Blood Rites (21 page)

He’d done it so well, she’d never even noticed when he’d stolen her name from her mind! But she hadn’t liked him doing it, apparently not at all, because she dropped him and slid quickly to the far side of the shed.

Amazed at her fear, Patrick padded over to Donna and squatted beside her. “I am sorry, Donna Harper,” Patrick said. “I would not hurt. He hurts.”

“Who?” she whispered, her eyes wide and frightened as she strained to see his face.

“Russ,” Patrick told her, then added one more though’t from her mind, “your father.” Fear and anger had done something wonderful to Patrick. He felt stronger. Smarter. Quicker. He thought of how angry Dickey would be and began to laugh, that high-pitched titter Alan always found so disconcerting.

Donna began to scream.

She was still screaming when Russ pulled her out of the shed, dragged Hillary inside, then pushed in Alan. Alan’s lip was cracked, his head bleeding. It smelled wonderful to Patrick and he crouched beside the boy and began to lick the wounds the way he had Donna’s tears. “I read her mind,” he said happily to Alan.

Alan sighed. He couldn’t think of any way to explain why Patrick should not have done that. Even if he could, he wouldn’t try to control the child without Hillary’s assistance. “Untie me,” he asked the toddler.

“I made him stop hurting you,” Patrick added. He brushed Alan’s cheek with his hand, then crawled behind the older boy and untied him.

Alan’s eyes had grown accustomed to the light. He picked up a dirty sleeping bag and covered Hillary, then turned his attention to Patrick’s bloody hands. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“Russ hurt Hillary. I wanted to stop him.”

Alan pulled out a few more splinters, then sucked on the wound. The blood tasted strange—like sucking on a copper penny that had been dipped in salt and honey. He spit out a sliver of wood and sucked again. “Does this hurt?” he asked Patrick.

The toddler waited a long time to reply. “No,” he said. “No. More.”

Alan wasn’t certain what Patrick meant. “Do you want me to pull more slivers?” he asked.

—More blood— Patrick replied, showing him what he could not express with words, their bond strengthening, how easy it became for them to communicate when they shared each other’s blood.

—What good will that be?— Alan responded and sensed no clear reply. He continued pulling splinters out of Patrick’s fingers and sucking the wounds to clean them. The toddler’s soft hair brushed his cheek and he held Patrick tightly, too frightened of the truth to ask him anything about Hillary.

Donna paced nervously in front of the fire. Russ had already told her to shut up but she kept on talking regardless of the risk. Actually Donna would risk anything to keep from getting locked in the shed with that monster again. “I tell you, Russ, that little kid knew my name,” she repeated. “And he knew about us in Wyoming. About how my father used to hit me.”

“A good guess. Considering all the noise he makes, his father probably belts him too,” Russ replied.

“Ask him how he knew. And while you’re at it, take a good look at him. I know lots about babies and he isn’t built like one at all.”

Russ put down the Austra report. “All right. If it will make you shut your damned mouth, I’ll look at him.” He unlocked the shed and pulled the toddler out, kicking Alan back when the boy tried to follow. He took Patrick to the fire and stood him upright. Patrick managed to stand for a moment, then his hips unlocked and he fell forward, flat-handed onto all fours. “Long arms,” Russ commented.

“Long legs. Long fingers. Russ, toddlers are pudgy and weak. And they don’t talk, not like he does. And when I was in there, he was licking my face. His tongue felt rough. It’s not right, Russ. There’s something strange about him.“

Russ studied the toddler. “What’s your name?” he asked after a while. When Patrick didn’t answer, Russ looked at Donna in disgust. “Get a blanket and cover him up, will you?”

Donna brought a woven Indian blanket from the car. Patrick shrugged it off. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked him.

Patrick shook his head. Russ reached for him, gripping him hard while trying to stick a finger in the boy’s mouth to feel his tongue. Patrick retaliated with a deep bite. “Shit!” Russ swore and slapped the toddler hard on his naked buttocks, then tossed him on the ground, holding him down while he pried the toddler’s jaws apart and angled the boy’s head so he could look at his teeth and tongue. He backed off after a quick glance. Patrick twisted out of his slackening grip, retrieving one of the bracelets that had broken off during his struggle. The toddler held it tightly as he moved away from Russ, a hand on his shoulder, covering a deep gouge one of the rocks on the site had opened during the struggle. Russ pointed at the bracelets. “Ask him what those are,” Russ ordered Donna.

Donna did and Patrick responded. “The blue and green ones are mental colors. The red and gold are effort colors. I have six . . . six more than Dickey because I did well.”

“Christ!” Russ said as he heard the precise speech of the toddler, then leaned forward watching the child carefully as Donna questioned him.

“What did you do well?” the girl asked.

“I walked with just my feet. I told Alan the numbers on the blocks. I told him what Mother was doing outside.”

“So he’s smart, so what?” Russ commented, not certain what he’d seen or felt, still trying to deny the obvious.

Donna ignored him. She pulled three pieces of yarn out of the blanket. “Show me the game and I’ll make you another bracelet. Lots of them.”

Patrick did. He showed Donna everything he could do while Russ sat dumbfounded, watching the two of them. Patrick was proud. He got a dozen more bracelets. And just like he’d promised Alan, he never said a word to Russ.

Much of Russ Lowell’s deadly skill came from his intelligence and his mastery of the unexpected. Now, with so many of his careful plans destroyed, he sat and considered his dwindling options.

The kids had finally told him the truth. Dick Wells was in the mountains. He wouldn’t be back for days. The trade of Wells for his son, a trade Lowell had no doubt he would eventually obtain, would have to wait.

In the meantime, the kidnapping might be discovered or the family might return and report it.

But would they? He’d wondered about that even before Donna had displayed the toddler’s strange mental powers. Now, he had a good inkling of one reason why they wouldn’t.

After he locked the toddler with the others in the shed, he studied the Austra global reports. He had no trouble understanding the data or even in accepting it. But the facts astounded him. Where in the hell did they get this information? How much did they have to pay for it? And to whom? Or did they just read minds the way the child was apparently able to do?

How much would this data be worth to a government obsessed with spies and communist plots in the military? In the media? Even in the police?

Enough to buy more than one man’s freedom, of that he had no doubt.

Every plan he’d made suddenly became unimportant. He wrote a cryptic, unsigned note for his employer, then shook Donna awake and the two of them drove away, heading for Powder River.

As they pulled up at the two-story rooming house, the largest building in the tiny town, Russ warned Donna, “Not one damned word to Halli about the kid, understand?” He didn’t need to be any clearer about which kid. She knew that Patrick had become their secret.

Not that she had any chance to open her mouth. Russ had

162 Elaine Bergstrom pushed her up the stairs ahead of him and as soon as Russ’s partner saw her, he ordered her into the bathroom and shut the door. “Hey,” she called to Russ. “How long should I stay in here?”

“Until we tell you to come out,” the other man said. “Take a bath. And keep the water running.”

Donna followed the orders and turned on the tap, then stared out the window at the quiet street below. She saw an older woman walk from the rooming house to the gas station across the dusty street to get a bottle of cold pop from the soda machine. As she returned, the woman wiped her forehead with the side of the bottle.

Donna could call out, beg the woman to help her, and hope that Russ didn’t hear. Maybe she could just climb out the window and make it to the ground and get to the police before Russ even knew she’d gone.

And then what? If they caught Russ, he’d probably say she was an accomplice. If they never caught him, they’d send her home. Neither option was a good one. She leaned against the sink and stared at herself in the yellowed mirror.
You’re a survivor. You’ll be all right
, she reminded herself, then, with a resigned sigh, she took off her clothes and stepped into the tub. She looked down at the old bruises on her wrists and breasts, noticing how they’d faded to dark patches. No new ones had taken their place. Since she tried to kill Russ Lowell ten days ago, he hadn’t hit her. Maybe he respected her, maybe he was just preoccupied with the kidnapping, or maybe he guessed, correctly, that for the moment threats were enough.

She turned the faucet down to a trickle and leaned back in the tub, trying to listen to the discussion in the next room. The men were angry, she could tell from their tones, but they kept their voices low. She could make out only a few words. Eventually, she stopped trying and concentrated on washing off the most recent traces of Russ Lowell.

IV

Alan coughed. The motion roused Patrick who slept in his arms. The toddler stretched and, as he remembered where they were, gripped Alan’s shoulders so tightly that Alan winced.

“Dark,” Patrick commented.

“It’s nighttime.”

“I am hungry. I want Mama.”

“So do I. Can you find her?” Alan asked.

During the long silence that followed, Patrick lay limp in his arms. “No,” the toddler finally said and followed that with a long groan of misery.

“Are Russ and Donna back?”

“Yes. They made a fire.”

“Was Hillary ever awake?” Alan asked.

“Yes. Her head hurt. She liked talking to me.”

Patrick took Alan’s hand and placed it over the bracelets on his arm and demanded his payment for spying outside. “Make me one more,” he said.

Alan felt dangerously close to tears. Knowing they were useless, he sniffed them back. “I wish I could, Patrick. But the yarn is at home. After we find your mother, I’ll make them. Do you understand?”

Patrick’s deceptively delicate hand touched Alan’s face. “I do,” he said. He rested his head on Alan’s chest. His breathing slowed and evened as he fell asleep leaving Alan awake, trying to come up with some plan.

Alan lay close to Hillary under the damp sleeping bag and reviewed everything he knew about the Austras. He had thought he was only dreaming of Helen since she had left home but apparently he had actually seen her. He wished he could do that at will and somehow talk to her the way she did to him the night she went hunting.

When she took him with her!

“Patrick,” Alan whispered and lightly shook the child until he stirred. “Patrick, I think I can find your mother but I need your help. When we find her, you must talk to her. Do you understand?”

164 Elaine Bergstrom

Alan felt a buzzing in his head and the darkness diminished. He was above the shed, looking down at Donna cooking dinner, Russ napping in the car. Without really seeing it, or knowing how he sensed it, he felt Hillary wake and wrap her arms around him and Patrick. Her mind merged with theirs and together they moved higher, in an erratic wobbly spiral that made Alan queasy.

Alan held with Patrick as long as he could, then began fighting the toddler’s hold until, with what felt like a pinch between his eyes, Patrick let him go. “But I went far,” Patrick protested in a voice far too loud.

“Shhh. Of course you did,” Hillary said.

“But you can’t go far enough,” Alan explained.

“You said I must help.”

“And you will.” Alan tried to make his explanation as simple as he could. “I dream about your mother but I can never talk to her. You must go with me—in my dream—and when I see her you must talk to her and stay with her in your mind until she finds us.”

“No. Dreams are bad.”

Alan slapped his hand on the shed floor, let out a long breath of air, and tried again. “Some dreams are bad. This one will be good. I will dream about your mother. When I do, can you go into my mind without waking me and come with me to see her?”

“This is help?”

Alan nodded and Patrick nuzzled against him. —Like this?— he asked.

There’d been only a slight buzzing, certainly not enough to wake him up. “Exactly,” Alan said.

Alan rolled over. His head hurt, breathing had become difficult again, and the shed floor was cold against his shoulder. Even so, it had been a long, terrifying day, and filled with need, he focused his mind on his cousin and slept.

I

Helen dreamed of them speaking to her—a long way off it seemed but distance made no difference now. Hours had passed while she held Dickey and slept, conserving her strength, waiting for darkness and this calling in her dreams. She woke in the center of the night, powerful, ready for her first human kill.

She doused the fire in the stove and put a squirming, protesting Dickey in the shoulder pack he hadn’t used for months. After ordering him to be quiet, she strengthened the bond with her cousin and her missing son. The stars swirled around her as her mind soared toward them, while her body swiftly followed.

Helen reached Russ’s campsite an hour before dawn. She unstrapped Dickey’s harness and ordered the boy to stay quiet and hidden. When he had done as she asked, she crouched in a stand of scrubby bushes at the edge of the clearing and studied her prey.

Russ had loaded his supplies into the trunk of the car and was just bringing out the children. Alan led, followed by Hillary carrying Patrick and, behind her, a fourth, a girl a little younger than Hillary who seemed as frightened of the man as the others were. Helen heard the man calling the girl’s name, the girl answering in a tense even voice. Donna and Russ. Russ . . . the one she would kill.

The rifle Russ carried made Helen nervous. She didn’t know how quickly her body would heal if she were wounded so she moved cautiously closer to the car parked at the end of the rutted drive. She would wait until Russ reached the driver’s side of the car where he would be near enough to her that she could take him by surprise. Once her hands reached him, he’d have no defense.