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

by Deborah Coates

  “I’m fine,” she said, which everyone in the car knew wasn’t entirely true, but they accepted it because that’s how you went on.

  “Damnedest thing,” Ole said, though not like he really thought it was the damnedest thing, more like he was sure someone somewhere would think that. “We knew where she was, but it was basically the middle of an open field and we couldn’t get near her. Couldn’t get a clear shot. Didn’t dare get any closer. Knew where you were too, but obviously couldn’t get to you. Then you moved and she stood and, well, you know, it all worked out.” He nodded as if agreeing with himself. “Still. It was the damnedest thing.”

  “Which part?” Hallie felt compelled to ask.

  “The part where you moved for no apparent reason,” Ole said, like that was what he’d gotten in the car to say in the first place.

  “Laddie told me to,” Hallie said.

  Ole nodded again as if it were just the sort of answer he’d expected.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but Laddie Kennedy’s still dead, right?”

  “His ghost,” Hallie said.

  Boyd shifted, looking at her, his head tilted slightly to one side, like she’d surprised him. He put his hand on her knee. “I thought they didn’t talk to you.”

  “Well, he talked to me tonight,” she said. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out Laddie’s stone. It was small and dull and dark. If she dropped it on the side of a gravel road, Hallie didn’t think she’d ever find it again. Still, “I think it was the stone,” she said. “It let Laddie talk to the dead. And I think it let his ghost talk to me.” She palmed it, then opened her hand again.

  “Really?” Boyd’s voice was edged with something Hallie couldn’t quite identify, but which she thought she understood. Another thing. Another way their lives couldn’t be like other people’s.

  “I don’t know,” Hallie said. “I mean they’re only supposed to work for people who have a talent for them, right? I’m not hearing random dead people. Just Laddie so far. Maybe it just lets me talk to the ghosts attached to me. Which,” she added, “would be fine.” And the only good supernatural thing that had ever happened to her.

  Ole huffed out a breath, then said, “Yeah, listen. We still need to talk to the shooter. I guess it’s Shortman. She says that’s who she is, anyway. I need you to be there, Davies. I’m headed over to the hospital now.”

  “After I drive Hallie home,” Boyd said, “I’ll meet you there.”

  “My truck is here,” Hallie said.

  “You can get it tomorrow.”

  “I don’t need you to drive me home,” she said.

  “You don’t—”

  “I need a statement from you too,” Ole interrupted. “You might as well just come along and we can get it there.”

  Which effectively settled things.

  At the hospital, they had to wait until the doctors were finished. The bullet had hit Prue’s sister high in the right shoulder, but it was a through-and-through wound and didn’t require surgery. Hallie sat in a nearly empty cafeteria with a big steaming hot cup of coffee and told Ole and Boyd everything she could about what had happened from the time she’d been shot at to now.

  Ole had a notebook in front of him, but he didn’t write anything in it, just listened, like this was not going to be the official story, though some of it, it seemed to Hallie, would have to be included.

  When the doctor came and said that they could talk to the patient now, Hallie rose with Ole and Boyd and followed them to the room. No one bothered to stop her. Teedt was standing outside the door, looking annoyed, but then, he usually did.

  Shortman talked to them for three hours, laying out everything she did, everything she thought, and what she’d wanted.

  “She killed us,” she said. “Me and Billie.”

  “You’re not dead,” Ole said.

  Shannon stared hard at him. The thing Hallie couldn’t figure out was why she looked like she was twenty-five instead of forty-five. People aged differently, but twenty years was something you could see. Except on Shannon Shortman.

  “How do we know you’re really Shortman?” Ole asked.

  She glared at him. “I don’t have to prove myself to you,” she said. “Take my fingerprints. They’re on file. They’ll match.”

  “Why do you still look twenty-five?” Hallie asked.

  They all turned and looked at her as if they’d forgotten she was there.

  It was Boyd who answered.

  “She fell through. That’s what happened in Jasper when they were experimenting with the stones. Isn’t it?”

  Shannon didn’t say anything, and Boyd continued. “Maybe it wasn’t just the stones, maybe it was a combination of the stones and experimenting in Jasper. I mean, you can see why they’d do it there, since it had been pretty much abandoned so they had shelter and privacy and a lot of space around if anything went wrong. But it was probably a bad idea because in addition to the stones, I’m guessing there was residual magic from the tornado. So they brought all the stones together and it created what? A vortex? An explosion, definitely. We’ve already seen that. But something else. Something that dropped Shannon into the underworld.

  “She was there until the walls thinned again, until we rebuilt them, until everyone dropped back through.”

  “She’s the third one,” Hallie said.

  Everyone looked at her. “Beth Hannah can sense people who’ve been to the underworld. She told me she could tell where I was, where Boyd was, and where one other person in Taylor County was. That other person was you,” Hallie said.

  Shannon shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, I wasn’t anywhere. I was in that cellar in Jasper one minute, and the next I was standing in the middle of the street in Templeton. I almost got run over. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was twenty years later, that Billie was gone. And that my sister had everything.”

  “Why didn’t you just talk to her?”

  “You don’t understand,” Shannon said. “It was all her idea. All hers. She killed Billie. She cheated me of twenty years. She promised me power and she got rid of me instead.”

  Hallie didn’t think that was quite what had happened, but maybe it was how Shannon had chosen to understand what had happened.

  “So you wanted revenge on your sister and you wanted the stones,” Boyd said.

  “They were mine,” Shannon said. “They had to be mine.”

  “Why did you have to kill Laddie?” Hallie asked. “Why did you try to kill Tel?”

  “They’d have figured it out, that it was me. Especially once I had the stones. And they were talking. To you. And to you.” She pointed at Boyd. “I couldn’t let them keep talking or you would have figured it out too.”

  “We did figure it out,” Boyd said.

  Shannon scowled. “You should have just given me the stones.”

  “I still don’t understand exactly how you created the stones,” Boyd said. “It’s not as if the rock was there and the tornado charged it. You had to know there would be a tornado. You had to put the stones there to charge, isn’t that right?”

  Shannon heaved a deep sigh, as if she were disappointed people hadn’t gotten exponentially smarter since she’d been gone. “Billie Packer had one talent.” She held up her finger. “One. He could tell you where there was magic. It’s how he found Prue. How he got involved in the first place.” Her face softened. “He was a big dumb idiot. He just wanted to be part of something. And look where it got him.” She looked up again, glared at Boyd as if somehow he were responsible for everything, including what had happened twenty years ago. “We knew Lillian Jones was using magic. Big magic. The bad stuff, the kind we all swore we’d never use. We had these big rocks we’d gotten from up in the Hills and we put them in three or four different locations around the house and the town. And we waited.”

  “Big rocks?” Boyd asked.

  “Oh, yes, big. Five, ten pounds. They blew apart in the tornado. I gue
ss we should have known then. Billie only found the four afterwards. We found a few other granite rocks, but there wasn’t any magic in them, not quite the right kind of stones, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe Billie or Prue could have told you. All I know is Billie and I went out and found them, brought them back to the old farmhouse, where Prue would test them. We got the fourth one, brought it back … and I don’t know what happened. I just know where I ended up. And that Prue somehow got out alive.”

  She smiled in some sort of grim satisfaction. “Except I guess she didn’t. In the end.”

  Later, as they were leaving the hospital, Ole said, “I don’t even know if she’ll stand trial.”

  “It’s not like she’s not telling the truth,” Hallie said.

  “It’s not like anyone will care,” Ole said.

  “There’s something else,” Hallie told Boyd as he drove her back to the ranch. Her truck was still in the field at Bolluyt’s. The sun had been up for the last hour. She was so tired, she was having trouble forming words. But she couldn’t skip out on this, couldn’t wait for just the right time. Not after everything else.

  “Can it wait?” Boyd asked. Hallie could see that he was just as tired as she was; neither of them had slept much the last couple of days. She imagined sleeping for two days, three days maybe, though neither of them would do that. There were horses and dogs to feed, Boyd’s house to repair, and work. For Boyd, there was always work.

  “I don’t—,” she began.

  Before she could finish, Boyd slammed on the brakes, the patrol car skidding on the early morning frost on the road. Hallie’s hand shot out to brace herself on the dash and she swore.

  Something drifted out of the field to their left like old smoke and rotted forests. Unmaker. Boyd threw the car into park, reached under the front seat, and pulled out an iron fireplace poker. Hallie stared at him.

  “Where did you get that?”

  He grinned without humor. “When we came after you last night,” he said. “I mean, I know we assumed it was a person who killed Prue and Laddie, but the way things have worked lately, it just seemed likely that I’d need it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hallie said, reaching for the door handle. “Let’s do this.”

  She couldn’t tell if the unmaker was watching them as they exited the patrol car. She couldn’t even tell if it was the same one they’d seen earlier. It was nearly all smoke, tendrils of dark oily black that drifted away and turned the air around it gray and sick.

  Boyd held the poker like he was ready to take a swing.

  “Hold,” the creature said.

  “What do you want?” Hallie asked.

  “Thank you.”

  That stopped her. Because the only thing she could think of— “It wasn’t a favor,” she said. “It wasn’t a payoff.”

  “It was the right thing.” The rumbly voice had an undercurrent of decay and abandonment. “We couldn’t ask. Because Death wouldn’t ask. But it is proper. Well done.”

  The unmaker disappeared then in a swirl of acrid smoke that pinged sharply in Hallie’s nostrils.

  Boyd looked at her.

  Hallie swallowed. “That’s what I was going to tell you. I opened the door to hell so Beth Hannah could go in and talk to her father,” she said, because she was tired of long explanations and trying to figure out the why of things or how it affected, frankly, anyone. “She wanted to tell him that she would take his place.”

  “To save you?” he asked.

  Hallie shook her head; this much she was sure of. “To save herself.”

  36

  Laddie’s funeral was three days later, on the coldest day of the year so far. The service was at a small Lutheran church on the edge of Templeton. Hallie invited everyone back to the ranch afterwards. She hadn’t expected to, wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, but Laddie didn’t have family in the area; she’d been talking to his brother, Tom, at the visitation, and it had somehow just happened.

  There were more people than she’d expected, and a half inch or so of dry, powdery snow swirled through the yard as cars and pickup trucks and old Suburbans drove up the long driveway.

  Hallie’s father came inside and drank a cup of coffee, then put on his coat and went back outside, where he tuned up the tractor, fed and watered the horses, then left without saying good-bye, though Hallie was sure he thought he had.

  Sally Mazzolo spent an hour in the side yard, throwing a stick for the Australian shepherd. The dog would have carried on for at least another hour and possibly forever, but when Hallie went outside and offered her a cup of coffee, Sally said, “I’m on duty at four, so I’ve got to go.” She nodded at the Aussie, who had flopped to the ground and was happily chewing on the end of the stick. “She’s an awesome dog. Lots of energy.”

  “She’s looking for a home,” Hallie said.

  “You’re not keeping her?” Mazzolo looked surprised.

  “She doesn’t get along with my other dog.”

  Yesterday, the Aussie had spent the entire morning sitting at the edge of the hex ring barking at Maker, who lay quietly a few feet beyond, looking doggishly amused. Hallie’d been glad—relieved—to see that Maker was still around. She’d asked it about the crack between the worlds, whether it was still open, since she, Hallie, was still in the world. Maker had looked at her, like the answer was obvious. “No more unmakers” was all it said, and for now she figured she’d be satisfied with that.

  “I’ll think about it,” Mazzolo said now, looking at the Aussie with something approaching affection. Hallie was pretty sure she meant yes.

  The pit bull followed Boyd from room to room, followed him when he went out to his SUV to get the paper plates and napkins he’d stopped for on the way. It ignored Maker as if the harbinger didn’t even exist. When it lay in the living room so it could see Boyd in the kitchen, letting people step over it or go around, Hallie laughed and said, “That’s your dog.”

  “I don’t need a dog,” Boyd said. But when he put his coat on and went outside to talk to Ole, he whistled up the dog and took her with him.

  The Jack Russell yanked a pillow off the couch, moved it to a spot by the heating vent, and settled in. Two days ago, he’d gone outside, trotted over the hex ring and straight up to Maker so the two of them were nose to nose. He was the oldest of the three dogs, and Hallie wondered if that was why, if he had no fear of death or harbingers, either one. In any case, she thought it was pretty clear, he intended to stay right where he was.

  Boyd returned, trailed by the pit bull and the Aussie and a swirl of snow. “It’s starting to come down,” he said, stamping his boots on the mat by the door. He blew on his hands to warm them. “I told Ole I was taking three days off.”

  “To work on your house?”

  “No.” He’d bent over to pet the dogs and he looked up at her now. “I think there’s going to be a blizzard. I think I’m going to be stuck here.”

  Hallie laughed. “You think the world will leave us alone?”

  He put his arms around her and she felt a chill up her spine that had nothing to do with ghosts or black dogs or anything except that he was close and she wanted him close. She wasn’t going to think about tomorrow or the future or anything but this.

  “I think it better,” he said, and kissed her.

  ALSO BY DEBORAH COATES

  Deep Down

  Wide Open

  What Makes a River (e-original)

  About the Author

  DEBORAH COATES lives in Ames, Iowa. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and Strange Horizons, as well as Year’s Best Fantasy 6, Best Paranormal Romance, and Best American Fantasy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STRANGE COUNTRY

  Copyright © 2014 by Deborah Coates

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Trevillion Images

 
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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2902-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-4847-0 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781429948470

  First Edition: May 2014