The sun rested heavily on the horizon when Cornelius finally signaled the end of their training and ordered the guards back to the factory. Sinking down onto a pile of cinder blocks, Ashe released their magic with a twist of her power and then dropped her head into her hands as the men filed out of the building.
Every muscle in her body ached. She wondered if she’d be able to move tomorrow.
“Not bad,” Cornelius said, lowering himself down beside her.
She didn’t bother to look up.
“I have asked Elias to begin teaching you about portals this evening,” he continued. “They are his forte, and thus he is best suited to teach them to you. He should be here soon.”
Her gaze went to him incredulously. “I’m about to fall over, Cornelius. Can it wait?”
The man grimaced.
“Please?” she tried.
“As you wish, your majesty.”
She drew a breath and then let it out in a sigh. Over the past weeks, she’d often marveled at the bizarrely mixed role of dictator and subordinate Cornelius played. In matters of training, he drove her mercilessly, only to switch back to unflappable deference the moment their lessons were done. If she hadn’t known better, she’d almost have thought he was insane.
The storage building door swung open and she looked over tiredly as Elias walked in. Surveying the damage, the familiar hint of humor twitched his expression.
“Love what you’ve done with the place, your highness,” he commented.
She gave him a flat look before focusing her attention on stretching her cramping shoulder.
“Her majesty wishes to start portal training tomorrow,” Cornelius said.
“That’s fine,” Elias replied as he crossed the room. “I actually just came to let you know we’ve found a few cripples.”
Freezing in mid-motion, Ashe stared at him.
“They’re willing to help us,” he continued, “and claim to have encountered your Blood wizards as well. They’re on their way here now.”
She hesitated. “Did you get their names?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, no. But I can take you to meet them, if you’d like. Provided you’re both done, that is?”
Cornelius nodded, but she’d already risen to her feet.
“Where?” she asked.
“The old loading bays.”
Elias had to hurry to catch her.
The loading bay entrance was opening as she reached the top of the stairs leading from the factory to the bay floor. Eyes locked on the door, she stopped, her hands gripping the metal guardrail.
Led by two wizards, an old woman and a teenage boy edged into the room. Watching the area around them nervously, the cripples clung to each other and hung back from the wizards.
The door closed.
“Are those the only ones?” Ashe asked, her voice tight.
“Yeah,” Elias said. He glanced to her, his brow furrowing. “You okay?”
She didn’t answer, not taking her eyes from the unfamiliar pair. Swallowing dryly, she pushed away from the guardrail and headed down the stairs.
The caution on the cripples’ faces grew as she approached them over the length of the loading bay. Stepping to either side of the pair, the guards regarded the empty space in front of them and bowed their heads as she came near.
She ignored them.
“Hi,” she said to the cripples, trying to appear nonthreatening. “I’m Ashe.”
Behind her, Elias coughed.
An urge to scowl hit her and she fought it, not wanting to frighten the old woman and boy just because the wizards were uncomfortable with the familiarity she was showing.
“The Queen of Merlin,” Elias amended politely.
The old woman blinked.
“I just wanted to thank you for coming,” Ashe pressed on.
Cagily, the woman studied her. “They said you believed us about the Blood.”
Ashe nodded. “They killed my family.”
The teenager looked to the old woman, desperate hope in his eyes, while the woman’s hand tightened on the boy’s own, caution still in her gaze.
“They didn’t mention that,” the old woman allowed.
Ashe kept from looking at the others. “They don’t like to spread it around.”
“We had to take the chance,” the woman continued, her tone almost daring Ashe to challenge her. “We had to try to stop them. They killed his mother. My daughter. Like she was nothing. So we just… we needed to…”
She trailed off, unable to go farther.
“We will,” Ashe said.
Nodding angrily, the old woman looked away, resolve steeling her expression.
“We have some space set aside for you,” Elias said after a moment passed. “Away from the wizards.”
Her expression unchanged, the old woman nodded again. Her gaze went back to Ashe. “Thank you.”
Uncertain what to say, Ashe nodded as well. “You too.”
She watched as the guards led the pair toward the steps.
“You want to go out there with them, don’t you?” Elias asked.
She didn’t answer.
“It’s not safe, your majesty. If–”
“I know,” she said sharply. Grimacing, she forced the frustration down. They were here. It was a beginning.
And that had to be enough.
“I know,” she repeated more quietly.
Taking a breath, she turned and walked away.
*****
He’d dug through leads to come up with nothing, and poured over newspaper articles with equal lack of success. He’d talked to reporters who’d eventually stopped answering his calls, and surfed the internet till he thought his laptop would break.
And four weeks after his visit to the morgue to see the body of her accomplice, he still had nothing to show for his efforts.
Harris wished he could convince himself that after so long of searching for Ashley and her sister, he’d become accustomed to the frustration, but he knew it would ring a lie. The dearth of progress was infuriating, and when it finally became shoot something for the hell of it or move on, he’d decided to do what all good detectives did when the trail ran cold.
Go back to the beginning.
He’d avoided Monfort, and all of Utah for good measure, on his journey back. There weren’t any answers there, but there were plenty of people with questions he didn’t care to engage. In her typical, conscientious way, Malden’s wife, Rhianne, had kept him apprised of everything, though he’d yet to answer a single one of her emails. Scott was due to start physical therapy soon, and the plastic surgeons were hopeful they could restore at least a semblance of normalcy to his face. The kids were doing well, all things considered, though Nicole’s grades were suffering and Andrew had gotten in a few fights. Meanwhile, the department kept checking to see if she’d heard from Harris, as they’d received word he’d taken some new work during his leave and they wanted to follow up with him about it.
She put it so mildly, but he could read between the lines. And stay the hell away as a result.
Annoying as it was, though, the department being after him didn’t really matter. He didn’t need to go back to Monfort because, as many lives as Ashley had destroyed there, that city was only part of the story. Everything was only part of the story.
This was the beginning.
The weeks hadn’t been kind to the ruins of the farmhouse. Soaked by rain and baked by the sun, the blackened boards were warped and yellow tatters of crime scene tape still hung in several places, fluttering in the early summer breeze. A hole gaped near the edge of the ruins, marking where the firemen had extracted the bodies from the basement, such as they were. Charred corpses without a shred of identification, not much of use was found on anything or anyone inside the wreckage.
And the same could be said for the whole situation, really. Since arriving in the state a few days before, he’d practically lived in libraries and county clerk’s offices, digging through everyt
hing from musty paper records to electronically scanned files, with little to show for it. Paid for in full eight years ago by a small company that’d since gone bankrupt, the house’s bills had been accounted for by automated transactions from a network of shell accounts, more small companies, and general confusion. The deed and utilities all listed people of whom he could find no trace, and who – he was starting to suspect – never had existed at all.
He grimaced. Like everything else with this girl, the mere concept of a discernible trail was starting to seem like a joke. There was no pattern, no thread connecting anything. Each location in which she’d left her mark was as unrelated to the others as kangaroos were to cowboys.
A clink sounded by his foot and he glanced down to see the sun-faded pipes of a broken wind chime lying in the grass. His mouth tightened as he nudged them with his shoe. If he was honest, he hadn’t really expected to find some grand clue to her whereabouts in the ruins of her farmhouse. He’d just wanted to see the place, rather than merely look at photos online. And if, somewhere inside himself, he’d hoped the sight of the girls’ home would bring him closer to understanding what’d prompted a teenager to massacre her whole family… well, that was forgivable.
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.
Chapter Seven
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.
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