The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  I watched the landscape roll by outside my window, moonlight highlighting the horizon. My freedom was slipping away with every mile. I needed to get Jude on my side. “You know I’m not the only one at risk here. He may be after me now, but once he has me, it won’t be over. He’ll need you for the next thing, and the thing after that . . .”

  He had no response for me, but I could tell he was listening.

  “You know Adair’s dangerous. He’s shown that he can turn on any of us. And he lied to all of you the whole time you lived together, pretending to be something he wasn’t. In truth, you don’t really know him. None of us do. We don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  Jude snorted. “No kidding. I have been seriously freaked out since he came back.”

  “That’s why I’m asking you to help me. We’re in this together.”

  He was thinking about it, I could tell. He kept looking in the rearview mirror as though the answer were written there, or was afraid that something might come hurtling at us from the darkness, attuned to our treacherous talk.

  “Has he talked about what he plans to do to me?” I asked, saying aloud the fear I’d tried to suppress, the fear I’d carried with me ever since I trapped Adair. “I expect he’ll bury me alive, the same as I did to him.”

  I’d never been as afraid as I was at that moment. I was seized by a terrible chill, and my teeth started chattering, and my stomach tightened into a hard knot. There was nothing I could do to help myself. I wished I could fling myself out of the car to end my life, lose consciousness with a thud and a slap against asphalt, tumbling end over end like a discarded toy.

  “Hey, calm down,” Jude said, reaching for my arm. It was his attempt at sympathy, the way the butcher tries to soothe the lamb before cutting its throat.

  “Who are you to tell me to calm down? You know what will happen to me, and yet you’re taking me to Adair. Don’t kid yourself that you’re better than him!” I shouted at Jude.

  “Hey, I could’ve—”

  “You’re doing his bidding. At least I tried to stand up to him.”

  “And look what it got you.”

  “It got you two hundred years of freedom,” I spat back at him angrily.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. He hemmed and hawed, and his driving became more erratic as he thought. I tried not to hope that my tirade had gotten through to him, but finally he sighed and said, “I tried to warn you once, didn’t I? In Boston, that time I checked in with Adair and there you were in his house, to my surprise. I tried to tell you that you were making a big mistake, but you threw me out.”

  “You don’t want me to say that I should’ve listened to you, do you?”

  He sighed. “Look, what would you do if I let you go? Can you go somewhere he won’t find you? Do you have a plan?”

  I was shocked, but didn’t risk the moment by contemplating my luck. “I have an idea, yes.”

  He looked over his shoulder as though the devil might be in the backseat, a witness to his perfidy. “And it won’t get back to Adair, even if he catches you?”

  I shook my head. “I’d never tell him.”

  Jude slowed the car and made an abrupt turn, tires squealing in protest, and we were suddenly heading back the way we had come. I was speechless.

  He shook his head ruefully, as though he regretted his actions already. “I haven’t called Adair yet to tell him I’d spotted you, so he doesn’t know I have you. As far as he knows, you never came out this way. I’ll let you go, Lanny, because you’re right: I don’t need this on my conscience. Adair isn’t the only one who’s afraid of the afterlife.” He stretched his neck as though the tension had become too much. “That advice I gave you all those years ago . . . I should’ve heeded it myself. But I was headstrong and thought I could handle anything. You, me, the others—we were stupid to accept his offer, even if it did come at the point of death,” Jude said bitterly. “In my case it came as I was hanging from a rope in a warehouse in the Waterlooplein. . . . I should’ve known, after the things I’d done, to refuse an easy way out. Some things are worse than death. If I’d accepted that my life was over, at least with my death I’d have been able to make amends. So this is my second chance. I’ll take it.”

  We drove the rest of the way to my car in silence, each lost in our own thoughts about the twisting path that had brought us here. Once we’d glided to a stop next to the abandoned rental car, Jude leaned over to open my door.

  “Think of this as a small gesture of amends,” he said. “Now go, and don’t let him catch you.”

  I looked him in the face. “What are you going to do? Will you go back to him now?”

  “I’ll give it a few days, wait until I hear from him. He’s got a new man to help him now, and you know how he always favors his most recent convert. Maybe he’ll be done with me soon.”

  “Do you know what he’s planning to do next?”

  He shook his head. “No. He’s stopped telling me things. I don’t think he trusts me anymore.”

  I looked each way down the lonesome street. There were no cars on the road, not at this hour. I squeezed Jude’s hand before stepping out. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t forget: if the worst happens and he catches up to you, you were never here,” Jude said, staring straight ahead. “Go.”

  As I sat behind the wheel and watched Jude drive away, I thought about how much worse things could’ve gone tonight. If Adair had come for Luke himself, everyone in that house would be dead. There would be corpses scattered throughout the house and across the lawn, Luke restrained and made to watch the carnage before being released from his grief by a blow to the back of his head. There would be more dead innocents, and it would make no difference to Adair, as long as I suffered.

  I couldn’t sit on the side of the road in a rental car, waiting for the police to question me come sunrise. I had to continue with my plan to see Tilde and throw myself on her mercy. If I felt any trepidation in placing my trust in her, I could take comfort from knowing that the others hadn’t let me down. Alejandro had not closed his door to me; Jude found it in his conscience to let me go. Adair had been right when he said we were a family and that we had to be able to depend on one another, although I don’t think he knew our solidarity would have this effect. There are unintended consequences to everything.

  I turned the car south on the two-lane road, away from Luke for the last time, and resolved not to look back.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN

  Luke slipped back into the house through the garage. The voices of his daughters drifted in from the living room, their high-pitched laughter folded in with good-natured growls from Richard and background noise from the television. They hadn’t noticed his absence, but he expected his former wife had. Nothing escaped Tricia.

  She looked up from the dishwasher. “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Went out for a smoke,” he lied.

  Her shoulders sagged, a dirty dish in one hand. “You’re smoking again? You know you shouldn’t. I don’t want the girls to catch you with a cigarette in your mouth.” Tricia turned to look Luke in the eye. She read his expression in an instant—she always could—and said, “You’re a terrible liar, Luke. What’s really going on?”

  Should he admit she caught him, or dig himself in deeper? He was tempted to try the latter, but his former wife had the instincts of a bloodhound. “I was talking to Lanny just now.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and gave it a wiggle; no sense letting her know the woman she despised had been parked fifty feet from the house. “Listen, Trish. I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s something I need to tell you. It probably won’t come as a surprise, but Lanny is mixed up with some dangerous people. . . .”

  Tricia crossed her arms over her chest, probably putting it together in her head: all that travel, the seemingly endless supply of money. Where did it come from?

  “And now these people are looking for her. She called
to warn me that her pursuers know about me, and because they’re trying to get to her”—Tricia’s expression hardened by the second—“the kids might be in danger.”

  “Dammit, Luke—”

  “I need you to take them somewhere. On a trip, not to see your mom. Someplace no one would know to look for you.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me, Luke—”

  “I’m serious, Tricia. I’m not saying this lightly, and I’m not delusional. These are really bad people. You’ve got to take the girls away. I’ll pay whatever it costs, just take them someplace safe.”

  She shook her head, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “What about school? I’m supposed to pull Jolene out of school for this? And work? I just got my shift schedule from the hospital for this month. What am I supposed—”

  “Tell them it’s an emergency. It doesn’t matter. Just do it.”

  “This is great, Luke. How could you do this to us—to your daughters—by getting mixed up in something so dangerous? What am I supposed to tell them—or Richard? He’s not going to leave. He’s going to want to stay and work the farm.”

  “No, you’ve got to tell him to go with you. He’ll be in danger. You’re in danger. That’s why I want you to take the kids somewhere.” He faced up to her blazing eyes. “I’m sorry, Tricia. I didn’t mean for you guys to get involved.”

  She made a noise that indicated she couldn’t care less for his apology. “And how long do we stay away? Can you tell me that? Can’t you just talk your girlfriend into giving these people whatever it is they want? Drug money, I assume.”

  “It’s not drugs or money they’re after.”

  “Whatever.” She spoke crisply. “Whatever illegal thing it is she’s involved in, can’t you get her to take her lumps and do whatever it is she needs to do so that innocent people don’t suffer?”

  “It’ll be okay. You just have to stay hidden for a few days.”

  “Oh—now it’s just ‘a few days’? What’s going to happen in a few days?”

  It was his turn to look away. “I’m going to go help her.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Tricia shouted. The girls must have heard her because the volume on the television set rose appreciably; thank goodness Richard was paying attention. “Let your girlfriend take care of herself. She got herself into this mess, let her get herself out. You have other responsibilities to worry about, Luke. Jolene and Winona, have you forgotten about them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “They’re your first responsibility. Don’t choose your girlfriend over them.”

  “I’m not. The reason I’m going is to make sure that the girls are safe—that you’re safe.” Luke’s throat was constricted; his head ached. It was all too much for him. He was making promises, but he had no idea if he’d be able to keep them. “And I can’t let Lanny face this on her own. What kind of man would I be if I did that? Not one the girls could respect.”

  “Don’t try to be a hero,” Tricia said, frustrated.

  “I’m not looking to be a hero. I just want to be a decent human being,” Luke said, almost wishing he could ignore this feeling inside him, the one driving him to go after Lanny. The urge for self-preservation was supposed to be stronger than the urge to sacrifice yourself for someone else. Maybe he was defective, he thought, raised by overly idealistic parents.

  “And if something happens to you . . . if we never hear from you again, what do I tell the girls?” Tricia asked. Luke was surprised and gratified to see tears in her eyes.

  “Tell them their father was an idiot.”

  Tricia laughed. “That’s exactly what I’ll do. Do you even know where she is, where to look for her?”

  He checked his cell phone before stuffing it in his pocket. “Oh, I have an idea of how to find her.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ASPEN, COLORADO

  The driver I hired at the airport left me at the gate of an estate built on the side of a mountain. Clearly, Tilde guarded her privacy, being a public figure and wealthy beyond measure. According to the newspaper and magazine articles Alejandro had sent, her husband, the energy magnate, had died recently, leaving her with two stepsons. The husband had collected and raced vintage sports cars and suffered a fatal crash while taking a recent acquisition for a few test laps. Other than revealing that the widow had taken over her husband’s charitable foundation, the latest batch of articles made no mention of her.

  If I had to throw myself on the mercy of anyone on this planet, it was beyond ironic that this person would be Tilde. When we lived together under Adair’s roof, I was terrified of her. She had been the most cold-blooded of all of Adair’s chosen, the woman who, without any misgivings, procured unsuspecting girls and boys to serve as entertainment for Adair. Tilde had never seemed to care for anyone else, not even Adair: her own survival was all that mattered. Could a person like that change? I didn’t want to be uncharitable; I wanted to believe everyone is capable of change, of acting selflessly, of becoming a better person. In my experience, the longer we lived, the more we understand and develop empathy for our fellow man, and are moved to change our selfish ways. I would hate to meet the person who was forever inured to the misery of others.

  By the time I walked up the steep driveway to the house—the car itself was turned away at the gate and not allowed on the property—a handsome young man was waiting outside the front door for me. He was decoratively pretty, with the vapid expression of a fashion model, and seemed to have no curiosity about me. I wondered if he could be one of the stepsons. He listened as I told him that I was there to see Mrs. von Haupt, and he turned on his heel, expecting me to follow. He left me in a room that had a gorgeous view of a steep rocky slope and the majestic mountain range beyond. The grounds surrounding the house were covered in a thin, patchy crust of white in keeping with the earliness in the season, but the mountaintops were stark and brilliant, and thick with snow.

  I knew I’d instantly recognize Tilde, as she’d made such an impression on me. No matter what she wore or how she styled her hair, I thought I’d always remember her sharp, eagle-eye stare and the way she carried herself, like a lioness. And those characteristics were still there in her photographs two hundred years later, but much softened. There were only traces of the implacable huntress she once was.

  The woman who stepped into the room was tightly and elegantly edited, dressed head to toe in cream, the only contrast a pair of dark sunglasses over her eyes. Her yellow hair was cut in a gamine fashion, but she was too somber to be taken for a sprightly young woman. Her predatory air had been replaced by weariness.

  She slid off her sunglasses as she walked toward me; her eyes were still lavender, giving her a coldness that could never be overcome. One last burst of nerves rippled through me. She smiled warily and reached a hand out to me. “Hello, Lanore.”

  We shook briefly, her firm hand like an icicle in mine. “Should I call you Birgit?” I asked.

  She gestured to a pair of armchairs close to the fireplace. “When no one else is around, you can call me by my old name. I’d like that; I haven’t heard it in a long while. Just please be careful if someone should join us. My stepsons are here with me; we’re on a skiing holiday, one of my husband’s family traditions, and I have a few friends with us as well. Needless to say, no one knows me as Tilde.”

  I picked up the differences in her manner immediately: she used the word “please,” which I don’t think I’d ever heard her use in Boston unless it was with heavy sarcasm. Her formerly shrill tone had been replaced by something calmer, soothing. And she kept her late husband’s sons with her, hadn’t relegated them to boarding school or left them with one of her husband’s relatives. That, too, seemed unusual for the woman I had known.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I began, but she brushed my thanks aside.

  “We must be ready to help each other,” she said gently. “I’m sure you’ve found, as I have, that while we love our families and t
he special ones who come into our lives, our time with them is brief, and passes so quickly. We’re comforted by their company while it lasts, but we have no one to help us put our lives in perspective. No one with whom to share the breadth of our life experiences, no one who can understand what we’ve been through. No one but each other.”

  She was so subdued and unlike the Tilde I’d known that I was starting to worry that something was amiss. Could a person change so drastically? In two hundred years, surely anything was possible. Her somberness, her listless gaze . . . And then I remembered that she was in mourning.

  “I heard about your husband. I’m sorry for your loss,” I hurried to say.

  She bowed her head. “It was unexpected. Bruno was wonderful, one of those people you meet once in a lifetime. The newspapers only talk about his companies and his success with his businesses, but he was a considerate partner and a good father. I will miss him. I’m sure you’ve been in this position more than once yourself, losing the person who keeps you connected to life. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to enjoy life for myself anymore. It seems I’m only happy when the people I love are happy.”

  I nodded in agreement but inwardly was overwhelmed. I couldn’t ask for more evidence that she’d changed than her last statement. She seemed devastated by the loss of her husband and, in contrast to the woman I had known, seemed to have become quite reflective and struggled to understand our bizarre existence. I was ready to trust her—and besides, I had no other choice at this point. I cleared my throat. “I assume Alejandro explained to you why I’ve come,” I started hesitantly.

  “He said Adair has returned after his long absence and that, for some reason, he was looking for you.” She watched for my reaction while giving nothing away.