Valentine's Exile (47 page)

A giggling nursing mother offered him a spare teat after feeding her daughter. It hurt to laugh.

Once his jaw knit he borrowed an old-fashioned horse, loaded up a second with grain and dried meat, and rode out to where he had last seen Ahn-Kha. He left a stoppered bottle of Bulletproof bourbon at Grog-eye level with a note to his friend, telling him where they were wintering until warmth allowed travel again. He tried to learn what had happened to Ahn-Kha and his pursuing column, but only found some shattered glass and debris that might have been from a motorcycle eight miles away.

The fruitless search left him moody and depressed. His tender mouth troubled him every time he spoke and ate, and a fragment of mirror showed that his jawline now had an uneven balance to it thanks to the break. The only bright spot was Gail Foster's transformation into a convivial, charming woman, though she remained a little pallid, even on the hearty Bulletproof cooking. She looked as though she were about to have twins. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a woman with such a wide belly after the baby dropped.

The baby came on December 22.

Duvalier woke Valentine and passed him a hot cup of grassy-tasting tea. “Gail's water broke. Our vet is attending. Suki's there too.”

She brought him to a modest, pellet-stove-heated home that served as a sickroom for the local Bulletproof.

Suki was a Bulletproof midwife. She was young, perhaps a year or two older than Valentine, but had a calming effect on Gail brought about by nothing more than her quiet voice and cups of the honey-filled silvery cinqefoil tea she brewed. Gail had given birth once before, but remembered nothing of the event but gauzy business on the other side of her screened lap.

Valentine went in and saw Gail lying on her side with her knees drawn up and buttocks at the edge of the hammocklike “birthing bed.” He gripped her hand through a contraction, sponging the sweat from her forehead when it was over. She'd soaked through her shirt even in the winter cool.

“I wish Will was here,” she gasped. “He always . . . '' The words trailed off.

Valentine wrung out the sponge. “Will never forgot about you for a moment. Your husband wasn't the man you thought. Or he was. You'll understand when you see him again.”

She smiled and nodded.

“First we have to get your baby into the world. Can do?”

“Can do,” she agreed.

But you can't be there to see it. This trip, the risks. You'll never see a payoff. You could just as well have driven away with Ahn-Kha. You can never walk down an Ozark highway again
.
You're condemned by your own actions, an exile.

“She's quit dilating,” Boothe said, bringing Valentine out of his thoughts with a flash of guilt over what Gail must be experiencing. She had a short flashlight attached to her forehead: a medical unicorn. “I'm going to C-section. Pe— Suki, get me the tray I laid out in the kitchen.”

Valentine got out of the way as the midwife came in with the tray.

“Suki, keep her chin up.”

Boothe poured a shot glass full of Bulletproof, then added a couple of drops of ether to it. She tipped it into a fist-sized wad of cotton.

“Have her breathe this,” she said, handing the mask to Suki. Gail inhaled the mixture.

“Christmas baby. You were almost a Christmas baby,” Gail said as the ether took effect.

“Enough,” Dr. Boothe told Suki. “Gail, keep looking at the ceiling. Over before you know it.” Valentine watched her focus on Gail's belly, steadying the scalpel.

Valentine watched, relieved and fascinated at the same time, as the scalpel opened Gail just above the pelvis.

“Coming now. Your baby's doing fine,” Boothe said.

Valentine couldn't help but think about Malia. What had Amalee's birth been like? The sweet, burning scent of ether in the air, along with blood, sweat, and amniotic fluid?

Boothe pulled out a froglike creature, narrow, legs drawn up tight, arms folded like a dead insect's, brachycephalic skull all the more unreal as the doctor held it upside down. “Oh, Christ.”

A baleful yellow eye, slit-pupiled, peered at him from a face pinched by internal agony. It hissed, fought for breath.

Gail Foster Post had given birth to a Reaper.

Suki backed away, hand over her mouth.

“Boy or a girl?” Gail said, then, when there was no reply, “What? What?”

Boothe showed her.

“Get it away from me!” Gail screamed. “Bastards! Lying bastards!” Her words trailed off into sobs.

“Stay still,” Boothe ordered. “Suki, put three more drops in another shot glass.”

“Give it to me,” Valentine said, extending a towel. He took the struggling infant—cleaned its sexless body.

“What a mess. Tearing everywhere in the uterus,” Boothe said. “I hope I can fix this.” She turned her light on Valentine. “Just pinch its nose and mouth shut. Bury it outside. ”

Valentine took the infant out into the December air, instinctively holding it close against the chill. He looked at the blood-smeared face, purple and green and blue, crisscrossed with veins, horror in miniature. Black nails, impossibly tiny, gleamed wetly as it moved its hand.

The future death machine coughed.

“Do you have a soul?” someone asked, using his larynx, tongue, and mouth.

Valentine wondered if he'd directed the question to the newborn or to himself. Tiny nostrils, long little jaw; he could smother it one-handed.

However much, a tiny amount of it was Kurian. Evil.

Or Lifeweaver. The
Dau'weem
and
Dau'wa
shared however many gene pairs they possessed, thirty thousand or three million. They differed only in their opposition over vampirism.

Could he say a creature fresh from the womb deserved to die, thanks to its appearance?

Not appearance, design
.

A newborn, innocence embodied in what felt like ten pounds of sugar. Harmless. But experience told him otherwise.

Songs of Innocence and Experience.
William Blake.

Valentine closed up the towel, protecting the newborn tyger against the chill. The Reaper's head turned, sensing something it liked in Valentine's wrist.

Valentine pushed his pulse point a little closer, offering.

Its mouth opened, latched on, and Valentine felt the prick of the sharp tongue. The penetration only hurt a little.

Softly, the Reaper fed.

Read on for a sneak peek at

VALENTINE'S RESOLVE

Available from Roc

David Valentine didn't rest under the bridge long. He got to his feet again well before dark, but not before he exchanged the down-at-the-heel road shoes for a pair of soft buckskin moccasins.

He was tempted to take one or two of the weapons from the cache under the bridge, but there was still a chance that he'd be observed sneaking through the estate's orchards. He could talk his way around a few pilfered late apples, but not a pistol.

Valentine carefully cut upstream toward the Manse.

This was not his first visit to Weathercut Manse; he'd been on and off the lands a dozen or more times in the last month, getting a feel for the rhythms of the estate and its personnel. Taking your time with this sort of thing made the results exponentially surer.

This being a Wednesday, F. A. James, late of the TMCC but now enjoying a comfortable sinecure courtesy of Crossfire Security and the Ringwearer of Weathercut, would be on the east side of the grounds from eight to twelve, after which he'd put in four more hours at the gate house, then sixteen in ready reserve in the security apartments next to the utility garage.

Not that Valentine intended for him to ever see his warm bunk again.

Sometimes the Captain or one of the older hands would accompany him on the field patrols, but tonight would be cold. He'd probably be alone, driving his ATV from point to point, possibly with a dog riding in the back, checking the fields and fencing and warming his hands over the engine.

Valentine had formed two plans, one involving the dog, the other not. If James had the dog, Valentine would back off and try again another night, unless he rode close enough to the wall for a jump.

He'd picked out the spot a week ago, spent two long cold nights, one watching it to get the lay of the ground and the guard routine down, especially where the headlight of the ATV would shine.

The east side of the estate ran down into a soggy streambed, ground rough and dimpled and thick with birches and poplars and a drowned oak that had fallen. The estate fence ran down into the bottom.

The fence wasn't very formidable at this point—a chain-link fence with razor wire strung atop in a slinkylike tangle, a barrier for the estate's livestock and a serious warning to anyone else. But whoever had built it didn't account for smaller animal activity, or simply didn't care. Prowling raccoons had dug under it and a dog or two might have expanded it, chasing the raccoons for all Valentine knew. He'd opened it still further on one of his scouts.

He looked at the fence one more time, and checked the distinctly non-trampish timepiece he kept in a tobacco pouch in his pocket. Made of steel thick enough to cause sparks if struck against flint, it was a soldier's wristwatch long bereft of band; it had a magnified bezel so the big white-painted numerals and hands could be easily read at night.

Stalking makes one feel alive and focused, yet it is oddly calming. This night provided a little extra frisson of excitement for Valentine. F. A. James would be the last. He didn't know what he'd do after this one.

Tomorrow would take care of itself.

He took a breath and extracted the red balloon he'd found near Carbondale, Illinois, and carried around, knowing he'd find a use for it sooner or later. He'd slipped a rolled-up piece of paper into a tiny white-capped orange plastic container—the kind Kurian-issued aphrodisiacs and fertility enhancers usually came in—and attached it to the lip of the balloon with a bit of wire. He put just enough breath in it to make it look like it was on its last legs, then added a knot in the bottom. He reached up to hang it on the razor wire, where he was sure the ATV's light would hit it as James turned along the path.

He examined the ground around the thick oak on the Manse side of the fence, picked up a few twigs, and tossed them back over the fence. No telling just where he'd have to drop and how far he might have to run.

Valentine patted the small knife in the sleeve sheath on his forearm and gripped the legworm-leather handle of his hatchet pick. It was a handy little tool of stainless steel used by the legworm riders of Kentucky to mount their forty-foot-long beasts. This one had a pry-blade at the other end of the slightly curved pick with its nasty fishhook barb, great for popping small locks and a hundred other uses, urban and rural.

Including swinging yourself up into an oak.

Valentine hooked a limb and swung his legs up, crossed his ankles around the branch, and was in the leaves and branches as neatly as a retreating cat. He'd even found the branch he wanted to rest upon in his last scout.

He passed the time thinking about Mary with her curry comb, or giggling at the dinner table.

He didn't doze, but fell into a mental state that lowered his lifesign, a form of self-hypnosis. He doubted there would be a Reaper prowling the estate; they were scarce in this bit of Brass Ring-thick Iowa outside the bigger towns, but it was still good to stay in practice. Even if the fleas and ticks on his body helped obscure the signal humans gave off and provide another form of camouflage.

The blat of the ATV lifted him half out of it, the way a mouse's tread might cause a rattler to open an eye even as the rest of it remained quiescent.

Valentine tensed for a jump. There was always the chance that F. A. James wouldn't see the balloon. Then he'd have to drop off the tree and knock him from the saddle with a body blow, and that could be chancy if James was alert.

No dog in the back of the minibed. A bit of his neck relaxed. He hated killing dogs, even when famished.

James directed his ATV slowly along the fence. Part of his job was to check its condition. Cattle-rustling was not unheard of in Iowa even in this quiet corner; an ambitious young Grog could easily lope off with a couple of prime calves or a young bull tied across his shoulders and paddle them back to the Missouri valley in a canoe.

And at the back of the estate owner's mind there would be old sins, walled out of the Manse but still lurking there like Poe's telltale heart. Most ring-wearers had made enemies on their way up. The fence was Weatherfield Manse's outermost layer of skin protecting the vitals at the great house.

Unfortunately for F. A. James, the skin could be easily gouged if that's all an intruder wanted. He was protecting the house and its lands. Nothing but a handlebar-hung shotgun and cattle prod at his waist protected him.

F. A. James must have seen the balloon as soon as his headlight hit it. He slowed and then stopped his ATV.

He turned off the motor as he exited and Valentine silently swore. The idling engine would cover his footsteps.

F. A. James's fur hat, its security badge at the peak glowing dully like a third eye, tilted upward as he examined the balloon. A message in a tiny plastic jar—the old prescription label had been stripped off so the paper curled within could be more easily read—would be tempting. It was traditional in Iowa for brides and grooms to loose balloons on their wedding day, usually with messages of good wishes— sky cheer was the phrase—but it was always customary to send one off with a large-denomination bill inside.