by Jo Raven
Teancum opened the door and said, “Get in the car.”
Tryp slid in because he thought there was a serious chance Teancum would shoot him right there in the yard outside the front doors. His fingers felt empty without drumsticks, maybe because the old cigarette smoke that clung to the sun-rotted upholstery stank like clubs they had played in the early days of Killer Valentine.
Teancum put the rifle in the trunk and got in the car to drive. Tryp had a moment of hope that he could overpower Teancum if he didn’t have a gun, but as the other man twisted and eased himself into the car, a handgun on his far hip rotated into view.
Tryp leaned his head back against the headrest even though his arms behind his back bowed him forward. Fuck. He had known they might shoot him from the moment he’d gotten on a plane, but he had had delusions that he could somehow get Elfie to safety, that he could hold them off while Elfie sprinted back to the rental car, or something.
At least he had made sure the Elfie was as safe as she could be. He hated himself for letting her come with him. He should have walked away from her in Augusta, just left her standing by the bus and pissed off at him, but she would be safe. Kumen was going to marry her and rape her—helpless fury built in Tryp and threatened to shake him apart—but at least she wouldn’t be assigned as a handmaiden. That was worse. So much worse.
Tryp was going to fight, though. He was going to fight to get back to Elfie, to take her out of New Empyrean. He would fight until his last breath, until Teancum put a bullet between his eyes.
Teancum answered his cell phone, sighed, and hung up. He said to Tryp, “We’re going to set you on the road again, Tryfon, but I need your word as a man that you won’t come back and you won’t be talking about us anymore. We have two of your women now, Sariah and Elfie, and your behavior will determine their treatment.”
Cold relief gusted on Tryp’s face, and he sucked in a deep breath of sweet air and planned Elfie’s rescue for an instant until he figured out that Teancum might be fucking with him so he wouldn’t fight back on their drive out to some lonely spot in the desert. “Bullshit.”
“No, it’s not.” Teancum said, starting the car and driving down the driveway. His dry tone made Tryp think that someone else had made the decision not to shoot him. “The elders think that Twitter would go nuts,” his sarcastic tone broadened, “if the big rock star dropped off the map, and we don’t want to draw that kind of attention to ourselves. Nobody in small, conservative, faith-based communities wants to see the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’s black helicopters sweeping into town, chockfull of flashbang grenades and flamethrowers.”
When they reached the end of Kumen’s driveway, Teancum spun the steering wheel and aimed the car toward the highway.
Enough cars frequented the highway that Tryp could jump for it, and there would be too many witnesses for Teancum to shoot him. He was relatively sure that he would survive jumping out of the car at highway speeds. Maybe.
If he survived that, he could make it back and rescue Elfie before Kumen married and raped her. Maybe Sariah would leave, too.
But Elfie. His heart lurched at the thought of that old man asshole even looking at her, let alone—
Images of blood rose in his mind, and Tryp gagged but swallowed hard.
“So I’ll need your word,” Teancum said.
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I was just hoping we could be civilized about this. We’ll send pictures of what happens to them over Snapchat if you do or say anything.” He turned onto the highway. Cars whizzed around them until he got up to speed.
Tryp didn’t remember how to pray, but he sure as fuck remembered rage.
The first time he had been set out on the road, on a Tuesday morning about ten o’clock, his mother had told him never to come back or else Kumen would shoot him on sight. He had been a scared fourteen-year-old kid, grieving his lost home and family, and all he could see in both directions was mile upon mile of sun-steaming asphalt.
Tryp leaned back against his overbuilt arms in the car’s bucket seat and took deep breaths, just like the ones Cadell sucked in before going on stage every night. “You don’t have to do this,” Tryp said. “You can help me get her out.”
“Which ‘her’ are we talking about?” Teancum asked. He stared straight ahead, driving and squinting into the setting sun that blazed over the horizon.
“Elfie.”
“Not Sariah? The woman you keep coming back for?”
“Sariah has never wanted out. I wanted her to leave, but she won’t.” Tryp stared at the road that painted a straight, black line crawling with cars to the fiery horizon. He’d been keeping an eye on the odometer, judging how far they’d come.
Picking at the zip tie binding his hands behind his back didn’t help. He used a knife to cut those damn ties off his mic cord when he needed some extra slack. His fingernails didn’t even dent the tough plastic.
Tryp said, “I thought I could convince her this time because Kumen and the elders would beat her to blackmail me, but it’s useless. She’s told me, herself, so many times.”
Teancum’s stare hardened. His jaw clenched. “I don’t know what she really thinks,” he ground out through his teeth, “but Elder Kumen forced her to write that letter a few years ago. She is sealed for time and all eternity to Elder Kumen. You should stay away, regardless.”
Even a few years ago, Tryp’s soul would have soared to hear that Sariah had been forced to write that devastating letter that Tryp kept in his copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence. Now, it just felt like a hole in his chest had widened. She was a missing branch of his life, a future that never was and never could be. Even if it was a teenage thing—and, looking back, Tryp was sure that it was an adolescent crush—he should have found a way to convince her to go with him to safety. He had been fourteen, but he had left her behind.
He had lived in the outside world for as long as he had lived in New Empyrean, a world of kind people and choices, and the guilt of leaving her behind weighed heavier on him every year.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tryp said. “She told me no to my face twice. She could have walked away with me, but she didn’t.”
“So you do just want the girl.”
“Her name is Elfie.”
“Elfie? And I thought Utah names were weird.”
“Her real name is Elsa.” Tryp blinked, and he wondered if that was her real name. Elsa Hernandez? She must have used a fake I.D. to get hired when she was seventeen. No traveling tour would have hired a minor. Tryp had used the name Gunther Haas for four years in order to work at the music store for Gloria until he had turned eighteen, even though she had known his name and story within the first month.
“Elsa. Okay.” Teancum stared at the road and chewed on his lip. “You can’t come back, Tryfon. They will force us to shoot you next time. This desert is wide, and Sheriff Smith’s cadaver dogs won’t look in the right spot to find your body, not if Elder Kumen tells them to look elsewhere.”
“I know.”
“You were friends with my brother Coriantum.”
“Yeah.” Cory had gapped teeth and dark hair, and he was the only other black-haired kid Tryp knew. They had learned to throw baseballs together out in the tall grass, and Tryp had taught him to read. “Where is he?”
“He was set out on the road about a year after you were.”
A chill gripped Tryp’s back at the thought of Lost Boys out there and teenaged girls still in New Empyrean. Bitterness hacked up in his throat. “Did you ever hear from Cory?”
“No.”
Fuck. Cory was out there somewhere, too. How many other Lost Boys were out there?
Hundreds.
Maybe thousands, over the years.
Fuck.
Teancum pulled the car over on a dusty part of the highway. Tryp glanced at the odometer. They had driven seven and a half miles in this car that already had two hundred thousand miles on it. “Get
out.”
“You could help me save Elfie. She wasn’t born here. She must be terrified.” A cramp shot through Tryp’s heart at the thought of Elfie crying in a room somewhere. “You know that it’s the right thing to do.”
Teancum turned and pure venom filled his pale brown eyes. “I have two wives and five children. I may not be a perfect man, but I’m a damn sight better than anyone else they would be assigned to. Those are my kids. Little kids die if they get reassigned. I won’t endanger my kids because you brought a woman here when you shouldn’t have come here at all. Get out of my car.”
Tryp studied his terror disguised as hatred. “If you ever leave, if you ever put them in a car and drive away,” Tryp said, “find me, and I’ll help you.”
“Turn around.” Teancum flipped his pen knife open and popped the zip tie that bound Tryp’s hands. “Just get out.”
Tryp opened the car door and stepped out into the hot wind that blasted his skin.
Teancum drove away, skidding on the loose gravel, as soon as the door clanked shut.
Last time, when he was fourteen, the road had been blurred by Tryp’s tears and he hadn’t known where to go or what twenty dollars might buy him.
Seven and a half miles.
Tryp ran eight minute miles at that hardcore gym in Salt Lake City that Xan had forced them into before the Rolling Stone cover shoot, only a few months ago.
Tryp would be back in New Empyrean in about an hour, and the keys to his rental car still jangled in his pocket. He glanced down at his shoes, grating on the stony dirt. The hot afternoon sun reflected white stripes on the shiny black leather. The fashion guy had insisted that Tryp needed to wear proper dress shoes with the suit.
Damn. His running shoes were still in his suitcase.
Fuck it.
Tryp wasn’t leaving the woman he loved behind this time. He was going back for Elfie.
The Wedding Dress
Elfie leaned against the wall in the tiny bedroom, her eyes closed.
The brown stains on the mattress could be anything. The faint scratches in the white paint near the bed could be anything. Imagining what might have happened in here wouldn’t change anything, past or future.
Instead, she thought of Tryp and held him in her heart. If he was still alive, she hoped he was thinking of something beautiful and peaceful and not afraid.
Her eyes burned.
The flimsy door rattled when it opened. Sariah edged around the door, and Elfie looked down for kids but she had no children with her. Instead, Sariah held a white dress.
“Oh, no,” Elfie said.
“They locked my girls in one of the nurseries,” Sariah said, her jaw clenched tight. “Kumen wants to go to the temple immediately.”
“Don’t you have to send out invitations or something?”
“Not here,” Sariah said. “The head wife is already calling the other houses. Anyone who can come, will. Elder Kumen is very influential in New Empyrean. I’m sure there will be,” she sighed, “a lovely turnout for you.”
“I am not doing this. I will fight you the whole way.”
Sariah looked at her feet and swiveled one toe on the floor. “I understand. I really do. But they’ll beat you until you acquiesce. They don’t care if you go to your wedding bloody, with two black eyes, and your teeth all broken out, and Kumen doesn’t like his wives spending money on dentists and such.”
Elfie braced her arm against the wall as the room spun around her. “This isn’t happening. This is fucking insane.”
“Are you really a virgin?”
“Yes!”
Sariah’s gentle voice just scared Elfie more. “I was just asking because you’re not very young, and you’ve been out in the world.”
“I’m only nineteen! It’s not weird!” She shouldn’t have to defend herself for not fucking some guy yet. She had been traveling with the tour since she was seventeen and sure as hell didn’t like any of those other roadies as a boyfriend. The decent people among them were all too old and already married. The young guys did stuff with the groupies, gross stuff. She wasn’t ready and she had been through a lot and had just been really beginning to assimilate it and it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t, damn it.
“It will go easier for you if you are a virgin,” Sariah said. “You should thank him afterward, or else he gets mad.”
Acidic bile surged in Elfie’s throat. “Okay,” she said. “I need some privacy to change.”
“I could help you.”
“Just leave me alone and let me get dressed. I’m a modest virgin, remember? Just leave me alone.”
Sariah laid the dress over the broken dresser. “I’ll be just outside if you need help with the buttons or anything.”
“I’ll be fine.” Her brain came back online. “Wait a sec.”
“Yes?” Sariah’s sympathetic smile pissed Elfie off. If Sariah was so compassionate and attuned to Elfie’s distress, she should help her escape, not look at her with big, sad eyes.
Elfie asked, “Do you have some matches and a cigarette? I need a smoke.”
Sariah dropped the smile. “A cigarette?”
“Yeah. I’m about to be forced into a marriage to a sadist and raped, and then I’m supposed to thank him for it. I want a friggin’ cigarette.”
Sariah’s rosebud mouth stretched into a prim line. “I’ll see if I can find something.”
Perfect.
As the door closed behind Sariah, Elfie picked up the dress to look at it. Her teeth ground in her mouth, but she inspected the light, white cotton.
The dress’s full skirt had lots of space under it, kind of a floaty fabric, and there was an ankle-length cotton slip to further disguise anything she might be wearing under it.
She held the wedding dress up to herself and pressed it to her waist to check the length. Yep, past her toes. As always. God, she hated being so damn short. And it went up to her chin and had long sleeves.
Lots of space to hide all kinds of stuff.
Elfie draped the dress over the bureau again and took off her black cargo pants. She chewed on the pants leg below the bulging pockets and yanked, ripping the fabric to shorten them.
Wedding
Elfie took the half-used box of wooden kitchen matches and one cigarette from Sariah, and they went out to a balcony on the third floor, high above the scrub brush and sandy hills.
The afternoon sun cast black shadows on the desert around the house with clawing fingers. Elfie managed to choke her way through a third of the cancer stick before she declared herself too nervous to smoke and crushed it out, but the taste of a dirty ashtray lingered on her tongue. She had already slipped the matches up the long sleeve of her wedding dress. The voluminous skirt whipped around her legs in the desert breeze, but her ripped pants’ legs and heavy pockets didn’t show below the flapping hem.
A little while later, about four o’clock, Sariah had pinned Elfie’s hair into one of those ridiculous bouffant buns and she looked like yet another of the blond, prairie-dress clones. She was scrunched between two very pregnant ladies in the far-back seat of a fifteen-year-old mini-van. They were all driven through the oppressive sunlight to the temple in a long caravan of vans and big, ugly sedans. No one tried to talk to her, and Elfie pretended to sulk while she ground her teeth.
When they got to the temple, one of the larger buildings in the downtown area of New Empyrean, even though it looked suspiciously similar to the construction warehouses they had passed on the road on the way there, Elfie saw Sariah emerge from a similar minivan, holding one little girl’s hand and carrying an even smaller one. They stood among all the other women and children, huddled together.
So Sariah’s daughters were there, too, and they were all in one place.
Convenient.
Around Sariah, all the older girls, tweens and teens, held at least one baby or toddler and a couple kids in a flock, cooing and playing with them, just like the older sisters that Tryp had adored when he was a kid. There were dozens
of them, and the little kids clung to them and held onto their skirts.
“Sariah!” Elfie called out.
The woman looked around, her pale blond bun swiveling in the sunlight, but no one seemed to notice or care, so she brought her two girls over to Elfie and introduced them. “This is Zillah, and this is Milcah.”
Sariah was a beautiful woman, and she had beautiful daughters, both with rosebud mouths and heart-shaped faced under their baby-blond hair. Kumen and the other elders would find them comely and pleasing in ten years or so.
“They’re lovely,” Elfie said. She looked up into Sariah’s bright blue eyes. “Always keep them close.”
Sariah’s expression didn’t change, but she nodded.
Elfie really, really hoped that Sariah actually wanted to leave and hadn’t been either pacifying her or playing good cop to everyone else’s bad cop.
They filed into the low, squat temple, so different from the silver spires and soaring glass of the Latter-Day Saints temple in Dallas, probably because these people were a splinter cult in a stupid small town. The crowd of women and children stopped at a desk, where the head wife, dressed in a semi-shapeless pastel blue prairie dress but standing with authoritarian steel in her spine, spoke softly to a man there and presented him with a thick sheaf of paperwork before the mass of twenty-some wives and horde of children were allowed to continue down the hallways.
Sariah was walking beside Elfie, and she whispered, “They’ve decided not to do all the preliminary stuff. You’re just going straight to the celestial room for the wedding. They’re even letting the kids in. That’s odd.”
“Okay.” Elfie didn’t bother to ask questions. She didn’t plan on sticking around long enough for the answers to be important.
The crowd funneled through steel double doors into the temple proper, walking through large rooms that made no sense to Elfie, and through twisting hallways to a big chamber. The whole building, Elfie noted, had not only the silver spigots of a sprinkler system but also more than adequate fire exits for the couple hundred adults and children crammed into the rows of chairs and standing in the aisles and against the walls.