Merciful Father, he could probably go to prison if someone saw what he was about to do and got the wrong idea. But he couldn’t risk letting them take Rachel. Not with everything else that was happening behind the scenes here.
So John scooped Rachel’s tiny form up in his arms and headed for the door at the back of the kitchen. He crossed the small fenced-in back yard, trying to look everywhere at once in case he should be spotted by prying eyes, but the yard was fairly private.
He set Rachel down, cracked open the rear gate, and checked to confirm the car was close enough. Satisfied, he turned back to pick up Rachel and stifled a curse. Her comm. He’d nearly forgotten about it. It wouldn’t make any of this look any better if and when he had to explain himself to the authorities, but for now, the device had to go. If these people had the reach to invalidate Net IDs, they’d have no problem finding Rachel’s comm and tracking it.
So, repeating to himself under his breath that this was a matter of life or death and that he had no other choice, John stripped off Rachel’s comm, removed its battery, and chucked both over the fence. Then he picked Rachel back up and hurried to the car. He buckled her into the front seat, figuring if anyone cared to notice them on the road, the slack eleven year old might look less suspicious as a sleeping passenger rather than laid out across the back seat.
He didn’t have time to think it through more than that.
He looked back at the tragic house one last time. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Then he got in the car and set them on a roundabout course back toward home, swinging unnecessarily northwest for starters just in case there were unfriendly eyes somehow watching.
Would they be safe at his house? He had no idea—about any of it. About what in holy hell Lilly had done. About what had just happened back there at the house. About what he was going to do with the unconscious eleven year old he had no real custody over—legal or otherwise.
Next to him, Rachel gave the slightest stir and made a troubled moaning sound.
The sound, coupled with everything that had happened in the past hour, filled John’s eyes with tears.
The poor girl. If she’d seen everything that had happened back there…
“It’s okay,” he whispered, helplessly smoothing her hair and patting her leg. “It’s okay, Rachel. I’ve got you. I’ll keep you safe until…”
The words stuck aching in his throat, and suddenly the tears were spilling over and he was shaking with silent sobs and he didn’t know what to do but hold on to Rachel as the car silently drove them along.
Until your mom comes for you, he wanted to say. But he couldn’t. Because, for some reason he couldn’t consciously explain, he was suddenly sure that Lilly was gone. The revelation settled over him like an ocean, vast and far more certain than it had any valid reason to be.
“Lilly,” he whispered.
Silence answered. Nothing but silence, bleak and empty and hopeless.
Only it wasn’t hopelessness he felt when he looked over at the young blond girl beside him. It was duty, and a desperate need to protect something that was good and sweet and kind. It was love for a friend who’d been lost for a long time now.
It was hope. Hope that, whatever was happening, John might have it in his power to see this poor girl through.
“Don’t worry, Rachel,” he said, his heart breaking all over again as he watched her quiet breathing.
“I won’t ever let them hurt you again.”
Epilogue
Rachel woke straight into a moment of utter disorientation. The moment only stretched as her eyes flicked over her surroundings. Dim room. Unfamiliar. Curtains pulled. She tried to turn her head to investigate further, and her body caught fire with pain like she’d never felt before—far too intense to fall under the category of simple muscle soreness.
What was happening?
She clenched her teeth against the pain, which only worsened it. A whimper escaped her lips, but she forced herself to stop, to lie still and bear the pain until it receded.
Where was she? And why was she—Oh no.
It hit her like a truck rolling over her battered body with slow, unwavering certainty. Flickers of awful images and growled curses. Rough men. Terrible men. And blood. And-and…
“Dad,” she whimpered, eyes filling with tears.
It had been a dream. A nightmare—the worst nightmare she’d ever had, but a nightmare all the same. Only it wasn’t. Much as she wanted to deny the weight settling on her chest, as if the blankets had suddenly turned to thick sheet metal.
She couldn’t breathe. Was going to be sick. Needed to scream. Needed to find Mom and—
Footsteps.
The sob froze in Rachel’s throat, clamped firmly there by sudden terror at the realization that she had no idea who’d brought her to this unfamiliar room.
She closed her eyes and went slack just as the bedroom door creaked open.
Heart pounding so hard she was sure the intruder would hear it across the room, Rachel waited, too scared to even breathe.
“Rachel?”
The soft voice came from the direction of the door. And was there something familiar about it? She didn’t have the time to figure it out or the discipline to stifle her involuntary gasp when the footsteps started across the room.
That was it. Cover blown. Her eyes tore open, frantic desperation blazing through her chest. She’d have to run. Have to—
The face that came into view was one she recognized. Square jaw. Dark skin. Kind eyes—eyes that were currently full of worry and concern.
“It’s okay,” John said quickly, holding his hands up in a non-threatening way. “It’s okay. You’re safe. You’re safe here.”
Rachel watched him, unable to bring herself to do anything but continue breathing like she’d just sprinted a mile.
“You’re good,” John said, nodding. “Just breathe. Do you remember me? I’m John. I’m friends with… I’m friends with your mom.”
“Mom,” Rachel croaked, throat burning. “Where’s Mom?”
John pulled a chair from the corner over to her bedside with slow, careful movements and sat down. “I don’t know yet,” he said slowly. “I’m trying to find out where she is, but… Do you remember anything about how you got here?”
It sounded like a trick question to Rachel, an adult ploy to avoid asking the real one. But she didn’t have long to think about that before the images sprang back, unbidden, tearing at her even when she closed her eyes to shut them out.
“It’s okay,” John said. “We don’t need to talk. You can just—“
“They’re dead.” She opened her eyes, almost as surprised at her own words as John looked to be. “Aren’t they?”
John stared at her for a stretch, mouth hanging partially open as if his words had caught right at the edge. Finally, he gave up and reached for her hand.
Her vision clouded and shrank, her breath catching, and she yanked away from his touch without thinking. The movement earned her another full-body bout of fiery pain. A scream built on her lips and was cut short as a great convulsive sob gripped her.
The exertion lit her world with exquisite agony from the center out, freezing her mouth in a wordless scream until the next sob took her.
Rachel cried. For how long, she couldn’t say.
John hovered beside her all the while, looking afraid to reach out again, his own eyes full of tears. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She cried on, somehow almost glad for the sharp pains each sob brought on, tugging her mind to the present, demanding the whole of her attention in a place where it couldn’t so easily wonder back to the things she’d seen.
Dad. Grams.
Gone. They were gone.
By the time the tears dried and the sobs finally abated, her nerves were too raw to even appreciate the recession of the physical aches and pains.
She lay still, fading fast now. It didn’t seem to make sense how she could be so
tired when her world was crumbling around her, and yet her eyelids grew heavier by the second.
John was holding her hand, she realized. Apparently she’d been too distraught to even notice when he’d grabbed it, and she was absolutely too tired to care much now. Her eyes drifted shut, darkness closing in.
At the edge of her awareness, John gave her hand a strong squeeze. “I want you to know I’m going to take care of you, Rachel,” he said quietly. “No matter what happens. I won’t let them hurt you. I promise.”
A part of her wanted to ask him if he’d promised Mom the same thing about Dad and Grams. But darkness closed before she could, and Rachel slept.
In the days that followed, Rachel spent the overwhelming majority of her time in bed. John seemed to be there in between every fitful bout of sleep, carefully nursing her with a steady stream of warm soups and kind words. Apparently he’d called out of work for the week.
Every time she woke to find him, Rachel would ask about Mom. Every time, John’s mask of guilty grief would reveal the answer before he managed to scrounge together the next hollow excuse.
Mom was gone too.
Rachel wasn’t sure how she knew it, but that didn’t make her any less certain.
And so she cried and she slept. She let John spoon the odd bite of soup or sip of water into her mouth, and, when necessary, let him carry her broken body to the bathroom too.
She still didn’t understand why she felt like she’d fallen down a skyscraper’s-worth of stairs three times over, but she didn’t spend much time questioning it either. She couldn’t remember enough of the attack to explain it, and she didn’t want to. Nor did she particularly feel like moving from the bed at any point, so it was all just as well.
Why would she move?
Mom was gone. There was no more Dad. No more Grams. They were gone—all of them gone—and Rachel was alone in the world.
Alone. Forever. Alone to deal with the utter numbness in her head and the ever-present, demanding ache in her chest. Alone.
Except for John and his son, Michael.
She hadn’t even known about Michael until the second day, when he’d barged in and started asking questions with animated enthusiasm about who she was and where her parents were. John had hustled him out, looking back at Rachel as if he expected she’d shatter like china on tile at any moment.
To be fair, she almost had. But that wasn’t exactly new, stabbing questions or no, and despite how those words turned in her chest, Rachel didn’t so much mind seeing someone who was too enthusiastic on life to get sucked down into the somber weight that had settled firmly over her and John’s short conversations.
Michael wasn’t so bad, she decided.
Then the next day, he’d barged in again, this time to bring her a drawing of the three of them holding hands in front of the house—a happy little family, sunny rainbow and everything. For the first time since she’d woken up there, Rachel’s tears were compelled at least in part by something more than blind, hopeless grief. Michael stood by her bed all the while, small hands resting on her arm, looking unsure as to why exactly she was crying but perfectly willing to do what he could to help her stop.
After that, Rachel had asked John to leave the bedroom door open.
It was another few days before Rachel had recovered from her full body shock enough to start stiffly standing and limping her own way to the bathroom. Once Michael witnessed the feat, he asked if she would come eat with them in the dining room and insisted that John could feed her eggs because eggs made people big and strong, so maybe they’d help her feel better.
Unable to argue with Michael’s supreme logic, Rachel agreed and limped after him to the kitchen, where John scurried to plop down extra pillows on one of the small round kitchen table’s four chairs for her.
John looked tense as he skirted around the kitchen, frying up some chicken and whipping up a salad to go with it. Michael sat at one of the kitchen island stools, waving his dangling feet through the air and keeping them both occupied with a steady stream of questions that neither of them were overly engaged with.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked John quietly when he came over to deposit the mixed salad on the table.
He gave her an assessing look before his eyes flicked back toward Michael. “Later,” he replied just as softly.
They ate in silence but for Michael’s occasional question or profound thought. Between John’s unspoken tension and everything else, Rachel’s appetite was no stronger than it had been over the past… Had it really been a week? That said, John’s cooking was good enough that she managed to get down about a third of her plate before Michael finished up and John asked him to go play in his room for a little while.
“What is it?” she asked when Michael had gone.
John chewed his lip and glanced at something on the kitchen countertop. She followed his gaze to the small TV there, and it clicked like a heavy stone settling in her stomach.
“The news? Are they… Have they talked about it? The…”
“You don’t have to see it,” John said. “But yeah. The, uh… Well, it made headline news pretty fast. No big surprise there. But it’s more than that.”
“Show me.”
She wasn’t entirely sure why she said it. Maybe she wanted to save John from having to dance around whatever it was he was trying to tell her. Maybe some part of her was secretly just looking for a good reason to shed more tears.
John was watching her closely. “Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He studied her for another long moment, then gave his own resigned nod and called the TV to life. He swiped at his comm and brought them to a video he’d saved from earlier, with a headline that read 11 year old Rachel Cross missing after double homicide home invasion. In the top left, floating over the news caster’s shoulder, was another spat of text with an emergency Net ID and a plea to call with any relevant information.
John tapped play, and the raven-haired news lady sprang to somber life, detailing out much the same. Two perpetrators in custody. Two still at large, thought to be on the run with Rachel, whose picture appeared on screen at the appropriate time, and if anyone had seen or heard anything that might help—
John cut the video off and the feed snapped back to the real time news, which was currently covering a story about some farmers who swore they’d seen a great big purple spaceship taking off just that morning. But Rachel hardly had the mental space to process that as John reached to mute the TV.
She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She’d known perfectly well what was coming. The caster hadn’t even mentioned Dad or Grams as anything beyond “two victims,” but still, seeing it on the news was just another reminder, another step in firmly solidifying that this wasn’t all just a bad dream.
“No one knows?” she asked quietly. “That you have me, I mean?”
She looked at John, wondering if she should be frightened about the intentions of a man who’d snatch a girl up from a crime scene and hide her away from the police and everyone else. It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered it, but she’d been too devastated over the past week for the worry to take precedent, especially when John had shown her nothing but kindness. Even now, looking at the man who was, legally speaking, probably her kidnapper, she couldn’t seem to scrounge up more than an ounce or two of fear.
She couldn’t say why, but some deep instinct told her John was to be trusted. Still. “Why haven’t you called the police? Couldn’t you go to jail if they find me here?”
The tightening of his face and shoulders told her she’d found at least part of the reason he’d been looking so tense. After a long, thoughtful silence, though, he let out a deep breath and laid his hands calmly down on the table.
“Did your mom ever tell you anything or show you anything you couldn’t explain? Anything that seemed, well, like magic?”
“What? What are you—” She shook her head.
What was he talking about? And more
importantly, why did she suddenly have the strangest feeling—a glint of a glint at the edge of her mind—that said there was something there? Some buried snippet of memory of something impossible, something she’d done back there. At the house. When those men… How had she escaped those men after they… after they’d—
“No,” she snapped, shaking her head more forcefully this time. “What does this even have to do with anything?”
She realized she was breathing too rapidly and sat back heavily to cross her arms and try to get control.
John didn’t miss the reaction, and the look on his face said he considered it his own fault. “Maybe nothing,” he said slowly. “Maybe everything.”
What was that supposed to mean?
Rachel was about to ask when John’s gaze flicked to the TV and his eyebrows knitted together in a suspicious expression.
“What the hell?” he muttered as Rachel turned to look too.
The news station had cut to a live feed from a room Rachel instantly recognized, though she’d never set foot in it. The oval office. And behind the dark wooden desk sat President Connors, her normally kindly features composed in a grim expression.
John dialed up the volume just as she began.
“Good evening, my fellow Americans. You’re no doubt wondering why we felt the need to interrupt your scheduled viewing tonight. What could—” Connors gave an odd little twitch. “What could possibly be so pressing? Well, the reason…” Another twitch, and when she spoke again, her tone was somehow different, colder. “The reason, my fellow Americans, is that you’ve been bad. Very, very bad.”
“What’s happening?” Rachel asked.
John, riveted to the TV with his furrowed brow and his slack jaw, didn’t answer.
“You took your best shot, you petulant, filthy little vermin,” President Connors continued, biting out each word like a curse now.
Then she slumped in her chair as suddenly as if someone had cut her strings. A man in a charcoal suit strode in from the left, Rachel assumed to check on the President. But instead, he plucked the small microphone from the lapel of her jacket and, with a motion as casual as if he were sliding a chair out of the way, he threw the massive wooden desk aside and stalked toward the camera.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 129
