“Your whoring ways gone on too long. Warn’t sure I had it in me to punish you like I done your mother. Sickly now. Her fault.” More pounding. “Your fault.”
Maggie cupped her hand over her mouth, dread washing over her. But she had to know. She lowered her hand. “How... how did you punish her?”
The pounding stopped. A weight slid against the door. She could hear him gasping. “This place warn’t ever good enough fer her. I saw how she looked at that fella that came with the propane. Whoring bitch. She was doin’ him every chance she got.” There was a wheezing chuckle. “But I put a stop to that nonsense.”
“You did?” Maggie hated that her voice was small, as though she was eight again and he was telling her nightly how her mother ran off with the propane guy because she didn’t care about either Elroy or her daughter.
“Tire iron and an axe done the trick.” He sounded so proud. “Buried ’em out in the desert. Won’t nobody never find ’em. Can’t hang me with it.”
God. “You... you killed her?”
“I stopped her whoring!” he shouted hoarsely. She heard his body slide down against the door. “Damned whore.” This was nothing more than a whisper. “Killed that damned puppy of yours too. It was a bitch. Be backin’ up to every dog around here.” Then nothing.
Maggie felt the bile rise into her throat. All these years she thought her mother deserted her. Her world turned upside down. What did that mean?
It meant that Maggie might be next.
*****
Tris wanted to scream. Fucking LA traffic had been worse than he thought. Even weaving between lanes and using the shoulders hadn’t helped much, except that he got to exchange curses with some irate car drivers. Six hours and he was still at least a hundred miles from Austin. The Ducati sliced through the night like a cheetah, eating up the road until the white line was a blur. Fallon was a dim cluster of lights behind him. The wind roared in his ears and all he could see for miles was ghostly white sagebrush flashing by in his headlight and the dim shadows of the mountains to the south.
The night stars were cold and judgmental. Why had it taken his father to tell him that something about the accident wasn’t right, that Maggie was in danger?
Idiot! Now he was likely to be a day late and a dollar short, and Maggie would pay the price. Tris’s fixation on her had been a big neon finger pointing her out as a target. His fault she was in danger. And she was in danger. However long he held out against believing in his own destiny, he sure as hell believed in hers. She belonged with his family more than he did. He only wished he had some power he could use to save her, but as usual, Tris Tremaine came up short. No magic powers here. His father believed he’d be able to do something with engines, if and when he got his power, but shutting engines off didn’t seem like it would do much good right now. All he wanted was to go faster. And if he was up against those shadowy others his father seemed to think were out there, and they had powers, how was he supposed to help Maggie? A Smith and Wesson .45 was no match for... for what? If his mother was a Healer and his father an Adapter and his unknown assailant was a Cloaker, what other powers were out there?
It was as if the earth had opened up and revealed a whole new world sitting just beneath its crust. Tris felt powerless. All he could do was rev the Ducati and shoot through the night.
The sagebrush ahead flickered with light as he came around a rare curve in the road out here. Even as Tris’s mind processed what he saw, the flicker was gone. It was as if....
An engine revved in the night, almost drowning out the Ducati’s snarl. Pain seared his left thigh. A clink and then another came from the Ducati between his legs. Tris whipped his head around. Nothing. But those were bullets and that flicker on the sagebrush was another vehicle’s lights right before they’d been cloaked.
He swerved to the left where he saw nothing, but heard an engine. Car engine. At least it wasn’t a semi. His knee and the bike thumped against metal. The Ducati ricocheted to the right. He heard a squeal of tires to his left. He jerked the bike back toward the center of the road. The thud as a fender nudged the Ducati bumped Tris forward. He wrestled the handlebars back to stability. Two could play at this game.
Tris waited until he heard the engine right beside him again. He gunned the Ducati and leaned into where he knew the car must be. He bounced off the hard surface. The car flickered into sight as it swerved to the left and hit the uneven shoulder. Tris caromed across the highway to the right, the bike leaning as it wanted to lie down. He hauled on the handlebars, stuck out his right boot, and threw his weight left. The bike righted itself. Tris slowed and turned back. The sedan was rolling over and over out into the desert. Tris watched as it came to rest upside down. In the glow of his headlamp, he saw a man crawling out the window on his hands and knees. The smell of gasoline permeated the night.
Tris turned the bike and gunned it. Behind him, an explosion roared. The desert night glowed red as Tris shot away.
Jesus Christ! His father was right. Somebody who could make himself and his vehicle invisible had tried to kill him. Twice. And that guy might have friends.
If they knew about Maggie, they might know where she lived.
Tris became aware of the pain in his left thigh. He reached down and felt the slick wet. Blood. Kind of a lot of it. Too bad. He couldn’t let a bullet in the thigh stop him. But he began to have a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going be enough to help Maggie. The final disappointment. Tris Tremaine lets the woman he loves come to harm.
He pushed the Ducati harder, the smell of gas still stinging his nose. He might be a loser, but he was all Maggie had at this point.
*****
The exploding gas tank knocked Jason flat against the desert and sent his senses reeling. He had failed the old woman. There was no avoiding it now. No avoiding her. He’d thought he was so big and tough. The badass confidence was all a lie. A lie he told himself to keep the nightmares at bay....
It all came washing over him, the crypt, its damp walls only part of what was making his skin clammy. Hardwick chaining him to rings in the walls next to what he knew was his father’s coffin. Brittany there, grinning, waiting. And he knew. He knew right then what would happen. The old woman picked her way around the coffins in the crypt and stood over him.
“Please,” he’d begged. “Don’t do this. Don’t you understand? I can’t kill Selah. I love her. She’s everything to me.”
“She’s got a soft power. Who needs the ability to take pain away? And she doesn’t believe in the cause enough to do what needs to be done. She’d be a drag on us.”
“She wouldn’t.” He’d almost been sobbing.
“You knew I required ultimate loyalty when you took your oath. You break it, there are consequences,” she rasped in the dim light. She pointed to Brittany who raised her arms. The old woman joined her. Power swirled in the room. Jason could hardly breathe. It sat like a weight on his chest.
The coffin lid lifted, pried open by Brittany’s power. Jason shrieked. He didn’t want to see what was in there, even though he knew. And he knew what the old woman could do. His teeth began to clatter. “N-no!” he stuttered.
But that didn’t stop the tattooed hand that emerged from the coffin and gripped the side. It wasn’t desiccated. That was most horrible of all. He’d know that hand anywhere.
And he was back at fifteen, all the anger, the gibbering fear clutching at him. What his father was going to do to him wasn’t anything new. It had been going on since he was about five. The beatings, the whippings, being forced to suck him off, to spread his buttocks for his father’s cock. But he hadn’t gotten used to it, ever.
And it was going to happen again.
His father’s shadowy form rose from the coffin. “Where am I?” he asked, confused.
“Right where you belong,” the old woman said. “Look, I’ve got a present for you.” She pointed to Jason.
Even in the dim light, he could see his father’s eyes gleam. “You, you
tried to deny me, boy. You hit me ... with a rock or something....” His father was bearing down on him. “You ... you killed me.”
He had. God, he had. At fifteen. And now he was going to have to do it all over again if he ever wanted to escape. But this time he was chained up.
Jason shook his head and moaned out on the desert under the stars. The old woman had let Hardwick give him a knife, after a few hours. And he’d done it again, crying and wailing and stabbing, over and over.
But the old woman could bring his father back again. And again and again. That was her power. She could raise the dead. And that meant Jason would never be free.
Later that night, he’d killed Selah. Slit her throat with the same knife that killed his father, and held her in his lap as her life drained away. From that moment on, he belonged to the old woman, body and soul. Until she died. Only then would he be free.
So there was no doubt what kind of punishment she’d arrange for him now. And there was no escaping her. She’d find him. And if she didn’t find him immediately, someday she’d acquire a Finder, and the Finder would locate him. There was no escape at all.
He got to his feet, glanced back at the burning car, and trudged back to the road.
*****
Maggie sat huddled in a corner of Elroy’s room. She’d listened to him rant and rave for hours. After she’d thrown herself at the plywood-covered window and the door without result, she’d descended to pleading, though she knew that wouldn’t work. Not with a man who murdered his wife and her maybe-lover and kept the secret for all these years. No wonder Elroy drank. He came by his cirrhosis honestly, or dishonestly. He’d even killed her dog. Somewhere deep inside she’d always suspected that. He didn’t want her to have anything to love. But she’d never suspected he killed her mother.
After a long time, he quieted down. She heard clinking and muttering. The light from under the door had dimmed with the fading day and was replaced by artificial light. Her butt was numb, but she was too exhausted to move. What did he intend to do with her? Keep her in here until she starved to death? She was hungry, as stupid as that was under the circumstances. If he opened the door, she was pretty sure she was stronger than he was. But if he shot her.... Well, then she’d follow her mother and the propane guy into a sandy grave.
She had a long time to think about what it meant that Elroy had murdered her mother. He was a loon, of course. But it also meant her mother hadn’t deserted her. Maggie had always somehow felt responsible for driving her away. In the memories she had of her mother, her mother was always unhappy and wan. But that might not have been because she regretted having Maggie, the way Elroy said. It might have been because she knew how dangerous he was, with his obsessive control and jealousy. Maybe her mother should have left.
Maybe she actually stayed because of Maggie. Her mother might actually have loved her.
That thought was horrible because she’d spent so many years hating her mother for deserting her. But it was also strangely freeing because Maggie hadn’t been dumped by the one person who was always supposed to love you unconditionally. And she hadn’t inherited some tendency to infidelity either. She was her own woman....
She’d always known Elroy was crazy. Maggie had distanced herself from his ranting and berating. That might be why she always called him Elroy, rather than Dad, or Pa, or whatever. What was surprising was that he hadn’t killed her after she started leaving the spread to rodeo and sell her horses. By then, he needed the money she brought back from those jaunts for alcohol, after he lost his trucker job. Must have frosted his ass.
A diesel pickup truck of some kind by the sound of its engine pulled up to the house. The door opened, and then the door of the shack.
“’Bout time you got back,” Elroy slurred. He had spent time between rants with the bottle.
Heavy boots came up on the porch. “She here?” a deep voice asked, ignoring Elroy.
“Yeah. Locked up in the bedroom. Where’s my money?”
“In good time. I want to examine the merchandise first.”
“Be my guest,” Elroy wheezed.
Maggie blinked against the darkness. Her father had... sold her? Panic rose through the fog in her brain. For what? A white slavery ring? A snuff film? Or just a night of rape?
Oh God oh God oh God oh God. This could not be happening.
The heavy boots clunked across the living room. Maggie shoved herself to her feet. She wasn’t going to let this guy find her crouched in a corner. Maybe he wasn’t as big as he sounded. She still had a mean right uppercut. She was definitely not going down without a fight. Outside the room, the chair was knocked away from the door.
The doorknob turned. The door rattled as the newcomer realized that Elroy had at least partially nailed the door shut. “You need to nail the door shut for a little five-foot-nothin’ girl?” Had he seen her? How did he know her? Who was this guy?
“She’s little but she’s tough,” Elroy pouted.
“Gimme your hammer,” the guy said, disgusted.
The next sounds were of nails squealing as they came out of the old wood. Again the doorknob turned and this time a channel of light blinded Maggie.
“Come out here, girl.” The silhouette now mostly blocked the channel of light.
Well, at least she’d be out where she might be able to make a break for it. Maggie stumbled to the door, her feet half-asleep, holding her hand up to block the light from the overhead bulb. “What... what do you want with me?”
“A little talk.” He reached in and grabbed her wrist in one huge hand. She was shackled as surely as if with iron. He dragged her into the middle of the room. She got the impression of brown hair and brown eyes, and a kind of a lumpy face as if he’d been in a lot of fights. He was dressed in black pants and a black shirt and a long coat of black denim or something. Elroy looked smug from where he sat at the claw-foot oak table.
“What about?” she managed, standing up straighter and shaking her head to clear it.
“What’s your power?” he asked, out of the blue.
“I... I don’t know what you mean,” Maggie stuttered.
So fast she couldn’t even flinch, he slapped her. Her head snapped to the side. “Let’s try that again. What’s your power?”
“I don’t have any power, I swear,” she said, her eyes tearing of their own accord. Her cheek felt like it was on fire. But this wasn’t anything she hadn’t felt before. She knew she’d live and that, if she had to, she could take a lot more where that came from.
“Tremaine tracked you all over hell and gone. Took you home to mama. That means you got a power.” The big guy’s teeth were uneven, like they’d been knocked around some and never straightened. “Why else would a Tremaine be interested in poor white trash like you?”
“She got a way with animals,” Elroy ventured. “Like I tol’ you.”
“That true?” the big guy asked.
Elroy had already spilt the beans. No use denying. “Yeah.”
“Well, it ain’t much of a power. But that must be it.” He had an idea. “You talk to them? Maybe see through their eyes?”
She shook her head. “I just calm them.”
The guy shrugged. “I guess.”
“Now, I want my money. I held her here, just like you said.” Elroy stood shakily.
“I don’t need to pay you,” the guy said, not even bothering to look at Elroy.
“You said you wanted her if she had magic. She calms animals. So pay up.” Elroy’s alcoholic belligerence seemed stupid when this guy was so big and so nasty.
The guy got an ugly little smile. “My boss wants her, even if her power is a shitty one. She’s got the gene.” Now he turned to Elroy. “But you don’t have a power. So she must’ve got it through her mother.” He grabbed Elroy with his free hand and hauled him over to the front door of the shack, which still stood open. “So we ain’t got no use for you.”
He shoved Elroy out. Elroy’s drink fell to the porch floor, shatter
ed glass tinkling as he stumbled out onto the sandy desolation of a yard. He was trying to get up, sputtering about a deal being a deal. The big man held out his hand like a traffic cop telling you to stop. Just as Elroy managed to get upright, the guy’s hand began to... to glow. It cast a ruddy light over the station wagon and the old rust heap of a pickup out farther in the yard. Maggie had never seen anything like it. Elroy backed up. The air filled with a palpable tension.
Then Elroy burst into flame. Not a piece at a time, but all at once like a torch filled with gasoline igniting. He screamed and ran a little way, waving his arms, no longer human but just flame. The flaming torch fell to its knees and the screaming turned into little sounds and then stopped as the torch fell over. The only thing left was this little black heap, flame flickering over it. The flames turned blue and finally flickered out, leaving the heap smoking.
Maggie’s fast little gasps didn’t seem to get any air into her lungs. Somewhere out behind the house a horse shrieked in fear at the smell of charred meat.
“Now that’s a power,” the guy said. She looked up at the pride in his eyes and couldn’t think. All she could see was Elroy, turned into a living flame. All she could hear were the small sounds he made at the end. Elroy might have been despicable, but he was still a human being. And, whether she ever wanted to admit it or not, he was her father.
The guy smiled at her. “Firestarter,” he said and looked back out over his handiwork. At last he sighed in satisfaction and, her wrist still clasped in the hand that hadn’t killed Elroy, dragged her back into the house.
Maggie’s brain started working again. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “So, I’m next on the barbie?” She hoped she managed cool and collected.
“No love lost between you two, was there?”
“Not much, no.”
“Your only choice is to join us and try to prove that your stupid-ass power can be useful, or....” He trailed off ominously.
“Yeah, I get it. Maggie O’Brian, Post Toastie.” Not much of a choice. She was out in the middle of nowhere with a guy who could start fires with his hand. “Think I’ll pick useful.”
01 Do You Believe in Magic - The Children of Merlin Page 27