A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose)

by Charlaine Harris

  “He was ill?”

  “He said he’d been unconscious last night because he used so much magic in resurrecting Moses the Black. And then turning him into a statue. Maybe this morning, killing Dr. Gimball and putting everyone at the hospital to sleep so we could get you out … maybe that was too much.”

  Eli slumped against the doorframe. “Lift my arm,” he said.

  “Put it where?”

  “On Felix’s neck.”

  “We were just talking about killing him! I don’t want both of you dead from your own magic overuse.”

  “Do it.”

  Eli sounded pretty stern. I said a few things to myself, but I lifted his arm and blessed the length of it. I put Eli’s big hand on Felix’s neck, still warm.

  “Keep your hand on top of mine.”

  I pressed his fingers hard. And I felt Eli’s magic flicker into being, run through me like I was an electric cord, and magnify through my strength into something big and powerful. It passed into the blood vessels and muscles of Felix’s scrawny neck. I felt the magic falter when it met up with death, but it kept pushing at that thing in Felix, pushing it out of his body, replacing it. I was getting weaker and weaker, but I couldn’t let go of Eli’s hand.

  “Eli,” I said with great effort. “I can’t.” I thought I was going to die giving Felix life. And that was not my way to go.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “One more minute.”

  My life was going to last one more minute.

  But it didn’t have to. Felix whispered, “I’m back.”

  Then I was on the ground.

  I was never completely out. That meant I could hear a car coming fast from the direction of Sally. As Felix and Eli climbed slowly from the car to tend to me, I croaked, “Car! Car!”

  They both turned their heads to the east at the same time, like deer on alert … or birds when a hawk flies above them.

  A car pulled in behind us, and to my shock and dismay, who should climb out but Mr. Mercer. Still alive. “You took everything away from our town!” he yelled. “Everything!” He was wearing the clothes he’d had on yesterday, which had been soaked in the rain and then bled all over. And he was staggering. And he was a terrible color.

  Would he never die?

  Oh, for God’s sake. We had gotten away from Sally and its weirdness and nastiness. But here came Sally after us.

  Mercer still didn’t know shit. As Felix and Eli raised their hands, with the slow movements of exhausted men, I eased my Colt from its holster with the sloppy movements of my weak hand. I gathered the little bit of energy I had left. As Mercer yelled at Eli and Felix, I whipped up the Colt and I fired.

  Got him. In the foot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We loaded him in his car and pushed the car out into a field,” Eli was saying. He was looking down at me, and we were moving. “We made it look like a snake bit his foot. We fired his gun, like maybe he’d seen the snake close to his feet and shot at it, and hit his foot instead.”

  “Not bad,” I said. My voice was weak and faint.

  “Felix made his foot swell up. What was left of it.”

  I nodded. Just a little bit, since otherwise my skull might crack; that was how delicate I felt. I was not used to this at all. Also, my head was on Eli’s lap. Not used to that either. We were in the back seat. I rolled my eyes to see Felix’s dark ponytail. He was driving.

  “We’re back in Texoma,” Felix said. “Just barely.”

  Show-off. I’d been just about to ask where we were. From the light, it was late afternoon. Days were getting shorter. That was good.

  “We’ll stop soon,” Eli said, stroking my hair back.

  “Okay,” I said. Or I think I said it, before I went back to sleep.

  Next thing I heard, Felix and Eli were arguing over my head. Not about my head, just over it. Two angry but quiet voices.

  “We need to stick together.” Felix.

  “We need some quiet privacy.” Eli.

  On it went, each restating his own opinion. Finally I realized I’d have to intervene. “I’m not going to bathe in front of you, Felix,” I said. “I get a room alone with Eli.”

  So then we were stumbling down a hall. Eli was laden down with our bags and his own weakness. I was walking, but I had one hand on the wall to keep me straight. He unlocked the door. Then we were in, and there was a toilet and a sink in the room. I used both, and brushed my teeth, and crawled into the bed in nothing. Oh, it felt so good. The sheets felt clean, the night was cooler, and when Eli slid in beside me, I felt like everything was right. I was asleep the next second.

  After all that, I woke the next morning by five. It was dark, but dawn was approaching. Eli was still asleep. I crawled over him as careful as I could to use the toilet, and I noticed a note had been pushed under our door.

  That was a bad way to start the day. No one ever slips you a note to tell you that all is well with the world, or that they love you more than anything, or that breakfast will be ready whenever you want it.

  The room was too dark to read the writing, the toilet and sink weren’t in a separate room, and I was anxious. I found a match in my bag, flicked it with my fingernail, and it sizzled into life. The message read, Eli, I must go. Take the car and get out of here. They’re on our track; they’ll catch up today.

  “Well, hell,” I said, loud enough that Eli made a mutter of protest.

  “Shake a leg, Eli,” I said. “Your buddy Felix says you and I got to get out of here. Except he forgot to mention me.” In ten really unpleasant minutes, we were in the car and on our way. We’d left some money under our key on the front desk. For the first time, I saw that our hotel was almost by itself in the woods right off the highway. There were a couple of cottages and a body shop business.

  I volunteered to drive. I was more alert than Eli. “Look at the map, if Felix didn’t take it,” I said.

  Eli found it folded in the glove compartment.

  “I think we need to get off this highway,” I said. “We got half a tank of gas, so if we find a good paved road to turn left on, we can dip south a bit and then meet the highway again farther west, if the roads are real bad.”

  Eli had to switch on the overhead light to study the map. It was hard on my eyes. I was glad when he switched it off. “We’re coming to an intersection in seven miles,” he said.

  I kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if there were any lights behind us. Not yet.

  “You got any idea how Felix left?” I said, since the darkness and monotony of the empty road were about to make me crazy. I was hungry and thirsty, I felt grubby, and worst of all I felt separated from Eli in a way I couldn’t pin down. Maybe because I thought he and Felix knew each other better than he and I did, and that hurt, which was stupid. Felix and Eli had trained together and lived in the same circle for years, I figured. Felix probably knew Eli’s sisters. Maybe he partnered with them at dances, if Russians had dances. Felix didn’t think I was good enough for Eli. I could not talk to Eli about that. It would mean I thought Eli and I had a future together, which was something I tried not to imagine, because it wasn’t going to happen.

  I spotted some lights, way back.

  I said, “Someone’s behind us.”

  “Turn right as soon as you can.”

  I saw a decent road coming up, and I turned.

  “First open area you see, park.”

  We went a ways before I spotted a good place. The side of the road was open, both north and south, for about ten feet. Looked like there had been a small fire there that had gotten out of hand for a few minutes. I pulled over to the right.

  “Go into the trees. If they try to kill me, shoot them all.”

  Without a word, I grabbed my rifle from the back and took off running. Had the guns all ready, of course, and they were fully loaded. I always checked that first thing in the morning, if I hadn’t remembered to do it last thing at night. The sky was lighter by the minute. The sun was just up.
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  I found a good tree and scrambled up it so I could get some oversight. When I looked down, there was a sleeping black bear about ten feet away in a natural depression in the ground lined with old fallen leaves and pine needles.

  I tried not to picture what would have happened if the bear had woken as I started up the tree. You never could tell with bears. Sometimes they did their best to get away from your area. Sometimes they charged. I had not been careful to be quiet.

  I made myself forget the bear and sight through the Winchester on Eli, who had gotten out of the car to lean on the trunk. He wasn’t wearing his hat, and he hadn’t had time to tie his hair back, but at least today he was wearing real clothes. He did not look my way. After a moment I could hear the car coming up fast.

  And then it skidded to a halt.

  Three people piled out of it, two women and a man. The women were both redheaded, and though it was hard to tell in the light, I thought they were twins. The man was black. They were all wearing grigori vests, which settled that.

  Eli had said that I had to wait to kill them until they tried to kill him. There was a long, uneasy silence among the four grigoris.

  “Where is the woman? The gunnie?” The black man had a heavy accent. I couldn’t place it.

  “I left her to make her way home,” Eli said. “You needn’t bother to look for her. You won’t find her. Why are you here? I did what I was sent to do.”

  “We don’t believe you should have come at all,” said one of the women, her voice calm and confident.

  “Why?” Eli sounded truly surprised. “This was the wish of our late tsarina, that people here should see a better way, that black people should be free. Kasper, you should understand that.”

  The black man said, “There’s more to this than freedom, Eli. There are economic …”

  “Oh, bullshit!”

  I’d never heard Eli say that before.

  Then he said, very clearly, “There is no point in waiting.”

  That was clear.

  The red-haired woman on the left raised her hand to fire some kind of power at Eli. It was too dark to be sure I had a killing shot, but I could hit her. I shot her and she went down. Quick as a wink, I shot the other woman, a gut shot. By that time, Kasper was running back to their car, and he was harder to hit. But I winged him in the right shoulder, and when he was on his way down I shot him again. Took care of him.

  And the bear woke up, of course. It charged Eli.

  “Get in the car!” I screamed, and by some miracle he made it into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. I didn’t want the car any more banged up than it already was, and I prepared to shoot the bear. I didn’t want to. It went against my grain to kill an animal I couldn’t eat.

  And then a good thing happened. A deer, really a fawn, maybe startled by the gunfire, blundered into the clearing and ran for the other side.

  The bear took off after it.

  I didn’t question luck, good or bad. I was down the tree and dashing for the car. Eli leaned over to push open my door, and he took my rifle from me and put it in the back seat. When I was sure the bear wasn’t coming back, I took the grigori vests off the dead people and handed them to Eli. I had to shoot one of the women again; she wasn’t quite gone. I had to move their car, too.

  Finally, we took off. The whole thing had taken maybe ten minutes, but it felt like a lot longer.

  I kept driving until we had to stop for gas.

  No one else came after us. Or if they did, they didn’t catch us.

  We didn’t see Felix—or anyone else we knew—and we joined back up with the highway about thirty miles later. It was easier and faster driving, but it was also the road anyone searching for us would take.

  We ate quickly in a diner in Texoma. Chicken-fried steak and the last of the summer squash and biscuits. I felt real glad to be in my territory. We were low on money, and that worried me along with about ten other things.

  I began driving for Segundo Mexia. Eli didn’t say a word, yes or no. He slept a lot of the time. When he was awake, we didn’t do a lot of talking. But I was thinking as I drove, and the first night we turned to each other in bed—he mostly had to let me take the reins because he was so fragile—I had some questions afterward.

  “Did you know Felix was going to do all that with the bones?” I still felt kind of hurt when I thought of it. I had believed the bones were alive, that Moses the Black was with us, and I was not much of a believer in anything. I hated Felix for doing his sorcery well enough to make me wonder, and I also thought the better of him for trying to do such a bold thing. And he had done it so well. I would sure like to punch him in the nose, though. Now that I’d brought him back to life.

  Eli ran his hand across my stomach, up and down it, rubbing it and patting it. He really liked my stomach. He said, “What would you do if you thought I was running after someone else?”

  That was a shocker of a subject change.

  I started to give a teasing answer. Like, I’d shoot you first and her next. But I thought again. Eli had sounded serious.

  “I would walk the other way,” I said. “I am too proud to try to hold on to a man who would treat me that way. I would tell you I wished you well, but for a while that would not be true. I would hate you. But in time, weeks or months, I guess … I would get over the worst of the pain. And I would hope someone new, someone better, would cross my path.”

  “You would not hope that I would come back?”

  That surprised me. “I would not take you back.” That was all there was to it.

  “Why not?” He was dead serious.

  Seemed so plain to me. “You did it once, you might do it again. I try to learn from my mistakes.”

  “That seems almost … manlike.”

  “Don’t you ever think women are always the ones who ruin relationships. If you stray, you deserve the backfire. I’ll tell you something. Dan Brick isn’t any more than a friend to me. But I know he would never do me that way if I took him on.”

  Eli was silent after that, and I was glad. I had said my say, and I meant every word. I knew Eli must have some princess or a fancy rich woman to go back to. How could he not? And I knew when this little jaunt was over, he’d go back to the HRE. He’d probably get some title or medal for helping the black people of Dixie get some rights, since of course they’d want to join the church that had taken off their chains, namely the Russian Orthodox Church. And if all the blacks in Dixie joined the Russian Orthodox Church, and they began voting, they might think it was a good idea to be allied with the HRE. And if that alliance didn’t work, it had only cost the tsar some money and some expendable gunnies and grigoris. I knew the grigoris I’d killed had another point of view, but I could not imagine what that was.

  We reached Segundo Mexia after three more days of hard driving. We arrived after dark and helped each other up the hill to my cabin, leaving the car parked outside of John Seahorse’s combination stable and garage. I’d left a note on it that said, $75 and it’s yours to turn into what you want, if you do it quick. Lots of people in Segundo Mexia could use car parts, no matter where they’d come from. It would be like holding bait over a hungry fishpond.

  I unlocked my cabin door and turned on the lights. Someone had been in it while I was gone. There were flowers in a jar on the table. Nothing else was changed.

  “Your admirer has been here,” Eli said, caution in his voice.

  “Me and him’s going to have a talk real soon,” I said.

  “I believe you,” Eli said. “But right now, even if I didn’t, I’d say I did, because I have to lie down on something that’s not moving.”

  I figured out after a second that he meant the bed, not me. I’d been thinking, I move plenty when the occasion calls for it. “Okay, let’s go to bed,” I said.

  We both used my bathroom (consistent running water courtesy of Eli) and washed our faces and necks, and I pulled on an old nightgown, and Eli pulled on nothing, and I got him to cl
imb in first against the wall. We were in my place and it was my job to defend him. It felt so strange to be sleeping with him in my home.

  It felt good.

  Early next morning, I walked down to my mother’s and Jackson’s house. I hadn’t wanted to leave Eli, but I had to. Mother hadn’t left for work, and Jackson was reading his morning paper. My mom hugged me and didn’t cry, which was the best I could hope for, but Jackson gave my battered self a steady look.

  “I’m back, but I don’t know how much peace I’ll have,” I said. “I got Eli with me, and he needs some days to get better. Then I’ll try to get him on the train for the Holy Russian Empire.”

  They both stared at me with real serious faces. Mother and Jackson both wanted to know whether my relationship with Eli was one that would break me, or just a little thing. I could not tell them one way or another.

  “So I don’t need nobody—anybody—to tell strangers where I am or who’s with me. I might not get the drop on ’em next time. Might not have any warning.”

  “You need me to bring you some food to cook?” Mother asked me.

  “Yes, ma’am, since I can’t go shopping. I know that everyone on the hill will know I’m home, but I think I can trust ’em to keep their mouths shut.”

  “I’ll take care of ’em if they don’t,” Jackson said. “You in love with this man?”

  “I am.”

  Mother’s eyes widened. “You love a grigori.”

  “He isn’t anything like Oleg Karkarov.” My father. Whom I’d killed.

  “Must not be,” she said quietly. “You got good sense.”

  “But I know he’s gonna leave,” I said. “He’s got to go back.” I shrugged. “That’s it.”

  They both stared at me, and then my mother nodded. Jackson touched my shoulder. Conversation about Eli was over.

  “You heard about the train wreck?” I asked.

  “Charlie’s wife and Jake’s man came by to tell us how much they appreciated your letting them know, and that you were fine when you sent the message.”