What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (32 page)

He reaches down a hand—fingers draping, weaving like spider legs above me—wants me to take hold of it.
It’s all right
, he says.
I can touch you now.

My hand rises up to meet his. I don’t want it to but I have no control over what my hand is doing.

And I clasp those fingers—oily, slick, hard to hold onto. My skin starts melting, melding into his. Right before my eyes I see that our hands aren’t just clasped but are now molded together like two wax candles dissolved into one.

I’m dead. Let me lie here. I’m dead. Let me lie here, quiet and still.

The same words scream over and over from my mind.

He has that odd little smile, the edges of his mouth at either end of the long, thin mulberry lips twitching up ever so slightly.

Yes, you’re dead
, he says.
And now you’re mine.

He plucks me out of the pit I lie in with one swoop of his arm and pulls me to him. I thought I was trapped in a grave before he lifted me out but it’s like being buried in the deepest, darkest tomb to be embraced by him. He clutches me tight and everything goes black.

I awake with
a jolt.

For a moment I’m not sure where I am. The room is dark, unrevealing. The smell of melted wax hovers in the air.

A keen-edged purple-pink fingernail is tracing its way down the length of my forearm—I swat at my arm like it’s on fire. Beat at my long tangled hair like it’s full of tiny, crawling insects. Needle is all around me, touching me, fingering my hair—

Then I hear breathing. Steady, relaxed, peaceful breathing.

I’m at Aiden’s side, keeping my promise to him. Alone in the back office and I’ve let the candles burn out, have fallen asleep.

It’s catching up with me, the fatigue, the hunger. I nap in fits and starts, jarred awake by the slightest sound.

Or another bad dream.

I don’t feel so bad about sleeping now that Aiden is waking up every few hours, says a few words to us, takes a sip of water. I want him to eat but I’m not sure what we’ll feed him. With the children running wild, they’ve nearly stripped the kitchen of the old school bare and what’s left is mostly stuff they don’t like or can’t eat. I’ve got to get more food from somewhere soon.

There’s some commotion in the hall, the kids calling to each other, shuffling footsteps.

I go to the door and peer out, try to decipher what they’re saying. A little light reaches back here from the bank of windows across the hall.

Another night has passed. The Black Riders did not come.

We can’t stay here—it’s too cold, there’s no food, it’s not safe. I want to move Aiden as soon as I can—but it would be so much easier if he was able to walk again. I imagine putting him on a cart and dragging him behind us. A wheelbarrow—it might work. He must know of a place to go, somewhere better than this.

For now all I have is the rifle mysteriously returned to me. Whatever the reason for it was, I can use it to make a last stand if I have to. And I will—Aiden’s already one of us, a part of my family. I won’t leave him.

One of the kids running through the corridor stops at the open doorway to the school’s administration area, not willing to venture any farther. “Are you back there, Gillian?”

The voice is familiar. “Finch?”

“Gillian, come here.”

I look back over my shoulder even though I can’t make out anything clearly in the room behind me. I don’t want to go far from the room.

“What is it?”

“You’ve got to come and see.”

Another boy stops at his side. “Come on, Gill. Hurry!” It’s Terry.

Before I can get to where they’re standing, they dash back down the corridor. As soon as I stick my head out the doorway of the outer office, I see what looks like every child housed at the Orphanage clustered by the front doors, pushing at each other, trying to get ahead so they can see what’s happening outside. There’s clearly some movement out there, shapes leaping, skittering, sprinting. There’s shouting—someone crashes with a thud into one the school doors.

One of those doors opens a crack and there’s some hurried whispering. The door smacks shut again.

CJ comes walking up to me solemnly and tells me what I already know. “The Elders are here,” he says. “They said they want to talk to you.”

I run back for my rifle, cursing myself for not bringing it in the first place. Shrug into that same dirty parka I’ve been wearing and bend low over Aiden to make sure he’s still peacefully asleep.

I rush upstairs to the dormitory. Stace has been sleeping but is sitting on the edge of her cot when I find her, rubbing her eyes, frowning at the muffled noise coming from below. Her red hair is still a frazzled mess but the color is back in her cheeks—she’s ruddier, fresher, less worried.

“Can you watch Aiden for me?” She sees that I have my coat on and the rifle slung over my shoulder. She jumps to her feet, suddenly concerned, anxious.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. The Elders are out there. They want to talk to me.”

She grabs my arm. “Don’t do it, Gillian. They’ll do something to you—”

“But if I don’t, it will only be worse. Do you think they’re just going to go away?”

Stace follows me down to the first floor and does what I tell her, disappears into the back office to be with Aiden.

When I get outside I see the Elders playing in the snow. I try to count how many there are—ten, I think. I try to keep my eye on all of them, looking from one to another, not wanting any of them to distract me and get too close. They’re aggressive, hurling snowballs, smearing snow into each other’s faces. Some are sliding down the sloped front lawn of the school on a piece of cardboard.

But they all stop when they notice me walking out of the school. I let the heavy steel door swing shut behind me with a bang and stay where I am, feet apart, holding the rifle at rest in front of my chest.

They drop their snowballs, stop sliding and cluster together at the lower end of the steps. There’s sniggering, pointing and laughter but it’s muted. Then they start shushing each other, stare at me in silence, taking note of my every move.

One boy steps free of the group. He has curly brown hair, sharp little eyes, lanky in an expensive suede jacket splotched with damp snow. I can’t remember where but I’m sure I’ve seen him before. He makes a pronouncement. “We’re here to tell you something, Gillian Rose.” His voice reminds me—

I see the group pushing a tall, thin boy forward. He stumbles, tries to retreat. Moira hisses. He starts moving toward the cage, his head bent, looking like he’s about to be beaten.

Carson—that’s his name, that’s what Moira called him—the boy who whacked apart the padlock of the cage the Riders had me in when he couldn’t find the key.

He speaks confidently, condescendingly, proud to be the designated spokesman of the group. I try to maintain a pose like a gunfighter before a duel, keeping my expression blank, unreadable, waiting for him to make the first move.

“They want you at their ceremony.” He pauses to let the words sink in.

“Ceremony.”

“Ceremony of blood.”

William. Jendra. They’re going to go through with it.

“You know what it is?” Carson says, impatiently.

“I know what it is.”

It’s wanting to see if they can speed the process of William’s conversion into full-fledged Riderhood by a mingling of his blood with Jendra’s. An experiment with William as the guinea pig.

“They want you there. You need to go back across the river. Wait at the square—where the bonfire will be.”

“Why did they give me this?” I hold up the rifle. None of them seem intimidated. None of them takes a step back or flinches. It could be a toy gun for all they care.

But no one answers my question. All stay silent, waiting for me to acquiesce.

“I’m not doing anything they say. I’m staying right here. They can try to pry me loose from this place if they want but I
will
take a few of them down with me.”

Carson actually laughs at me, laughs out loud. The other Elders nudge each other, there’s more sniggering.

“I don’t think you want to do that. They’ve left you alone so far but they won’t if you don’t cooperate. What can you do with that rifle? You won’t even save yourself let alone all the members of your little family.”

They’re boxing me into a corner. Leaving me no choice but to fulfill one more part of some master plan.

“So I’m supposed to wait for them across the river?”

“Yes,” Carson says irritably. He starts swatting at himself with his arms. “It’s getting cold out here and we want to go in.”

“The school? You’re not going in.”

He snorts. “It’s our place. We’re in charge here. And we have someone with us assigned to be Aiden’s official caretaker.”

I’m amazed that I didn’t notice her before. He steps aside—the whole group steps aside—and behind them all is Tetch. I squint, wanting to see her clearly. She’s dressed in one of her usual fancy sweaters, skinny red pants and cowboy boots. She doesn’t look any the worse for wear, indistinguishable from the other Elders.

She starts walking up the steps toward me.

“I’ll take care of him. He’s going to be all right now.” Her voice is smug, superior. As if nothing happened across the river, no repercussions. As if we’re back to where we were when we first met.

She’s peering at something that’s happening just over my shoulder.

I turn to look and several Elders are slipping out the big front doors. They have their arms folded across their chests like bodyguards, not remotely intimidated by how close they are to me.

“You’d better go,” Carson says. “You don’t want anybody to get hurt. Do what you’re told and we’ll take good care of your family while you’re away.”

“Hurt my family and I
will
make you pay.”

This time Carson doesn’t laugh. There’s no sniggering, no nudging from any of them.

I know I have to do what they say. Someone will get hurt—Aiden can’t stand on his feet, Stace and the younger ones are far too vulnerable. There’s far too many of them and not enough of me.

The Elders shuffle to the sides of the wide front steps, clear a path to let me pass.

The square. The site of the ceremony.

But what’s around the Square? Department stores, hotels, office towers. The Riders must be hidden safe indoors somewhere nearby. All of them nested together like bats, waiting out the day. There’s a tiny, tiny chance that if I could find just one, kill just one before nightfall…

The odds might be better. The odds of our survival.

I march down the steps, eyeing Tetch as I go past, wondering what she will do. She looks at me passively, gives me a tight little smile like she was the first chosen for a team on the playground, proud to be more popular than I am.

I walk away from the Orphanage, not looking back. Start the long trek back to the river.

Kill. If I
could just kill one…

That word again.
Kill.
It has never occupied my mind even a fraction as much before but it’s all I think of as I trudge along. This beautiful, whitened world, made innocent with snow is tainted by the word, by what I intend to do. There’s no longer any wonder in it for me—only blood I want to spill.

I don’t want to be this person, hardened like this. I don’t want to think this way. So I keep arguing with myself, asking if I have a right to do this…

But the Riders’ world is a dead world. It’s a dead end. It’s not a world of survivors, of rebuilders. Nothing good can come out of a world with them in control.

I don’t fully understand what they are yet but I do know that they’re diseased, plague-carriers that must be stopped. Eradicated.

So if I can uncover the hiding place of even one of these creatures while it’s still light out—I will do my best to kill it.

I’m back in the city’s central square. I’ve never seen it in daylight. Even with a frosting of snow, I can make out the black smudge in the middle of the square where bonfires have been built.

What I see now is overlaid by memories from when I was a child.

There’s a wide semicircle of steps like rings coiling up the rim of a Mason jar. Where I sat with my father one summer, sipping iced tea and pointing out the most eccentric people in the square.

There’s a row of columns like those of a Greek temple along the square’s uppermost end and that odd line of broken columns off to one side, the first hardly above ground, then each fragment a little taller until the last one is the height of a man. I remember sitting on one of these, waiting for my mother to come back from an errand at a bank.

And reminding me more than anything of long ago visits to the city with my parents, there’s a bronze statue of a man in a business suit holding up an umbrella against whatever might be falling from the sky—rain, sleet, snow or too much sunshine. I remember taking his hand, posing for my father’s camera.

I try to imagine what my father would want me to do.

I try so hard to conjure up the actual words he would say to me now, exactly what he would tell me. I want so bad to hear him tell me what I should do.

But I can’t figure out what his logical advice would be. I can’t come up with anything he might have said that applies. It’s just too strange—what’s happened to this city, the situation I’m in. Nothing my parents ever told me has the slightest connection to where I am, to what I need to do now.

I look up at the sky, still a solid mantle of pewter gray. I can’t tell how high the sun is, how much time I might have left.

I must act, must do something.
Right now.

I take a close look at the buildings that surround me, choose one and walk toward it.

Above me is
the Raintree sign. It creaks in the wind, a chill wind that’s kicked up, making it feel colder. The temperature’s dropped and the snow’s never had a chance to melt.

I stare up at the sign as it dangles right above my head. In the daylight I can tell that it’s painted a dull green splotched with rust, the letters spelling out the city’s name composed of shattered light bulbs, not neon tubes.