Unforsaken (5 page)

I was too anxious to thank her. I grabbed it and hit the answer key.

“Hello?”

“Hailey, it’s me.”

Kaz
. “Where are you? Are you safe?”

“On my honor.”

Relief washed over me.
On my honor
was our safety phrase, something Kaz’s dad used to say to him long ago, before he left to fight in a war and never came back. When Anna and Prairie had given us the phones, we had all settled on the phrase as a way to communicate that we were safe and alone, that there was no one with a knife at our throat or a gun at our temple.

“Oh my God, Kaz.” I wanted to let the story rush out—
They have Chub and Prairie and I’m on a bus and the cops are after me
—but I knew I had to be careful. I moved to the back of the bus, where there were no other passengers who might overhear, and then I forced myself to take a deep breath before I
told him everything: how I’d seen Prairie’s jacket on the hanger, as if she was going to be back any moment; how the cop cars had pulled up in front of the preschool; and how I had heard the children’s laughter but I hadn’t been able to see Chub.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on a bus. A city bus. I took the first one that came. I don’t think anyone saw me. It’s … we just passed the U.S. Bank building.”

“Hailey.” Kaz’s voice was gentle. “I don’t even know what city you’re in, remember?”

That was right—I had never told. “I’m in Milwaukee,” I said, and with that one revelation, I knew that everything had changed. We were a team again, me and Kaz, with an impossible challenge ahead of us. But I had learned to focus on the first step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that. We had a chance if we just put one foot in front of the other.

In my heart I knew that it was a fantasy, that our odds were nearly impossible. But for the moment I chose to pretend. After we settled on a plan, I hung up and looked out at the streets of downtown Milwaukee, at all the people going about their business. Nice, ordinary folks who’d never had to discover a terrible secret that changed their lives forever.

I managed to keep the denial going for a while.

When the city bus came within a few blocks of the Amtrak station, I got off and bought a ticket and a sandwich
and a magazine I didn’t read, and waited in the station with all the other passengers until it was time to depart.

A year earlier I wouldn’t have known how to buy a ticket, where to wait, what to eat. Every decision would have frightened me. I had never left Missouri, and I could count on one hand the number of times I’d left Gypsum. I had never shopped in a department store, had a real haircut, eaten in a nice restaurant, gone to a concert, or kissed a boy.

Now I’d done all those things, and more. Prairie had been there for me every step of the way. She knew when I was afraid and she always made time for me, whether it was to take me on my first visit to a real doctor, to teach me how to ride public transportation, or to help me balance my checkbook. She’d created our new lives with great care, making my safety her foremost concern. And she’d been right to worry, even as I chafed under her rules, even as I broke them, even as I resented her for loving me enough to keep me safe. She’d given me everything, and I’d thrown it away.

As the Chicago skyline came into view outside the train window, I picked out the Sears Tower, the Hancock building, all the landmarks I’d come to love in the brief time that Prairie and I had lived with Anna and Kaz, and wondered if I was a city girl now.

But deep down I knew that despite my new confidence, my new look, I still didn’t know who or what I was.

I got off the train hoping Kaz would be waiting for me—and knowing that he wouldn’t. We had learned to be a lot more careful than that. I kept my sunglasses on, an expensive
pair that had been a recent splurge on a shopping trip with Prairie, and walked purposefully in the direction of the shops lining the edges of the train station. I pretended to windowshop, pausing in front of a little store jammed with racks of costume jewelry.

I lost track of how long I’d been standing there. A minute, two, five. I watched the reflection in the polished glass, a thousand people with a thousand different destinations.

“Hailey.”

I had been waiting for his voice, but I still jumped; my thoughts fell away and I blinked and spun around and there he was, right in front of me, and for a moment I forgot everything else.

“Kaz,” I managed to whisper, and then I was lost in his arms.

“G
IT UP
,” R
ATTLER
S
IKES
muttered, his lips inches away from Derek Pollitt’s freckled ear. It had been no problem letting himself in through a poorly secured ground-level window at Derek’s place, which was really just the basement of his mother’s crumbling ranch house on the west end of town, not far from the old Pack’n’Save they’d shut down when they built the Walmart Supercenter over in Casey. Kids took potshots at the sides of the Pack’n’Save building now, and spun donuts in the parking lot on days when slate skies left a slick layer of ice on the pavement.

Rattler himself had let out some of his extra energy there a few times on days when all that power inside him felt like it wanted to itch its way out and leave him twitching and empty, days when he felt like
it
controlled
him
rather than the other way around. He didn’t like that feeling, no, not one bit.
Days like that he split wood for hours, working in the freezing cold with no shirt on, feeling the splinters bounce off his torso, smug in the knowledge that they’d leave no mark on him. Or he shot a couple dozen rounds at the
n
in the abandoned store’s sign from across the parking lot, feeling the restlessness ease its way back down with every shot that met its mark.

Which was all of them.

Today, though, he hadn’t come over to this side of town meaning to shoot anything. He’d shot enough yesterday. He’d seen them coming, waited stealthy and still in the corner of the parlor, and sure enough, in they came sneakin’, too dumb to know what they were up against. Rattler nailed one of them in the heart and the other between the eyes, and weren’t they a sight, tumbling to the floor like the cowards they were.

The thrill of the blood hunt was still in his fingers, making them sure and strong. And now he was about to sign himself up a lieutenant.

If that was what it was called, anyway. Rattler had never been in the service, didn’t know anyone who’d served, and made the mental connection only because it sounded like a second-in-charge, a right-hand man, which was what he wanted. He didn’t want a
partner
. He didn’t need an
equal
. What Rattler wanted was someone who would do what he said without much fuss, someone who understood a basic concept and was clear on a result and would do what it took to get from one to the other without wanting to run the show.

And someone who was Banished. It might as well be another Banished. Not because Rattler needed anyone else’s visions, especially given that there wasn’t another man in the county who could predict which way the wind would blow to save his life, and hadn’t been in an easy couple of generations, not since most everyone had gone and married outside and diluted the line. No. He wanted a Banished man because it felt right to him in the same way it felt right that he’d put on his grandpa’s silver watch that didn’t keep time and nodded as he left the house at the old family portrait of his great-grandparents that hung in his hall—because this was about getting back to the past, to the way it was meant to be, to the way it was ordained before the Families left the soil of that village in Ireland so many years ago.

Derek Pollitt wasn’t the worst of them and he wasn’t the best. He had a taste for weed and a pint-a-day rum habit, but that made him about ten times as reliable as the ones who’d gone down the prescription-drug road. Those ones twitched; those ones were about as skittish as a burnt cat. They forgot whether they were coming or going, and Rattler didn’t need any of that.

Ironic, really, since he was doing this for
them
. For all the lame-ass diluted-blood breed of the Families, those who’d tossed away their heritage the first time they’d caught sight of a tight-fitting skirt, chasing tail all over the county and fathering any number of spawn with the gift so weak in their blood they’d be hard-pressed to know it was there. It didn’t make any sense, since the Banished were drawn to each
other—like bees to honey, the way a girl from the Families could set a man’s heart to pounding—but a lot of men just went for the path of least resistance. The easy score. Then they got locked in, put a ring on a woman’s finger and compounded their error by having more kids to taint the population with half-breeds. Hell, quarter-breeds, eighth-breeds, who knew? In fact, as far as Rattler was aware, there were only a few pure lines left—among them the Sikes and the Tarbells.

And it was Prairie Tarbell he aimed to bring back. He’d already fathered the girl Hailey with Prairie’s sister, and no one could say it was his fault that Clover had hanged herself from a rafter before her baby took her first steps. Hell, he’d treated Clover Tarbell
good
—better than he had to, anyway. Rattler’s mouth tightened in a stoic line as he thought about the other ones, the ones who’d resisted, the ones he’d had to raise a hand to.

Not in anger. He wasn’t an angry man. An idealist, that was what he was—a visionary. Hell, they all ought to be thanking him. He was fine-looking; that was a fact. He’d fathered half a dozen fine-looking kids around town that he knew of, not counting the Tarbell girl, and every one of them had the strength of
his
blood in their veins, and since he only picked women with the strongest blood ties to their Banished ancestors, he was single-handedly turning around the ruination of the bloodline that Gypsum’s once-proud citizens had allowed to happen.

Clover’s girl was pureblood.
He
had done that. And when
he brought Prairie back, she’d give him children too. Hell, she wasn’t much more than thirty; she had a decade of bearing left, easy—enough time to produce a damn brood.

It didn’t even bother Rattler that they’d all be girls. He wasn’t the kind of man who had to have a son, who wanted to teach a boy to toss a ball or skin a deer. Rattler wasn’t father material and he didn’t care. He was on this earth for one reason, the way he saw it, and that was to build the Banished line back up the way it was meant to be. And he was meant to do it with Prairie. It made him near upon insane that she couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand how it was meant to be between them—but he’d make her see. This time he’d
make
her see.

But first he had to get her back. And he couldn’t do it alone. The failure in Chicago—his dead eye, which his daughter had stabbed before she and Prairie escaped, throbbed in fury at the thought—that failure filled him with shame and determination, but it also served him notice that Prairie and the girl had more backbone than he’d expected. More power.

The thought excited him even as it angered him.

“I said git up,” Rattler said a bit louder, giving Derek’s shoulder a good shove. Derek coughed, his breath foul with whiskey and cigarette smoke and rot.

“Wha … what? What do—Oh. Rattler.” Derek put a hand to his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose with grimy fingers. He squinted and moaned faintly, then dragged himself up to a sitting position and raked his hands through his
hair, body odor wafting from his undershirt as the bedclothes fell away. “What you want, anyhow?”

Rattler fingered the card in his pocket, the card he’d fished out of the wallet of one of the men who’d died in the ambush on his house. It had a name
—Prentiss
—and a phone number, written in blue ink. “Got a job.”

Rattler saw Derek’s jeans lying in a heap next to battered work boots on the floor. He picked them up and tossed them to Derek, letting the heavy metal buckle strike him in his soft gut.

“What kinda job?”

“The kind where you might could make some serious cash.”

“How much?” Derek asked automatically as he kicked the sheets away so he could pull on his jeans.

“Five hunnert,” Rattler said without thinking. It was what was left of the money he’d had in his pocket for most of a month, the money Mr. Chicago had given him for information. Too bad he hadn’t held out for more; now Mr. Chicago was burnt up dead and a lot of that cash had gone to the doctor—he’d said he was a doctor, anyway—who had swabbed and cleaned and stitched Rattler’s stabbed eye in a filthy South Side apartment.

Damn irony: Prairie could have fixed him faster, and for free.

Only this way, with his eye dead to the outside world, it seemed to have developed an inner life of its own. And Rattler wasn’t sure but what it might be better like this.

He caught Derek staring while he pulled on a wadded-up work shirt. “That hurtin’ you still?”

“No.”

“Figure you can still drive an’ all, with just the one eye?”

“Got here, didn’t I?” Rattler put a little extra menace in his voice and that shut Derek up.