Moving Target (45 page)

No lights turned off behind them.

He hadn’t spotted any lights following him from the freeway to his home. No little pickup truck or pale Nissan sedan had been parked in front of North Castle, waiting for him to return. Nor had anyone been nearby, watching with binoculars.

Or if there had been someone, he or she hadn’t gotten into place quick enough to pick up the SUV when it left North Castle. No one had followed them from Palm Springs to the lonely county road leading east into the Mojave Desert.

Along with cars and concrete, they had left behind the lid of clouds that had settled over L.A. and was trying to engulf Palm Springs. Even without clouds, there wasn’t as much light as usual. There was no moon to separate the night into slices of silver and shards of black. Beyond the reach of the headlights, a bowl of stars glittered brilliantly overhead, almost bright enough to cast radiant, ghostly shadows.

Erik kept on checking the mirrors all the way up the asphalt road to the dirt road that led to shacks inhabited by a determined, far-flung handful of desert hermits. Lisbeth had once been one of them. The most resolute one. Her cabin was the farthest away and the best hidden.

Serena woke up when he turned off the county road onto the dirt road that twisted up and over several miles and many rumples in the desert floor, branching off to cabins or dead ends where the locals came to play with their guns. In the bright glare of headlights, the dirt showed signs that another vehicle—or vehicles—had been on the road since yesterday’s rain, but no matter how often Erik checked, he didn’t see any moving lights anywhere in the landscape ahead of or behind him. The graded dirt road stayed empty.

Unless someone was driving without lights.

As an experiment he killed the headlights and went with parking lights alone. Then he went with nothing at all. It was slower, but safe enough as long as you were sure you were the only one driving in stealth mode. The graded road didn’t have any potholes or rocky outcrops to snare the unwary. The ruts leading to the burned cabin were a different matter. They would require care and good light, especially after a rain.

He turned the headlights back on. If he was going to hit one of the big-eared local deer or a roving coyote, he wanted to see it coming.

“Well?” she asked, watching him check the mirrors.

“So far so good. Lapstrake must have decoyed Heller back in L.A. No one picked us up leaving my place in Palm Springs. No one is in our rearview mirror. Or in our windshield, for that matter.”

“Then why do you look like you’re attending a funeral?”

In the muted glow of the dashboard lights, Erik’s smile wasn’t much more cheerful than his expression had been. “Guess I’m just naturally a happy sort.”

“I think you’re cranky for lack of sleep. You should have let me drive part of the way and slept.”

“I don’t need much more than five or six hours a night.”

“Yeah? Any other vices I should know about?”

His smile softened into a real one. “Vice, huh? How much sleep do you need?”

Serena put the window down partway. Clean, crisp desert air poured over her in a reviving stream. “I’m a steady seven hours or more kind of person.” She inhaled deeply, letting the dry, pungent air seep into her, past her conscious mind, all the way down to the deep places where memories slept. “G’mom wasn’t a big sleeper. The older she got, the less she slept.”

“That’s pretty common after sixty or so. I don’t think Granddad slept more than two or three hours a night.” While Erik spoke, his glance kept shifting from mirrors to road. The farther up the graded road they came, the more turnoffs they passed, the less tire tracks there were. “Any guess about how many people live out along this road?”

“There are five houses, counting G’mom’s. Hers is the most remote. The turnoff we just passed leads to Jolly Barnes’s house—shack would be more accurate.”

“Jolly?”

“Yeah. You know, tall guys are Shorty and skinny guys are Hefty and—”

“Sourpusses are called Jolly,” Erik finished. “Gotcha. I take it Jolly isn’t?”

“He might be a regular wiggling puppy for all I know. I never got close enough to him to find out. Between the dreadful hand-rolled cigarettes he always smokes and the fact that no liquid ever saw the inside of his cabin or the outside of his body unless it came in a box of wine and then right out of him, Jolly is enough to wilt cactus at ten feet.”

Erik laughed despite the uneasiness prowling through him. He told himself the bug-crawling feeling on his neck and forearms came from just the darkness, just the multiple tire tracks on a rarely used road, just the approaching site of a murdered woman . . . anything but the man’s voice that was like his and not like his, an utterly familiar stranger speaking in the silence of his own mind, warning him that flesh was frail and death was final and arrogant pattern masters could make mistakes just like anyone else.

Silently he wondered if he should have let Niall come along.

The voice in his mind had nothing to say on that subject.

Thanks, buddy
, he thought sarcastically. Be sure to let me know if I can ever help you out.

Then he realized he was talking to the five percent of himself that he usually did his best to ignore. Not good. Next thing he knew, he would be seeing someone else in the mirror and speaking a kind of English that had been out of fashion for centuries. That was when the guys with the nets and really long-sleeved shirts would come for him.

“That turnoff goes to a ravine,” Serena said, pointing toward the right. “People use the place to turn bottles into little pieces of glass.”

“How far off the road?”

“Less than a mile.”

Erik turned the wheel and bumped down to the local target shooting place. Nothing was there but shattered glass glittering in the headlights and the darker gleam of spent brass casings. He turned around and drove back out to the road.

“See those ruts at the edge of the headlights on the left?” Serena said a few minutes later.

He made a noise that said he was listening.

“Those lead to Grandmother’s cabin,” she said.

“Where does the rest of the road go?” he asked, stopping at the ruts rather than turning off.

In the headlights, vehicle tracks were clear on the surface of the unraveling road. The tracks led away from the ruts that ended in a burned cabin.

“There’s a wash about a hundred feet up the road. It’s impassable except on foot. Some people park and hike farther into the desert from there. Most people just turn around and go back to wherever they came from.”

Erik drove up the little spur just to be certain that no one was staked out there, waiting. The ragged turnaround/parking area was empty. No one had parked there over the weekend and not come back. There were no fresh human tracks, nothing but desert and a four-foot drop into a damp-bottomed wash.

Without a word, he turned around just as previous vehicles had since the rain and headed back the same way he had come.

“You’re thinking like Grandmother, aren’t you?” Serena asked as he drove back to the ruts leading to what was left of her grandmother’s house and her own childhood.

“What?” he asked, scanning the ruts before he turned onto them.

“Paranoid.”

He didn’t argue her point. He should have felt better after he proved to himself that they were alone. There was no one parked where they shouldn’t be. Even more reassuring, the tracks he was leaving now were the first ones to mark the ruts.

He wasn’t reassured.

And the bugs didn’t stop crawling on his neck and forearms.

He took a better grip on the wheel and settled in for some bumps and surprises. If he had been able to come up with a better way to open Serena’s memory, he would have. He hadn’t.

So be it.

“How about you?” he asked. “Are you thinking like her?”

“I’ve never understood my grandmother, which was why her advice to think like she did when she was my age seems useless. I have a hard time even imagining her in her thirties, much less thinking as she would have thought then.”

“A woman alone, raising a child on a raw little homestead in the desert, all the conveniences of the early nineteenth century.” Erik shook his head. “No, I don’t see you doing that. But you had points of similarity with her.”

“Both women?” Serena suggested dryly.

“Both weavers. Both bound to the Book of the Learned in ways that are . . .” He hesitated. “. . . uncanny.”

For a time there was only the crunch and growl of tires over uneven, rocky road to disturb the silence. Then she sighed.

“What’s the point in denying it?” she asked. “The instant I saw those pages, something in me shook off a long sleep and said, ‘These are mine.’ It was the same for the scarf, except even more intense.” Her fingers caressed the ancient weaving. “Even as I say it, it sounds nuts, but . . .” She shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything. You can label it any way you want. I don’t care anymore. It’s real. That’s all that matters to me.”

“I know how you feel.”

She gave him a look he couldn’t read in the shadowy interior of the vehicle.

“I first saw a piece of the Book of the Learned when I was nine,” he said. “It grabbed me like nothing has before or since. Except you. No,” he said before she could speak. “I don’t have to like it. You don’t have to like it. But it’s damned real. I’ve chased that book my whole life. I dream of it, of writing its pages, of flying stormy skies like a peregrine and coursing the forest like a staghound. I dream of a woman with the violet eyes of a sorceress and hair like fire, watching me with anger and love and fear and desperation in her eyes. I suspect I watched her in the same way.”

There was a taut silence, a sigh, two words: “You did.”

Though her words were soft, he heard them. Something twisted deep in him, something like anger and love and fear and desperation.

“I don’t like the feeling of living someone else’s life,” Serena said tightly.

“Neither do I.”

“Would you cut yourself off from the Book of the Learned because of that?” From me? she asked silently.

“I’m not sure I have the choice.” His voice was as grim as the set of his mouth.

“Let me out.”

His head whipped toward her. “What?”

“Let me out here,” she said evenly. “Turn around and go home. I promise you, if I ever find the Book of the Learned or any more of its pages, I’ll give you as much access to them as you need. If I don’t have children, the book will be yours to pass on to your children. Agreed?”

“Serena, what in—”

“Stop the car,” she said urgently across his words, reaching for the door handle.

He slammed on the automatic locks and the brakes at the same time. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. It’s you, not me.”

He looked at her narrowly and felt the twisting inside himself again, colored shadows rippling, time overlapping, rage and love and desperation.

“You came to me once, drawn by a pattern you refused to see. I paid for being the lure. You paid for being lured. Our child—“ Her voice broke. She shook her head. “Never mind,” Serena said bleakly. “It was a long time ago. But what is the past and all its pain for, if not to learn? So go back to what you understand, Erik North. Let me go where I must.”

“I’m not letting you go anywhere without me until I know what the hell is going on!”

“Is that your choice, freely made?”

“What are—”

“Is it?”

Silence filled the car. Then he understood: she would never again take choice from him. The twisting ache in his gut eased. “Yes. My choice, freely made.”

She lifted her fingers from the door handle.

In a silence that seethed with uncanny shadows, they drove the last quarter mile to another Serena’s cabin.

T
he loom was there,” Serena said quietly.

Night was kind to the ruined cabin. The soot marks didn’t show on the high stone walls. The charred ends of roof beams didn’t look like black, rotting teeth. The shadows in the corners seemed to be part of the natural darkness rather than swirls of windblown debris and ashes.

She held the gently hissing lantern up so that the north corner of the cabin was illuminated. The jagged fingers of glass that still stuck up from window frames flashed briefly in the light. She moved the lantern again, remembering.

“Someone took the potbellied stove after she was murdered. I hope it works better for them than it did for us. Every time the wind blew from the northeast, smoke backed up into the cabin. That’s why G’mom liked to use the hearth, even though it didn’t warm the corners of the room quite as well.”

“Which part of the room did you sleep in?” Erik asked.

In the lantern light, he was all glowing bronze and stark black shadows, except for his eyes. They were pure gleaming gold.

“The west corner. We shared a bed at first. When I got too big for that, she made up a pallet for me at the foot of the bed, closer to the hearth, but not next to it. G’mom was always very worried about fire. Ironic.”

Serena turned slowly, taking the lantern with her. The feel of the cooling night, the warmth of the lantern close up, the subtle flicker of the light fed by pressurized gas, the distinctive smell of petroleum and hot glass, all were familiar to her. She could feel echoes of memories whispering . . .

She held her breath as memories rose, only to turn and slide back into darkness. But they left part of themselves behind. Part of her childhood.

He watched her, light and darkness combined, her eyes a flash of violet at midnight, her hair as wild as fire itself, light in one hand and time in the other; and he had never wanted her more.

With an effort he forced himself to look away. He stared at the hearth, which was opposite the loom. The floor there was stone. In fact, it was stone everywhere. He sat on his heels and watched light quiver over the floor’s rocky mosaic with each breath Serena took.

Beneath the soot and ruin, there was a pattern to the floor. Lisbeth Serena Charters had taken a lot of care choosing and placing stones. Like the walls, the floor was a composition of selected colored rocks rather than an aimless mixture of whatever stones were handy.