Unforsaken

more demanding until I gave in to it.

Maybe Kaz’s visions were the same way.

I sat as still as I could and watched him. Five minutes turned into ten, the time passing achingly slowly. I wondered if he had fallen asleep, and decided that might be for the best. It grew harder to see him in the dark, but I knew he was there next to me and that was good enough.

Down the road, the cars came and went from the parking lot: hungry travelers, weary families, people trying to get to their next destination. Nothing sinister, nothing out of the ordinary.

There was really no reason for the anxiety that had been gnawing away at me ever since we’d left Chicago, a raw and seething layer underneath all my other fears.

Kaz rested. I waited.

15

RATTLER SHIFTED ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLY on the wood shelf that served as a seat. Next to him, Derek startled, caught napping. Derek was no good at waiting. He had no patience. Rattler bit down hard on his disgust: the Banished blood was weak indeed in Derek, but he was all Rattler had for now.

But the future-ten years from now, there’d be new blood all around town. Young, strong boys and girls with at least one full-blood parent-and a few with two. When Rattler grew old, his many children would make him proud, and there would be grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all Banished, all strong and determined, and they would live well here. They would take their rightful place as the leaders of Gypsum; they would drive fancy cars and live in big-ass houses, and the biggest one of all would be the one he would build for him and Prairie.

He and his Prairie, they would grow old together; they would look out their front door and see what was theirs… their land, their town, just like the village of their ancestors. If something displeased Prairie, Rattler would blast it sky-high; if someone made her unhappy, he would remind them by force who was the leader of the Banished, who had returned them to their rightful glory. No one would make Prairie unhappy twice. If they did, Rattler would make them taste their own blood as they died.

They would see. They would all see. So far, they hadn’t understood, and maybe, just maybe, some of that was his fault. He had failed with Prairie once, but she had been under the influence of that other one, of Mr. Chicago, with his slick ways-he saw that now. He hadn’t seen that then, when Mr. Chicago had offered Rattler money to turn Prairie and Hailey over. But that was then and this was now.

Rattler worked up a gobbet of spit and let fly, narrowly missing Derek’s boot. Derek was wise enough not to say anything; he just moved his foot out of the way.

The memory disgusted Rattler: Mr. Chicago with his stack of hundreds, peeling, peeling, peeling, waiting for Rattler to signal when it was enough. Well, he’d taken the man’s money-why shouldn’t he?-but it was never enough. It would never be enough! And see what had happened to Mr. Chicago, who had thought he could buy Rattler? Charred and dead, burnt up in his own squalor, a fitting end.

Not that there was anything wrong with making a little money from the gifts. No, nothing wrong at all. He needed cash. He needed capital. Others had stepped up to take Mr. Chicago’s place, and Rattler had showed them, hadn’t he? He had taught them a blood lesson they would not forget. Now they would respect him. He would set a high price for their services… his and Hailey’s and Prairie’s. And he would bring the others, the Trashtown riffraff who possessed only a shadow of the gifts, let them experiment on his lesser brethren, let them play their games with the piss-weak stock, even as Rattler was beginning to rebuild the clan.

He would be like a broker; he would be the businessman he’d always known he could be. His sons would take up the yoke someday. He would teach them, train them. And in his home, Prairie would raise the girls, and they would be strong and beautiful, like her. It would be as it should be.

Next to him, Derek cleared his throat. “We been out here-”

“Shut up,” Rattler said automatically. “Drink.”

Rattler knew that Derek had a flask in his pocket; there was rarely a time when Derek didn’t have a flask in his pocket, topped off with cheap whiskey. That was okay, though; what he needed Derek for didn’t require quick reflexes. Rattler just needed an extra hand in case the boy gave him any trouble. The boy was expendable; Rattler had armed himself with the Ruger just in case, but he hoped not to use it. Just put the boy on the road and send him back, that was all that was called for.

But he needed the girl. Because the girl was the next step to Prairie. And she was his firstborn, a Healer like her mother, so she was rightfully his as well.

She had to know it too. Otherwise why was she coming back here? Had to be scared, seeing what she’d seen. He understood that. A sheltered girl like her, all she knew was the home her granny had made for her, that retard boy they’d taken in, the mongrel that ran in the yard. Her granny didn’t let her talk to the Morries, and that was good and right. The few times Rattler had seen one of the Morrie boys talk to her, he’d made sure it was the last time. He might not have been the most involved father, but a girl didn’t need that, anyway. She needed a dad who looked out for her, who knew what was right and what was wrong. Rattler did the right thing when it was important. He kept the boys away. He would make sure that when the time came, it was a pureblood boy who came to call, and no other.

She must have known that. Because where, after everything that had happened to her, was she coming to find safety? Back here to Gypsum. Oh, Rattler didn’t have any illusions that she was coming to him. She had in mind to come see a girlfriend maybe, a favorite teacher. Who knew with girls? They were delicate things, emotional things. Hell, he thought ruefully, rubbing the socket around his scarred eye, they could be quick and unpredictable, and a man had to be on his toes around them.

But now she was on her way back. Rattler had seen it with his blind and spinning eye that morning as he’d lain in bed: he’d seen the car, the girl, the boy, the Exxon sign lit up in the sky above them.

Derek took a dispirited swig from his tarnished flask and returned it to his pocket. He didn’t bother offering it to Rattler. Everyone knew Rattler didn’t drink. He never had, even when they were kids, Rattler and Derek and Armand and the rest of them skipping class to smoke behind the Elks lodge. Even then Rattler knew drink was poison; it was what had led so many of their fathers away from the Banished. Drink made them lazy, distracted them, and then they married outside; they sired their bastard broods and drank and did drugs and pissed away their pride and their birthright.

No more.

“If they was comin’, they’d be here by now,” Derek said, a little more loudly, disgust in his phlegmy voice. The liquor gave him courage, a cheap and deceptive kind of courage, but one that had to be dealt with all the same. True, the man had let Rattler take over the old house on his dead pappy’s land, and Rattler owed him for that, maybe, though a man who’d live in his mother’s trailer instead of cleaning up the mess his own father had left behind wasn’t much of a man in Rattler’s book. But Rattler had taken something from Derek, and he would remember that when it came time for splitting up the spoils. Derek would be taken care of.

That was the future. Now was now.

Rattler moved fast. His hand shot out and seized Derek’s ear and twisted it, and as Derek squirmed and mewled like a puppy, Rattler twisted harder and forced Derek’s head around so he would have to look across the field to where night was etching a layer of purple-black on the fading glow where earth met sky.

“Guess you don’t know nothing,” Rattler said softly as an old brown sedan pulled slowly off the road and came to rest a few feet shy of the cattle guard.

16

HOW COULD WE HAVE SLEPT?