She sounded like a little girl, and for the first time in a long time that’s what she felt like: a child who needed a grown-up.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at a doorway on the port side of the granary. The guard is dead. I think Jacob killed him. Please. Seth needs help.”
“There’s a security force on the way,” the voice said.
“Okay.” Waverly buried her face in her hands.
She couldn’t do this anymore. No more scheming. No more revenge. She wanted safety. She’d had it once. She hadn’t even noticed it then. It wasn’t real anyway, she told herself. I only thought I was safe, but all those years, that’s when Anne Mather and the doctor were making their plans, laying their traps.
Cones of light spilled into the darkness in front of her and she heard the heavy steps of men. She raised her hands to show she had no weapons. “Please! We need to help Seth.”
“Where is he?” one of the men asked, stepping forward. She couldn’t see him, but he had a deep voice that was somehow gentle, and she took a step toward him.
“Jacob Pauley has him in the cornfield.” One of the men took hold of her roughly by the elbow.
“Can you take us to them?”
“I think so,” she said.
One of the men took Jared’s com unit out of her hands. He looked at it with suspicion. “What is this?”
“It’s some kind of computer. It belongs to Jared Carver.”
The man’s eyes dropped to the dead man on the floor and he cried, “Who killed Robert?”
“Jacob, I think,” Waverly said, blinking against his flashlight. She was surrounded by men now, at least five of them. “Please. Seth is so sick.”
“Show us where,” said the stocky one with the deep voice. He took her arm and walked with her, his grip firm but gentle. There was something about him that appeared kinder than the rest, and she pinned her hopes on him.
“In the cornfield,” she whispered. “Toward the starboard side.”
“I told the Pastor to raze this field,” she heard someone behind her say. “But she wanted things to stay normal.”
“All the guns were accounted for,” said another man. “We thought it would be okay.”
“They’re not using guns,” Waverly hissed, losing patience. “The Pauleys made Kieran swallow explosives.”
“How do you know that?” one of them asked, alarmed.
“I’ll tell you later. Right now Jacob is looking for the detonator in the cornfield, and we have to stop him before he finds it!”
That got them moving. One of the men stayed behind to issue evacuation orders to the audience. Waverly could hear the voices of the crowd, hushed, waiting for the lights to come back on. Two of the men went ahead, their flashlights illuminating the corn fronds, stopping every few feet to look back at Waverly. She pointed them toward Seth, following the broken stalks she’d left behind in her flight from Jacob.
When they were getting near, she whispered, “Better turn off your lights.” She crouched down, and the four men did the same.
“He might have a gun,” Waverly whispered to the man on her right.
They moved more cautiously now, but their footsteps through the cornstalks were too loud. She hoped the sounds of the audience being moved out of the granary bay might cover the noise they were making.
If Jacob had found that gun …
One of the men walking to her left cried out, “Someone’s here!”
“Where?” the man holding her arm asked.
“I stepped on him.” The man’s flashlight flicked on and he pointed the beam at the ground, but Waverly couldn’t see what he was looking at. “He’s dead.”
Waverly sank to her knees. “No!”
“I’m here,” someone whispered a couple feet from her right knee. She crawled toward him and felt Seth’s clammy forehead, heard his struggling breath. She leaned her forehead on his and cried.
“Jacob Pauley,” one of the guards said and kicked at the dead man’s arm. Jacob’s staring eyes never moved in their sockets as his head wobbled on the ground. Waverly cringed. He was a brute. He was stupid. He was cruel. And she was glad he was dead, but she couldn’t stand to look at him like that.
“Central Command … we need a med team down in the port-side granary, stat,” said one of the men into a walkie-talkie. He knelt by Seth and felt his forehead. “Bad fever,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don,” Seth whispered.
The other men paused, all of them looking at the stocky man. “How does he know you?” one of them asked sharply.
“I brought him a few meals down in the brig.” He was lying. Waverly could see by the way his eyes never moved a single iota as he stared into the other guard’s face.
“We’ve located Kieran Alden,” Waverly heard through a walkie-talkie. “He’s in a shuttle right now.”
“Copy,” one of the men responded.
Waverly was glad Kieran was safe, but she was terrified watching Seth’s face as he struggled to breathe. His lips were peeled back from his teeth in a painful grimace and she could hear fluid in his throat. She took hold of his hand, squeezed, and was relieved that he had enough strength to squeeze back, if weakly. He rubbed her fingers with his thumb, back and forth.
She rested her forehead on his and whispered, “I love you.”
She held her breath until he whispered, “I wanted to say it first.”
She smiled. In the middle of all this, he’d made her smile.
Soon two people came pounding through the corn, carrying a stretcher between them. She watched as they slid the stretcher under Seth and strapped him in. She started to follow them back the way they’d come when she felt a hand clamp around her elbow. She turned to see Don blinking apologetically. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
Just then, the lights came back on. Squinting, Waverly looked around to get her bearings. She could just barely see over the tops of the corn. Mather was standing on the stage next to a group of guards, their heads ducked away from the bright lights as the last of the audience left the granary.
Waverly gasped. A dark shape mounted the stage right behind Mather. The shape uncoiled like a snake; a hand extended like a fang.
“Look out!” Waverly screamed.
Ginny Pauley opened fire before anyone could react. She shot Anne Mather in the back once, twice, three times.
Mather sat down on the stage, almost as though she meant to.
The guards around her started running, fumbling for their guns, screaming. Ginny turned her gun on the men who had been standing with Mather and shot them, one by one, a single bullet for each of them.
Waverly ran after the guards, racing toward the stage, her vision jarred with every step. She acted without thought, without feeling, not sure why she followed them. They broke through the edge of the cornfield and were now in full view of that crazy, murderous, damaged woman.
Ginny dropped down to one knee, her gun pointed at Waverly. Waverly felt arms wrap around her waist and she hit the ground. A heavy body landed on top of her, and she heard a man’s deep voice in her ear. “Stay down.”
Waverly nodded, and he crawled off toward the stage. She watched from between chairs as four men opened fire on Ginny, who sank to her knees, hiding her head under spindly forearms, her body twisting in a grotesque spasm. The air exploded with so many rounds of gunfire that Waverly couldn’t count the bullets.
And then …
… quiet.
In the calm that followed, Waverly heard agonized moaning. Four men were standing around Ginny, looking down at her as a fifth man stripped her body of the weapons she’d carried: knives, a machete, a nightstick, and a handgun.
It was Jared’s handgun, the one Waverly had brought here.
Don came back to Waverly, stricken, beads of sweat over his brow and the bridge of his nose. He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “You okay?” he asked.
Waverly nodded. “What about Mather?”
she asked.
“Not good.” He took hold of Waverly’s arm to help her up. She was unsteady on her feet as he pulled her toward the stage, her legs moving automatically. When she swallowed, her mouth was dry and somehow full of dirt.
The moaning got louder—it hadn’t been Ginny moaning after all—and when Waverly looked up at the stage, she saw a pair of legs twisting in agony. She slowed down, but the guard kept her walking. “I don’t want to see,” she whispered.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“No,” Waverly said quietly, but she let him pull her along.
So many times she’d pictured killing Anne Mather. She’d dreamed it, over and over, bloodthirsty dreams that woke her feeling disturbed and satisfied, horrified and eager.
But now she’d seen it: an unarmed woman gunned down. It didn’t matter that the victim had been Anne Mather, the architect of all Waverly’s loss, her pain, her transformation into a dark-hearted creature. The act itself had been the ugliest thing Waverly had ever seen, and she was glad now she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.
“Tom,” Mather moaned.
“Thomas,” one of the guards said into his walkie-talkie. “You better get here now. Hurry.”
They were almost to the stage, close enough that Waverly could see the sheath of blood spreading under Mather as she lay on her back, looking up at the lights with those cool gray eyes, swallowing down the blood that pooled inside her mouth.
“Wave…,” Mather whispered. She moaned and closed her eyes.
“Hush,” Waverly said. She knelt down and took Anne Mather’s hand.
“I wanted…,” Mather said softly. She seemed to have no control over her own breath and had to time her words with each tortured exhale. “To say … I’m sorry.”
Waverly looked at her own hands cupped around Mather’s deathly cold fingers. Her sworn enemy, the woman she’d planned to ruin with her lies, whose death she’d fervently wished for—why was she holding her hand?
“I’ve done so…”—Mather panted between words, grimacing in pain—“… many things.” She took in breath sharply, then coughed, great racking hacks that sent foamy blood spurting out of a hole in her chest.
“I brought this,” Mather whispered, “on my … myself.”
Waverly could only look at her. She had no words.
The heavy metal doors behind Waverly opened, and the guard named Thomas stood in the doorway, his face slack with shock.
“No,” he whispered and staggered onto the stage. He fell to his knees next to Waverly, then bent over Mather and smoothed the hair off her forehead. “Annie,” he said with a whimper. “I should’ve stayed! I should’ve known!”
She smiled at him. “No, honey. Don’t.”
The big, frightening guard bent down and kissed Mather tenderly, her forehead, her eyebrow, the corner of her bloodied mouth. “Stay,” he pleaded.
The Pastor opened her mouth to speak, but she coughed again, and suddenly she was heaving, folding in half as a medical team thrust Waverly out of the way and bent over her, fitting a mask over her face, stanching her wounds with mounds of gauze. Thomas refused to let go of her hand and watched her face with minute attention as the medical team traded arcane terminology, describing what was happening to Anne Mather’s body. Waverly didn’t need to understand their words to know she was dying in the most horrible way.
The color faded from Mather’s cheeks, her lips turned blue, her eyes rolled up in her head. Waverly lowered her gaze when Thomas, the Pastor’s most vicious protector, wept over her, kissing her forehead, massaging her hand, rocking on his knees.
Waverly turned away. They all did, to let Thomas have a few last moments alone with her.
Besides, the woman was no longer there and there was nothing more to look at.
THE GIFT
In the infirmary, a medical team fitted a mask over Seth’s face, and he breathed in the pure oxygen. Soon his head cleared, and his feeling of panic subsided. Nan, the nurse who had saved his life, was in the bed next to him. He couldn’t believe she was still alive.
She had turned toward him, looking sleepy, her skin pale, her lips cracked and whitish. Clear tubes snaked out of her nostrils. She raised her eyebrows as her lips formed the words: “How are you feeling?”
He couldn’t speak with the mask over his face; he could only roll his eyes. She nodded in understanding, and he felt a little less lonely. Someone else was suffering, someone who cared about what happened to him.
He motioned for the doctor, the older woman with a knot of gray hair at the nape of her neck. He could barely whisper, “How is she?”
The doctor turned toward the nurse and asked, “May I tell him your condition?”
The nurse nodded once.
“His knife hit her between the scapula and the spine. The blade nicked a lung, but most of the damage is orthopedic.” The doctor looked at Seth fondly, and he looked back at her high cheekbones and intelligent expression, thinking she must have been pretty when she was young. “Don’t you want to know your condition?”
“I’m dying,” he croaked.
“I hope not,” the doctor said, her tone deadly serious. “You came close. But the oxygen is helping your body stabilize. We’ve got you back on your meds, and we’re watching you.”
“Waverly?”
The doctor shook her head. “We’ll try to find her, okay?”
He nodded and fell asleep immediately.
When he opened his eyes, the lights were back on. Nan looked very tired, and her chest was wrapped with layers of white gauze, but when he turned toward her she brightened up. “You look better,” she said softly.
He smiled.
A tall, thin man brought him a tray with some cut fruit and a bowl of broth. He managed to drink the broth through a straw, and it felt good as it filled his stomach with warmth. The fruit was pink and soft and sweet. He couldn’t identify it, but he enjoyed warming it on his tongue before he swallowed it, piece by piece. At the end of the meal, he was exhausted.
“Waverly?” he asked the thin man.
“Let me make a call.” The man walked out of Seth’s line of sight, but Seth could hear his side of the conversation. “I’ve got a very sick young man here asking for Waverly Marshall … She’s sixteen years old, how much of a threat could she be … Patients do better when they have family around … She’s the closest thing he has…”
Seth closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, he was looking at Waverly. Tears slid over her smooth cheeks, and the corners of her lips pricked upward into a smile. He felt instantly better.
“Hi,” she whispered, and he felt her fingers moving through his hair, rearranging, working at knots, smoothing it back from his forehead. Her touch relaxed muscles he hadn’t known were tight, helped his blood move through his veins, soothed the nerve impulses that told him he was still in pain, still sick, still in danger.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.
He knew she was lying, that they’d told her the truth. He knew it by the hint of terror in her eyes that she tried to cover with her smile. He loved her for that, how brave she was being, and how brave she was trying to help him be.
“Where you been?” he asked.
“They had a lot of questions,” she said evasively.
“You in trouble?”
“All I could do was tell them the truth,” she said. “So far they can’t find a problem with my story.”
Seth felt a presence on the other side of his bed and turned to find Don standing over him. “I tried to get back to you in the lab. I could tell you were sick.” Don rubbed a chunky hand over his face, looking as though he hadn’t slept in days and hadn’t shaved in a lot longer than that. “I couldn’t risk leading them to you.”
“It’s okay,” Seth said. He was already feeling tired from all the talking. But there was something he needed to tell Waverly before he fell asleep, because he was afraid he might not wake up. He badly wanted to touch he
r face, stroke her hair, but he was too weak to lift his arm. “Listen,” he said to her.
Don got up to let them be alone, and he was grateful for that.
“I don’t want you to be alone,” he told her.
Her face crumpled. “I’ll have you.”
“Maybe not,” he got out before he had to fight for air. Waverly seemed to have lost the ability to smile. She stroked his hair at a frantic pace. When he could speak again, he said, “I want you to have a family.”
She shook her head in a desperate kind of denial and looked away from him.
“The kids they made from you,” he said. She wouldn’t look at him, but he knew she was listening. “I saw one. She’s … she’s so cute.”
Now Waverly did look at him. He saw a hardness in her that he knew would probably never subside completely, but she was with him, listening.
“Kieran is a good guy,” he said. “He loves you.”
Her large brown eyes searched his face as though trying to divine some motive. “He wants someone else now,” she said.
“He’ll protect you.”
“Seth…”
“This place is dangerous.” She tried to put her fingers over his lips, but he spoke anyway. “If you’re married and pregnant, they…” He stopped to catch his breath, then forced out the words, “They’d let you live. For the baby.”
“Without you?” she whimpered. “I can’t—” She lay her head down on his mattress, but she kept hold of his hand, massaging his fingers, kneading them, kissing them.
When he had the strength, he squeezed her hand. “I need to know you’ll be okay.”
Her features hardened. “Then live.”
REUNION
Kieran’s shuttle touched down on the Empyrean in a dark, empty shuttle bay. He’d expected Arthur to meet him, but there was no one. Kieran walked down the shuttle ramp, confused, holding his sore middle. He’d expected relief now that he’d expelled the explosives, but the detonator had lodged inside him, somewhere deep, and it felt like a hunk of broken glass.
He pushed the pain out of his mind and looked around. The bay was completely dark except for the light of a single OneMan hanging near the air-lock doors.
Flame: A Sky Chasers Novel Page 25