43
BUT THE TRUCK DIDN’T MOVE.
I waited, shivering in Kaz’s arms, for the engine to turn over. Off to the west of the office park I saw a bobbing, flickering light. Someone had had the sense to find a flashlight before running. Good for them-they’d be glad to have it when the moon went behind a cloud.
After several long moments, the passenger door opened and Prairie got out, carrying Chub. He was sleeping soundly, loose as a rag doll in her arms.
“Get out, hurry,” she said. “I need you to hold him.”
“What about-”
“Rattler’s taken care of.” Prairie cut me off, flashing me a quick, humorless smile. “Come on, Hailey, that trick you pulled with Maynard?”
“What-”
“You’re not the only girl in town who can do that,” Prairie added. “Only I did it with a kiss.”
I imagined how it had gone: Rattler, alone with his love at last, Chub sleeping between them. Rattler, unable to wait, stealing a kiss before he took her home to start his new empire.
The determination and loathing I’d glimpsed, which she’d kept coiled and hidden all through her ordeal, bursting free, coursing through her body into his. Intensified by the blood bond between them, the eternal attraction of the Banished.
“Hurry,” Prairie urged, and Kaz and I scrambled out of the truck bed. I took Chub from her and hitched him up on my shoulder as she leaned back into the truck and rooted around behind the seat.
When she straightened, she was holding one of Rattler’s guns-the smaller one, which still seemed plenty big to me. It looked at home in her hand and I realized that I’d never asked her if she knew how to shoot.
She seemed to read my mind as she gestured at Rattler with the gun. He was slumped over the steering wheel, his arms limp at his sides. “Who do you think taught me?” she asked, her voice as hard and cold as steel. “Him and Dun Acey. First it was BB guns in the woods. Didn’t take long to move on from there.”
She took aim and I almost stopped her, because I was remembering the photo in the room Rattler had prepared for her: two skinny kids playing in the creek. The look of longing on his face as she sparkled and danced in the sun. He’d been a dangerous and reckless child; he’d grown into a dangerous and twisted man. But he had loved her always and that love refused to die.
He was my father, but he’d never loved me. Only one woman would ever shine for him, and every terrible thing he’d done since I met him, he’d done for her.
That was my last thought before she shot him.
44
PRAIRIE WANTED TO LEAVE HIM THERE, lying in the dirt outside the office park. She figured his death would be chalked up as one more casualty of the night’s violence, and I knew she was right.
But I insisted we take him home to die.
He never regained consciousness. Blood bubbled from his nostrils and trailed from his slack mouth. Prairie had shot him in the chest, and there was a rattling wheeze as he struggled to breathe.
We laid him out in the passenger seat, and I held Chub on my lap in the back with Kaz as Prairie drove through town and into the darkened streets of Trashtown.
Curtains moved and lights flickered in the windows of the houses along Morrin Street. Despite the late hour, people were up: restless souls looking for a high; bitter men looking for a target for their anger; fearful women hiding in their own homes. The Audi was still parked in front of Rattler’s house where I’d left it, and I imagined that everyone in town had noticed it and wondered who had come to call. Unsettled by indecipherable waking dreams of water and blood, the Seers would have known something was coming.
Prairie parked and we got out of the truck. Chub slept on, oblivious. Kaz opened the passenger door, and our eyes met.
“I’ll carry him in. Why don’t you and Prairie get in the Audi with Chub-I’ll be right back.”
No one spoke for a moment. Prairie slowly got out of the car, wiping blood from her arm. She stared at Rattler like she’d never seen him before. And I realized that in a way, she hadn’t; at least, she’d never looked at him without fear before, never known him when he wasn’t a danger to her.
“Give Prairie the keys,” Kaz said gently.
I did; then I handed Chub over, and Prairie cradled him in her arms and walked slowly toward the Audi without looking back.
It was down to Kaz and me. He dragged Rattler from the car and got him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. It took effort; Rattler was solidly built, every ounce of him muscle and bone. I walked ahead, and when we reached the front door, I knew the knob would turn in my hand. I’d guessed that Rattler would not lock his home, that he would not be afraid of any threat that could come through his front door.
I was right.
Inside, I snapped on a light switch and the front parlor was lit with the ocher glow from a china lamp on a battered hutch. Even in the dim light I could see that Rattler had made an effort to prepare his home for Prairie. Every surface-the humble pine floors, the old furniture, the paneled walls-was scrubbed and gleaming. Yellowed lace-edged linens were draped over tables. Crumbling crocheted doilies covered chair backs. Jars of wildflowers lined the windowsills.
My heart hitched as Kaz laid Rattler on a faded sofa, his long legs extending far past the end. It had been important to me that my father die here, in his home, among the Banished. There was no love between us; I knew that. Besides Prairie and Chub, he was the only family I had left-but more important, he was my link to my ancestors, and the blood that ran in my veins was his blood. I owed at least some part of my strength, my determination, even my bravery to him.
As I knelt in front of him, I could feel the energy of the place, the low, thrumming, familiar heartbeat of my ancestors, who lived on in the very soil here. The blood shed in these streets was Banished blood; the tears that fell in the rooms of these shacks were Banished tears. Our people had gone terribly wrong since they’d left the ancient village centuries earlier, but as I watched my dying father take his last struggling breaths, I knew that I would never be able to turn my back on them, on who I was.
I looked up at Kaz. He was watching me, his expression full of concern.
“You’re going to heal him,” he whispered.
He knew it before I did, but once he said the words, my hands were already reaching for Rattler. I
45
COMPARED TO HEALING BRYCE, healing my father was simple. The words slipped from my lips; the energy traveled smoothly through my fingertips into his damaged flesh. Almost instantly I felt the jagged edge of the bullet wound begin to skim over.
