“Preacher Benjamin,” Eleazar said, crashing through the forest behind him. “You are a persistent man. I will grant you—”
“No, you fool,” Rene exclaimed. “Not him. I meant—”
“Preacher! Run!”
It was Addie. Eleazar spun toward her voice, back toward the clearing where Rene stood. Preacher clambered to his feet. He could see no sign of Addie, but he had heard her. He had very clearly—
The twang of a bow. He saw the arrow. Saw it heading straight for Rene. Saw it hit him square in the throat.
Eleazar let out a howl of rage and ran for the girl, now standing ten paces away, stringing her bow again.
ADDIE
Addie couldn’t ready her bow fast enough. She ought to have been able to—she’d made sure she would have time to fire two arrows. One for the monster that had stolen Charlie’s body and one for the monster that had helped him. Yet as she strung the second arrow, the ground seemed to fly up under her feet, as if by magic.
She toppled backward, and Eleazar was on her, wrenching the bow away with one hand while grabbing her coat with the other. She went for her knife, but before her fingers could touch the handle, he’d grabbed it himself. Then he whipped her around, knife at her throat, shouting at Preacher to stop.
Preacher halted in midstep, and stood there, his eyes wild with fear, breath coming so hard she could hear it.
I’m sorry, she thought. I ought to have shot Eleazar first. Let you escape. But all I could think about was Charlie. That monster in his body.
The monster that was dying now. Lying on the ground, wheezing its death rattle, arrow lodged in its throat.
“Let her go,” Preacher said.
“I cannot,” Eleazar said. “I need—”
“I know what you need. And I know that what you have isn’t satisfactory. What you had wasn’t either. So I’m offering you a trade.”
“Are you? Interesting . . .”
“Take it,” Preacher said. “It’s what he’d want. You know it is.”
Addie struggled to figure out what they were talking about. Preacher was making sure she didn’t. She could tell that, and a knot of dread in her gut grew bigger with each passing moment.
“Take it,” Preacher said. “Quickly.”
Eleazar seemed to be considering the matter, but then, without warning, he grabbed Addie by the hair and whipped her against a tree. Her head hit the trunk hard, blackness threatening as she fell. She lay there, fighting to remain awake, as she heard them continue.
“You did not need to do that,” Preacher said.
“Oh, I believe I did. She’s a feisty little one, and I don’t think she’ll like what I’m about to do.”
“Just get it done. Quickly please.”
Addie managed to raise her head and saw Eleazar walk to Preacher. She saw his hands go to Preacher’s neck, wrapping around it, and she understood what he’d meant. That with Charlie’s body dying, the monster—Rene—needed a new vessel. Eleazar had been going to take hers. Preacher had offered his instead.
“No,” she whispered. “Please no.”
She could see her bow there, only a few paces away. She dug her fingers into the dirt and pulled herself toward it and—
And she passed out.
PREACHER
As Preacher watched Addie lose consciousness, he had a sudden vision of her death, of Eleazar killing him for his master and then walking over, kneeling and wrapping his fingers around the girl’s neck. Preacher’s hands flew up, catching Eleazar’s, stopping them as they squeezed.
“Wait!” he said.
He held the man’s hands still as he looked at him.
“You’ll not hurt her,” he said. “After it’s done.”
“I have no cause. You’ll have given me what I want.”
“It was not a question,” Preacher said, locking eyes with the man. “You are accustomed to bodies where the soul is long departed. If Rene’s soul still lingers now, then so will mine, for a time. If you hurt the girl . . . I cannot lie and say what I will do, because I do not know what I may do. But I am certain I can do something, and so I will, if she’s harmed.”
“As I said, I’ll have no cause once Rene has his new body. A girl child is no threat to me. As for telling anyone, I’m quite certain that by now, your village has already realized something has gone very, very wrong.”
The village. The other children.
“No,” he said. “You—”
Eleazar’s grip tightened. Preacher tried to stop him, to say more, but the man squeezed with inhuman strength and then—
Darkness.
* * *
Preacher jolted upright. He was lying on the forest floor, Charlie’s body beside him. He scrambled to his feet and looked around, but there was no sign of Eleazar.
Something had gone wrong. He’d been tricked.
Addie.
Preacher whirled, searching for his foster daughter, seeing no sign—
No, there she was, across the clearing, still on the ground. He raced over and dropped beside her. He put his hands to her thin chest and—
His fingers passed through her. He stumbled back, falling on his rear. Then he looked down at his hand, the grass poking through it, undisturbed.
Nothing has gone wrong.
I’m dead.
He gasped, the sudden realization as agonizing as a bullet to the heart.
I’m dead. I’m gone.
Sophia. Dear lord, Sophia. I’ll never see her again. Never see our child. Never see Addie grow up.
Addie.
He hurried to the girl again. She was breathing. He could see that. As he rose from her side, a scream split the night.
The village. The villagers. The resurrected children.
Preacher ran toward Chestnut Hill. At first, he weaved around trees and bushes, then realized there was no need and tore through them. He could hear more now, shouts and screams and cries for God.
Soon he could see the houses in the distant darkness. Lights flickered. Doors slammed. Shots rang out. And the screams. The terrible screams—of shock, of pain, of horror.
He came out of the woods behind a house, following some of the worst cries. A woman lay on the grass, not screaming now, but making horrible gurgling noises. Atop her was a boy covered in blood, his face contorted and wild as he raised a stone, hitting her again and again, smashing her face until she couldn’t scream, until Preacher could only tell she was a woman by her dress.
He ran toward them, shouting for the boy to stop, please stop.
As he drew near, he could see the child under that mask of blood. Jonas Meek. Little Jonas Meek. And the woman below him, gurgling her last? His mother.
“No,” Preacher whispered. “No.”
The boy flickered, as if he were the ghost, beginning to fade. So too did his mother and the blood-soaked grass below them. Something tugged at Preacher. He tried to fight it. Tried to stay, to help, to do whatever he could, but the pull was too great, and as he scrambled for a hold, feeling himself lifting, he caught sight of something moving at the end of the woods.
He saw himself. Standing there, with Eleazar, watching Jonas Meek beat his mother to death and laughing. He was laughing.
ADDIE
When Addie woke, Eleazar and Preacher were gone. It was growing dark, and she knew she wouldn’t find them, but she still raced down the path they would have taken, only to get a quarter mile along it and realize she wasn’t even sure this was the way they’d gone. She made her way back to the clearing and tried to search again, to no avail.
And what good would it do if I found them? It’s too late. He’s gone. Preacher’s—
She couldn’t finish the thought. Her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground, weeping as she hadn’t wept when Charlie died, hadn’t when her parents died.
Preacher was gone. Dead. Possessed by that thing, and if she found him, all she could do was what she’d done for Charlie—set his body free. Did that even matter? Their
souls were gone. In heaven, she hoped. In heaven, she prayed.
Preacher had given his life for her, and she wasn’t even his child. Now he’d never see his real child, because of what he’d done for her, a stranger who’d come into his life and slept in his house and eaten his food. He’d let her in and he’d given her everything. Absolutely everything.
There had been, she realized now, always a part of her that didn’t quite trust Preacher and Sophia’s motivations in adopting her. They were good people. The best she knew. But surely no one could be that good, no one could voluntarily take her, not when her own parents had begrudged every morsel she took from their larder.
She’d always suspected that there was more to it, that the town paid Preacher and Sophia to care for her. That still made them good people—of all those in the village, she’d known them for the shortest length of time, and yet they were the ones who’d taken her in. But surely they were receiving some compensation. They ought to have been.
Except they weren’t. She knew that now. They’d taken her because they’d been worried for her. They’d kept her because they cared for her. And now Preacher had given his life for her because . . . well, perhaps because he loved her.
Addie picked herself up then. She dried her eyes, and she walked to Charlie, and she said her good-byes. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there for three days. But she said them anyway, hoping he’d hear, wherever he was.
Then she gathered her bow and her knife, and she set out. She had a job to do. A job for Preacher.
* * *
There was death in the village that night. Addie could hear it as she walked back toward Chestnut Hill. Screams. Horrible screams, as the “children” awakened and everyone learned the truth. They’d murdered people outside the village and put them into the bodies of children, and now the children had awakened, possessed by those vengeful spirits.
This was what Preacher had been running to stop when Eleazar caught him. He’d known what was coming, and he’d wanted to warn them. If he were here now, he’d race to that village and save whom he could.
Addie decided he’d done enough for the village. They’d brought this on themselves, and even if Sophia would say there were many who were innocent, Addie disagreed. They’d let Eleazar into their town. They’d ignored Preacher’s warnings. Now they should face whatever wrath their actions had unleashed.
They would not all perish. Likely only a few. She supposed that was terrible enough, if they were innocent of murdering Timothy James and the others. But she did not think as Preacher and Sophia did. It wasn’t how she’d been raised, and there were parts of her that all Preacher and Sophia’s goodness could not heal.
Addie had spent the last two years haunted by the grave sin she had committed the night her parents died. What she’d done. Or, perhaps, what she’d failed to do.
She’d heard the fight. A dreadful one. The worst ever. She’d listened to her father beating her mother. That was nothing new, but this was not like any other time. Her mother’s screams were not like any Addie had ever heard.
Addie had lain in her tattered blanket by the fire, feigning sleep as her father beat her mother to death, and she had done nothing to stop it. Her mother never stopped the beatings he gave to Addie, so why ought Addie to interfere and risk turning that rage on herself?
When it was over, the house had gone silent. She’d risen then, and seen her father sitting in his chair, shotgun in hand. Her mother’s body lay crumpled and bloody on the floor.
“You’ll hang for this,” Addie had said, and what she’d felt, saying it, was not horror or fear but satisfaction.
“No, I won’t,” he’d replied, and put the gun between his legs, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.
For two years, Addie had lived with that. With listening to her mother die and not intervening. With telling her father what she thought and making him splatter his brains across the room. It was her fault. Her sin. For two years, she’d regretted it, and now she did not. Now she realized they had brought it upon themselves, and had she interfered, she’d only have been lying there with them. They had not raised her to interfere, so she had not. As she would not now.
So she circled wide around the village, ignoring the screams, and continued on.
* * *
Addie found Sophia in Timothy James’s cabin. She told her that Preacher was gone. Sophia wept as if she’d break in two, so much that Addie feared for the child.
She told Sophia what had happened. Or part of it. That Eleazar had returned the old man to Charlie’s body. That he’d returned the souls of the murdered to the children’s bodies. But there Addie’s story for Sophia changed.
In Addie’s version, Preacher had made his escape. He’d run to the village to warn them. He’d arrived too late, the children reawakening, but he’d fought for the villagers. He’d warned who he could and then he’d helped fight off the threat. He’d fought for his village, and he’d lost his life doing it. He was a hero.
That part was true. He had sacrificed his life—for Addie. And she would never forget it. He’d given her a family, and now she’d protect that family with everything she had, in every way she could.
So she told Sophia the lies that would set her heart at rest, and then she gathered her up, got her on the horse, and took her away from that place of death, off to find a place where she could bear and raise Preacher’s babe, and where she could be happy.
Where they all could be happy.
Pipers
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
1
Ezekiel Prater drove his ancient Ford pickup along Doffin Road, enjoying the cool night air that streamed through the open windows. His daughter, Savannah, had never understood why he had spent the time and money to restore a sixty-year-old vehicle, but she sure liked riding in it.
“Turn it up, Daddy,” she pleaded from the passenger seat, barely turning from her open window. “I love this song!”
He smiled and obliged her, though it was one of those bubblegum pretty-boy songs all the young girls seemed to love and anyone over the age of sixteen wanted to scrub from their brain. Zeke felt eighty years old when such thoughts entered his head, but he couldn’t help himself. Savannah’s preferred entertainment might have had rhythm, but it didn’t sound much like music to him.
“So, who’s going to be there tonight?” he asked.
The wind blew through the cab of the old pickup and carried his voice away. Savannah put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, letting the breeze whip her hair across her face. His heart melted just looking at her. Savannah had gotten her big blue eyes and the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose from him, but the copper skin and dark brown hair and lovely, sculpted features had all come from her mother, Anarosa, who’d found the lump in her left breast too late.
Zeke felt the familiar pinch of grief, but by now it had become his bittersweet friend, his reassurance that he had found love in his life. Seven years had passed since Anarosa’s death and he still missed her constantly. Once in a great while he would find himself realizing that he had gone an entire day without thinking of her and the guilt would nearly suffocate him. Savannah always saved him with some bit of prattle about her day, a fight she was having with a girlfriend or a boy who had paid her some special attention.
He turned down the music.
“Hey, bud,” he said when she shot him her patented irritated-teenager look. “Who’s going to this thing tonight?”
“Most everyone, I guess. We talked about this already.”
“Refresh my memory. Terri, Vanessa, Abby . . . ?”
“Abby can’t make it,” Savannah said, twisting slightly in her seat to face him, the seat belt fighting her. “She went to Austin to visit her brother.”
Zeke flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Her parents are okay with her sleeping in her brother’s college dorm room? She’s thirteen!”
“She’s fourteen.”
“Oh, well,
that’s so much better.”
He laughed and shook his head, watching the road for the potholes that had played hell on his gorgeous whitewalls a few months before. The October moon was so bright that it suffused the ranchland that rolled away on all sides with a golden glow. Zeke had known people from up north who believed they had a claim on autumn, and on October in particular, because they believed folks down south never had a proper autumn. But the moonlight in South Texas this time of year had a certain quality to it—a kind of soft, tender magic—that made the world seem a kinder place, rich with possibility. Nights like this made the threats of an uncertain economy and the dangers of living so close to the border seem far away indeed.
“Daddy, please. You know Daniel. It’s not like he’d let anything happen to his little sister.” She rolled her eyes with a huff.
“I just don’t want you gettin’ ideas in your head, is all. You’re not sleeping in any boy’s dorm room, even when you get to college!”
She smirked and cast him a sidelong glance. “And how will you know if I do?”
“Twenty-four-hour surveillance, kid,” he joked. “Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Better be careful, Daddy. One of these days you’re liable to see something you don’t want to see.” She waggled her eyebrows in a way that seemed goofy rather than suggestive, and that silly, innocent part of her warmed his heart. “Besides, one of these days you’re going to want grandchildren. You can’t keep me away from boys forever.”
“Slow down there, girl. I’m not halfway old enough to be a grandfather.”
“Oh, don’t have a heart attack. I’m not in any hurry.” Her voice grew quieter, though he could still hear her over the wind. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, anyway. The boys I like never like me back, and the ones who do make my skin crawl.”
Zeke swallowed hard. Nothing pained him more than hearing the hurt in her voice.
“I’m sure that ain’t true, Savannah. Maybe it seems that way—”
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 8