Between the Spark and the Burn by April Genevieve Tucholke Read Free Book Online Page B

Wide-Eyed Theo had said.
    Everyone gave us directions willingly enough, though they looked at us strangely and seemed a bit unnerved at the question. Even the kids—a brother and sister on a small farm, wrapped up against the chill. They were no older than ten, with grave expressions, like old black-and-white pictures of towheaded Great Depression children I’d seen in
National Geographic
. They came up to Neely’s rolled-down car window and the green-eyed older brother peered over the top of the car door and told us where to go . . . down this road, up the next, very earnest, as if he were being graded on it. And when he was done he rubbed a calloused un-mittened hand over a small cut on his left temple.
    I wondered what work he’d been doing at his age, to get hands like that. I wondered how he’d gotten the cut on his face.
    The boy caught my eye and added, “You shouldn’t go there, though. Bad things happen in Inn’s End. It’s a bad place.” And his little sister pursed up her chapped red lips and nodded too, like it was the God-given truth, praise be to him.
    But it would take more than two wary little kids to make us turn back now, even if the directions were full of wrong turns and dead ends and misleads, as if people didn’t want us to find the town. Two hours it took us. Two hours of twisting roads and black trees and dark hollows. And then we turned down another unnamed, unpaved road, crossed a covered bridge, and there we were.
    The town sign was weathered and tilted at an angle, but we could still read it.
    Inn’s End.
    I guess I had built it up in my mind as a wild backwoods place with barefoot children and chickens running around squawking and rusted-out washtubs and weathered, beaten-down shacks. The reality was a windy, one-main-street town with a vague New England feel that reminded me of Echo, just like the rest of the Appalachian Mountains. The white wooden houses looked suspicious and tight-lipped, with their black shutters closed tight against the wind, but the outskirts of the town backed up into sloping meadows, which themselves backed up into endless rolling hills and trees, trees, trees. Beautiful.
    We parked the car next to the small, steepled, red-roofed church at the end of the main road. We got out. Stood still. Took the town in.
    The first thing I noticed was the quiet. The deep, deep, middle-of-the-forest quiet. After the quiet, I noticed the lack of Christmas decorations. No lights on trees, no greenery around door frames, no cheery red tinsel hung between streetlights. All the towns we’d passed recently had put up their own slightly shabby holiday trimmings, making the streets seem more cheerful and sweet than usual. But not Inn’s End.
    And then I noticed the birds.
    Black-feathered corpses. Everywhere. Piled up on steps, kicked into snow piles, dangling by their necks from lampposts and signs. There were eight nailed to the door of the dark, abandoned-looking Youngman’s Inn, and five hanging by their feet from the iron church gate.
    The four of us walked down the center of the road. Still and silent. I saw lights in windows, but there was no one in the street. Not a soul.
    The sun was just a sliver on the horizon now, like a small prayer said without much hope. The orange-pink light reflected off the snow and turned the world a strange, ominous color that put dark thoughts in my head.
    â€œWhat was it that Wide-Eyed Theo said?” Neely asked, quiet.
    â€œThe devil-boy commands a flock of ravens,”
Luke said, voice low.
    I shivered, a sick, hard shiver, like the ones you get when you have the flu.
    My wrists started hurting, sharp and cold at first, and then hot and full of sting. I tore my mittens off and turned my hands over, but all I saw was the same pink scars, looking like they always did.
    â€œI don’t like it here,” Luke said. His words fogged up in the cold air. His eyes were wide open, his