Taliesin Ascendant (The Children and the Blood) (13 page)

Even if he knew that when it came to homicidal maniacs, sometimes the opportunity was reason enough, and the high they got from the experience was its own justification.

His brow drew down thoughtfully.

“Come to cry?”

He turned at the weedy voice, and then tried not to stare at the woman several feet behind him. Her hair looked as though her daily styling ritual included sticking her finger in a light socket, and her eyes were freakishly bright in her narrow, wrinkled face. At least a dozen cats swirled around her ankles, though an exact count was hard to come by since the animals never stopped moving.

“Excuse me?”

“Why are you here, then? Little flower and the rest were all taken away by the firemen, and someone besides us should cry.”

He blinked, not knowing where to begin with the gibberish she’d just said. “Did you know the family who lived here?” he tried.

She looked at him as though he was the one babbling.

“Did you know Ashley?” Harris reiterated.

The woman hesitated, a mistrustful expression creeping onto her face.

“Ashley?” he repeated. “The girl who lived in this house?”

The expression strengthened.

“Why
are
you here?” the woman asked warily. “Are you trying to get me to talk about Elvis? Because I already told her and I’m not telling anybody else.”

He considered his answer, and then decided the direct approach was probably best. “I’m trying to find out why Ashley killed her family. I want to stop her before she hurts anyone else.”

Shock washed away her caution with theatrical speed, leaving her gaping in horror.

“
Killed
them?” she gasped.

Her gaze darted around the countryside before returning to him. “You’re a bad man,” she said, shaking her head. Hands raised in front of her, she backed up as though expecting him to attack. “You’re very bad. You say bad things. You…”

She kept retreating till she reached the top of the rise, and then she pulled up her skirts and took off, her spindly legs churning madly as she dashed away.

He stared after her, and for more reasons than he could name, anger suddenly made it impossible to breathe. He was a bad man?
Him?
For the love of God, he was the one trying to stop this! He was the one trying to protect people! He was the one who’d spent every waking hour working to keep that girl from murdering one more innocent, destroying one more life, wreaking hell on one more city. And Ashley…

His gaze dropped to the wind chimes near his feet.

Ashley just kept killing. And killing, and killing, and…

Maybe that was the answer.

He paused. His brow drew down as he nudged the chimes again, listening to them clink lifelessly.

She wouldn’t stop. And he couldn’t stop her. Not now. Not proactively, as he’d spent weeks trying to do. She was too elusive, and there were too many places she could hide.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a lead. That didn’t mean there wasn’t something he could follow. He’d thought she left no trail and that there was nothing to track, but that wasn’t exactly true.

He looked up at the farmhouse decaying in the sunlight.

She left bodies.

And she never stopped at just one.

Three Months Later

“Hey, Paul! You fed the hogs yet?”

Cole looked up at the sound of Ben’s voice from the far side of the paddock. “Yeah,” he called, setting the manure shovel to one side and then stepping out of the barn into the early morning sunlight. “That one you got from Jesse still seems to be having trouble though.”

Leaning on the wooden fence, the middle-aged man shook his head with frustration. “Alright, I’ll go take a look at her.” Still looking exasperated, he turned and headed down the dirt lane.

Cole watched him go and then returned to the barn. Pulling his gloves a little tighter on his hands, he reached for the manure shovel again.

“You missed a spot.”

He glanced back with a raised eyebrow at the little girl sitting on a hay bale, her arms cradling a sleeping tabby kitten. A grin pulled at Lily’s mouth.

“You want to get over here and help?” he asked.

With an innocently baffled expression, she gave a look to the kitten as though to ask how she was supposed to do that. He shook his head as he went back to work, trying not to let her see his smile. It’d only encourage her.

More than three months had passed since they’d found their way to Sweet Summers Farm. In the first few days after they parted ways with Travis, they’d headed west, travelling on the basis of Robert’s rants about wizards living in the eastern portions of the country. Spending the night in supermarket and truck stop parking lots, they’d wandered from town to town, just trying to think of a plan and stay a step ahead of anyone looking for them. Of the wizards, they hadn’t seen much, though they’d had a few close calls with human security guards wondering why two children were sleeping in a truck and not their own home. After the third narrow escape from an over-interested patrol officer, Cole’d taken to parking in whatever abandoned barn or overgrown back road he could find. Their system had worked beautifully for weeks, though neither of them slept very well and their tempers had run short with ferocious consistency. But they’d kept moving, and by the time they’d reached the farmlands of central Washington, they’d had their routine for scouting potential sleeping locations down, even if having enough money to simultaneously afford food and gas had been starting to present a problem.

But then everything went wrong.

The barn looked as abandoned as any he’d seen, and with their usual practice of leaving long before sunrise, he hadn’t expected much trouble. But when the pounding on the truck window came at four in the morning and the first thing he’d seen in the darkness was a man with a shotgun, Cole thought their luck had finally run out.

An escapee from Washington State Penitentiary was rumored to be in the area, and Ben Summers wasn’t apt to take any chances with an unfamiliar truck sitting in his old barn. The discovery of two kids inside startled him, however, and stepping away from the door, he’d waited cautiously to hear what their explanation for sleeping on his property might be.

Keeping Lily behind him, Cole’d climbed from the truck, squinting in the glare of the man’s flashlight. Over the past weeks, they’d concocted cover stories for their alter egos, Paul and Hannah Wood, as they’d been so named by the identification cards Robert bought a lifetime ago. One hand on Lily and the other raised placatingly, Cole’d launched into their story, tensing at every slight move the man made.

The two of them were siblings, he said. Their parents had been killed in a car accident, for which he’d not been present, but which Hannah had barely survived. In the aftermath, the Department of Children and Family Services had stepped in to care for the newly orphaned kids, but their plan included splitting up the siblings and placing Hannah in a group home. The trauma she’d experienced had left Hannah nearly mute, and the caseworkers and psychologists determined supervised care was her best option, even if it meant taking her from the only relative she still had. Desperate to protect his sister, and determined not to let the remnants of his family be destroyed, he’d gathered what money he could and they’d run.

It might have been the way Lily clung to him, or the protectiveness Cole couldn’t hide, but as the story ended, Ben Summers paused, and then lowered the flashlight.

They looked starved, Ben said, and from the thinness they’d acquired over the past few weeks, Cole couldn’t argue. After inviting them to his house for food, Ben told them to follow in their truck, and then turned around and walked away.

Cole glanced to Lily, but the little girl just shook her head. Neither glowing to him, nor appearing as a wizard or cripple to her, Ben Summers showed all probability of being just a regular man. Hungry enough to take their chances, they’d climbed back into the truck, and cautiously trailed him away from the barn.

Life at Sweet Summers Farm revolved around the white, two-story farmhouse at the end of a long gravel lane a mile from the dilapidated barn. In the front yard, a massive oak tree shaded the house, and beyond the home’s shingled roof, there rose an enormous newer barn. Sunrise lit the sprawling orchard to the right of the driveway and past the wooden fence to their left, cattle roamed.

Eyes wide, Lily stared as they drove up the gravel track in the early morning light. Wishing he could share some of her wonder, Cole’d glanced at the rearview mirror, internally sweating the growing distance to the main road that was their only route of escape should things go wrong.

Pulling his truck over by the house, Ben had climbed out and then waited as Cole and Lily cautiously joined him. Still looking torn about his decision to bring the kids back to his home, the man nevertheless headed for the door and then called to his wife as they came inside.

Sue Summers was a big-boned woman whose family went back five generations in the central Washington area. At the sight of them, she’d given a pointedly questioning look to her husband, but at his brief explanation, she’d turned an abrupt about-face and called over her shoulder for them to follow as she marched to the kitchen to make food.

Over orange juice and scrambled eggs, Cole’d repeated their story, while watching the unreadable looks passing between the couple. When he and Lily finished their meal, the couple excused themselves, and he heard the low sounds of their voices as they retreated to the living room.

And softly, he’d told Lily to get ready to run.

Fear in her eyes, the little girl inched from her barstool. His gaze locked on the entryway to the living room, he’d slid off the seat and started toward the door when Ben called to him. Motioning Lily to stay near the back door, he’d walked to the entryway.

Still wary, the couple regarded him for a moment before Ben spoke. The two kids could stay through the night if they wanted, which would at least give Paul and his sister a chance to get a few decent meals. The guest room upstairs was empty and they both looked like they could use a good night’s sleep anyhow. Ben and Sue didn’t want any trouble from DCFS, but if nothing else, feeding the kids for a day seemed the right thing to do.

Cole glanced to Lily, raising an eyebrow. At the girl’s incremental nod, he’d looked back at the couple and carefully agreed to a single night’s stay.

The Summers didn’t call the authorities as he’d feared. And with plentiful food and soft beds to draw them, Lily and Cole found themselves lingering until, at Sue’s invitation, they’d stayed overnight again. Two nights became three, and then more, and though Sue and Ben remained cagey about the two kids without much more than their own word as to their history, the couple never questioned too deeply. For a while, Cole saw the older man scouring the web for corroboration of their story on his shaky dialup connection, but nothing seemed to come of his search. Whether they remembered the newscasts from earlier in the year, neither of them seemed to connect shy little Hannah clinging to her brother’s side with Lily, the multiple homicide survivor and victim of sex trafficking the news had portrayed.

And so the days went by. Lily swiftly became the darling of the farm, her position cemented the first time she’d cautiously asked Sue if she could make some crafts from the scraps of cloth and paper the woman’s own creations left behind. By the second week, Ben offered to let Cole work on the property, as extra hands were always welcome on the small organic farm. Though they were isolated to some degree by the rural countryside, Sweet Summers nevertheless faithfully served what customers they could with free-range meat by special order, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables as the season allowed. The work was harder than anything Cole had ever tried, but as time passed, he found it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.

That it got him in better shape than any other time in his life didn’t hurt either.

But weeks crept into months and despite the fact they both felt reasonably safe for the first time in recent memory, he couldn’t ever relax. The wizards were still out there. They’d still be looking for the two of them.

They’d still killed all the family he and Lily had known.

And he had no idea why.

He tried not to show how much that reality upset him. Lily had enough trouble with the nightmares that woke her screaming almost every night and her fear of the magic they both knew she possessed. Sue worried about the girl, and Ben did too, and the last thing either of them needed was to know he’d give almost anything to be back out there, tracking down the fantasy creatures he believed responsible for the mess he and Lily were in.

But the situation was slowly driving him insane.

He hated to admit how often he thought of just leaving. The girl was safe. Ben and Sue weren’t a threat and the farm was so isolated, it might as well have been on the moon. But he knew how that story went too. Lily’s dad had probably thought the same thing, right up until the Blood and their henchmen shot him and burned his house to the ground.

And so they stayed, while he tried to tell himself it would only be a matter of time. Something would change. Or the hours he spent on Ben’s dialup connection would yield a clue. Or he’d see something on the television.

Or he’d finally lose his mind for lack of anything else to do.

Grimacing, he pushed the frustration aside as he set the shovel against the wall. The stall was done enough and Ben would be satisfied. Everything else could wait, and mostly needed to. Glancing to Lily, he headed for the door, trying to escape his own thoughts more than anything. Curling the kitten tighter into her arms, the little girl climbed down from the hay bale and followed him into the sunshine.

“What’d you name that one?” he asked, working to sound more cheerful than he felt. Soon after arriving, Lily had taken it upon herself to name every one of the multitude of interchangeable tabbies roaming the farm, and now most of the cats were wandering around with titles ranging from Apple to Zigzag.