As the images came to him again, he had to fortify himself. But he kept seeing her unlacing those pants, one side, then the other. Kept seeing her pause, as if she’d heard him behind her, watching. Kept seeing Mariah touch herself, as if she’d been driven by the possibility of his voyeuism.
Even now, his vision pounded. Before seeing her like that, he’d genuinely been preparing to go outside, where he’d hoped to hunt, eat, then refill his flask while making sure Stamp and his crew had left. So Gabriel had eased into Chaplin’s mind, surprisingly successful in getting the dog to sleep so he wouldn’t follow his new master. But Gabriel’s intentions had been thwarted by a whiff of Mariah’s skin, stronger than ever, as if it had been exposed and the air was carrying it to him.
He hadn’t meant to watch, yet he’d sure gone and done it.
Bad enough that he’d wanted her from the first. Even worse that he hadn’t been able to stop himself from following the scent of her arousal to her room, where he’d yearned to jam his fangs into her, joining with the building rhythms of her body.
Yet, just in time, he’d saved himself, forcing himself to back calmly out of the shadows and up that ladder, his reddened sight nearly blinding him. And, once in the cleansing outside air, he’d rushed to a spot far away from Mariah so he could hunt and appease the thirst that battered him in the aftermath of such a tease.
He didn’t remember much more—just waking up a little later, his stomach full, his mouth ringed by crusted blood. After cleaning up, he’d arrived back at Mariah’s, hearing noises down in the work area, where she was clearly laboring away, even in the dead of night. Thinking avoidance would be a fine idea, he’d gone to the study, looking at all those books, taking down the one called Monsters to see what it said about things like him.
Soon after, the noises downstairs had stopped, and when sunrise approached, he’d fallen into the blank rest that he often considered a gift.
Tentatively, Gabriel rolled out of bed, coming to a smooth stand and awakening Chaplin, who must’ve been up and about much earlier before returning here to guard him. The canine stretched so casually, without any indication of question or judgment, that Gabriel knew the dog had slept right through last night’s shenanigans; Chaplin had no idea about what Gabriel had seen with Mariah . . . or the aftermath.
Thank-all, Gabriel thought. However, it might’ve been convenient if the dog could’ve provided enlightenment about last night. It would’ve been nice to know whether Mariah realized Gabriel had been watching her undress, or if the situation would cause them even more tension around here.
“She’s still working?” Gabriel asked the dog.
Chaplin nodded.
“She was going at it last night when I got back, too.”
The canine got to his feet, in no rush, just as if he were used to Mariah’s near around-the-clock labors and didn’t feel a mite of guilt about lazing through them.
I’m off, then, Gabriel mind-shared with the dog. My flask’s outside where I buried it after a refill. Just for good measure, he added a lie to cover the fact that he didn’t remember just what he’d eaten last night, only that his flask was full. Blood from a sand-rabbit.
Chaplin stared for a moment, then shook his head, clearly catching the fib. You’re not going out there for your flask, Gabriel. Annie’s place. Didn’t you go last night? Are you going back now? What’s to see?
Lying might be useless with this dog. Chaplin was smart, and it seemed he was getting better and better at resisting Gabriel’s sway.
I didn’t find her old home last night, Gabriel thought, so, yeah, I’m going now, just out of curiosity, boy. It’s just something I’ve got to do.
He didn’t mention that there hadn’t been much of a chance for him to search out Annie’s last night. A tad too much going on in the frenzy department.
Gabriel waited for the canine to talk him out of going, to tell him, just as the other Badlanders had done, that Annie was nothing, that she’d just up and gone and that was the end of that. But when Chaplin merely sighed, it took Gabriel aback.
Maybe the dog knew that Gabriel was going to do what he needed to, no matter the barrier.
Whatever it was, Chaplin took his que sera, sera attitude across the room and to the door that led to the workroom, then camped out near it, waiting for Mariah.
After scanning one of the outside-view monitors to make sure the coast was clear, Gabriel grabbed his carryall and exited by using the ladder entrance, verifying that it was hidden all neat and tidy afterward. Then, in the stretch of darkening sky, where carrion feeders circled in the distance, he concentrated on the job at hand, making his way to where he thought the Badlanders’ common area might be located below the ground. He was planning to map his way outward from there, seeking Annie’s home via where he thought her tunnel led.
Before he began, Gabriel opened his senses wide, taking in everything: the dryness of the air and ground, the smoky hint of a brush fire somewhere, probably near Stamp’s property. Those carrion feeders.
But it all turned his stomach, so he lowered his intake.
All the same, he identified Annie’s entrance soon enough, because when Stamp and his guys had discovered it last night, they’d decimated the otherwise camouflaged doorway behind its mound of scrub.
Blood rushing—this could be it, Gabriel thought, Abby—he opened the entrance, sending tiny four-eyed lizards scurrying.
He waited until they were gone, then lowered himself through the hole, where a set of rickety steps led to the ground. Then he opened his senses as far as he could again.
Even before he was partway down the stairs, the scents of Annie’s place attacked, rushing him with a mélange of skin from all the people who’d been through here recently, probably Stamp and his men, though the components were so mashed together that Gabriel couldn’t separate them. Then came the scent of old sage that someone might’ve used to smudge and cleanse after Annie had departed. Then old wood and cotton.
Gabriel reeled under the combination. He’d been too quick to open his perceptions this wide. He’d only done so because he’d wanted to isolate Abby’s scent right away, but he didn’t recognize her. Not in this crowded assault.
Gabriel lowered his intake once more, letting his visual senses come to the forefront. There was no light to speak of but he could see well enough, even without the rusted solar lanterns that dangled cockeyed like a spindly chandelier. There was a deadened visz screen, too, as well as walls crumbling with dirt, like diseased faces.
All the way into the room now, he looked around some more, soon discerning the cause of the old cotton smell; Annie had evidently been in the middle of braiding several rugs that hung on the walls, most only halfway finished.
Abby hadn’t ever practiceda hobby like this, Gabriel thought. But maybe she’d taken up this trade out of necessity.
He ran his fingers over one of them, trying to feel her in the rough material.
No. Not there.
Yet, he didn’t stop searching, and he found a spot in the corner where she must’ve slept, because there was a pile of those rugs there. Touching the top one, he felt for an indentation where her body would’ve lain, then pressed his face to the material.
A faint smell. An impression ghosted from months and months of abandonment. . . .
Blood tugging through him, Gabriel took out a piece of pink material from his carryall. A swatch from a shirt Abby used to wear. When he’d seen her one of those last nights, her shirt had been so worn that the sleeve had begun to separate, and soon after he’d revealed his true nature to her, she’d ripped the material all the way off, giving it to him.
“You know what they say about wearing hearts on your sleeve,” she’d said in that sweet, lightly affectionate way of hers. But there’d been a slant of sadness, too, and in hindsight, he should’ve known what had been coming.
Now he held the swatch to his face. These days, there wasn’t so much a scent as much as something like a note he’d f
orgotten, and he tried to get it back, to save the last of her because he was afraid that, before long, it might all be gone.
Then he went back to the rug, absorbing the last remnants of smell.
Something jerked in his chest.
Was there a similarity?
He kept testing the difference, desperate for a match, but if there was, Abby hadn’t been here for a long time.
Longer than Stamp’s first appearance in the Badlands?
As Gabriel tried to construct a timeline, he stuffed the swatch back into his bag. Nothing was coming together yet.
When he searched further, the process seemed equally fruitless . . . until he came to a little cove where the shadows melded.
A cleaning station?
Then his own perception seemed to imitate the shadows, flowing together, ebbing back into his mind, where thoughts of last night weren’t far from the surface.
A place where a watcher could stand undetected, just as I did with Mariah?
While he lingered, he experienced the vision of her all over again, and his gaze heated right along with the blood thrusting through him.
Then he realized the sacrilege of seeing Mariah in a domain that might’ve been Abby’s. Raw need versus a pure love.
He backed out of the cove and found another room, and one scent untwined itself from all the others.
But . . . it couldn’t be.
Mariah? Or was he confusing Abby’s scent with hers?
At first, he rejected the notion, thinking that his lust for her had eclipsed everything else. Then, as he followed the smell and wandered closer to another side room, where stacks of old material for those braided rugs was stored, Mariah’s essence overcame him.
Her. He could feel Mariah priming him, the scent so overwhelming that either he was losing his mind or she’d been here very recently.
He grabbed the swatch of material from his bag again, used it to cover his nose, and reality crept back on him, second by second, enough for him to focus on what else was in the small room: nine containers for water that looked as if they’d been culled from a sporting complex; a long stick leaning against the wall, near twenty-eight faint hash marks that looked as if they’d been hastily erased; fifteen sharpened poles, plus chains and cables, that could’ve been used as defense in case of an attack.
As he continued around the rest of the domain, he noticed that most of Annie’s belongings had clearly been picked over, and he suspected it was more due to Stamp’s trip through here than anything else. In the end, he still had no answers about why Annie had left or if she’d ever been Abby at all. Really, wishful thinking had been the best evidence he’d found.
If he had the ability to naturally feel anger, he knew that it would’ve been mastering him right now, but as it was, Gabriel walked toward the door that led to the common area and followed the tunnel there instead. Annie’s visz screen had been disabled, and he wanted to see if any of the Badlanders were out and about yet, just to pose a few follow-up questions.
He was in luck when he got there, because Zel Hopkins was exercising, using a root-constructed bar on the one wall to do pull-ups.
From what she was wearing—a khaki tank top and canvas pants—Gabriel could see that the middle-aged woman was still in great shape, her arms and shoulders toned with muscle while she methodically pulled herself up, then lowered herself down. She was so deep into her routine that she didn’t even seem to know he’d entered until she dropped to the floor to face him.
Her unfazed expression told him that he’d been wrong about her not realizing he was there.
She wiped her hands together, nodding at Annie’s door. “I knew you’d be coming through, sooner or later.”
“Were you keeping guard, just to catch me if I did?”
His query was casual but entirely serious; he remembered last night, when he’d run into the blackness of her blocked mind, and was even somewhat relieved that he wouldn’t even need to try anything but this humanlike questioning with her.
“I wasn’t spying so much at all,” Zel said, chuckling, and he wondered if she was trying to make him see that this needn’t be a confrontation. “I use this wall here a few times a week. That’s why the oldster arranged some of that wood to stick out among the roots, to give me something to do besides yoga and running up the walls of my own home.”
“Kind of him.”
She assumed a more serious grin, and he knew the small talk was over.
“If you hadn’t taken up against Stamp last night, I might be a little put off with you being here. There’s just something about you, isn’t there, Mr. Gabriel?”
“And why’s that?” he asked, interested in her candor. “Because of my interest in Annie?”
“Because we already told you there’s nothing much to know, and you’re still at it.”
She went back to the wall, where she jumped to the bar and raised herself up, spinning herself over feet first until she balanced, her stomach to the bar and her back to him.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Can you at least tell me what Annie looked like?” He didn’t have pictures because Abby had shunned technology, like most of the other Southblock sanctifiers. He couldn’t illustrate worth a lick, either, or else he’d have drawn a portrait.
Zel didn’t even wobble, though her voice revealed her effort. “Brown hair, brown eyes, thin as a stick. Independent cuss, too, but you pretty much have to be out here.”
Abby had blond hair, but she could’ve colored it if she wanted a change. But why would she have wanted to disappear to such an extent?
He crossed his arms over his chest. “How long ago did Annie . . . ?”
“Leave us?” Zel breathed out, then in one motion, brought her legs over the bar and sat on it, facing the wall. Her shoulders were stiff. “Over a year ago.”
“I thought Stamp arrived only a few months past, and I was under the impression that Annie’s problems started when he got here, based on what the old man said.”
“Did you ever think that maybe Stamp and some company came out here to scout around before that?”
Her response offered a welcome condolence—an explanation. With Stamp out here that long ago, the timeline would make sense. If he and his guys had been scouting land and they’d found Annie’s visz lens, just as they’d eventually found Mariah’s, maybe they’d threatened her. As a single woman, she might’ve been scared off.
But would Abby, who’d had the stones to run away on her own, have been that affected by a threat?
“Listen,” Zel added, looking partway over her shoulder but failing to meet his gaze, “she’s gone, Mr. Gabriel. She hasn’t come back in all this time, and I highly doubt she ever will. Dragging Stamp into this isn’t going to bring her back, okay?”
It was as if a brick had been pulled out of him, making him crumble a little. Now he hoped that Annie wasn’t Abby. Hoped that, somewhere out here in the Badlands, the woman he loved had found a place where she was living in quiet away from Annie and this place. He would find her someday.
Then again, hadn’t he sensed Abby in Annie’s room . . . ?
He managed to speak. “I appreciate your help, Zel.”
She positioned herself so that she was fully in front of the wall again, like a bird on a wire. “You can thank Chaplin for bringing you here and getting you into our graces in the first place. He’s a smart one, and he wouldn’t have accepted you if there wasn’t a good reason.” After a pause, she added, “We’re all family here, including anyone who’s allowed in by one of us.”
Little did she know that family wasn’t for monsters.
Thinking she might be warming up to him, he decided to push his luck, especially since Mariah still might be down in her workroom, where he’d seen no visz monitors, just lenses. She wouldn’t know that he was about to ask Zel about her.
“I only wish I knew more about Mariah,” he said. “There’s a lot that goes unspoken at her place. Even when it comes
to her dad—”
Without warning, Zel dropped from the bar, landing gracefully before standing. Her expression gave nothing aas she finally turned to him.
“Best to not wonder. I mean that, too. Family respects each other. Am I clear?”
She moved past him and toward her door, going through it and shutting it behind her with a soft click, then the sound of locks being engaged.
In the disquieting aftermath, Gabriel looked at Annie’s own door, thinking that there had to be more to everything than seemed apparent.
A lot more.
11
Mariah
Over the last hours, I’d washed myself in a lot of cold water, then worked at the aquifer pumps, as if that would clean me through and through. But no matter how much I scrubbed or labored, I knew consequences were on their way.
Gabriel was upstairs.
But, worst of all, so was the rest of the world.
Sweat was clammy on my forehead, my skin, as I pushed back my lamp helmet to wipe off the moisture, panting while I rested my hands on my hips. The next time I saw Gabriel, I’d see a reflection in his silver gaze, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
You see, the last few hours had been . . . well, bad. Not even Chaplin knew what I’d done, and I was dreading how he’d respond when he found out. Guilt was punishing me, along with the ache I still carried from the sins of my body.
Furthering that punishment, I donned a waterpack and trudged toward the steps. Long ago, Mom would’ve said, “Our bodies are temples, Mariah. Treat yours accordingly.” Over the years, I’d tried my best to remember that, but last night I’d crossed a line, and it was because of Gabriel and the way he affected me. I’d let myself go too far.
Thing was, I’d liked it.
But there was something else putting me on edge now.
After my loss of control, I’d gone over to Annie’s to rearrange the remnants of her life in the Badlands. Hell, I’d even sucked up my courage and taken the outside entrance, where dawn had been flexing, while Gabriel was bundled in his blankets and it was still decent enough not to require a heat suit.
Bloodlands Page 11