Banished

“You slowed me down, girl,” he said, so softly that I knew he was speaking only to her. I might as well have not even been there. “But you can’t stop me. Not when I’m coming for you.”

My fear curled and stretched into something new, a realization that Rattler didn’t want to kill us-he wanted something worse. It was as if he wanted to own Prairie, and I realized that I was more frightened of Rattler Sikes and the other Banished men than I was of the professional killers who’d been chasing us.

More frightened of Rattler than all of those guys put together.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Prairie said, but there was a tremor in her voice, and she shrank back from him. It was like the twisted energy around him diminished her.

Suddenly Rattler laughed, and the spell was broken.

“Now let’s get back on a friendlier track,” Rattler said, his voice oily. “Set on down, girl, I think you ought to be comfy enough in that chair. We got a little talkin’ to do ’fore we all git on the road.”

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie hissed.

But Rattler only shrugged. “I’m gonna take you girls home, where you belong. You can go easy, or you can go hard. Up to you. Hailey, go on, take the kid and git him settled in one of those bedrooms. And take that mangy hound with you.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I edged through the room, avoiding looking at the dead woman, Rascal at my heels. I wished he was a better watchdog-it was like he didn’t care at all that Rattler was threatening us. My heart was pounding so hard, it seemed like everyone ought to be able to hear it. In the hall a door stood open to a small room with a tidy bed made up with a quilt and a pile of embroidered pillows. As I put Chub on the bed and slid my backpack off my shoulders, I tried hard not to think about the woman with half her head leaking out in the other room.

“I like how you look all eased down in that chair,” I heard Rattler say from the other room. “You’re lookin’ real good, Prairie.”

I had to do something to stop Rattler. I unzipped the backpack and dumped everything out. I handed Chub his giraffe and sorted frantically through the rest of the contents.

“Bedtime?” Chub asked, yawning. “I want my bed.” Even through my terror I noticed how well he was speaking, how clear his words were. Evidently he had forgotten his fear, or maybe he was simply too tired to care.

“You can just nap here for now,” I said, pulling the quilts and covers back from the pillows. I could hear Prairie murmuring something.

“Okay. Good night.” Chub got up on his knees to hug me and I kissed the top of his head.

Chub started to wiggle under the covers, but suddenly he sat up, frowning. “I don’t want to watch.”

“What, sweetie? What don’t you want to watch?”

“Bad man’s eye. I don’t want to watch.”

My nerves were so skittish, it took some effort for me to smooth the hair off Chub’s forehead and kiss him gently and get him to lie down again. “You don’t have to. You just go to sleep.”

“ ’Kay.” He closed his eyes, his long lashes casting shadows on his soft cheeks.

In the other room Prairie and Rattler talked in low, intense voices. There was nothing I could use-just my old clothes and Prairie’s purchases. I glanced around the room but saw only framed snapshots, a fancy silver comb and brush, china figurines, a basket of dried flowers. There was a chest of drawers pushed up against the wall and I ran my hand along the top of it.

“You can’t tell me you don’t remember how much fun we used to have,” Rattler said, his voice rising. “You used to love skinny-dippin’ with me and the rest of ’em.”

“I never loved it,” Prairie snapped. “I hated it.”

“That ain’t true. You know you an’ me should of been together. Everyone knew it.”

“No. No.”

I yanked open the top dresser drawer. Slips and camisoles, folded tissue. I tried the next drawer.

Scarves. A soft pile of scarves, lengths of silk in every color of the rainbow-beautiful, but nothing I could use. My heart plummeted.

“Only, you didn’t do like you were supposed to,” Rattler continued. “I waited, I followed your mom’s rules, even if you didn’t. You think I didn’t know about you and that boy from Tipton?”

“He was-”

“You thought you were so smart, sneakin’ around with him? Thought nobody’d figure it out, just cause you kept it from your mom? Well, I knew. I knew.” I was shocked at the bitterness in Rattler’s tone. Was he… jealous? Was that possible?

I stuck my hand in the drawer and seized the scarves and pushed them to the side. My fingers brushed against something hard and sharp. I picked it up. It was made of pale bone or ivory, with two delicate long, curved points at one end and a pearly fan-shaped decoration carved at the other. Some sort of hair ornament, I guessed.

I picked it up and held it in my right hand so that the long, curved points lay against my wrist, then stepped into the other room.

“Don’t matter anyway,” Rattler said. “ ’Specially since your sister beat you to the big prize.”

I heard Prairie’s sharp intake of breath. “What do you mean?”

Rattler laughed bitterly. “Only that once you took off, your mom said she guessed Clover was old enough to date after all. It took some convincin’, like to hurt my feelings the way she kept turnin’ me down, but I finally got her to see things my way. I guess I had a mighty fine time with-”

“Don’t say her name!”

“I’ll say what I want, Pray-ree,” Rattler hissed. “You need me to spell it out?”

I stepped into the light.

Rattler glanced at me, and for a split second his face was open to me, his expression unguarded, and I saw something there I would have never imagined in a million years.

Pain.

Because of Prairie. It wasn’t love-I refused to believe a man like Rattler could love-but a longing so strong he wore it like a second skin; and it was suddenly easy for me to believe that their connection went back not just generations but centuries. The thing binding Rattler to Prairie knotted tighter the more it was resisted.

But when Rattler saw me staring at him, the hurt vanished and was replaced with something else, something sharp-eyed and crafty. Amused, even.

“Little Hailey girl,” he said. “Look at you, practically grown up.”

“You never-you couldn’t-she wouldn’t-” Prairie gasped for words and looked like she was going to come out of her chair and attack him. But Rattler raised his gun hand without even looking and leveled it at her.

“Go easy, Prairie,” he warned, his voice barely more than a raw whisper.

Then he looked at me full-on, his eyes glinting green sparks in the dim light. One corner of his cruel mouth quirked up.

“You know who I am, don’t you, Hailey girl,” he said softly, and suddenly I did-I knew, and my hand clutched hard at the handle of the hairpin as the knowledge thundered in my brain. “I’m your daddy.”

I lunged at him and raised my hand, clenched that hairpin tight, and the sound when those elegant curved points found their mark wasn’t like much of anything at all, like sliding a knife into a melon-

But the sound that came out of Rattler made up for it, a sound that was neither human or animal but something in between, a wild something, a furious something, as he clawed at the thing that was sticking into his right eye.

“Prairie!” I yelled. I whirled around and saw her bolt out of her chair.

I ran to the bedroom and yanked back the quilts. Chub was propped on his elbows, his little face winding up for a scream of his own. He wasn’t all the way awake, I could see that-it happened sometimes, when he was startled out of a deep sleep; it was like a sleep-waking nightmare.

“It’s me, it’s me, Chub,” I said as I yanked him out of the bed, stuffing everything back in the backpack and shrugging it over my shoulders. He started to wail, squirming in my arms as I ran out of the bedroom. Rattler had got the hairpin out of his eye-blood covered the hand he had pressed against it-and he raised his gun hand and swung it from Prairie to me.