24

I FOLLOWED MR. TENNIN out to his car, and something inside me was saying, “Run!” But I didn’t listen. I crawled into the passenger seat of his old black car, and he started it up. The engine rolled over a bunch of times before catching, and it sputtered and spat before settling into a rhythm.

“There we go,” Mr. Tennin said in his soft voice. He put the car in reverse, backed out of his space in the grass beside the barn, and drove down the lane toward the road.

I kept reminding myself that it would only take four or five minutes to get to Abra’s house, and I resolved to say as little as possible. I didn’t know how I’d answer if he asked me about the box with the blade and the atlas and the articles. Who else would have it? But then I remembered Mr. Jinn sneaking around Mr. Tennin’s room and even going up into the attic. Maybe Mr. Tennin knew that Mr. Jinn was spying on him. If he did, he probably thought that Mr. Jinn stole the box, which put me in the clear.

I stared hard out my window and into the empty darkness of Abra’s family’s pastureland. I knew the cows would all be in the barn for the night, but still I peered into the shadows, thinking about the Amarok. I wondered if I would be safe walking from the driveway to the house. I imagined it jumping on top of the car and ripping through the roof, tearing Mr. Tennin and me to shreds.

As we got to Abra’s long lane, Mr. Tennin pulled the car off to the side of the road so that two of the tires were in the grass. Then he turned off the car. It was so dark I could barely see his face. I felt for the door handle, getting ready to yank the door open and run for my life.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said quietly. “You know as well as I do that it isn’t safe out there tonight. Not for anyone.”

He looked at me in the darkness, and I knew that he knew everything. He knew what was going on with the Tree. He knew the Amarok was on the loose. He knew about Mr. Jinn and probably even about the box stashed in an old closet in the empty side of Abra’s house.

“What do you know?” I asked, trying to stay calm. I surprised myself with how steady my voice came out.

“I know much more than you do, so that’s a start,” he said. He continued with something like reluctance. “I know Mr. Jinn is searching for the Tree of Life. I know you would like to find it in order to bring your mother back from the dead. I know the Tree is on your property because of the sacrifice your mother made, and because of the presence of an honorable, dead tree. I found the remains of three large, dead dogs in the woods, so the time is almost here. Perhaps worst of all, I’ve seen the shadow of the Amarok.” He paused. “There are many other things that I think I know but am unsure of. I’ll spare you all my guesses.”

His straightforward answer came out full of truth. He didn’t seem worried at all by what I might do with the information. For the first time in my life I realized the power of truth and of truth telling, how knowing and telling the truth will always give you the upper hand over someone who is being malicious or deceitful or even simply withholding information. But I was too afraid to tell the truth. It’s always one fear or another that makes us lie.

“I have the Tree, but I don’t want it only to bring my mother back,” I lied. I felt that old darkness stir inside me.

“If you don’t want it,” he said in a kind voice, “give it to me.”

Even though his words were kind, they also held power, a terrible power that I feared almost enough to rival my fear of the Amarok, and my hand moved to the door handle again. His words held the power of truth.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’ve promised it to someone else in exchange for . . . something. But I’ll . . . I’ll . . . Listen, I can make a trade with you if you’ll help me.”

“How can you offer it to me if you have already offered it to someone else?”

“I haven’t offered it to anyone,” I said, working hard to assemble these intricate layers of lies. “What I meant was that I need to have the Tree in order to fulfill my promise, but I don’t have to give it to them. I can still give it to you and make good on my promise to them.”

Where were all of these lies coming from? I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t a liar by nature, but there I was, scrambling to create some kind of reality in which Mr. Tennin would help me find the other three things I needed.

He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was waiting to hear the terms.

“If you tell me about the stone, the water, and the sunlight, and help me find them, I’ll give you the Tree.”

He didn’t seem surprised that I knew about those items required to grow the Tree, and that surprised me.

“Why would I give you what the Tree needs to grow? And why would you even want them unless you wanted to keep the Tree for yourself?”

I was done. I couldn’t come up with anything. My lies had reached that natural end point where they collapse in on each other and begin to contradict every obvious bit of sense.

“I can’t explain it to you now,” I said. “But if you help me find those things, I’ll give you the Tree. I promise.”

I reasoned with myself that if he helped me do those things, I could somehow take a piece of the Tree, anything that would help me in bringing my mother back. I no longer even factored in that I didn’t have the Tree to give, or that I told Mr. Jinn I’d give it to him first. In that moment the only important thing was for Mr. Tennin to tell me about the stone, the water, and the sunlight.

“I don’t want you to misunderstand me,” he said slowly in a kind voice. “I know you’re not telling me the truth, or at least not all of it. I don’t think you actually have the Tree. But I think you will lead me to it one way or another, willing or not. So I will help you. But I’m warning you with a reminder of your own words—you have promised the Tree to me. You might be surprised at how seriously your oaths are taken, if not by you, at least by others. Even by the Tree itself.”

I sat there in his car, barely breathing.

“I’ll tell you about each item one at a time. Once you find the item, come to me and I’ll tell you about the next one. Understand?”

I nodded.

“First, the stone.” He paused as if still considering whether or not he wanted to help me. But then he continued. “The stone is the first item. If the Tree represents life, the stone represents death. The stone is the foundation that all of the other objects build upon. Without it, the Tree will die quickly.”

“What is it? Where can I find it?”

“The stone is not just a rock. It will be in the form of a vessel. Something that can hold the other items.”

Immediately I thought of the bowl the old ladies had given to the man when we first saw them in the Darkness of the fairgrounds.

“Okay,” I said.

“You know where it is?”

“I think so.”

“Do not go by yourself.”

I nodded. “Because of the Amarok?” I asked quietly. “Because of the Amarok controlled by Mr. Jinn?”

Mr. Tennin gave a grim smile. “Mr. Jinn does not control the Amarok,” he said, and his voice was whimsical. It was his storytelling voice. “He may have called it here, but the Amarok is controlled by no one. By no thing. Enemies of Good are almost always enemies of each other, as allies of Good are almost always allies of each other. The Amarok is its own, and if the Amarok decides to devour Mr. Jinn, well, Mr. Jinn would have a fight on his hands.”

He turned on the car, turned on the headlights, and drove up Abra’s lane. I looked at him for a moment. He was nothing like what I expected an angel to look like. Could it be possible? Could he and Jinn be the cherubim who had been there for the creation of the world? Could they have seen when it all first fell?

“Thank you,” I said, getting out of the car.

He nodded his bald head at me in the darkness. “Make sure you get a ride home,” he said.

When Abra and I snuck into the empty side of the house and entered the upstairs bedroom where we had last hidden the duffel bag, I could tell she had spent a lot of time in there that afternoon. I stared around the room in astonishment, and she gave me a sheepish grin.

“I wanted to get things organized,” she said. “Besides, some of the articles were still stuck together.”

“This is incredible.”

All the articles had been spread out in order by their number. There weren’t as many as I had previously thought, maybe less than a hundred.

“Some of these earlier ones, I couldn’t even read them,” she said, pointing at some ancient-looking pieces of paper with scribbles and notes on them in foreign languages. “But the most recent half of the cards and articles are in English.”

I glanced over them. One was about a five-hundred-year-old mesquite tree in Bahrain that the article called the Tree of Life. Another was about the Cotton Tree in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There was the Lone Cypress near Monterey, California, now held in place by cables.

“Tree after tree after tree.” She poked a new article each time she said the word tree. “Ancient trees, and most of them burned down, cut down, or destroyed. Or trees that people are protecting or hiding. But every article is about a tree.”

She waited and let me skim through some more of the articles.

“Mr. Tennin has a serious interest in these trees,” she said. “Why else would he keep track of how each of them has been destroyed or hidden? Why would he have a matching map showing where each one was located? And why would he have taken special note of this?”

She pointed at the article at the very end, the most recent of all the newspaper clippings. It was one I had seen somewhere before.

“I think you were right,” she said solemnly. “I think he is here to destroy the Tree.”

Valley Woman Dies When Lightning Strikes Ancestral Tree

It was the story of my mother’s death, with #68 in the top right corner of the article. I looked at Abra. She nodded, holding the atlas out to me. There was our small town in central Pennsylvania, flanked by the curving slopes of two mountains. Our valley.

“But our tree is already dead,” I said, thinking out loud.

“You said it yourself earlier today. He’s here for the Tree of Life.”

I told her about the conversation I had just had with Mr. Tennin.

“How did he know it was here? It must have something to do with all these.” I pointed to the articles spread out over the floor.

“I wonder,” Abra said. “Do you remember the story he told us about the Tree of Life when he first arrived at your house?”

“Of course,” I said. “But keep going.”

“What if these are all times when the Tree of Life appeared?”

My eyes scanned the photographs that some of the articles contained, pictures of charred trees or lopped-off stumps, rings within rings. There was a picture of our old oak, dashed as it had been after the lightning struck and before the neighbors had come over to clean up.

I nodded. Not only was he the angel charged with destroying the Tree, but these were his notes on all the times he had already done it.

“You’re brilliant,” I said.

She blushed. “Well, if it’s true, it’s great that we know it,” she said. “But that doesn’t solve our biggest problem.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“What do we do next?”