Someone had been cleaning, preparing for our arrival, no doubt.
This was meant to be our new home.
“After you,” Rattler said grandly, but Kaz didn’t budge.
“Come on, now, boy, don’t be like that. You’n me, we’re practically kin, you bein’ full-blood and all.”
Kaz and I followed Derek through the parlor and up the stairs. He turned on the lights as he went. None of the bulbs were very bright, and the dim light added to the gloom of the place, illuminating torn wallpaper, worn carpets, stained and cracked ceilings.
Upstairs was a narrow hallway with a bathroom and three closed doors. Two of them bore shiny padlocks just like the one on the front door.
Rattler stepped in front of us and opened the first one.
“This was supposed to be your auntie’s room,” he said. “But you can use it till she gets here.”
When he turned on the light, I stopped short, at a loss for words.
Rattler had fixed the place up with care, a prison for his beloved that he’d filled with the things he thought she would like. The bed was neatly made up with a faded quilt, but there were extra pillows and lace-edged sheets. An embroidered runner had been draped on the little table next to the bed, and a jar of flowers stood by a dish filled with small polished pebbles. I had once had a collection like that in my own room, stones that had been tumbled smooth from a thousand years in the bottom of Sugar Creek.
Clothes were folded over an armchair pulled up to a wooden desk. They were brightly colored, things I knew Prairie would never wear. She favored dark, plain shirts and pants, gray and black and navy blue; in the stack I saw fuchsia and pink and red and orange, the colors of a summer flower bed.
A sadness stole through my heart, surprising me. Had there been a day, when Rattler and Prairie were children, when these had been my aunt’s favorite colors? As a little girl, playing with the other Banished kids, had Prairie ever been carefree? Had she and my mother picked flowers and chased dragonflies and splashed in the creek before things went bad, before they started school and learned how much the townspeople hated Trashtown, before the other children refused to play with them? Had Prairie once owned a pink dress? Had she worn it for the high school boyfriend who she’d long ago lost?
I looked around the rest of the room. The old furniture had been polished, the floors scrubbed. A stack of shiny new magazines lay on the little desk next to a photo in a silver frame.
I stepped closer. In the frame was a photo of two kids, around eleven or twelve years old. A girl with dark hair almost down to her waist balanced on a rock in the middle of a creek, a look of intense concentration on her face, the bottom of her jeans wet. A tall wiry boy leaned toward her from the edge of the photo, almost out of the frame, grinning and reaching for her, all summer-tanned skin and white teeth and too-long hair, pants too short and sleeves barely reaching his wrists, a boy who was growing toward manhood as fast as he could, who even then wanted nothing more in the world than he wanted that girl.
I swallowed hard and glanced at Rattler, and for the first time ever, he refused to meet my eyes. “Don’t you wear her things, now, Hailey-girl,” he muttered. “Derek, go on in that other room and get what-all I bought the girl.”
Derek was back in moments with a stack of jeans and T-shirts, new and shiny with the price tags still attached, which he laid on the bed without a word.
“Had to guess at your sizes,” Rattler said. “And I ain’t got anything for you, son, but we can get that took care of. I didn’t guess I’d be hostin’ you here or I would have been prepared. Now come on, we got a phone call to make.”
18
I SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED to see the setup on the kitchen table-Rattler’s cell phone was attached to a sleek compact speaker-except the technology was so incongruous with the worn, sparse old furnishings.
“Y’all’ll be able to hear ’im just fine,” Rattler promised. “And more important, he’ll be able to hear you, too.”
“I need a li’l somethin’ before we start,” Derek said, and I noticed that his hands shook as he opened an old metal cabinet and took out a bottle. He splashed liquor into a brown coffee mug and took a greedy drink.
“Hell, you don’t even need t’be here, you don’t want,” Rattler said impatiently.
“It’s my house,” Derek protested, half angry, half forlorn.
Rattler nodded and his lips curved in a slight smile. “That it is, buddy,” he said softly while he waited for Derek to cap the bottle and put it back.
When we were all sitting down, Rattler picked up the phone and thumbed a few keys. Instantly we heard the ringing as though it was right in the room; almost immediately the call was picked up, but after the click of the connection being made, there was silence.
“It’s me,” Rattler said, not bothering to mask his drawl. “Your good friend Rattler Sikes. And this had better be the man in charge, or I’m hangin’ up. I don’t mean to speak to nobody else.”
“Don’t hang up,” a deep, clipped voice said. “This is Alistair Prentiss speaking. I am the man in charge, as you say. Thank you for calling, Mr. Sikes.”
“Well now, it just seemed like the right thing to do, after y’all sent them folks to pay me a visit th’other day.”
Prentiss coughed slightly, and Rattler caught my gaze and winked.
I felt a shiver of nerves run through my body. I’d expected Rattler to be furious, given the way I had injured him, the damage I’d done to his eye. At best I’d expected him to trade me to Prentiss, to sell me for whatever he could get them to pay. But he’d treated me well enough since finding us pulled off the road.
I didn’t trust him, of course. I figured he’d go after Kaz first, maybe see what he could get for him, a Seer with a great deal of power, before starting to negotiate for me.
“About that…,” Prentiss said. “You do understand, Mr. Sikes, that was only business.”
Rattler laughed, a hearty, rich laugh from deep in his chest. “You sent a couple guys to drag me out of my own home, threatened to put me in the ground if I didn’t go with ’em. That all in a day’s work for you?”
“Yes, Mr. Sikes, in your case. But it seems I underestimated you.”
Rattler had been sitting tipped back on an old kitchen chair, but at Prentiss’s words he slammed the chair down on the floor and laid his forearms flat on the table, glaring at the speaker as though it had offended him. “Hell yeah, you did. And your hired men paid the price. That don’t speak to a whole lot a balls, you ask me.”
“Indeed. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Rattler let the moment lie, his thick black brows knit in fury. Slowly, he relaxed, getting control over his emotions. Across the table, Derek looked from Rattler to the speaker and back, mouth slightly open as he tried to keep up with the conversation.
“So, Prentiss, I got somethin’ I believe you want. Got the Healer y’all were trying so hard to get your hooks into, little gal called Hailey. Say hello, Hailey.”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to speak.
“Aw, come on, now, sweetheart. Just say hello to the man, nothin’ more. He don’t need to know any of your… private stuff. This is just business, like he says.”
Rattler’s expression stayed neutral as he spoke, but he was staring at me intently, and I knew exactly what he meant by “private stuff”-like the fact that I was his daughter. No one knew that besides Prairie and Anna and Kaz.
“It’s true,” I muttered. “My name is Hailey Tarbell.”
There was no response from Prentiss, and I imagined him assimilating this new information. In my mind’s eye he was a large man, only slightly diminished by age, broad shouldered and muscular, wearing an immaculate uniform with medals on his chest.
“Ms. Tarbell,” he said after a long pause. “It is an honor to make your acquaintance.”
