakelike shape even as the bottom still covered the doorman.

The top arched and began to swivel, as if looking for something. And then it stopped.

It was pointing toward Sarah.

“Uh-oh,” said Aidan.

“Run!” shouted Sarah.

Dodging traffic, she and Aidan sprinted back across the street toward the hotel. Behind them they heard the all-too-familiar roar of beating wings. Sarah glanced back and saw the dark mass swooping toward them. Behind the mass she caught a glimpse of a figure crumpled on the ground—the doorman, or what was left of him.

“Hurry!” she shouted to Aidan, who needed no encouragement. Moments later they reached the hotel, where the crowd was flowing back into the lobby; the alarm had apparently been declared false.

Sarah and Aidan plunged into the mob, then looked anxiously back; to their relief, they saw that the black mass of birds had veered away and was breaking apart, the ravens now flying separately, like ordinary birds. They flew off in all directions; in seconds they were gone. A few members of the crowd had noticed their odd behavior and were pointing upward, but most people were focused on getting back into the hotel. In the distance, Sarah and Aidan saw figures in the park gathered around the fallen form of the doorman.

They entered the lobby and spotted their parents on the far side, anxiously scanning the crowd. A moment later their parents saw them and started working their way toward them, their expressions a mixture of relief and anger.

“Sarah,” said Aidan urgently, “we can’t keep the box.

You saw what happened to the doorman.”

“Yes,” said Sarah. “Ombra shadowized him. And then he…I don’t know what he did to him in the park. I guess he was angry at him because he failed.”

“Yes, but now he’ll just shadowize somebody else. He’s going to keep coming, Sarah. As long as we have the box, he’s going to keep coming. Do you see that? Do you see that?”

Their parents had almost reached them. Sarah shifted the backpack, acutely aware of the heavy weight of the box. “Yes,” she said. “I see.”