that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”
He sighed, and then stopped talking.
Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.
“Laura,” was all he said.
Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”
“I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”
Wednesday raised a bushy eyebrow.
“Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura.”
Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”
“What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones or thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”
He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.
Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.
He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.
Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.
The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.
“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”
“All at the same time?”
“Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”
“I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.
“Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine, slid up the window and drove off into the frigid night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
—BEN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK
Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.
He was down at the Video, Tanning, Bait, and Tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.
He asked Hinzelmann.
“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.
“For real,” said Shadow.
“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it