Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,18

this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”

“Which are?” he says.

“They’re shape-changers.”

He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.

“You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.

She doesn’t say a word now.

“You cursed them?”

He doesn’t believe in personal curses.

“None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.

She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.

“What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”

“Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”

Ten years is a moment.

“I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”

“What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”

“How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”

“I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”

“Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”

WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.

She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.

It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.

“—foresaw this?” he pants.

She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”

“I don’t fly—”

He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.

He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.

He hears screaming from the lake.

And he flies. Nothing superhero- like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.

There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.

The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.

When he hits the ice, it tilts.

Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll hold.”

But it doesn’t. He tries to extend a cradle of force all the way across the ice, over the hole, without trapping the boy and his father. But there are too many of them, the kids all together are too heavy on all that tipping ice, it’s too far, it’s been too long.

The ice cracks; she slips and flails and is gone. One by one the kids slide in after her and in a moment the ice is empty.

His giant invisible hands of force reach out and tilt the ice back, find a struggling body here, a furry parka there. His giant invisible fingers sieve the black water, hunting the kids. He shapes a globe of air and shoves a drowning kitten into it. A bear is grabbing at the ice, breaking more chunks away. A Red Sox hat, a Hello Kitty