Unforsaken (12 page)

We walked toward the lights of the gas station and fast-food restaurants ahead, not even a quarter of a mile away. I shook my head in disgust as we came within fifty yards of the giant Exxon sign: choosing to stop here in the shadow of this sign was like sending Rattler a postcard inviting him to come find us.

I’d made another rookie mistake. I kept pretending that I
could stay a step ahead of all the dangers that surrounded us, and I kept failing. First I’d led the General’s men straight to us. And now Rattler. I couldn’t keep letting things like this happen. I had to be sharper, think faster.

At the edge of the Long John Silver’s parking lot was a big old sedan sagging on its wheels, and Rattler and the other man led us to it. In the parking lot’s bright lights, I got a better look at the man and realized I knew him; he had been one of Gram’s regulars. Derek Pollitt. He’d been one of the quieter ones, never putting a hand on me or even joking with me, and for that I was grateful. He opened the passenger door for Kaz and then got in the driver’s seat.

Rattler opened my door, but before he released my arm, he stood looking into my face. It was the first good look I’d had of the eye I’d stabbed, and it was a transfixing sight. The skin below the eye was rimmed with a red ragged scar. The eyeball was milky and pale, and it seemed to spin as Rattler stared at me, but surely that was an illusion.

I looked away first, and Rattler laughed, a harsh, bone-chilling sound. “Aw, don’t be that way with your daddy,” he said. “You and me, we got off on the wrong foot, after all this time. We both got a little makin’ up to do, I’d say. Now, I’m not going to hold this against you.”

He pointed at his wrecked eye. It was true—Rattler didn’t look angry, only slightly amused and … somehow very much alive, sparking with the manic energy I’d always associated with him.

“You and me, we got the same goal here,” he added as he
pushed me gently into the car. “We’re gonna get your auntie back. And then we’re gonna set out to restore the good family name.”

I slammed the car door, trying to shut out the sound of his laughter.

I
KNEW WHERE WE WERE GOING
after just a few miles, when Derek took a right at the fork in the road past Sugar Creek. We were headed for his daddy’s land, mostly poor clay soil that had yielded stingy crops of alfalfa and soybeans until Mr. Pollitt died eight or nine years back. Everyone thought Derek, the Pollitts’ only son, would take over, but instead he leased off what he could and let the rest go fallow and moved in with his mama at the far edge of Trashtown. Derek’s mama hailed from the Banished; his daddy did not. Mrs. Pollitt was long divorced from her husband and was at first more than happy to house and feed her only child and wash his clothes. I guessed it had gotten old fast, as Derek never seemed to be able to hold on to a job more than a few weeks at a time.

Next to me, Kaz gave me a reassuring smile and took my
hand in his. Derek, who was leaning over the seat, keeping an eye on us, guffawed. “Aw, check it out, young love.”

“Leave ’em alone,” Rattler snapped. “ ’At boy’s got pure blood in his veins, which is a damn sight more’n you can say.”

I saw a look of hurt pass across Derek’s dull face, but he shut up.

I hadn’t realized that Rattler knew Kaz was Banished, but it made sense. I was still getting used to the ability to sense other Banished, the curious magnetism that was like a stirring of the cells when they were near. Prairie had explained that it would become second nature before long; Kaz had said that for him it was like yet another layer of vision, on top of the reality that everyone else saw and the pictures that occasionally flashed through his mind.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to be open to it, and sure enough I got a faint sense from Derek, but the connection with Rattler was almost overwhelming, like an invisible thread binding our destinies. It combined fear and familiarity with something else, something inevitable and dark but also part of me.

For my first sixteen years, I had believed that my father was dead, as Gram had wanted me to believe. How many times had I wished for a father to rescue me from Gram’s run-down house, to protect me, to cherish me?

And now, bizarrely, I had what I had wished for. “He won’t hurt us,” I whispered to Kaz.

We turned onto a weed-choked gravel drive leading into
a hollow, where the old Pollitt farmhouse was tucked behind a stand of poplar trees.

“Home, sweet home,” Rattler announced, but I was certain I saw Derek flinch as he looked at the old board-framed house, the sagging porch with its toppled flowerpots spilling dirt.

The padlock on the front door was brand-new, gleaming in the beam of Rattler’s flashlight as Derek fumbled in his pocket for the key. Inside, there was a smell of decay overlaid with bleach. Rattler snapped on the lights and I saw that we were standing in a plain square parlor that contained only a couple of straight-backed chairs, a threadbare sofa and a dusty braided rug. Near the door were half a dozen trash bags overflowing with junk. Someone had been cleaning, preparing for our arrival, no doubt.

This was meant to be our new home.

“After you,” Rattler said grandly, but Kaz didn’t budge.

“Come on, now, boy, don’t be like that. You’n me, we’re practically kin, you bein’ full-blood and all.”

Kaz and I followed Derek through the parlor and up the stairs. He turned on the lights as he went. None of the bulbs were very bright, and the dim light added to the gloom of the place, illuminating torn wallpaper, worn carpets, stained and cracked ceilings.

Upstairs was a narrow hallway with a bathroom and three closed doors. Two of them bore shiny padlocks just like the one on the front door.

Rattler stepped in front of us and opened the first one.

“This was supposed to be your auntie’s room,” he said. “But you can use it till she gets here.”

When he turned on the light, I stopped short, at a loss for words.

Rattler had fixed the place up with care, a prison for his beloved that he’d filled with the things he thought she would like. The bed was neatly made up with a faded quilt, but there were extra pillows and lace-edged sheets. An embroidered runner had been draped on the little table next to the bed, and a jar of flowers stood by a dish filled with small polished pebbles. I had once had a collection like that in my own room, stones that had been tumbled smooth from a thousand years in the bottom of Sugar Creek.

Clothes were folded over an armchair pulled up to a wooden desk. They were brightly colored, things I knew Prairie would never wear. She favored dark, plain shirts and pants, gray and black and navy blue; in the stack I saw fuchsia and pink and red and orange, the colors of a summer flower bed.

A sadness stole through my heart, surprising me. Had there been a day, when Rattler and Prairie were children, when these had been my aunt’s favorite colors? As a little girl, playing with the other Banished kids, had Prairie ever been carefree? Had she and my mother picked flowers and chased dragonflies and splashed in the creek before things went bad, before they started school and learned how much the townspeople hated Trashtown, before the other children refused to play with them? Had Prairie once owned a pink dress? Had
she worn it for the high school boyfriend who she’d long ago lost?

I looked around the rest of the room. The old furniture had been polished, the floors scrubbed. A stack of shiny new magazines lay on the little desk next to a photo in a silver frame.

I stepped closer. In the frame was a photo of two kids, around eleven or twelve years old. A girl with dark hair almost down to her waist balanced on a rock in the middle of a creek, a look of intense concentration on her face, the bottom of her jeans wet. A tall wiry boy leaned toward her from the edge of the photo, almost out of the frame, grinning and reaching for her, all summer-tanned skin and white teeth and too-long hair, pants too short and sleeves barely reaching his wrists, a boy who was growing toward manhood as fast as he could, who even then wanted nothing more in the world than he wanted that girl.

I swallowed hard and glanced at Rattler, and for the first time ever, he refused to meet my eyes. “Don’t you wear her things, now, Hailey-girl,” he muttered. “Derek, go on in that other room and get what-all I bought the girl.”

Derek was back in moments with a stack of jeans and T-shirts, new and shiny with the price tags still attached, which he laid on the bed without a word.

“Had to guess at your sizes,” Rattler said. “And I ain’t got anything for you, son, but we can get that took care of. I didn’t guess I’d be hostin’ you here or I would have been prepared. Now come on, we got a phone call to make.”

I
SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED
to see the setup on the kitchen table—Rattler’s cell phone was attached to a sleek compact speaker—except the technology was so incongruous with the worn, sparse old furnishings.

“Y’all’ll be able to hear ’im just fine,” Rattler promised. “And more important, he’ll be able to hear you, too.”

“I need a li’l somethin’ before we start,” Derek said, and I noticed that his hands shook as he opened an old metal cabinet and took out a bottle. He splashed liquor into a brown coffee mug and took a greedy drink.

“Hell, you don’t even need t’be here, you don’t want,” Rattler said impatiently.

“It’s my house,” Derek protested, half angry, half forlorn.

Rattler nodded and his lips curved in a slight smile.
“That it is, buddy,” he said softly while he waited for Derek to cap the bottle and put it back.

When we were all sitting down, Rattler picked up the phone and thumbed a few keys. Instantly we heard the ringing as though it was right in the room; almost immediately the call was picked up, but after the click of the connection being made, there was silence.

“It’s me,” Rattler said, not bothering to mask his drawl. “Your good friend Rattler Sikes. And this had better be the man in charge, or I’m hangin’ up. I don’t mean to speak to nobody else.”

“Don’t hang up,” a deep, clipped voice said. “This is Alistair Prentiss speaking. I am the man in charge, as you say. Thank you for calling, Mr. Sikes.”

“Well now, it just seemed like the right thing to do, after y’all sent them folks to pay me a visit th’other day.”

Prentiss coughed slightly, and Rattler caught my gaze and winked.

I felt a shiver of nerves run through my body. I’d expected Rattler to be furious, given the way I had injured him, the damage I’d done to his eye. At best I’d expected him to trade me to Prentiss, to sell me for whatever he could get them to pay. But he’d treated me well enough since finding us pulled off the road.

I didn’t trust him, of course. I figured he’d go after Kaz first, maybe see what he could get for him, a Seer with a great deal of power, before starting to negotiate for me.

“About that …,” Prentiss said. “You do understand, Mr. Sikes, that was only business.”

Rattler laughed, a hearty, rich laugh from deep in his chest. “You sent a couple guys to drag me out of my own home, threatened to put me in the ground if I didn’t go with ’em. That all in a day’s work for you?”

“Yes, Mr. Sikes, in your case. But it seems I underestimated you.”

Rattler had been sitting tipped back on an old kitchen chair, but at Prentiss’s words he slammed the chair down on the floor and laid his forearms flat on the table, glaring at the speaker as though it had offended him. “Hell yeah, you did. And your hired men paid the price. That don’t speak to a whole lot a balls, you ask me.”

“Indeed. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Rattler let the moment lie, his thick black brows knit in fury. Slowly, he relaxed, getting control over his emotions. Across the table, Derek looked from Rattler to the speaker and back, mouth slightly open as he tried to keep up with the conversation.

“So, Prentiss, I got somethin’ I believe you want. Got the Healer y’all were trying so hard to get your hooks into, little gal called Hailey. Say hello, Hailey.”

I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to speak.

“Aw, come on, now, sweetheart. Just say hello to the man, nothin’ more. He don’t need to know any of your … private stuff. This is just business, like he says.”