Unforsaken

couple dozen rounds at the n in the abandoned store’s sign from across the parking lot, feeling the restlessness ease its way back down with every shot that met its mark.

Which was all of them.

Today, though, he hadn’t come over to this side of town meaning to shoot anything. He’d shot enough yesterday. He’d seen them coming, waited stealthy and still in the corner of the parlor, and sure enough, in they came sneakin’, too dumb to know what they were up against. Rattler nailed one of them in the heart and the other between the eyes, and weren’t they a sight, tumbling to the floor like the cowards they were.

The thrill of the blood hunt was still in his fingers, making them sure and strong. And now he was about to sign himself up a lieutenant.

If that was what it was called, anyway. Rattler had never been in the service, didn’t know anyone who’d served, and made the mental connection only because it sounded like a second-in-charge, a right-hand man, which was what he wanted. He didn’t want a partner. He didn’t need an equal. What Rattler wanted was someone who would do what he said without much fuss, someone who understood a basic concept and was clear on a result and would do what it took to get from one to the other without wanting to run the show.

And someone who was Banished. It might as well be another Banished. Not because Rattler needed anyone else’s visions, especially given that there wasn’t another man in the county who could predict which way the wind would blow to save his life, and hadn’t been in an easy couple of generations, not since most everyone had gone and married outside and diluted the line. No. He wanted a Banished man because it felt right to him in the same way it felt right that he’d put on his grandpa’s silver watch that didn’t keep time and nodded as he left the house at the old family portrait of his great-grandparents that hung in his hall-because this was about getting back to the past, to the way it was meant to be, to the way it was ordained before the Families left the soil of that village in Ireland so many years ago.

Derek Pollitt wasn’t the worst of them and he wasn’t the best. He had a taste for weed and a pint-a-day rum habit, but that made him about ten times as reliable as the ones who’d gone down the prescription-drug road. Those ones twitched; those ones were about as skittish as a burnt cat. They forgot whether they were coming or going, and Rattler didn’t need any of that.

Ironic, really, since he was doing this for them. For all the lame-ass diluted-blood breed of the Families, those who’d tossed away their heritage the first time they’d caught sight of a tight-fitting skirt, chasing tail all over the county and fathering any number of spawn with the gift so weak in their blood they’d be hard-pressed to know it was there. It didn’t make any sense, since the Banished were drawn to each other-like bees to honey, the way a girl from the Families could set a man’s heart to pounding-but a lot of men just went for the path of least resistance. The easy score. Then they got locked in, put a ring on a woman’s finger and compounded their error by having more kids to taint the population with half-breeds. Hell, quarter-breeds, eighth- breeds, who knew? In fact, as far as Rattler was aware, there were only a few pure lines left-among them the Sikes and the Tarbells.

And it was Prairie Tarbell he aimed to bring back. He’d already fathered the girl Hailey with Prairie’s sister, and no one could say it was his fault that Clover had hanged herself from a rafter before her baby took her first steps. Hell, he’d treated Clover Tarbell good-better than he had to, anyway. Rattler’s mouth tightened in a stoic line as he thought about the other ones, the ones who’d resisted, the ones he’d had to raise a hand to.

Not in anger. He wasn’t an angry man. An idealist, that was what he was-a visionary. Hell, they all ought to be thanking him. He was fine-looking; that was a fact. He’d fathered half a dozen fine-looking kids around town that he knew of, not counting the Tarbell girl, and every one of them had the strength of his blood in their veins, and since he only picked women with the strongest blood ties to their Banished ancestors, he was single-handedly turning around the ruination of the bloodline that Gypsum’s once-proud citizens had allowed to happen.

Clover’s girl was pureblood. He had done that. And when he brought Prairie back, she’d give him children too. Hell, she wasn’t much more than thirty; she had a decade of bearing left, easy-enough time to produce a damn brood.

It didn’t even bother Rattler that they’d all be girls. He wasn’t the kind of man who had to have a son, who wanted to teach a boy to toss a ball or skin a deer. Rattler wasn’t father material and he didn’t care. He was on this earth for one reason, the way he saw it, and that was to build the Banished line back up the way it was meant to be. And he was meant to do it with Prairie. It made him near upon insane that she couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand how it was meant to be between them-but he’d make her see. This time he’d make her see.

But first he had to get her back. And he couldn’t do it alone. The failure in Chicago-his dead eye, which his daughter had stabbed before she and Prairie escaped, throbbed in fury at the thought-that failure filled him with shame and determination, but it also served him notice that Prairie and the girl had more backbone than he’d expected. More power.

The thought excited him even as it angered him.

“I said git up,” Rattler said a bit louder, giving Derek’s shoulder a good shove. Derek coughed, his breath foul with whiskey and cigarette smoke and rot.

“Wha… what? What do-Oh. Rattler.” Derek put a hand to his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose with grimy fingers. He squinted and moaned faintly, then dragged himself up to a sitting position and raked his hands through his hair, body odor wafting from his undershirt as the bedclothes fell away. “What you want, anyhow?”

Rattler fingered the card in his pocket, the card he’d fished out of the wallet of one of the men who’d died in the ambush on his house. It had a name-Prentiss-and a phone number, written in blue ink. “Got a job.”

Rattler saw Derek’s jeans lying in a heap next to battered work boots on the floor. He picked them up and tossed them to Derek, letting the heavy metal buckle strike him in his soft gut.

“What kinda job?”

“The kind where you might could make some serious cash.”

“How much?” Derek asked automatically as he kicked the sheets away so he could pull on his jeans.

“Five hunnert,” Rattler said without thinking. It was what was left of the money he’d had in his pocket for most of a month, the money Mr. Chicago had given him for information. Too bad he hadn’t held out for more; now Mr. Chicago was burnt up dead and a lot of that cash had gone to the doctor-he’d said he was a doctor, anyway-who had swabbed and cleaned and stitched Rattler’s stabbed eye in a filthy South Side apartment.

Damn irony: Prairie could have fixed him faster, and for free.

Only this way, with his eye dead to the outside world, it seemed to have developed an inner life of its own. And Rattler wasn’t sure but what it might be better like this.

He caught Derek staring while he pulled on a wadded-up work shirt. “That hurtin’ you still?”

“No.”

“Figure you can still drive an’ all, with just the one eye?”

“Got here, didn’t I?” Rattler put a little extra menace in his voice and that shut Derek up.

While he waited for Derek to piss and brush his teeth and gather up his guns, Rattler swiped a slingshot off a bookshelf, climbed the basement stairs and let himself out the front door of Mrs. Pollitt’s house, ignoring her baleful glare as she lurked in a doorway in her flowery housedress. He picked rocks out of the gravel and winged them at a row of mailboxes across the drive. When a red bird swooped out from the branches of a tall oak, he remembered how his mama used to call them Mr. Robin Red Breast, even as his stone found its mark and the bird fell dead out of the sky without a sound and hit the ground in a burst of crimson feathers.

8

“HOW DID YOU GET AWAY?”

Kaz and I sat on a high-backed wooden bench that gave us a little privacy in the middle of all the early-evening