CHAPTER ONE

  The Miracle

  II

  It would have been the end of Wilburn Totkins Fark had not his jacket snagged on the very branch of the old sycamore Ez had been planning to chop off for fear that it would break during a storm and hit the cottage. The branch absorbed Wilburn’s momentum with a groan, the stiff wood flexing to its limit. It bowed steeply, then sprang back, launching him upward in arc. He tumbled bonelessly through the air and landed hard on the cottage’s red roof.

  The thud his body made was the most terrifying sound Ez had ever heard. What she did next was only natural: she panicked. She crashed through the garden gate and sprinted a full circle around the cottage, yelling Wilburn’s name. When he failed to answer, she clawed her way up the old tree and hurled herself onto the roof—a feat she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of had she paused to consider it.

  The boy lay in a heap on the red shingles. Ez crawled to his side and ran a hand over his forehead, brushing back his windswept hair. His lips were blue, and his skin icy to the touch. But he was breathing. Ez checked him over thoroughly for injuries and found nothing worse than a few abrasions. That didn’t rule out internal damage, though...

  She hesitated, glancing at the old sycamore, then at the chimney, then at the rain gutters, then back to the tree. Risking her own hide was one thing, but Wilburn’s was quite another. How the hell was she supposed to get him down gently? Even a ladder would be risky.

  The solution came to her in a flash. Ez climbed down hastily and ran into the cottage. Snatching the slate board off the mantle, she feverishly scratched out an equation, then drew a rough diagram of the contraption she intended to build. A childhood’s worth of math punishments had not been wasted on her: Ez had almost been an engineer. She would have made a stellar one, she knew, if only certain unforeseen events had not transpired...

  Ez dashed around the cottage gathering the items she would need: her toolbox, her rolling pin, the folding cot she kept for guests, a coil of rope. She threw it all into the wheelbarrow and drove it to the base of the tree, then flipped the wheelbarrow over and unbolted the axle from the chassis. Minutes later, she stood on the cot and hauled the rope hand over hand, hoisting herself up to the roof using a block and tackle system she’d rigged with the wheel and the rolling pin as pulleys. It was a crude job, of which Ez would have been embarrassed under ordinary circumstances, but for this it proved sufficient.

  Tying the rope off on the weather vane, she bundled her unconscious son onto the cot with as little jostling as possible, then braced herself against the chimney and, letting the rope out inch by inch, lowered him smoothly to the ground. He weighed much less than the potatoes. Once down, Ez was able to pick up the cot and carry it inside with Wilburn on it. She set it down beside the fire, threw more wood on, and carefully removed Wilburn's wet jacket, which had torn so badly that she scarcely needed to move him, before wrapping him up snugly in a quilt.

  Time passed. Ez perched tensely on the edge of her seat, peering into Wilburn’s face, matching her breathing to the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Gradually, his color returned. And then his nose began to twitch. And at long last his eyes flipped open and he sat up. Wilburn had inherited his father Jack’s eyes, which were so brown as to look black, yet somehow full of inner brightness.

  “G’morning,” Wilburn mumbled, stretching. He sniffed the air with interest. He drew a hand out from beneath the quilt and pointed to the cauldron. “Soup?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Ez said, grinning with relief. “Just broth. Would you like some?”

  “Yeah! I mean... Yes please.” Wilburn leaned forward eagerly. Then his gaze became distant. “I forgot the potatoes,” he said. He frowned. “No, wait, I went out there to do it... I was just about to start... But then I thought—” He sprang up suddenly, causing Ez to flinch back in surprise.

  “Mom—guess what—I can fly!”

  Before Ez had a chance to get a word out, Wilburn bounded into the air. He got only a few feet off the floorboards before running out of steam. He hovered for a second, the enthusiasm draining from his face. Then he collapsed back onto the cot looking like he might throw up.

  “Oh... I don’t feel so good...” He tugged the quilt around himself again, shivering.

  Ez quickly ladled broth into a bowl and smeared butter on a chunk of bread to go with it. To her immense relief, Wilburn ate ravenously. She kept refilling his bowl and getting up to fetch more bread until he finally clasped his hands over his bulging belly and let out an enormous yawn. With that, he fell promptly back to sleep.

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  Ez studied him intently for some minutes longer before forcing her attention to the soup—or rather, the lack thereof. With a sinking feeling, she looked from the table, on which half the vegetables still waited to be chopped, to the floor, where much of what she’d managed to chop earlier was strewn, to the window, through which the light had already begun to fade. Then she spotted the gunnysack full of potatoes leaning by the garden gate, as yet unwashed and unpeeled. She wanted to cry.

  But damn it, Gramma Fark wouldn’t be crying if she’d been in Ez’s shoes. Or, well, muddy socks. And crying was exactly what the woman Gramma thought Ez was would do. That woman was weak, but the real Ez was tough, or so she told herself. She wouldn’t let Gramma be right about her.

  Ez sprang into action. There was no time to brew coffee, so she choked down a spoonful of dry grounds before attacking the vegetables in a frenzy. Precision was, unfortunately, out of the question. Ez took barely enough care to ensure she didn’t cut her fingers off. She dumped the whole mess in the cauldron and gave it a perfunctory stir. Then, imagining the snide remarks Gramma was going to make, she tore into the cleaning.

  This required her to finally take off her now-ragged socks in order to stop tracking muddy footprints, of which there were already a dismaying plenty. Wilburn slept right through the racket Ez made rushing about scrubbing and dusting. Not even when she dropped the empty tea kettle with a resounding clang did the boy stir. Shaking her head, Ez hurried out into the dusk to fill the kettle from the rain barrel.

  As she was coming back she thought she heard something: a distant humming, which of course must be the wind. Except... no wind was blowing. The note droned on and on, unnaturally steady; and it was steadily becoming louder, unless that was her imagination. There was daylight enough for her to see across the hilltops a few miles in all directions. What she saw was—nothing. Not a flicker of motion. Only hills and valleys stretching into darkness.

  Feeling jumpy, Ez went back inside to light the lamps and set the table, put the kettle on the hearth and give the soup another stir. Looking around, she was startled to discover she’d completed every task she’d meant to; rather shabbily, yes, but still, done was preferable to not. The last thing left to tidy was herself.

  There were only two rooms in the cottage: Ez's bedroom, to which she now retired, and the everything-else room. The loft served as Wilburn’s quarters, though he often crawled in with Ez late at night, claiming he’d had a nightmare. Ez never challenged this pretense, which she was pretty sure was false at least nineteen times out of twenty. She knew Wilburn would grow out of it one day, and... well, the cottage could be a lonely place at night, or really any time, isolated as it was amidst the windswept hills. Every brick of it, every nail in every plank was haunted by the ghost of Jack. His absence defined Ez’s world, even now: more than seven years after his death. Living in the cottage they had built together, raising the child they had made together... It was everything the two of them had wanted—together—But one of them was missing.

  Ez peered at herself in the dressing-table mirror. A small part of her was always surprised to see how young she looked; and today more so than ever, for she felt as if she’d aged a decade in the past few hours. Her reflection was a good reminder that she wasn’t an old widow like Gramma Fark yet. She was still twenty-seven, and in fact not even technically a widow, because she and Jack had only ever been engaged. That was her biggest regret: that she had put off marrying the man she loved for reasons that seemed utterly trivial in hindsight. She’d planned to marry him eventually, expecting there to be more time... so much more, years and decades. And of course, there had been time, and there still was—for her.

  There wasn’t so much as a speck of gray in Ez’s sandy brown hair, although she did brush out a twig from the old sycamore. No mark of the day’s misadventures showed on her face either, unless it was a certain... strangeness in her bottle-green eyes. Ez’s clothing was a sadder story. Between the digging and the climbing, she’d made quite a bit of mending work for herself, not to mention washing. But that could all wait for tomorrow.

  Ez changed into a clean pair of trousers and a baggy flannel shirt that had been Jack’s. As she was buttoning it, she became aware of that strange buzzing noise again. It had grown loud enough to hear it through the walls now. Or was it... ? She looked up, wincing at the resurgent twinge in her neck. The noise was coming through the roof all right, which meant whatever was making it must be above the cottage, which meant it was... flying. A giddy sort of dread began to boil in her stomach.

  Ez hurried from her bedroom, past the sleeping Wilburn to the door, and locked it. Then she went around locking all the windows and drawing the curtains shut. She could feel the vibration through the floorboards now. The humming grew louder, and still louder, until, for the second time that day, something landed on the roof.

  The thunk it made roused Wilburn from his slumber. Another thunk followed the first. And then another, and the buzzing ceased. In the relative silence, Ez and Wilburn stared into the rafters. They could hear whatever it was scratching around above them. A cacophony of clicks and skitters filtered down, as if a squirrel-circus was performing on the shingles.

  “She’s here,” Wilburn said blankly.

  “What?” Ez asked. “Who?”

  But before Wilburn could answer there was an almighty crash. Debris rained down into the cottage as a creature from a nightmare tore its way inside. The monster wriggled through the hole it had made and scuttled upside down across the ceiling with appalling speed. The firelight flashed iridescent off its wings. Ez gasped. It was a hornet the size of a cart horse, poison yellow with black stripes. Two more identical monstrosities came squirming through the hole after the first one. Their stench, like overripe fruit mixed with carrion, triggered a primordial hatred in Ez, a revulsion that ran deeper than her horror.

  The knife she had been using to chop vegetables was in her hand again without her meaning to have snatched it off the drying rack. She shoved Wilburn behind her as the hornets dropped from the ceiling to the floor. They couldn’t spread their wings in the cramped confines of the cottage, but they didn’t need to. The humans were trapped. The giant insects pressed in from three sides, backing Ez and Wilburn toward the fire.