Blood Hunt (40 page)

Reassured Lane could not be identified, Garreth felt as if his bones melted. He faded back against the theater ticket booth and slid down to sit on the sidewalk.

In moments feet gathered around him. Voices began exclaiming about his bloody jacket and the arrow protruding from it, began asking questions.

He ignored them. God he was tired...too tired to answer, too tired to feel suicidal any longer, too tired even to feel pain. He closed his eyes and shut out the world.

2

To Garreth, it indicated his state of debilitation that he never resisted being admitted to the hospital, refused to think about daylight turning the bed into misery, could not bother to worry about the results of his bloodwork, and did not even mind that they put him in a room with Duncan. Once Dr. Staab in the ER mentioned giving him blood, nothing else mattered. For all her deception, he knew Lane had not lied about recuperation and human blood. Blood revived him in San Francisco; he wanted it now, whatever it took to get it. He lay watching the blood bag slowly empty, feeling pain and weakness ease a little more with every drop, and fought an urge to just unplug the tube from the catheter in his arm and suck the bag dry. Fighting less because Duncan might see than the fear drinking human blood would give him a hunger impossible to satisfy with cattle blood and turn him into Lane, preying on people.

Duncan, of course, wanted all the details about what happened after Garreth left him in the alley.

Garreth sighed and said, “It’s a blur. I think I was running on pure reflex and adrenaline.”

He had a more complete story for Danzig in the ER, of course...that in pursuit of the assailant, whom he spotted smashing Castle’s front door — probably planning to steal drugs — he entered the drug store, where the assailant managed to get behind him and take another shot. But instead of going down, Garreth turned and grabbed the bow. At which point the assailant fled. Garreth again pursued him...caught up as they crossed the tracks and entered the southbound lanes of Kansas...and managed to grab the back of the assailant’s jacket. He did not see or hear the Trans Am until it was on top of them. He had not drawn his gun after firing once at the sale barn because pursuing his assailant took all his strength.

Danzig listened in silence to the end, then said, “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t call for backup after you were attacked at the sale barn, or respond to Doris and Duncan when they called you.”

Garreth shook his head in pretended frustration. “I kept trying. I heard them but they obviously didn’t hear me. I fell on the radio when the arrow hit me. Maybe that damaged the mike.”

Fortunately the radio was also a casualty of the fire.

Danzig appeared to accept that. The worst moment had come next, when Danzig said, “Tell me what you know about Mada Bieber.”

Garreth froze. “What does she have to do with this?”

“
Nothing as far as I know, but Anna Bieber has been calling the station. She hasn’t seen her daughter since the wedding reception but said Mada took a ride with you earlier and wondered if she said anything to you that might explain her disappearance.”

A loose end that needed tying up...in a way that never connected it to their John Doe assailant. He frowned as though thinking back. “Maybe, though I didn’t understand that at the time. She came out of the gym and asked to ride along with me, saying she needed to talk to me. What she wanted to was to tell me she’s my grandmother, that she lied to her mother about not being pregnant. She clearly felt extreme guilt about the lie, and about abandoning the baby. She said, ‘But I didn’t want him to suffer the stigma of being a bastard that I did.’”

Danzig said, “I guess there’s a part of your grandmother search I haven’t heard.”

“
A part I didn’t know myself until a few weeks ago. Anyway, Mada said she knew Colleen Mikaelian would be a wonderful mother, much better than she could be. ‘For years I thought about telling Mama,’ she said, ‘but I kept thinking how disappointed she’d be with me, and how people would whisper behind her, like mother like daughter and the daughter didn’t even have the decency to get married and give the bastard a name. I didn’t want to shame her that way.’”

An
ah-ha
look of understanding came into Danzig’s eyes.

“‘
Now the lie has come to haunt me,’ she said. I said, so tell your mother quietly. No one else has to know. She said if she did it would change Anna’s attitude toward me and everyone would figure it out. I said so let them. Anna didn’t let your birth shame her and she’ll ignore any talk about you.” When I dropped her back at the high school she said she was going to tell her mother. But maybe she lost her nerve.”

“
And took off? Without clothes, and without her rental car?”

Oh, god...that needed explanation. But not by him...not tonight. His brain felt like sludge. Maybe just as well. Pat explanations always sounded suspicious to him. He imagined they did to Danzig, too. So Garreth confined himself to a shrug. It hurt like hell. “She’s always kept in contact with Anna. Hopefully she’ll call or something and explain.”

Lying in bed watching the blood bag deflate and tuning out Duncan’s rambling speculation on the identity of their psycho, Garreth wondered how to have Mada make contact and establish herself as alive elsewhere, definitely separating her disappearance from John Doe’s appearance. When his brain still produced no bright idea, he turned to considering the real irony of the evening. Not long after Garreth arrived in the room, City Councilman Al Dreiling had come up the hall from his son’s room, the son Garreth might have killed while destroying Lane, to thank Garreth for saving Scott’s life. “I know he’s been a pain in the butt for you guys. Maybe this will make him finally listen to me and grow up.”

Eventually Duncan shut up. Garreth closed his eyes, savoring the silence and the feel of life dribbling into him.

“
Garreth!”

Maggie! His eyes flew open.

She hurtled across the room to his bed and crushed the nearest hand with hers. “What happened? How bad are you hurt? Doris called Helen, thinking you might need some things here in the hospital and she called me, of course. I — ” She broke off to frown across at Duncan, who eyed the two of them with raised brows and the start of a sly smile. “Okay, Ed, say it!”

He blinked. “Say what?”

“
Whatever smartass remarks about me or us you’re cooking up in your skull.” She straightened, hands on hips. “Now’s the time. Get it all out. Because if I hear anything from you later, or you start pulling your un-funny practical jokes, I will yank your nuts out through your throat!”

Duncan’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut.

“
Fine!” Maggie said, and stepped around the bed to jerk the curtain between the two closed. Then she pulled up a chair beside the bed and reached through the bed rail to take Garreth’s hand again. “You don’t have to tell me anything right now. There’s all the time in the world later. Go to sleep. I’ll just sit here until they kick me out.”

At a guess, looking at her jaw, no one better try. Garreth squeezed her hand back, smiling at her...and discovered he had no regrets about surviving the crash. His life — unlife — might be tangled in lies, but Maggie, like Baumen, gave him reasons to continue it, and learn how to enjoy it.

3

Where do they end, the roads that lead a man through hell?

Maybe with the realization that hell is only what people make for themselves, Garreth thought, lying in his own bed four nights later with his arms around Maggie, breathing in the sweet scents of her blood and skin and the musky one of sex.

Maybe it ended with atonement. He needed to make amends for killing Lane and using Scott to destroy her. As much as he disliked the boy, he felt sorry for him at the hearing today, no longer cocky but white-faced at the consequences of his recklessness. In the courtroom, Garreth silently committed himself to making friends with the boy.

He committed himself, too, to giving Anna Bieber friendship and support, to acting as the great-grandson she would soon believe him to be.

Lien gave him an explanation for Mada’s disappearance when he called her two days ago and told her everything...almost. Odd how he could confide so much in her...could confess to killing Lane, expecting understanding — which she gave him — ask her to abet a cover-up — which she agreed to — but still not be able to admit what he had become.

He thought maybe Lien could send a typed note to Anna, purporting to be from Mada, “confessing” to being Garreth’s grandmother and apologizing for running off because she felt so ashamed of having lied. Then the next time Lien read of an apartment house fire or other disaster with multiple casualties and some unidentified bodies, Lien would send another letter claiming to be a friend of Mada’s, regretting to inform Anna that Mada was believed to be one of the casualties.

“
It won’t work,” Lien said. “If she were alive, even if she confessed by letter, she would resume calling her mother. No, there must be nothing from her until we’re ready to have her die. I read about fugue states not long ago. I think she left the gym for a breath of air and met the man in this horror movie costume stealing the bow and arrows — you did say they found that’s where the weapon came from — and he attacked her. He slammed her head into the wall and that concussion caused her to enter a fugue state in which she thought she was one of her old professional personalities.”

“
Mala Babra,” Garreth said.

“
Good. As Mala, she didn’t know what she was doing in this strange town when she should be in San Francisco singing so she walked away and along the highway thumbed a ride with a trucker. She made her way back here by stages, stopping here and there to make money singing in bars and such. Once she reached here she began recovering her memory and contacted a friend, me, Lucy Lee. I will call your Anna, give her the story and say I’ve given Mada a sleeping pill because she was so bewildered, but Mada herself will call in the morning. Only I’ll call again to say with great regret that while I was out for the evening, because I’m a singer, too, my apartment house burned and Mada died in it. Or I assume so because she wasn’t among the survivors and there are unidentified bodies. I’ll even offer to send Mrs. Bieber the newspaper article.”

Which he hoped would put Mada to rest far from the John Doe — fortunately not autopsied — buried here. Buried but never to be forgotten. He planned to tend the grave as Anna would if she knew, and as a blood debt, a reminder of responsibility and accountability.

Maggie stirred in his arms. “Why don’t we move more to my side of the bed. Your side is so lumpy, like you have rocks in the mattress.”

“
Nothing’s wrong with that,” he answered, though he shifted her off the pallet. There must be a better way to have his sleeping earth. Maybe take fabric to someone and ask for a custom mattress pad with packets of earth sewn into the quilting, calling it an “holistic” aid to health. Further evidence that Californians were nutty, of course...which he hoped made his differences seem quirky rather than suspicious. “Contact with earth sets up positive resonance in the human body. My veins carry the blood of an ancient lineage who always keep close contact with the earth and barring accident or murder, live very long lives.”

She sighed. “You’re crazy, Garreth.”

“
Ah, yes, but it’s part o’ me charm, Maggie darlin’.”

She giggled and snuggled against his bandaged shoulder and side.

He smiled down at her. Maggie was not like Marti but even without being able to bare his soul to her, she filled some of his needs, as he did some of hers. The gulf between him and normal humans might be narrower than Lane thought, and bridgeable with care.

“
What did you talk about with your ex-wife today?” Maggie murmured.

“
Brian.” They agreed Dennis could adopt him, but have Brian hyphenate his last name to remain a Mikaelian, too. That satisfied Garreth’s parents, and Garreth, so he could keep track of his descendants. “Go to sleep. I need to run.”

“
You can’t lay off until your shoulder and side finish healing?” She shook her head and pulled the blankets over her head. “I always knew runners have a cog missing.”

The bandages were nothing but props now, the wounds under them just angry scars...soon to disappear altogether.

Sliding out of bed, he dressed in a warm-up suit and packed his bottles. The night outside was clear, the stars and sliver of moon bright as crystal in the icy sky. Garreth drew the air deep in his lungs and blew it out in an incandescent cloud of steam. He ran easily, enjoying his strength and endurance and the vision that turned darkness to twilight. Too bad he could not share it with Maggie, but... nothing is perfect and the solitude had its own pleasure.

The frozen ground streamed beneath his feet. When something moved in his peripheral vision, he smiled. Not exactly solitude. Three coyotes had fallen in behind him, tongues lolling in predatory laughter.

“
Hi, gang.”

He lengthened his stride. Far ahead, a herd of cattle lay dozing. With his shadow escort pacing him, he aimed for them. Nothing is perfect, so this was not bad. It was enough.