Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  She pulled out her phone, remembered the battery was dead, and shoved it back in her jacket pocket again. She hoped Boyd wasn’t worried about where she was and why things had taken so long, though she was pretty sure he would be. Nothing to do about it, though, except head back to the ranch. There were horses to feed and dogs to take care of—dogs she needed to find homes for because although Laddie’s dogs were fine with Laddie’s ghost, she didn’t think they’d be so happy with the random ghosts of strangers or with harbingers, for that matter.

  She put the truck in gear, pulled out of the lot, and was surprised when a vehicle passed her on the first curve going at least twenty miles an hour faster than Hallie was herself. Flakes of snow still fell, though not quickly and not accumulating. In the taillights of the car as it accelerated away from her, she could see snow swirling up like fairy dust. The snow glowed red when the driver hit his brakes, then disappeared as the lights slipped around the next curve.

  The fan in the truck was still roaring when she exited the Badlands. She was alone and it felt odd—no Maker, no ghosts. She knew the ghosts weren’t really people; that had been obvious the first time she saw one. They didn’t talk. And although they knew things, it was as if they were really on another plane, not quite in the world and not quite out of it. Still, having Laddie in the truck or drifting near her had held the moment at bay—just a little—the moment when she had to admit that he was gone. It wasn’t the same as losing her sister, but he was someone she’d liked and he’d been killed.

  When she pulled up the long drive to the ranch, it was just after seven thirty. The main yard light hadn’t lit at dusk, which was odd. The house was dark, most of the yard was in shadow, the only illumination came from the clear sky and the shorter light out by the corral. The place looked cold and dark and empty.

  When she opened the back door into the house, something thumped hard against her legs. She reached for the light switch and realized that it was Laddie’s pit bull. The three dogs circled her, like they thought she’d forgotten them, which she had, a little. She let them out, dug the charger for her phone out of a drawer, and plugged it in. She didn’t have a landline. Calling Boyd would have to wait until the phone had enough charge to turn back on. She went in the living room to find that one of the dogs had pulled all the cushions off the couch, though they didn’t appear to be damaged. She made a quick run through the rest of the house, then went outside to feed the horses and check the watering troughs.

  Twenty minutes later, as she was heading back to the house, figuring her phone had probably charged enough to finally make a call, she saw a set of lights turn up the driveway.

  31

  Halfway up the drive, the headlights seemed to pause; then they reversed all the way back down. Hallie watched as the vehicle, whatever it was, backed out onto the road and drove away in the direction of West Prairie City.

  “Still stinks.”

  Hallie wasn’t really startled anymore, hearing Maker in her head. It came and went and there wasn’t a pattern or a reason, but she was learning to accept that, to miss Maker a bit when the dog was gone. She was particularly relieved this time because she hadn’t been sure it would come back. If Beth offered to become Death in Hallie’s place, if Death accepted, would that close the crack? And if it did, would she see Maker anymore?

  It took her a moment to spot it, sitting just at the edge of the hex ring, sniffing the air.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Maker cocked its head like it didn’t know what she meant.

  “With Beth,” Hallie said. “Is she okay? Did she find her father?”

  “He wants to talk to you,” Maker said, then poked at the ground above the ring. “He can’t get in.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” Hallie said. Because of the ring.

  “Did she find him? Is she okay?” Or as “okay” as one could be, going into the under. It wasn’t a casual thing. It wasn’t something Hallie ever wanted to do again, though she’d been willing to, to rid the world of unmakers. It wasn’t that she felt guilty about Beth’s going, though admittedly she did. But there was an obligation, and Hallie’d known it when she opened the door. If Beth wanted to get out, Hallie would find a way. That was the promise. And Hallie kept her promises.

  “She forgets,” Maker said.

  “Forgets why she’s in there? Can’t you help her? Can’t Laddie?” Because that was the whole idea, that Beth wouldn’t be alone.

  “Found Death,” Maker said, unperturbed, like it knew what Hallie was going to ask and already had its responses. “Sent him to her. She’ll remember.” It paused, cocked its head again. One of the dogs in the house barked. Hallie heard something, wasn’t even sure what she heard, not so much a sound as the sense of a sound, and it was almost—that sound she didn’t hear—a sound from her past. She didn’t think, dived for the ground at the same time that Maker said, “Down!”

  She heard the bullet hit something behind her, was crawling and glad she was wearing dark clothes, but whoever was firing at her had a nightscope; there was no way they could fire at her otherwise. A long crawl in the dark, waiting for the next bullet and hoping the knee-high grass in the field directly past the yard blocked her from the shooter. Not much in the way of cover, hardly anything, and the shooter could already be moving, knowing she was defenseless, because why would she carry a gun here on her own property in the middle of the night?

  She could hear something now, the rustle of dried grass, someone moving quickly. She sucked in her breath, got to her feet, and ran to the house. She didn’t stop to figure who it was or what they wanted or why they were shooting at her. In this moment, none of that mattered.

  She threw open the front door, locked it behind her, ignored Laddie’s dogs, who moved back against the walls—except the pit bull, which followed her into the office while she grabbed her shotgun and a box of shells, loading it on the way back through the kitchen. She paused half a second, said, “Stay,” to the pit bull, which, miraculously, it did. She stopped then with her back against the wall, trying to see through the window just to the left of the door. She could see very little, deep dark shadows only slightly different from the night itself. The merest glow from the light by the barn, enough to get her killed, but only if the killer were expecting her and only if he were set up and ready. You couldn’t just point and shoot a high-powered rifle, you had to be calm, you had to be able to aim. Opening the door, even if there were no lights on in the house, might be an invitation to a bullet. She couldn’t just wait, though. It wasn’t what she did.

  She had her hand on the door when she had a thought, turned abruptly, locked the door with the key in the lock, and went back through the house. This wasn’t her house, wasn’t second nature to her yet, but she was used to that, to not knowing the place or its tricks. In Afghanistan, every place she’d ever been had been a strange place, a set of walls and roads and vegetation she’d never seen before and didn’t understand. It was what she associated with combat, the unfamiliarity, the sense that you could never know where the enemy was or what was just around the next corner.

  In the office, she moved a wastebasket and a small wooden stool that someone had painted red and white a thousand years or so ago. The office window was loose, had a tendency to pop up when it was unlocked, and Pabby had lost the screen—and possibly the storm—for it years ago. Hallie unlocked it, popped it open, grateful that it was nearly soundless, and slipped outside, drawing the shotgun out after her.

  She crept slowly around the side of the house. The moon was still low on the horizon, but it was such a clear, still night that it felt to Hallie as if someone patient and smart and with a freaking nightscope would see everything clear as day, like she had a glowing neon target painted on her back. She paused, listened. The good news, if there was any good news about all this—and why was someone shooting at her, anyway? The good news was that there was almost no wind, no rustling dry grass, no whistle around the corners of buildings, no wind its
elf blocking other sounds.

  Still sticking close to the wall, she approached the front porch. Something moved in the field below her, not much more than a shadow, but Hallie could see a shape like an arm and the barrel of a rifle. She aimed and fired, not expecting to hit anything, more to make the shooter understand that she was ready and that she was armed. There was a sound like a hard fall and a muffled curse. The shadow disappeared. In the aftershocks, Hallie heard something on the far side of the house, moving quickly through the knee-high prairie grass. She threw caution to the wind and ran. She couldn’t see anything, but she could follow the sound. It was loud, sounded panicked, like someone had gotten more than they’d bargained for and just wanted to get out any way they could.

  They weren’t getting away. Not if Hallie had anything to say about it.

  The sound of a car engine starting up brought her to a halt nearly a quarter mile from the ranch house, the length of her driveway and hundreds of yards east.

  “Maker,” Hallie called. “Maker!”

  She had no way to call it, had never asked if there were a way, because she’d figured Maker had had eternity to follow orders. It hadn’t asked her to be its master or for anything. And it seemed wrong, not the fact that she wasn’t sure whether Maker would follow a command from her—though she did wonder that. More that it was important in some way she hadn’t bothered to analyze too deeply that Maker make its own way in the world, that it stick around because it wanted to stick around, not because she commanded it.

  “Maker.” One more try.

  “Here.”

  “Can you follow that car? Can you find it?” The taillights disappeared once, then twice, then stayed visible for a long stretch. Maybe Hallie could get back to her truck and on the road and catch up before they disappeared completely, wouldn’t be stuck at an intersection, staring long and hard in all directions, looking for some small indication that there was one car, the one particular car she desperately wanted, out there in the big open with her. But maybe Maker …

  “Maybe,” Maker said.

  “Can you try?”

  It disappeared without saying anything. Hallie wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a “don’t bother me with your petty human concerns” or whether Maker even understood what she was asking, but as soon as it disappeared, she straightened, not quite aware until that moment that she’d still been tightly coiled, anticipating attack. She shook off the tension in her shoulders and headed back to the house, the moon still rising, rendering long dark shadows like coiling tendrils, floating across the landscape.

  She trotted quickly inside, turned on the light over the stove, but only after she’d pulled the narrow café curtain across the window on the kitchen door and the shade on the window.

  Why her? Why had someone tried to kill her? More accurately, why had the person who killed Prue and likely Laddie tried to kill her? Because she’d known the two of them? If that were the case, they’d have to kill pretty nearly everyone in Taylor County.

  She reached for her cell phone. Her right hand was shaking, from adrenaline she figured, or maybe just the cold. She wasn’t afraid. And that, at least, felt familiar, felt like coming home, because it was exhausting being afraid. She thanked Beth and the unmakers and maybe even Death a little for that, though they hadn’t intended it, getting her to a point beyond. There were things it was worth being afraid of or for; she understood that now. Someone who hunted in the dark without ever seeing their victims face-to-face was not one of them.

  She dialed Boyd’s number.

  He didn’t answer. She left him a message: “Call me as soon as you can.”

  She put the shotgun on the kitchen table, blew on her hands—so cold, they felt like the skin would flay itself at the slightest touch.

  Was there one killer? Two? A gang of some kind? Not that she had any idea what any gang ever would want in Taylor County. She’d figured whoever it was wanted the stones because it all seemed to involve the stones, but why? Laddie hadn’t thought it was much of a deal. Maybe Laddie’s stone was worth more to someone else than it had been to Laddie.

  Hallie wasn’t going to say none of it made sense. It made sense. To someone. She just had to figure out what kind of sense and to whom.

  She went out to the front hall closet and dug out a pair of insulated leather gloves and a dark gray wool ball cap that Brett had given her for some reason she couldn’t remember anymore. She went back to the kitchen, pulled off her coat, put a Carhartt vest on then the coat again, stuffed the cap in a pocket, put on the gloves, picked up the shotgun, and stuffed the box of shells she’d left on the kitchen table in another pocket. Before she went outside, she went back into the office, opened the bottommost desk drawer, and pulled out a shell box with just twenty shells. They looked exactly like the shotgun shells she’d just put in her pocket, but they weren’t. These were shells she’d loaded herself, with cast iron for the shot, dead man’s blood—by which she meant her own blood—on the wadding, and a sacrament recited over each of them.

  She’d made these shells, which she shoved in the breast pocket of her coat, three days after she got out of the hospital after defeating Hollowell. She told herself she’d never need them, told herself all that was done and she had the hex ring besides. But nothing was ever completely done. And it always paid to be prepared.

  She checked her phone on the way out the door—20 percent charged. It would have to do.

  32

  Hallie waited in the cold for a good half hour before Maker reappeared. She stamped her feet and blew on her hands in spite of the insulated gloves. She cursed the hex ring, which, by its nature, meant Maker couldn’t just come in the house and tell her what it found. The only way she’d know when it returned, was to wait outside.

  “Done.”

  She heard its voice before she saw it, a dark shape on a dark night.

  “Do you know? Where they went? Can you show me?”

  For answer, Maker jumped through the passenger door of Hallie’s truck, then looked out at her out the window.

  All right. Maybe they were getting somewhere. Finally.

  Hallie tried once more to call Boyd before she left. Still no answer. Damn him, anyway, what was he up to? She left a second message, then turned the phone off to preserve the charge. For the first time, basically, ever, she wished she had a car charger. She figured she’d call him one more time when she got wherever they were going—had to be somewhere within a twenty-minute drive or so. She’d even try to wait for him. If she could wait for him. Because sometimes things happened fast; sometimes waiting wasn’t possible.

  She put the truck in gear, let it roll forward, then smoothly pressed her foot on the gas, adding to the truck’s momentum. “Who is it?” she asked Maker, who was already curled up on the seat with its nose touching its tail. “What do they want?”

  Maker lifted its head and looked at her. Or at least she thought it was looking at her. It was dark in the truck and hard to tell. “Don’t know people,” it said. “Don’t know.”

  “Well, where are they?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Which probably meant it couldn’t tell her in a way she’d understand, and Hallie was surprised that it could show her. Addresses wouldn’t mean much to a harbinger of death. Still, it clearly had some way to find the people Death sent it to. It had a way to navigate in the world, even if Hallie didn’t know what that way was.

  “Turn,” Maker said.

  “Right or left?”

  Maker arched its nose toward Hallie, meaning, she presumed—turn left. It was a slow, deliberate gesture, as if all new truths were contained within the gesture itself and it wasn’t necessary, not now and not a year from now, to personally witness such truths. All anyone had to do—so Maker seemed to be saying, was what needed doing. Everything else took care of itself.

  The tough thing with Maker, of course, was that sometimes it just looked like doing nothing.

  It was a long, silent twenty minute
s, Hallie driving and watching Maker out of the corner of her eye. They were in the middle of what was, even to Hallie’s jaded eyes, the middle of nowhere.

  She’d also been watching her rearview mirror pretty steadily as they drove and occasionally turning off onto narrow dirt roads just to see, because it seemed logical and even likely that whoever had shot at her just an hour ago outside her own house wasn’t going to just give up and go home. Even though Maker had presumably followed them back to their home or lair or whatever, Hallie found it hard to accept that they hadn’t just gathered more weapons and circled back. Because that’s what she would have done.

  She didn’t see anyone behind or in front of her, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t there. Her taillights would be easy to see—clear night and cold—and she would have a hard time seeing anyone following her if they were willing to drive without headlights. There wasn’t enough traffic for that to be truly dangerous, though there would be some danger just in driving with the lights out—Hallie sure wasn’t going to do it. But she wasn’t going to sit home and wait either. The killer was in a hurry. That seemed obvious to Hallie. She was in a hurry too.

  She’d forgotten about Laddie’s stone stuffed into her coat pocket, but as she drove, she could feel it, warm against her hip even through the layers of coat and jeans and long underwear.

  She made one last turn at Maker’s cryptic directions and slowed.

  Damn.

  She knew this place.

  She parked on the side of the road.

  “Here?” she asked Maker.

  “Up there,” it said.

  Up the drive. Because “here” was Uku-Weber’s test field. The place they’d set up way back—or at least it seemed like way back, though it had been only a few months—set up so that Martin Weber could demonstrate to his investors the weather control he’d promised them. He’d set up wind turbines and a fake cloud-seeding apparatus. He brought investors out and pretended that it was all scientific, though the cloud-seeding device had been a hollow shell, the whole thing powered by perverted magic and blood sacrifice. Hallie could see the bulk of the cloud seeder right now, still sitting in the open field like a particularly dark hulking shadow.