But she had, and she hadn’t, and now she just couldn’t stay here any longer. Surely it had been long enough, and the man had given up and gone away. She hadn’t heard a peep from any of the dogs since Maidie’s barking had died away. Oh, please be gone, she thought fervently as she crawled toward the opening on her elbows. Blue, once released, quickly scrabbled his way out. Blaine wished for his speed, but not the ungainly landing she heard.
Not that she had much choice. She had to go headfirst, and even though her arms were stretched out to break her fall, she landed with a pained grunt. It took some moments to sort out her skirts, a task that the darkness made no easier. Blue urged her on with his whining, and when she finally stood and stretched out the kinks, she followed that noise to the ladder.
“Me first,” she told him, pushing him aside. “Unless you can figure out how to open that door.”
But once she reached it, she discovered she was none too eager to poke her head out. She needed a long moment to gather her courage. Finally she took a breath deep enough to do the job, and slowly pushed up on the door.
Nothing. There was no circle of Annekteh warriors waiting to snatch her, no padded leather boots standing in front of her as her head rose above the level of the floor. The light was surprisingly dim, dim enough to indicate that the sun had gone below the crest of the mountain behind Dacey’s cabin, and Blaine had a sudden moment of panic when she realized how close to dark it was. He said he’d be back before dark. At the time he’d said it, she hadn’t cared. But now....
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Blue bumped her from beneath, his front legs up on the ladder. “I sure hope you can climb,” she said crossly, taking the last few rungs and stepping out onto the cabin floor, “because after that, there ain’t no way I’m pulling you up. You’re on your own.”
In two lunges, and without actually touching his feet to the ladder that Blaine could see, the dog was up and out, running out of the cabin to see if the yard had changed significantly since the last time he’d been there.
Blaine was more cautious. She walked slowly to the open door, stepping over the bedding the man had left strewn across the floor. The dogs were in the yard, carefree and busy checking out Blue — except for Maidie, who was still up on the rock, even though the sunshine had moved on.
Blaine didn’t want to leave the house. She didn’t want to expose herself to someone who might still be watching from the woods — after all, if they’d come all this way to find her and Dacey, they weren’t going to give up that easily. She sure didn’t want to take any chances.
But the privy was fifty feet down the hill.
Blaine tried to look casual as she walked the endless distance, and once inside, she hardly felt safe. Still, by the time she poked her head out of the small structure, she realized that if the cabin was being watched, she’d have seen some sign of it by now.
Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back. She ran down the hill to the garden and her jacket — dammit, her blinder had been in that jacket! — snatching it up and reversing course. Up past the cabin and into the long twilight of the mountain evening, heading for a grove of rhododendrons that would offer her cover. There she intended to stay, at least until Dacey was back. And maybe a good piece longer, if she didn’t think it was yet safe.
The dogs had run into the woods on their own private mission, and weren’t around to bother — or warm — her. Blaine curled up, hugging herself for warmth. She’d gotten so chilled in that dairy, she should have brought a blanket with her.
But she wasn’t about to go back now.
There she waited, a miserable, angular huddle of girl with a growling stomach, red runny nose, and an anxious gaze darting around the abandoned-looking area below her. As it grew too dark to see, she alternately worried and seethed over Dacey’s continued absence. Even the dogs would have been welcome, but they, too, remained truant. Finally, cold and alone, she curled around herself and dozed.
~~~~~
They hadn’t learned.
Not that Nekfehr was entirely displeased. The vessel’s experience had told him that indulging in the anne-nekfehr would demoralize these people, remove their incentive to work. And so, despite the numbers of fresh potential vessels here for that purpose, none of the annektehr had done so.
The annektehr, one and all — as if they could be anything else — welcomed this opportunity...this excuse to act.
To feed.
~~~~~
Rand shook his sweaty hair out of his eyes and shoved his sleeves up his arms, not hesitating in the forced jog away from the timbering site. Nathan was on his heels, Cadell in front of him — and none of them knew what this summons was about. The Annekteh had never pulled the men off work in the middle of the afternoon before.
None of them knew, but Rand could guess.
Some one of them had struck out at the invaders, and met success.
The state of the meeting hall seemed to affirm his guess. The yard was packed with tired-looking people, dirty from their labors. Most of the boys were absent, out in the hills somewhere; those present looked as confused as everyone else. Well, then, no one had been mistaken for deer and shot, which was something Rand had considered trying some time back; the Annekteh had had to leave the boys their bows for hunting, and Rand felt certain he could lay his hands on one...
His sister and their mommy sought him out, looking tired and frustrated. The two had been fixing a broken door on the barn this morning, and bore the scrapes to prove it, the kind of scrapes which no doubt held any number of splinters. Man’s work. Rand put his arm around Lenie’s shoulders and tried to keep the hatred off his face, hatred at what these creatures had done to his pretty sister and to their mommy, whose sorrow for Willum and Blaine chased around her features when she thought no one was looking.
But there was no time for conversation, to see if the women knew anything. The last of them was still arriving when Nekfehr paced out of the barn, his booted heels hitting the ground with the force of his anger. Behind him came another plainsman, and across his shoulders was something — someone — rolled in a tarp. The hill folk gave the two wide berth as Nekfehr strode into the midst of them and stopped; the plainsman dropped his burden to the ground and gave the tarp a yank to unroll it.
Phew. Rand’s nose wrinkled; Lenie turned her face to his chest. The odor assaulted them right along with the very sight of the dead man — rank vomit and the stench of his fouled pants. His lips were bluish, his face contorted. Rand thought he recognized one of the men who usually walked the hills in patrol.
“It is clear that this man was poisoned,” Nekfehr said tightly. “It will be easier on you all if the guilty party steps forward now.”
Rand wasn’t the only one to startle when Jason spoke. Big of adam’s apple and nose, his arm tightly around the shoulders of his wife and their recent firstborn, he said, “Don’t reckon it had to be any of us. There’s plenty in the hills this time of year that’ll poison them that doesn’t know what to look for. Cowslip’s nasty, you don’t cook it through. Pokeweed’s coming on to poison stage.”
“My men are new to this area. That does not mean they are stupid.”
“We fed them at noon,” one of the women said; her name was Ester. She had several young children clinging to her, and Rand knew she was in the handful that stayed at the meeting hall with the young ones. “Along with the children. You don’t see any of us took sick.”
“Pokeweed poisoning has that look to it,” Jason said. “Plenty of that along this bottom.”
This time of year, poke was safe enough, and standard fare. But the berries when they arrived, and the roots always — those were were poison. Rand glared at Nekfehr. Take one of us, then. Take me, and see it’s true.
“We gathered some this morning, for poke sallet,” Ester said. “He was with us. I done saw him pull up a whole plant, and told him to leave it be. Mought be he didn’t.”
In two steps, Nekfehr reached her. The children
scattered as he gripped her arm; she stiffened, but there was hardly even time for anyone to protest before he shoved her away. “You’re lying,” he said. “He was there, but you didn’t see him pulling any plants.” He looked around at the other women who spent their time at the meeting hall. “Interesting that you feel you must lie to protect someone, when you don’t even know that one of these others did anything.” His gaze went back to the woman. “You don’t know, but you’re quite certain.”
Rand thought the gathering had been a quiet one, but when the leader moved back to Ester, all noise truly ceased. No scuffling, no coughing, no children whispering complaints. With a theatrical flourish, the leader removed his fancy belt knife, and as the woman shrank away from him, presented it to her, hilt first. Astonished, hesitant, she took it, her wide, worried eyes watching him, trying to see what he wanted of her.
And then he Took her, a gentle touch on her arm. Her face showed no sign of the internal struggle Rand knew was there. It was vacant as the leader gazed down at her, and it stayed vacant as she reached up to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. The knife hung loosely in her grip, just beside the veins of his neck, and the lost opportunity was almost as hard for Rand to bear as what the man forced her to do.
“No!” one of the others shrieked, a sudden, broken sound. Rand’s Aunt Bonnie darted to the leader and stopped short, her hands making small, aborted efforts to break him away from Ester. “It was me, I done it! Leave her be!”
The leader broke away from the kiss, and for once his eyes held some kind of expression, a shine of...
Of Rand wasn’t sure just what.
“Good of you to try to help her,” the leader said. “But useless.” He looked back at the woman, and, without taking her empty gaze from his face, she brought the knife down and put it to her own throat, pushing gently. After a moment, a thin line of blood ran down the blade of the knife, over the knuckle guard, and across her hand.
If we all rushed him at once — Rand thought, couldn’t help thinking, couldn’t help taking that one step, along with all the other men in the assembly. And then they stopped, of one accord, knowing they’d all simply be Taken at once.
“Leave her be!” Bonnie shrieked again, unable to stand it any more, and threw herself at Nekfehr. He caught her wrist with his free hand, not even taking his eyes from his victim’s face. Bonnie stood there, a husk with no will of its own, blood trickling down her neck.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have no intention of killing her. Damaging her will make the point just as well, and she’ll still be able to watch the children.” At his words, Ester, with quick efficiency, took the knife from her throat, and reached down to slash it across the back of her own knee. Then she returned the knife to the leader.
He dropped his hold on both women to take it, and suddenly the two were screaming, one in horror and one in pain, as Bonnie threw herself down next to where Ester had fallen and wrapped her arms around her newly crippled friend to keen with grief.
No one else moved. No one else dared. The leader turned to look at them, and his eyes still held that oddity of expression, left over pain and...and something else. Suddenly Rand realized that Nekfehr had felt the woman’s pain at the cut of the knife. And just as suddenly, he realized that the being had enjoyed it.
Rand took a step back, away from the atrocity of the man before him. Nekfehr caught his eye, saw his understanding. And smiled. A genuine smile. Cadell’s hand landed on Rand’s shoulder, but it didn’t distract him, or keep him from taking another step back.
What did the Annekteh really want from Shadow Hollers?
~~~~~
The sun slid over the top of the westernmost ridge — one of a series of long ridges, each poking up behind the other to Dacey’s left as he walked the path home, paralleling the twist of his own home ridge and halfway up the mountain.
Still plenty of light left; plenty of time to get home; just because the ridge had shadowed out the sun didn’t mean it was true sunset yet. But Dacey picked up his pace anyway, sending Mage on ahead. “Git to home, son,” he said, when Mage wasn’t quite sure if he meant the gesture he’d made. “She’ll know I’m coming, an’ she sees you.”
Mage gave him a solemn tail-wag, hitched his bad leg up out of the way, and trotted out. And Dacey, intensely aware of the blood on his clothes and the deep red stains of it seeped into the roughness of his hands, made his feet move faster and tried to keep his thoughts from doing the same.
Blood. Blood everywhere.
He startled, looking down at himself.
Not a memory. A possibility.
Seeings. Spirits, just what he needed now.
Blaine’s frightened breathing in the darkness.
Memory? Hitting him hard, confusing things? Blaine and her nightmares, those early seeings of hers? He knew that soft gasp, the catch in her throat...
With a bound, he took the fallen tree in the path — been there for years, it had, and he never bothered to touch his feet to the trunk on the way over, just a hint of a push off the soft, rotting bark with his fingers — but he landed square, held there by the flash in his mind’s eye. Unfamiliar boots on his feet, landing on the log, skidding off that crumbling bark —
Snatched by seeing, he stood frozen. Blaine, scrambling in some confining darkness...
Never were the seeings easy to unravel. But never had they taken reality and replaced it with some other view. Someone else’s boots going over this log...twisting back, he discovered the mark of it. Not moving his feet, not chancing to cover any trail sign in this fading light, he finally found heel marks in the spring-soft trail before him.
There was three of ’em, Dalkin had said.
Ahead of him, Mage gave a sharp bark of warning, an angry sound.
Dacey fit the knife back to his bloodstained hand.
~~~~~
Dead.
The final of the three annektehr, dead. Nekfehr-death, caught in a vessel with no place to go, no new vessel on hand, no nearby community of nekteh for which to leap, to rejoin.
Of all the deaths...
In a colony of beings where death was rare, nekfehr-death was the rarest. The harshest. The worst.
Three of them.
But not in vain. Nekfehr knew the fastest way south. He knew that he’d found the last traces of seer’s blood there. And he’d learned useful bits of trivia, especially from the last to die. “What have you done to her?” Dacey Childers had cried, his voice and face and very posture full of the agony of not-knowing. Of guessing...and dreading.
Immediately after that, the vessel grew too confident, and consequently died.
Savage, Dacey Childers had been, in his anger. In that way humans could be, creating their own vulnerabilities.
Nekfehr would remember — and with him, every annektehr in Shadow Hollers.
~~~~~
Barking.
Blaine started awake, jammed her head into a branch, and swore softly, a word that would shock her mommy.
Barking in the yard below her — the hounds gone wild. Dacey? Or the Annekteh again? She peered futilely through the darkness, unable to tell. Though there was light enough to move slowly through the woods, she could not see more than dark, moving masses in front of the cabin. Barking masses.
Dim new light flushed the cabin windows shadowy amber, slowly turning bright as that fancy lamp of Dacey’s steadied out. Blaine eased slowly away from the rhododendrons, staying down, trying for a better look. Above the barking she heard a sharp tone, and the dogs hushed — at least, mostly. Dacey. It had to be. Didn’t it?
“Blaine?” he called from within the cabin, a clear note of worry in his voice. Then, louder, from out in the open, “Blaine!”
She wouldn’t yell. Not while she was this far from him, and with that Annekteh-Taken man who knows where. But she rose up and worked her swift way down the hill with little caution for the steep, uneven ground or the full-budded branches whipping at her.
“Blaine!”
She was close enough then, to gasp out a breathless reply. “Dacey, I’m here!” Close enough, too, to see the change in his posture as he located her; how he straightened before sprinting up the hill, and didn’t slow until he she’d reached him, flinging herself at him without any thought other than the fact that he was back, and her ordeal was over. For a moment he held her tight, a surprising grip that echoed her own fear and relief. And then something changed, and he stepped away from her, his hands on her arms.
“Blaine —” he said, and stopped, his fingers flexing against her arms. Then, more quietly, “Blaine, what happened?”
“One of them was here,” she said, gulping down air and emotion at the same time, emotion she hadn’t realized was lurking there and couldn’t quite identify — like only now was it possible for the true horror to come out, now that Dacey was here. “He came at noon, an’ he tore the place apart. I hid in the dairy.”
“In the dairy,” Dacey repeated, doubt overflowing his voice — although she’d left the door up, so that much should have been obvious.
“Way back, up under the floor. Me an’ Blue both, for the longest time. He came down and looked, but —” His hands had fallen to his sides, and she faltered. “You act like you don’t believe it.”
He didn’t say anything right away, not until Blue trotted up and headed for Blaine. Then his voice was sharp. “Blue, no! Stay with me.”
“But —” For she’d been reaching out to drop her hand on that heavy-boned head, had wanted the feel of it beneath her fingers for once.
Suddenly she realized what it was about. Dacey believed that the Annekteh had been here, all right. He believed that she’d hidden in the dairy.
He just didn’t think she’d gotten away with it.
He thought she was a trap, that she was Taken, that she would — why, that she would Take Blue.
She stared dumbly at him, waiting to feel mad — no, waiting to feel furious!
Seer's Blood Page 12