The Night Strangers (39 page)

Y
ou had stood over each of the beds in the girls’ rooms on the third floor of the house, the pearl-handled knife in each case raised in your hand high over your head. And yet each bed was empty. Emily had vanished as well, the bed still made (and the knife, fortunately, still held by duct tape to the horizontal slat on your side). Her station wagon was in the driveway, which suggested that, when they left, they had left in someone else’s vehicle.

You wonder if they left because of the blackout. You noted in the kitchen that the digital clocks on the microwave and the oven were dark, and then in the girls’ bedrooms that the automatic night-lights were off. But again, someone would have had to have picked them up.

Since they are not with Reseda, the Hardins are the most likely possibility. And so you drive to their place, peering at the tortuous road before you, the wipers on Holly’s compact battling to keep up with the downpour and the lights no match for the darkness. But then, as you are approaching the Messners’, you spy a conga line of cars parked off to the side of the road and snaking their way up the driveway.

Of course. You are not alone in wanting the twins. You know what the captain knows and he knows that the herbalists want them for … something. You crush the brakes hard and park.

R
eseda hadn’t realized that John and Anise were taking the twins that very night. She presumed they would wait for the new moon, since the book suggested the tincture should be prepared when the moon was waxing, and now it would be waning for three more days. She knew only that the twins were in danger because Ethan Stearns had attached himself to the pilot.

Yet as she was approaching the Lintons’ driveway, before she had even pulled in, she saw headlights. She saw Holly’s car speed from the driveway onto the two-lane road, nearly sideswiping the mailbox in the process, and race away from her toward the village of Bethel. He must have accelerated to eighty or ninety miles an hour. Maybe more. Briefly she considered going to the Lintons’ as she had planned, but either they were already dead or they weren’t there. And she guessed it was the latter because Holly must have reached them by phone. She saw no lights on down the driveway.

And so she accelerated, hoping she could keep up with the captain, but she wasn’t sure she would succeed as she watched his red taillights disappear into the night. But she drove on as quickly as she could, the engine so loud that she could hear it even over the pounding drumbeat of the rain on the roof of her car. And then, as she was nearing the Messners’ home, she felt a powerful spike of unease rise up side by side with her frantic worry for the twins: In her mind she saw tall pillars of cedar mesa sandstone spiking straight into the air in the Southwest. There was an enormous amount of activity just beyond her aura, and she had the sense, despite the electricity in the air from the storm, that a gathering was nearby. She felt the presence, inchoate but organizing, of a crowd. And so she pressed hard on the brakes, the car swerving slightly on the slick pavement, and discovered instantly that she was correct. There was Holly’s car, empty, the front door wide open, the downpour saturating the seat and the upholstery on the inside of the door. It was last in the line of vehicles, most of which Reseda recognized. The Messners’ house was dark, but even through the storm she could see a weak penumbra of light emanating from the south side—the side where the large communal greenhouse was built—and so she started running across the yard, the rain-soaked grass saturating her canvas sneakers.

When she got to the greenhouse, she saw a window was venting steam from Clary’s cauldron, a massive wrought-iron pot that Reseda always viewed as a melodramatic affectation. But Clary loved it. A blacksmith had made it for the woman perhaps a decade ago, and she had an almost fetishistic attachment to it. Reseda gathered herself, unsure what she would say or do, and pushed open the glass door. She saw no sign of the captain, but there were the herbalists gathered in their robes, while one of the twins was teetering on her wobbly legs before the cauldron. They had pulled up the sleeve of her pajama shirt and were holding her naked arm above the kettle. Anise had the blade of the group’s ancient boline poised at the crux of the girl’s elbow.

“Anise, don’t do it!” Reseda commanded, aware that her voice could be firm and it could be cryptic, but rarely—if ever—was it menacing.

John Hardin took a sip from the chalice he was holding and then handed it to Peyton Messner. “I am one hundred and three years old,” he said quietly. “You know that, my dear.”

“And all of your extra time was at the expense of a twelve-year-old boy. I know that, too.”

He waved a single finger, correcting her. “All of
our
extra time,” he said, and then he motioned with his arm at the Messners, his wife, and Anise.

She looked at the group—the whole group—at the way their eyes were glazed and their skin was burning with anticipation. None of them would ever get any younger, that was a fact; but they all believed they could stall further aging for … years. The first tincture, built from the blood of Sawyer Dunmore, had given all of them who had gluttonously drunk from the chalice an extra three and a half or four decades. For someone like Clary Hardin, the best to be hoped for now would be to survive another three or four decades feeling seventy—but she was prepared to strike that bargain, especially since, like her husband, she was in fact well over one hundred years old. Meanwhile, someone like Celandine, the young state trooper? She would remain thirty, and what woman wouldn’t accept the energy and strength and firmness that came with being thirty for an extra third of a century?

“Where is Emily?” she asked.

Anise nodded toward the rear of the greenhouse. The woman was sitting in a wooden chair, slumped over, with Alexander standing behind her, his hands resting heavily on her shoulders. She stared at John, reading him, and saw in his mind what had occurred a few moments earlier: She saw Alexander throwing Emily to the ground and knocking her unconscious for a brief moment. The girls’ mother was still stunned. John looked away, but before he did Reseda thought she saw also what had happened to Michael Richmond last month: She hadn’t seen John’s entire recollection, but she saw that the old lawyer had used the very same knife on the psychiatrist that Anise was about to use to slice open a little girl’s arm.

“You can’t do this,” she said, speaking to everyone and to no one. She knew in her heart that they weren’t going to listen.

“Enough!” Anise told her. “This is not your decision. It’s ours.” And then she took the boline and scored the child’s arm from her elbow to her wrist, flaying the skin and allowing it to dangle over the cauldron as the blood spurted like a water fountain—Sage Messner, who had been helping to restrain the girl, dunked her mouth into the stream and swallowed a mouthful voraciously—before slowing to a steady rivulet.

“Blood meets seed!” Anise declared.

“And seed meets soul!” the herbalists raved.

And then as one they edged ever closer. The child was so drugged that she only looked down at her arm, a little curious as her blood trickled into the cauldron, but clearly she had felt very little pain. Still, Reseda rushed forward and wrestled the girl from Sage and Ginger’s grip, pushing the child’s thin arm into a V to try to stop the bleeding. But it was doing nothing, nothing at all. She needed a trauma dressing and stitches. Eventually, the child’s knees would buckle and she’d collapse onto the greenhouse floor. Still, Reseda wrapped her own arms around her, trying to protect her, as the circle of herbalists closed in upon the two of them.

“You’re killing her,” she said to them. “You’re killing a child.”

“Give her back to us, Reseda,” John demanded. “You know you can’t stop us. We’re going to finish this. Besides,” he wavered, his voice softening, “you’re one of us. You’re a part of us. You know that, too.”

They had, she realized, become animals. They were selfish, insatiable, violent animals. They needed blood, and they needed enough for all of them. She wasn’t going to be able to reason with them. Nevertheless, she said, “I’m not one of you. I was once. But I’m not part of this.”

“Reseda, really. The child is losing blood fast and it’s being wasted. Wasted! You’re a New Englander, how can you abide that? Besides: The more she loses now, the less she’ll have when we’re finished and the less chance she’ll have of—to use a term you’re fond of—going home.”

Anise was still holding the dagger, and so Reseda looked around for another weapon, her eyes scanning the tables and the floor of the greenhouse. On a wooden bench in the corner near her were a pair of one-handed garden clippers. There were shears just like them, it seemed, on most of the tables. The safety was open, which meant the clippers were splayed into a slender Y, ready to harvest herbs or trim dying leaves. With one thrust she could slam them into either John’s or Anise’s eyes, certainly blinding them and—if she drove the blades hard enough into the brain—in all likelihood killing them. The problem, of course, was that there were far more herbalists around her than only Anise and John. They would swarm upon her the moment she attacked either of their leaders, and she knew well how ruthless they could be.

Besides, she wasn’t built that way; she didn’t believe that she was capable of lodging the steel blades of a pair of garden shears in anyone’s eyes. Not even to protect a child. And so instead she did the only thing she thought she could do. “I’m a twin, too,” she reminded them.

“Yes, of course, you are. But you are also rather—and you’ll forgive me if this sounds ageist—old for our purposes,” John told her, his voice knowing and smug. “The tincture demands the blood of a prepubescent twin.”

“And you have some,” she went on, nodding at the cauldron. “You already have a lot. I know the recipe. Use what you’ve harvested from the child and then supplement her blood with mine.”

John turned toward Anise, his eyebrows raised.

“We’ll need a good amount, Reseda,” Anise said, a crooked smile on her face. Reseda knew that Anise did not especially like her, but she was unprepared for how happy the woman was to augment the tincture with her blood.

“I understand.”

Anise nodded and turned to Clary. “Put a compress on the child’s arm,” she said. “We have plenty of her blood already.”

Only after Reseda had watched Clary Hardin press a white hand towel against the child’s forearm for a long, quiet minute did she extend her own arm over the cauldron and allow them to roll up her sleeve and gouge a deep trench into the veins there. Anise made the incision, roughly and inexpertly, but Reseda didn’t watch. She focused instead on the moonstone at the tip of the boline handle. The cut hurt every bit as much as she’d expected.

T
here they are. There are the playmates your wondrous daughter deserves, standing perhaps a dozen yards apart, separated by a cauldron, each in the arms of those self-absorbed breathers. You stand at the entrance of the greenhouse as Reseda, looking uncharacteristically shaky, stares at something far away. Her arm is held over that massive black kettle, and the blood drips like water from a rusted-out rain gutter. They have not noticed you yet because they are focused only on Reseda and the girls, and they are in the midst of a euphoric chant about seeds and souls.

And so you charge, running across the greenhouse, oblivious to anyone and anything but the idea that Ashley will no longer be alone. But before you have reached the first of the girls, there is their mother, up and before you and throwing herself into your arms.

“My God, Chip!” she wails. “Stop them! They’re going to kill them!”

For an instant, you recall something. Them. Garnet. Hallie. They’re going to kill your children. The instant passes, because they’re not your children. Your child is Ashley. But that still doesn’t give them or you the right to kill … anyone. The whole notion has left you muddled, confused, and you find yourself staring at the knife as if you have no idea how it got into your hands. And just as you are starting to regain a modicum of your focus and your anger smothers your momentary befuddlement, the men in the robes—some, it seems, very old yet strangely strong—have a hold of your arms and the knife, and the greenhouse is filled with their admonishments to drop it, to stop struggling, to be still. You cry out against them, but there are so many and they are so forceful that they are able to pry the knife from your fingers. Your eyes rest on the women on the far side of the cauldron, and they stare at you, even Reseda, whose complexion is growing pale—as if the color is literally draining from her face and streaming into the cauldron. She murmurs, “Bring him to me,” and you are pushed forward so aggressively that only your toes are touching the greenhouse floor. She looks deep into your eyes across the black kettle and says, “I am telling you, she is gone. Your daughter is no longer here.”

She has said this before, and she will say it again. She will—

“I am telling you, your daughter is fine—but she needs you.”

She does need you. You are sure of this. A pitchfork leans against a glass wall, and the moment you spy it you rear up, bellowing like a wounded animal and breaking free from these old men. You grab it with both hands and jab at the crowd as they surround you. Once more you focus upon the children, standing a little stupefied with two of the older herbalists and their mother. And so you charge, the pitchfork a bayonet in your mind, only to be restrained again by the men and women in their robes. Their hands are everywhere upon your shoulders and waist and arms, and they are wrestling the pitchfork from your grip. And then abruptly they stop. You follow their eyes, but it must have happened so quickly that you are not precisely sure what occurred. Still, it appears that Anise and Reseda have collided and fallen to the ground as they tried to get out of your way. Or, perhaps, Reseda pulled Anise out of the way, trying to shield her, and the two women tumbled in a heap onto the greenhouse floor. Either way, when Reseda looks up at you, her face is oddly vacant. Almost bewildered. And then you understand why, as Anise is repeating “No, no, no!” over and over. Reseda’s blouse is black with her blood, and extending from that beautiful, swanlike neck is the long, elegant handle of the boline. When she fell, she fell on Anise’s hand and impaled herself on the knife.