The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (27 page)

“Oh, yes. Of course I remember
her.” Alice’s voice was sad. “She had the most beautiful long dark curling
hair. And she was a sweet woman. Sweet, and a bit fey somehow.”

“As if she knew she’d never make
old bones
?”

“That’s exactly it. She told me
once that she didn’t expect to grow old.”

“People who feel that way can be
a little headstrong.”

“I suppose they think that if
their time is short  . . . yes, Rosella could be a little
reckless. Obviously. She went to the
wilderland
,
after all.”

“With that in his
background—you see my point, I’m sure. I’d like to give him the benefit
of the doubt, but the stakes are terribly high. We need to get the girl away.”

“My son will want to go with
her.” Alice’s voice was steady, but I heard the competing undercurrents.
Pride.Worry
. Relief.

“If he could climb that tree
last night, he can do it. He can row. And if I had my druthers, he’s the one
I’d choose to go with her, because I can count on him to protect her.”

Row? It was too much. I sat up
and opened my eyes. They both were watching me, and Sir Tom was smiling.

“Even with his injuries, the two
of them can row
around to the other side of the
island,” he said, still speaking to Alice as if I couldn’t hear. “It won’t be
easy, but I’ll medicate him first, and they’re both young and strong. And
there’s no other boat, so there will be no pursuit. You can see, dear woman,
that ultimately they’ll be safer.”

“You can’t be sure
of that,” Alice said.

Sir Tom shrugged in
acquiescence.

I got up and went to
the table. “What’s the plan? Where are we going?”

Sir Tom reached out
and took my hand. “Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild.”

A chill went down my
spine and I pulled my hand away. Those were Louie’s words, but different. Fairy
child, Louie always said.

Sir Tom nodded at
me. “You’ve heard it before, have you? ‘With a fairy, hand-in-hand, from a
world more full of weeping than you can understand.’”

His eyes fill with
tears. Then he laughed, too loudly, and around the room people began to stir.

“Hunting,
they called it,” Sir Tom said, rubbing a hand meditatively across his grizzled
chin. “When they could still talk. They made no distinction between animals and
humans.”

He was briefing us, telling us
where the stockade was located, telling us about the Guardians who had gone
rogue after the
time of the ashes
and begun
mauling and killing at random. I still didn’t know whether one of them was the
chicken vandal, or whether that was Jensen.

“Main thing is, you want to
avoid them,” Sir Tom said, as if any of us needed that particular warning. “It
isn’t all that hard to do. They aren’t really dogs, even if they try to run
around like them. They only have a human sense of smell and hearing.”

As for the stockade, Sir Tom had
not seen inside of it since he’d lost control of it six years earlier. “I came
down with a bad bout of flu,” he said. “Angel couldn’t take me down, but a
little bitty bug could and did, and Angel seized the moment.”

Based on its earlier state,
though, Sir Tom thought the stockade should still be well stocked with
everything we would need—weapons, medicines, food.

“It was intended to support
thirty-plus Guardians for five years at a time,” Sir Tom said. “Not that we
ever had to go that long between supply drops. And Angel and I both live off the
land as much as we can, so the canned goods and MREs should be largely intact.”

“Exactly who dropped the
supplies?” Farrell Dean asked. “And why? And from what?”

“That’s a fascinating tale for
another day,” Sir Tom said, frowning. “Today we focus on our plan. That’s rule
number one: Focus on what is at hand. Distracted leads directly to dead.”

He was going to teach us to
shoot. Then we would retake the stockade. Once we had the stockade, we’d have a
fortress from which to launch our attacks, and a refuge for the old and the
weak if we needed to bring them out of the city before emancipating it. We
would have a nearby place from which to send out spies to locate and persuade
sympathizers in the city, perhaps even among the wardens. We might even have
functioning communication devices and monitoring capabilities, if Sir Tom could
fix what he’d undone, or if Farrell Dean could bring something he’d learned
from
Meritt
to bear on the problem.

The only barrier was Angel.

I cleared my throat. “Do you
think we could negotiate with him? Maybe he’d join forces with us.” I looked at
Sir Tom, trying not to see the bandage on his leg. “I know you don’t get along
with him, but—maybe he’s lonely, out here with no one to talk to. And
what if he ever got sick, like you got sick, or injured? He could die out here,
with no one to help him. Maybe we could persuade him that he’d be better off in
the long term, if he’d agree to work with us now. And it would definitely
better for us if he were on our side.”

Cline snorted.
“Red’s always had a weakness for a pretty face,” he began.

Farrell Dean shook
his head, and Cline subsided.

“It’s a legitimate
question,” Farrell Dean said. “We can use all the help we can get. Sir Tom,
what do you think? Red can be pretty persuasive.”

A look passed
between Liza and Shawna that I couldn’t read, but which nevertheless made a
slow flush crawl up my neck.

Sir Tom seemed uncomfortable; he
looked everywhere but at me. Obviously he didn’t like my suggestion, but surely
it was a reasonable one. Angel very well might help us. We hadn’t exactly had a
chance to establish what he was like, what his intentions toward us
were—Sir Tom kept sweeping in, talking about Rosella, preventing me from
even having a full conversation with
the man.

Sir Tom looked helplessly at
Alice, and she stood up.

“Red,” she said, coming over to
where I sat, kneeling on the ground in
front of me.
“I heard him last night. He sounds sincere. But you don’t really know him.”

“You don’t know him
either.”

“That’s true. But I do know of
him. And what I know is not good. He has done things in the past that are
simply unspeakable.”

What else had Sir Tom told her
about Angel, I wondered
. And then I was back to the
question of how could we be certain Sir Tom was reliable.

“Couldn’t I at least
try to talk to him?” I said. “I don’t think Angel would hurt me.” I didn’t know
how to convey the odd feeling of familiarity that he gave me, and I didn’t want
to try to explain it, given the scorn on Cline’s face. If I gave him any
excuse, he’d make me sound completely superficial and unreliable.

Alice searched my face. “Angel
might not hurt you,” she said. “But what about everyone else? If he did agree
to work with us, you’d be trusting him with their lives.” And she gestured at
the rest of the room, at my friends who sat staring uncomfortably at us.

“What do you think?” I asked
them. “Does Angel scare you?”

For a long moment no one spoke.
Then
Ezzie
shifted, cleared his throat. He was alert
and in his right mind this morning, and the cuts on his leg had stopped oozing
and begun to scab over. But something about him worried me. He was a little too
bright-eyed, a little too antsy. It wasn’t natural, not after the harrowing day
he’d had, the injury, the restless night. The rest of us were dragging. Why
wasn’t he? Maybe he still had a little fever.

“Angel scares me like a cobra,”
he said. Everyone else nodded agreement with him.

Only Shawna, among the lot of
them, even looked ambivalent. She lowered her eyes and put one hand on
Ezzie’s
calf, feeling, I supposed, for heat or swelling.
Her eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. She had sat up all night with
Ezzie
.

“Cobra’s a perfect analogy,”
Liza said, nodding approvingly at
Ezzie
. “Hypnotic
and deadly.”

Again, the others
nodded—all but Farrell Dean, who stared straight ahead. Taking no sides.

For a long moment I waited, but
no one said anything else.

“All right,” I said finally.
“I’m outnumbered. We won’t try to negotiate with him. But I don’t want you to
kill him either.”

Sir Tom threw up his hands. “I
don’t want to kill him either, Red Girl. Never have. Else I could have done it
many a time, these long years past.”

So it was settled.

With a bit of muttering from
Cline we worked out a plan to distract Angel, to draw him away from the
stockade so we could snatch it up while his back was turned.

I would be the bait.

“I
don’t like this,” Farrell Dean said, looking down at the empty beach.

He must have been talking to
Cline, because he sure wasn’t talking to me. It was early afternoon, and he
hadn’t spoken directly to me all day long, had avoided looking at me or even
being in my vicinity. I might have been invisible, except then he’d at least
have bumped into me a time or two by accident. He was only with me now because
Sir Tom’s plan demanded that we wait together in the woods at the edge of the
beach. Some thanks for saving his life at the city circle, I thought irritably.
What on earth was wrong with him?

“I don’t like Red doing this
alone,” Farrell Dean said.

“She won’t be alone,” Cline
said. “I’ll be watching, and Sir Tom and
Ezzie
are
watching. If there’s trouble, we’ll step in.”

Farrell Dean looked over his
shoulder at the dense woods, where filtered sunlight made uneasy, shifting
shadows. “I hope the others don’t run into Jensen or the wild men,” he said.
The others were stationed near the stockade, ready to occupy it while Angel was
gone. “And I hope Alice is okay.”

Honestly, I had never in my life
seen Farrell Dean worried, and now he didn’t seem able to stop.

“Alice is fine,” Cline said.
“And it’s time. You’d better go.”

Farrell Dean nodded and turned
to me, looking directly into my eyes for the first time all day. He still
didn’t speak to me, but he looked so tense that my indignation evaporated.
Maybe his peculiar behavior had nothing to do with me. After all, he’d been
through a lot, and his back was probably hurting. And he had, as his mother had
predicted, insisted on being the one to wait for me in Sir Tom’s hidden boat.
The plan was this: After I distracted Angel awhile, I’d climb down the cliff to
the hidden boat below—“escape down the cliff,” was how Sir Tom put it,
making it sound as if Angel would try to grab me and tie me up, which I thought
was unlikely. Then Farrell Dean and I would row up the coast, land, and rejoin
the others at the newly retaken stockade.

I smiled at Farrell Dean, trying
to look reassuring. His expression didn’t ease, so I reached out and laid my
hand against his cheek. It felt rough, sandpapery under my fingers, because of
course he hadn’t been able to shave, not for several days.

For a second or two he didn’t
move. Then he reached up and covered my hand with his.

Cline cleared his throat
impatiently and Farrell Dean released me and stepped back. Cline stuck out his
hand and Farrell Dean started to shake it, but then they pulled each other into
a brief embrace. What was that about? They weren’t acting like themselves. I
wasn’t afraid of Angel, but they were scaring me.

“See you at the boat,” Farrell
Dean said to me. Then he turned and walked into the woods.

We watched him go, the woods
dappling the light that fell on him, glinting in his hair. He moved a little
stiffly because of his injuries, glancing warily around him as he went, and my
heart seemed to clench up. Something was going to go wrong. I could feel it. We
had a good plan—I knew we did—but everything suddenly felt out of
joint. The day felt false like the sunlight was false, unexpected and
unreliable this time of year.

Farrell Dean vanished from sight
into the shadows, and the instant he did, Cline rounded on me.

“Can’t you let him alone?”

“
What
are you talking about?” I said.

Cline smirked,
batted his eyes, and reached out and touched my cheek, as I’d touched Farrell
Dean’s.

I jerked away from
his hand, and Cline dropped back into his normal cynical expression. “You
should keep your hands off of him,” he said. “It isn’t right.”

“Isn’t
right
?” I said incredulously. “He’s my
friend. You just hugged him, and I didn’t even do that.”

“Come on, you know
what I
mean,”
Cline said. “You lead him on.” His voice was low but it cut like glass. “You’ve
always led him on. You make him think he has a chance, but he doesn’t, not with
Meritt
around.
Meritt
, his
friend. Couldn’t you even pick on two guys who weren’t buddies?”

“This isn’t the right time,” I
began, but Cline spoke over me.

“I know exactly how you play
him. Everybody knows. You e
ncourage him just enough
to keep him at your beck and call. Poor sucker probably thinks he stands a
chance now that we’re out of
Optica
and
Meritt’s
dead—and
Meritt
probably is dead, regardless
of what you want to think—regardless
of what any of us want to think, because he was our friend too, not just yours.
And how do you suppose Farrell Dean feels about that, being half glad that
Meritt
died? And died saving Farrell Dean’s life?”

My face felt hot and I was
beginning to tremble. I’d known Cline disliked me, but this—he downright
hated me. He thought I was a terrible person.

“And if
Meritt’s
dead and Farrell Dean ever does have a chance with you, you’ll make him pay.
You’ll punish him for not being
Meritt
. You’ll make
him wish he’d died instead, which is exactly what would have happened if the
Watchers had had their way. He’d be dead—he was the one, you know? The
actual guilty party.”

Tears welled in my eyes and
began streaming down my cheeks, and still Cline went on.

“So maybe you’re thinking it’s
his fault that
Meritt’s
dead, but it isn’t. If
anything it’s yours. Farrell Dean was always worrying about you going hungry,
afraid you’d get sick, afraid you were malnourished. The food he took, he took for
you. So if you want to blame someone for
Meritt’s
death, blame yourself. Don’t blame Farrell Dean.”

“Leave me alone!” I cried, and
turning away from him I started to run, out of the woods, onto the exposed
beach.

I ran toward the water, slanting
toward the promontory, trying to control my tears, trying to block out the
images of
Meritt
dying, of Farrell Dean avoiding my
eyes, trying to forget the loathing in Cline’s voice, the accusations he’d
thrown.

I got a stitch in my
side—it must have been the crying, because I’d hardly run any distance at
all
. I stopped, gasping for breath.

It wasn’t true. None
of it was true. I wasn’t responsible for
Meritt’s
death. I wasn’t responsible for Farrell Dean and his mother being put in the
city meeting. I wasn’t.

An image of
Cynda
crossed my mind, her wink, her knowing smile when Farrell Dean slid something
onto my plate. Did she think I was using Farrell Dean? And Shawna and Liza,
that glance when he said I was persuasive—but they were my friends, and
Cynda
was my friend, surely they couldn’t be my friends and
think terrible things about me?

Abruptly my surroundings came
into focus. I was almost to the promontory where the boat was hidden; just
ahead, on the last stretch of sandy beach before the rocks took over, I could
see the two rocks that marked the trotline. Blast Cline! I didn’t have my net
and bucket, no place to put the catch from the trotlines.
Under the heat of Cline’s verbal onslaught I’d left them on
the ground at his feet. Had I already screwed up the entire plan?

Looking around, I saw no sign of
anyone. The thin strip of sandy beach was bare of footsteps, save my own. The
tide was high; soon it would turn, the waves beginning to think about going
back to their home in the sea.

 
What should I do now? Go back for the
bucket? Lurk around here? Build a sand city? Sure. That would look real
natural. But I had to do something to make me look credible when Angel showed
up. If he showed up. What a letdown it would be, if we went through all this
and then he didn’t even come. We’d have to come up with some other way to
capture the stockade, or repeat this again and again until Angel finally
showed.

The sun went behind a cloud and
the wind kicked up, making me shiver. The sea was still beautiful, but it
didn’t look welcoming any more. Without the sun it looked secretive
, shifting, sinister.

“My poor child.”

I almost jumped out of my skin.
I spun around wildly, looking for him—there, beside the big rock, wearing
as usual his camouflage clothing. He was standing about twenty feet away, and
his gun was slung over his shoulder.

“He doesn’t understand you at
all.” Angel’s face was sympathetic.

My cheeks grew hot. Angel had
overheard Cline’s accusations?

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Angel
said. “You’re a beautiful girl, and men react to you. You can’t help that. You
aren’t responsible for how they feel about you, for what they do for you.”

Behind him the trees swayed
gently in the wind. I glanced at them, thinking of Sir Tom and
Ezzie
hidden somewhere, wondering who else had heard Cline’s
words. When I looked back, Angel had come quite a bit closer to me. Startled by
his sudden proximity, I backed away.

“
Shhh
,”
he said soothingly. “Don’t be afraid. I only want to talk with you.”

I shot a glance up the beach; no
one was in sight, just the sand and rocks, the tall trees and the shadows.

“He doesn’t understand you,”
Angel said. “But I do. I know what you want, what you need. And I can give it
you.”

“That’s quite a promise.” My
voice broke on the words.

Angel shrugged. “It’s simple
enough. You want
Meritt
. I can take you to him.”

The world spun wildly around me,
trees and sky and sea in one wild tumult, then slowly grew solid again. Angel
had not moved—if he’d come at me then, I couldn’t have moved
in time.

“Is he alive? Where is he? What
happened to him? Is he hurt?”

Angel laughed and held up a hand
as if to slow my questions. “He’s fine,” he said. “Would you like to go to him
now?”

I had taken two steps toward him
before I thought.

“How do I know this isn’t a
trick?” I said, stopping.

Angel studied me gravely. “You
don’t,” he said. “But it isn’t. You’ll find the outcome well worth the risk.”

And why not risk it? Even if
Angel was lying, if I went with him it would distract him long enough for the
others to take the stockade. Wasn’t that what mattered? Even if he was lying it
would just be me who got captured. Even if he killed me—which he
wouldn’t—it would just be me. The others would take care of the old
people, would change life in the city. They didn’t need me for that. Farrell
Dean might miss me but, as Cline had said, he’d be better off without me
tormenting him.

Then I remembered that Cline was
watching, Cline and Sir Tom and
Ezzie
. I couldn’t see
them, but they were there. And they had guns. They wouldn’t let me go with
Angel, and they might kill him if I tried.

“I can’t go with you right now,”
I said softly, and despite myself my eyes were drawn to the sunlit shadowy
woods, to the figures I couldn’t see but knew were present.

Angel’s eyes narrowed, became
cold and dangerous and unreadable, and sudden panic welled up in me. What had I
done?

Desperately I tried to think of
a way to keep his mind on me, not on the
men
in the woods, not on his now-vulnerable stockade.

“I’ll meet you later,” I said in
an undertone.

“Where?”

“The western gap. Where we met
last night.”

He nodded and his eyes went back
to looking benevolent, but then he began walking toward me, holding one hand
out as if to tame a wild thing.

“It would be better if you came
with me now,” he said. “If Sir Tom suspects you are sympathetic to me, he will
watch you closely. You might not be able to get away again, and then
Meritt
would wait and you would not come to him. Think how
disappointed he will be.”

But I had seen the coldness, the
calculation, though they were hidden now. Angel could shift so quickly.

 
Besides, how could this man possibly take
me to
Meritt
? He had to be lying.
Meritt
was either dead or locked up in the prison, in the city, surrounded by wardens.
I had almost sacrificed our entire plan out of stupidity, out of childish
wishful thinking.

I backed away for a few steps.

“You think I’m lying to you,”
Angel said. “And I can’t prove otherwise. I can’t prove that I can take you to
Meritt
, though in fact I can and will. But I can tell you
why I want to take you to him.”

Something in his tone halted my
retreat. He was no longer cajoling; he was speaking matter-of-factly, as if he
had dropped the act and was now dealing straight with me.

“I’ve seen the two of you out in
the dark together,” he said. “I know that you care about him and he cares about
you, and I know that the Watchers won’t let you be together.” He smiled.
“Believe it or not, I’m not too old to sympathize.”