Unforsaken (6 page)

While he waited for Derek to piss and brush his teeth and gather up his guns, Rattler swiped a slingshot off a bookshelf, climbed the basement stairs and let himself out the front door of Mrs. Pollitt’s house, ignoring her baleful glare as she lurked in a doorway in her flowery housedress. He picked rocks out of the gravel and winged them at a row of mailboxes across the drive. When a red bird swooped out from the branches of a tall oak, he remembered how his mama used to call them Mr. Robin Red Breast, even as his stone found its mark and the bird fell dead out of the sky without a sound and hit the ground in a burst of crimson feathers.

“H
OW DID YOU GET AWAY
?”

Kaz and I sat on a high-backed wooden bench that gave us a little privacy in the middle of all the early-evening commuters, and he put his arm around me and pulled me close. It felt so good to be with him again, his chin resting on my forehead, my face pressed against his neck as I inhaled his scent of soap and cotton.

He let me go reluctantly. “There wasn’t a whole lot they could do. I mean, we were in Crystal’s office, there were people passing by.… They, uh, had a gun on me at first, but honestly they seemed a lot more interested in the phone than in keeping me there.”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “Who knew exterminators were so good with technology? No one in the library thought that was a little strange?”

Kaz shrugged. “Even I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, they were working up in the ceiling panels and down along the floorboards. They had the little sprayers and all. They even had people out of their offices for a few hours at a time so they could treat them.”

“When they were really getting into the phones, setting up the trace or whatever.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe they’d do all that. I mean, that’s a hell of a lot of planning, expense—”

“But it’s the General, remember?”

We were both silent, thinking about that. We knew very little about the General, only that he was the mysterious ex-military figure Prairie had worked for in Chicago. Well, to be accurate, Prairie had worked for a man named Bryce Safian, and
Bryce
had worked for the General, a fact Prairie had accidentally learned from overheard conversations and files she was never meant to see.

Prairie and Bryce had already been keeping one secret: Prairie was a Healer, a member of an ancient clan called the Banished. Not all the Banished could heal, but they all had abilities that the rest of the world didn’t. The men had visions of future events. Most Banished could recognize each other through an intuitive sense. And a very few of the women—including the women of the Tarbell family, like my mother and Prairie and my grandmother and her mother and
her
mother, all the way back to the Irish village where it all started—were Healers.

Bryce had thought Prairie was the only Healer still living in
the United States. Then he found out about me. He decided to kidnap me and use me for research, but he didn’t tell Prairie.

It wasn’t the only thing he lied about. He’d led Prairie to believe she was helping to research ways of using her healing gift to reach larger populations of the injured and the ill, when really he was studying her, trying to figure out how to create Healers out of ordinary people.

But the General didn’t care about healing people. He had discovered that if a Healer laid hands on a person right after the moment of death, the person lived on in an undead state for a while, his emotions and reasoning powers, his
soul
, gone. These people were able to follow directions, though, and the General meant to create and sell these “zombies” to foreign armies to be used in battle, as suicide bombers and mine clearers, to perform tasks that living soldiers could not be made to do. He also planned to use Banished men for their visions, selling their services to the military strategists. Attacking your enemies would be a hell of a lot easier if you had someone who could see their next move.

Foreign militaries, it turned out, would pay astonishing amounts of money for the General’s zombies. Without Healers to create the zombies, he had nothing. So he came after me. But when Prairie found out, she located me first. She didn’t know about Chub—she hadn’t even known I existed—but she helped us escape and then we made our way to Chicago, where Kaz and his mom helped us burn down the lab with Bryce and all the zombies in it, so that no one would ever be able to create zombies again.

After that, when we went to Bryce’s apartment to destroy his files, we discovered he had found another Healer. Three more, actually—Polish sisters descended from the Banished. Two of the sisters had died in the fire, and we sent the third back to Poland, where she would be safe.

A thought struck me. “Oh no,” I gasped, “I forgot to call Zytka.”

Zytka Walczak, the surviving sister, was the fifth person who carried an emergency phone. We hadn’t seen her since we’d said our goodbyes at O’Hare two days after we burned down the lab.

“Try her now,” Kaz urged.

I did, several times, but the phone rang and rang.

“Don’t worry,” Kaz said. “She’s safe. They won’t be able to find her in Poland.”

I wasn’t so sure, but we already had plenty to worry about.

“Chub saw something,” I confessed, trying to keep my voice from breaking. “He was talking about a ‘bad farm’ this morning. I thought he was just, you know, talking about getting in trouble at school. If I’d just listened …”

“You couldn’t know.”

“Yes, but … if I’d just done what Prairie asked me to? I mean, I
lied
to her, Kaz. I swore to her I wasn’t in touch with you.”

Kaz sighed. “I lied too. To my mom, to Prairie. Hailey … even before you left, I knew there was no way I was going to let you go. I
never
intended to keep my promise.”

That should have made it better, that I wasn’t alone.
Instead I just felt more miserable. It was my fault we’d been found, my fault Chub and Prairie were gone.

“Listen, Hailey, I was seeing things too, only I didn’t put it together.” Kaz pounded the bench with a fist. “I just didn’t figure it out.”

“You … saw them coming?” I asked.

Kaz shook his head, clearly frustrated. “No. I mean, I’ve been having those same visions. You, and the wires. Guess we know what that was all about now.”

Last week when we’d talked, he’d told me that he’d kept seeing me running, my hair flying, my legs moving so fast they were a blur. Neither of us had thought it meant danger. We joked that I ought to take up jogging. And the other thing … he’d said it was like a sped-up movie of a roller coaster on a track made of wire, a dizzying blaze of sparking energy flying by, a trip through a psychedelic grid that left him with a searing headache. I’d teased him, saying that he was spending too much time watching YouTube concert videos, but now I suspected he’d been seeing the trace itself, the moment the General’s men pinpointed my location and everything fell apart.

“So they let you leave?”

Kaz shrugged. “They didn’t stop me. I just walked out of the office. I knew they were focused on one thing, and that was tracing the call. I was afraid they might have someone posted at the entrance, but I just walked out into the street and kept going. I rode the el for a few hours, out to Blue Island, around the Loop a couple of times. By the time I
came here, I was pretty sure no one had tried to come after me.” His expression changed and he touched my cheek softly. “You’re really okay?”

“Yes,” I whispered, not trusting my voice. I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of safety for a moment.

Then I forced myself to pull away. “We need to get going. We can’t stay here.… ” I gestured at the lobby, with its soaring ceilings, the people hurrying to catch their trains. It wasn’t a bad place to hide, but before long the evening commute would dwindle, and there would be no crowds to camouflage us.

Kaz nodded. “Yeah, we need to keep moving. I called Mom earlier. I told her that we would be gone for a while. That we had to find Prairie and Chub.”

“Oh, Kaz,” I said, dismayed, imagining Anna’s reaction. She’d lost her husband in the first Gulf War, when Kaz was little, and had never remarried. Kaz was all she had.

“She didn’t take it well,” he said hoarsely, looking away for a moment.

“What if … if there’s any chance the cops could get Chub and Prairie back—”

But Kaz cut me off. “Think about it, Hailey. If you’re not … one of us? If you’re just another person who’s never had a vision and never healed anything and never heard of the Banished, if you’re just doing your job and trying to catch bad guys and keep order, would you believe it?
Any
of it?”

I thought about how I’d resisted when Prairie first told
me what we were. How I’d refused to believe even after she’d proved it, after she’d healed a bullet wound in Chub’s leg right before my eyes.

The mind refuses to believe what it knows is impossible.

Before I could answer Kaz, he took my hand again. The sensation—his touch, his warmth, the electric rightness of it—rocketed through me.

“Hailey, together we have a chance of finding Chub and Prairie.… Once we have them, we’ll come straight back here and figure out what to do next. But for now it’s down to us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Me and you. We have to go get them. We’re the strongest. We have my visions. You can keep us well. Mom will be safe here. She doesn’t know anything, and the General must know that by now, since they’ve probably been watching the house and tapping our phone for weeks.”

I looked in Kaz’s pale gray eyes, saw his determination and energy. And I felt the current that ran between us, felt how it danced at the edge of my heart, in the Banished blood that ran through my veins, and I knew that when I was with him, my gift was stronger;
I
was stronger.

At that moment it felt strangely as though we were not alone. As though in addition to me and Kaz there was some presence, something larger than life and older than history and deeper than time, that reached to us across myth and impossibility and pushed us forward, that blessed and comforted and promised everything would be all right.

“Okay.”

It was what Kaz had been waiting for, my permission, my agreement. But he hesitated a moment longer.

“They’re all going to be all right.”

I heard the fear in his voice and I knew he was saying that for himself as much as me. Leaving his mother behind was undoubtedly the hardest thing he’d ever done, but Kaz and I both knew that until we defeated the General once and for all, none of us would be safe. My shiny new life, the beautiful apartment and the new school and new friends, none of it had been real. We had all been waiting, knowing that this moment would come someday.

I’d seen the toll the last weeks had taken on Prairie, the worry on her face, the dark circles under her eyes. Maybe that was what parenting meant—constant fear of what might happen next. I didn’t know. Gram had never acted like a parent to me. Neither Prairie nor I had ever really had a mother, and we’d never had fathers, either.

Only Kaz had grown up with someone who loved him more than life itself, and maybe that was what gave him the strength to leave now. Because he was protecting Anna. He was almost a man, or maybe he
was
a man, in the same way that some days I felt like I was an adult and others I missed being a child. But when I looked at Kaz, I saw it clearly: he would be strong for the ones who couldn’t. For his mother, and Chub, and Prairie.

And I would be strong with him.

I put my hand in his. “I’m ready,” I whispered.

We slipped out into the descending evening, the city easing into its night self around us, and I knew that whatever lay ahead of us, Kaz and I would give everything we had to make things right again.

P
RAIRIE SAT UP STRAIGHT
in the upholstered chair and kept her expression impassive. They were watching her—she was sure of it—and they had been ever since they’d deposited her, still unconscious from whatever they’d given her, on the hotel bed. There was a beautiful sunset over Lake Michigan out her window. The room was on a high floor in what was clearly one of Chicago’s finest hotels, but Prairie ignored the view. She would wait for them to make their next move, and she would not give them the satisfaction of seeing how afraid she was.