Strange Country (3 page)

She looked startled for maybe half a second; then she smiled, looked at the open cellar door, and said, “Yes. Last week, maybe?” Like it was a question he could answer. She added, “Cleaning, you know. Always something to put away.”

“To put something up there or take something out?” he asked.

“There’s nothing valuable in the attic,” she said, not actually answering his question. “There’s nothing up there to take.”

“Maybe.” He paused. “This is an old house. Are you sure you heard something inside the house?” He found it difficult to believe she’d imagined the whole thing. Mostly because he didn’t think of people that way. But also because Prue Stalking Horse didn’t jump at shadows or mistake the sound of a creaking door for an intruder. And then, there was the question he didn’t ask, the one that hung between them—why did you stay in the house if you thought there was someone upstairs?

Prue rose in a single fluid motion.

“When you were upstairs, did you notice anything … odd?” she asked. The way she looked as she said it was unsettling, like it was at least partly for this, this question, that she’d made the call to central dispatch in the first place.

“Odd in what way, ma’am?” he asked her. It wasn’t that he minded wasting his time—and this increasingly seemed like a waste of time—it was that it seemed like she did want something. She just wasn’t going to come right out and ask.

She seemed relaxed and cool once again. She tilted her head. “You have certain … talents, don’t you?” she asked.

For a horrible moment he thought she was actually propositioning him. Which had happened more than once. Women seemed to like him—until they figured out how much of a Boy Scout he really was.

“I mean”—she looked amused—“psychic talents. So I hear.”

“I’ve had … dealings,” he said. Hallie was the only person he’d ever talked to about his prescient dreams. Prue Stalking Horse wasn’t going to become the second.

“This house has a certain … aura,” she said. “I thought you might sense it. And if you did, there might be something you could help me with.”

“Ma’am,” Boyd said. “It is not appropriate to make nonemergency calls to emergency dispatch. People depend on me being where I’m supposed to be.”

“Well, I do think there was someone,” Prue said, though Boyd wasn’t sure he believed her. “Just not … problematic.”

“I’ll make another circuit outside,” he said, “before I leave.” He was tempted to issue her a written warning about the emergency call, but she’d just say she really did think there was a prowler and it wouldn’t go anywhere or make any difference to her anyway.

She walked back up the hall with him. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. “Maybe it was a raccoon.” She opened the front door and walked out onto the porch with him, flipping on the porch light as she came.

Something poked at him, like the undercurrent of an approaching storm, something not right that he couldn’t articulate, about the way she was acting, about one of the rooms upstairs, about something he’d seen that didn’t entirely register. Prue opened the porch door and a blast of icy winter air rushed in. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

He walked down the three porch steps, then stopped and turned back. He meant to tell her it was no trouble to come out, that it was his job.

He meant to tell her to be careful.

The crack of a rifle shot and the burst of blood on Prue’s forehead happened simultaneously. In one swift motion, Boyd grabbed her around the waist and threw her to the porch floor. He scrambled for the light switch and plunged them both into darkness. His breath came quick and sharp, puffing out in bands of silver. It was the only sound in the room other than the soft hiss of the storm door closing slowly on its pneumatics. He slid back to Prue and took her wrist. She had no pulse.

He hadn’t expected one.

“Chelly,” he said quietly into his radio. “Shots fired.” He gave her Prue’s address.

“What?”

Whatever she’d trained for, prepared herself for, thought she knew how to handle, it hadn’t been those words. She probably hadn’t heard anything remotely like them since she started working night dispatch for Taylor County or probably ever in her life. “Oh. Jesus.”

“Chelly,” Boyd said. His voice was still quiet, but insistent. Steady too, and he appreciated that, because his heart was thumping so loud, he was having trouble hearing. “Call the sheriff. Wake him up. Tell him Prue Stalking Horse has been shot and give him this address.”

He heard her take a deep shuddering breath. “Okay. Yes. Okay. Jesus.” Then she was gone.

Boyd figured it would be at least fifteen minutes before anyone arrived. He sat tight up against the inside wall with his pistol drawn as Prue’s body turned cold beside him and waited.

3

The phone woke Hallie while it was still dark outside.

She blinked, sitting up before she was even awake, but disoriented because it was dark and she’d been having a dream that she didn’t actually remember, except it was about escape and wanting and things that had never been promised, but could still be taken.

“Hello?” For a split second, she thought it was Death on the phone, thought he’d found a way to reach her through the hex ring.

“Hallie Michaels?”

She didn’t recognize the voice, couldn’t have recognized it, because it was mechanical, spoken through what she suspected was some sort of computerized voice synthesizer, deep and slow and flat like something ground from stone.

“Who the hell is this?”

“Hallie Michaels?”

The same two words a second time, like a recording, or like she should know who it was, which she didn’t and which, she figured, she couldn’t, given that it wasn’t anyone’s real voice; of that much she was certain.

She threw back the blankets, dropped her bare feet onto the cold wood floor, and started looking for jeans and a shirt. Nothing good was going to come from a computer-created voice calling her in the middle of the night, and she thought she’d want to be dressed before finding out what did come of it.

“Tell me who you are and what you want or I’m hanging up right now,” she said. She said it slowly, like maybe the problem was the person on the other end of the line couldn’t understand her.

There was a long silence and she almost did hang up, would have hung up except she was awake now and she wouldn’t get back to sleep wondering who was calling her at whatever the hell time this was.

“What do you fear?”

“What?”

“Do you fear death?”

“Who
is
this?”

Static filled the line, a sound in the background like sparks and shorting electrical wires, then silence.

“Hello? Hello?”

Damn.

Hallie looked at her phone. Dead.

She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling like she hadn’t slept and trying to figure out what had just happened—who that had been on the phone and why they were calling her. She wanted it to be nothing, to be a continuation of the dream she couldn’t quite remember. But the part of her that accepted ghosts and black dogs and everything else that had happened in the last half year, the part that moved forward in the face of things she didn’t want and didn’t need and hadn’t asked for knew that it hadn’t been.

She pulled on her jeans and a gray T-shirt, scrubbed her hands through her hair, and stalked downstairs. She plugged her phone into a wall socket on the far counter, flipped on the overhead light, and looked at the clock—five o’clock. So, not quite the middle of the night, though it felt like it. She’d have been up in an hour anyway.

Since she and Boyd had come back from the under, Hallie’d been waking regularly at two or three in the morning from dark dreams she didn’t really remember. They weren’t like the dreams she had when she’d first come home, all blood and screaming and the explosive sound of gunfire. Or even the ones she’d had right after the whole thing with Martin, when ghosts cold as winter nights had drifted through her sleeping hours, each one wanting something and each time not able to tell her what that something was.

These dreams were different. She wasn’t even certain they were dreams at all. She thought maybe it was Death, trying to talk to her again, come to repeat the question he had asked her once already—to take his place in the under. And even though she knew what her answer was, what it absolutely would be no matter what or how he asked, she didn’t want him to ask, didn’t want to answer. What if he didn’t accept no? What if he took her anyway? He was Death. He’d spared her once, back in Afghanistan. He could change his mind.

And now, someone had called in the middle of the night to ask her what she feared. Why? Was it a joke? It had to be someone she knew. But if so, who? Almost no one knew about Hallie’s encounters with Death. And most of them were dead.

She stood in the middle of the room for a minute, then let out a breath, like a horse’s huff on a frost-sharpened morning. She moved to the kitchen table, sat in one of the battered straight chairs, and pulled on her boots. It felt like someone else’s kitchen table, which it had been and technically still was until probate was settled. Hallie had permission to stay there, though, to take care of the property and the horses. Pabby—Delores Pabahar—had left the ranch and everything on it to Hallie in her will, which wasn’t so much of a windfall as it sounded, or as Don Pabahar, Pabby’s son, tried to make it sound. The ranch was small; it had water problems. No one had made a living on it in years.

She pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and her barn coat, grabbed a cap and gloves and an iron fireplace poker, and went outside. It was too early, really, to move hay to the racks for the horses and check that the water in their troughs hadn’t frozen, but she was up and she needed something to do, so she did it anyway.

None of the chores she meant to do lay outside the iron hex ring, so she leaned the poker up against the side of the barn before she began. She carried it pretty much everywhere these days, because there might be a gap in the ring, because it paid to be prepared, because the world was a dangerous place. She grabbed two small square bales from a stack against the lee wall of the barn and crossed to the corral. A lean-to covered the near end where the horses could get shelter in bad weather and contained a long hayrack against the fence. She dumped both bales into the rack, hopped up on the railing, leaned over, and cut the strings of the first bale, pulling the twine from underneath the bale as it spilled sideways. Then she did the same with the second bale. The horses she’d inherited from Pabby approached quietly, almost like shadows themselves, and took what felt like their assigned places, four of them at one end of the rack and the fifth by itself at the other. She’d need to move one of the big round bales later in the week, but these would do for now.

Afterwards, she made a quick circuit of the perimeter. Pabby’s mother had buried the giant hex ring around the house, the barn and part of the lower pasture almost fifty years ago. It kept out ghosts, black dogs, reapers, and, Hallie figured, pretty much any other supernatural creature, including, she hoped, Death. There was a break in the ring back when the walls to the under had been torn, though she’d repaired it since. Eventually she intended to dig up the whole thing in sections, inspect it, and repair it where necessary. Later, when she actually owned the place. For now, she settled for checking it regularly. Not that she could see anything or tell if there was a break, since it was buried six feet deep.

She checked it anyway.

It was still dark and her feet crunched on the frost-hard grass as she walked. She could see headlights way off to the south and she wondered if it was Boyd, knew that he was working nights, and that he drove past the ranch at least once each shift. Usually not more than that. He covered a big area. But it was enough, she thought, to know that he was out there.

It was while she was watching the lights curving along the road that something lighter than the shadows beyond the yard light caught her attention. Whatever it was, it fluttered like an old flag a dozen yards along the driveway. It hadn’t been there when she came outside. Or she hadn’t seen it. But it had been darker then and still. She looked around now, her back to the front porch—force of habit, because there was no one and she’d known there was no one, because she always looked. Always.

She grabbed the fireplace poker from where she’d left it earlier. The iron was cold even through her gloves, but the weight of it felt reassuring in her hand. She headed down the driveway and stopped when she reached the edge of the ring. She had only a few more feet to go, just six steps. Six steps outside the ring. She didn’t have to do it. Not right now. She could wait until it was light, until she could see exactly what it was from inside the ring, until she could be absolutely 100 percent certain there were no reapers or anything else from the under waiting out there for her.

Yeah.

She pulled in a breath and let it out.

Damnit.

She lived here. This was her place. She would go where she needed to go. Had to. She closed her eyes. Opened them. Took another deep breath. Her hand gripped the poker like a lifeline.

She stepped out of the ring.

Something rustled in the tall grass to her right and she took an immediate step backwards, hand gripping the poker like it was a baseball bat. She stepped forward. Nothing. A frigid gust of wind heeled the brittle grass over with a long sigh. Then the wind died and it was quiet. When Hallie moved again, the scrape of her boots against the dirt seemed like the only sound in the universe.

Six steps.

It was a fence post, an old wooden one that she didn’t remember being there before, not this far up the drive. Lashed to it with what looked like half-unwound baling twine was a piece of heavy paper with thick writing that she couldn’t make out in the dark. She took the note and kicked at the post with her foot, hit it solid with the sole of her boot. It shattered, like it was a thousand years old, crumpling to dust. She could see what remained, in the weak light from the yard and the fading moonlight, ash and char. There was a smell too, something she couldn’t identify, old and dry and brittle.