“Tucker is still with the Spider People,” he answered. “But your war is over.”
“Oh, my God,” Olivia breathed. “Adam, what did you do?”
“I did…what everybody needed me to do. You, Tucker, Antonio, Billy, the men who died at that farm…hell, even Maggie…I couldn’t just make it about me and what I wanted anymore. Not after what I saw this morning.
So I went for the treaty you wanted…or at least I did my best. I tried to remember what your people would need to get out of it, although it would have really helped to have one of you along to guide me. There’s also the fact I was negotiating with a spider you could launch aircraft off of, so the thought of playing hardball never really entered my mind. Anyway, here’s the broad outline of what you got…
For now, most of your tribe is forbidden to enter Cole County. Only VIP’s. I guess it’s still too soon and it’s going to take some time for some memories to fade. But that’s something for your…our…leaders to work out later. The Spider People will send a certain quantity of veneno to Houston every three months. You guys will help conceal their existence. No more killing. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody but you.”
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her…maybe in the hope if he kept saying it, he would believe it someday. At least it had the benefit of being true. “Tucker is with the people he should be with. He thinks of them as family now, and they are certainly more qualified to raise a young telepath than I am. He needs…them.”
The solemn look in her eyes said more than any words.
“And, hey,” he gave her a weak grin, “since we’re not at war anymore, they haven’t ruled out the idea I might get to visit once in a while…so we’ll have to see what happens.”
“Adam...”
“Besides,” he continued, “there’s another bit of good which accidentally came along with it. According to Antonio, since I’m the one who negotiated the treaty, the council is sure to accept me now in order to reinforce the idea this treaty is between the Spider People and your People, instead of with me alone.”
Olivia frowned in thought a second, then nodded slowly. She looked so very tired and Adam hoped she would drift back off to sleep soon.
Of course that’s when Antonio came in through the door.
“We’re about ready to go” he announced. “How is our patient?”
Adam gestured toward the bed where Olivia lay watching.
“Ah,” Antonio nodded. “I see.”
He walked over, stood by her bed, and studied her for a few seconds without saying a word. Then he leaned over until he was almost nose to nose with her.
Her fingers twitched and Adam could see her fight the urge to pull the blankets up under her chin.
“Olivia,” Antonio stated, “you did exactly what I would have done in the same situation…even including your decision not to call me so you wouldn’t have to disobey a direct order to stand down. The truth is, once you knew what was happening, the situation was already making all the decisions for you. Sometimes the trick is seeing that, and trying to make those decisions work the best you can. That is all you can do, and that is exactly what you did. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Then while I understand you will mourn the losses we suffered in this battle, I can rest easy in the knowledge you will not be doing anything so melodramatic as beating yourself up with pointless second guessing. Correct?”
“Yes, sir,” came the meek reply.
“Outstanding!” Antonio exclaimed and stood to leave. “Then your new assignment is to spend the next two weeks healing, while acclimating Adam to his new life. I will be promoting Delgado’s nephew, Felix, as my second sub-chieftain and giving many of your current duties to him. You will retain your title, but will have new responsibilities reflecting one of the more bizarre addendums our dear Adam inserted into this treaty. I confess, I’m not entirely sanguine about that part.”
He gave Adam a dark look at this last.
“New duties?” Olivia queried, then looked askance at Adam. “Addendum? What addendum?”
“Well,” he shrugged, “it turns out the Matriarch is over thirteen-hundred years old and has an eidetic memory. Hell, she not only remembers everything that happened around her, she has all the memories of the people she ate, too. Anyway, she was fascinated with the idea of having somebody transcribe her memories, so the Dog People will be sending a qualified researcher up once or twice a month to sit at the Weyrich BBQ joint and discuss history with her avatar.”
Antonio continued to glower in his direction, but the look he now received from the bed made that completely unimportant. Sometimes it was getting what somebody else wanted that made it all worthwhile.
The Chieftain must have noticed the look as well, for he rolled his eyes in an expression that would have looked right at home on the face of Billy Clayton. Then he shook his head and walked back over to the door leading outside.
“I shall give you two a couple of minutes,” he sighed, then paused in the doorway. “But while I go to fetch the stretcher, I shall also leave you with this to ponder…
Olivia, you are destined to be a legend to our people. A legend that shall certainly outshine me. You are not only our first female chieftain, you are the one who launched the battle ending a centuries old war. And now it appears you will also be the one who will restore much of our past as well. Words cannot describe how proud of you I am at this very moment.”
“Thank you, sir,” she whispered. Antonio’s words on top of the revelation of her new assignment were not doing her famed composure any favors.
“But do you know what the best part is?” he continued. “The part where you have truly outshined your dear old uncle?”
“No sir?”
“The best part,” he broke out in the broadest, happiest smile yet, “is that in all my adventures, and misadventures, through Mexico and Spider Tribe territory…I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I have never accidentally gotten married! Not even when drunk!”
With that, he closed the door and they could hear him whistling as he walked away down the balcony.
Adam blinked in surprise, then looked down to see Olivia regarding the door with a look of open horror.
“Oh…my…God,” she moaned, and pulled the pillow over her head. “Adam, I’m doomed. We may have to run away from home and move in with the Spider People. He’s going to be gloating about this for years!”
Adam patted her on her uninjured shoulder in sympathy. He knew her dismay was half real, but couldn’t contain the smile spreading across his face. It matched the glow spreading within.
We.
Home.
He savored the words.
They were good words. And now they were his. They were all the words he would ever really need.
He still had no idea what “home” was in this new world, but he was content to find out. He didn’t care if it were in the building he had been housed before, or a house nearby. Hell, at the moment he didn’t care if it was on the damned roof.
Because as long as the word “we” was involved, home was wherever they were.
And that was all the home he needed.
EPILOGUE
The shadow staggered out of the trees at the riverbank, a black cutout against the moonlit white of the sandbar. It dragged a large canoe along behind, although the task seemed almost too much for it. The gasps, wheezes, and curses that carried over the water were a desperate mix of strain and frustration. It tugged, fell, cursed, and stumbled up to pull again.
“So, I see you read that book I loaned you after all.”
The figure paused in its laborious effort and went still. Then it slowly straightened, and turned to confront the second silhouette that emerged from the trees. The blue-white light revealed Maggie’s injured face to be gaunter than ever.
Grave dirt still dripped from her clothes. By custom, she had been buried near sundown on the same day she died.
>
“Dammit,” she groaned, then winced at the effort. “How did you know?”
Billy shrugged as he approached. The gesture hid the fact he couldn’t decide whether to be relieved, angry, or just sad that his hunch had been correct.
“You sent me away,” he said. “And there was no good reason for that. I could have held Molly till we got to safety and you know it. I was doing it at the theater until the bomb distracted me. The outsider gave me a different reason that was so nice I almost believed it just because I wanted to…but he doesn’t know you like I do. So it still bugged me.
Then I went to your house to get clothes for them to bury you in and I saw the book. I was going to put it in the grave with you, so maybe you could read it in the next life, and then I saw the bookmark. And that got me to thinking…”
Billy paused a second and looked meaningfully at her, but she just turned away and said nothing. Somewhere in the night, an owl added its voice to the chorus of frogs.
“You can already shut your spirit in to the point nobody can sense you,” he continued, “and using that book I learned to slow things down to the point I once scared Arlen into thinking I was dead. And then I wondered…if little ol’ me can do it, what about the strongest spirit singer this tribe has ever known? After all, once you’ve done it you would look and sense as dead as a doorknob…especially with all those injuries. The only thing was, you just couldn’t have a spirit singer around while you were in the process of doing it. That’s the thing that kept bugging me about you sending me away, so I had to check.
And sure enough,” he concluded, “here you are. I thought you promised me you weren’t going to go rogue.”
Maggie turned back to him with eyes so empty and tired it hurt him to look at her.
“I’m not going rogue, Billy. I’m just going away.”
“A lot of people would say that’s no different.”
“A lot of people ain’t here.”
Billy grimaced and glanced out over the river flowing by. He wondered why he never made it simple on himself. Why couldn’t he have just held off checking on his hunch until tomorrow when it would be too late to matter? Now he was in a hell of a position.
“Maggie, you do realize what my duty is here, right?”
“I suppose. Are you going to start shooting at me again?”
She bent and tugged at the boat. Billy could see her grimace and fight the urge to grab her sides.
“I ought to,” he snapped and walked over to where she panted by the craft. The teen reached in, grabbed it by one of the seats, and lifted it off the sand with one arm. He made a show of testing its weight before giving Maggie a narrow look. “Hmmm… I’d say about a hundred twenty, maybe a hundred thirty pounds counting the oars. I’ve seen you throw heavier things further than you managed to drag this thing so far. You sure you ain’t dying?”
“Does it matter?”
“Hell yes, it matters!” he exploded. “If you die in this boat, you’re gonna leave one hell of an interesting corpse for some lawman down river to puzzle over. Did you think about that?”
“I thought about it. I won’t die.”
“Good! Because if I thought for one second that could happen, I would drag your ass back home and consequences be damned! I ought to anyway. Why the hell are you doing this? Do you hate us that much?”
“I don’t hate anybody. I’m all out of hate.”
“Then why?”
Maggie’s jaw worked and she stared down the moonlit river. She watched the water flow by as she answered.
“Do you know what the hardest part of fighting the rogue was? The part that almost made me throw down my gun and walk away?”
“No. What?” Billy demanded. He had never known Maggie to walk away from a fight in her life.
“She was right.”
That brought him up short.
“What? Right about what?”
Maggie looked up at the moon then closed her eyes.
“The Great Mother is old, Billy. She’s a creature of another time and she sits in the middle of our web which makes us the same thing. And as she’s gotten older, we’ve become flies in her web…watching the outside world getting both closer and further away, and more dangerous all at the same time. The rogue intended to kill her and take her place…and she wanted me to help her. I gotta admit I thought about it. I really did.”
“Oh, Maggie…” Billy whispered in horror.
“I didn’t though. I fought her. But the problem is it wasn’t out of loyalty to the Great Mother. The rogue was right about her, and I couldn’t deny it.”
Billy didn’t know what to say, both horrified at the blasphemy she uttered, yet trapped by the knowledge that Maggie was not one to embellish or exaggerate. Lying is born from fear and she had never had much incentive to develop the skill.
“I fought her,” the girl continued, “because she was an outsider. She spoke as the Sellars woman, and showed herself as the Sellars woman. She didn’t even know our language. I couldn’t let her win…couldn’t let her lead us…because she wasn’t one of us. She was just a different path to ruin.”
The teen shook his head in confusion.
“Okay, so if that’s true, you made a tough choice, but in the end you made the right one. You served the Great Mother. There’s no reason you can’t stay.”
“No.” She opened her tired eyes and looked from the moon to him. “That’s just it. If I had only hunted her down and killed her for the fangs that would have been one thing. But the fact I made that choice means I can’t stay. You can’t choose which god rules and then serve them. Both you and they know who put them there. So the only thing I had left was to serve our People. I did what I was created to do.”
“Maggie, you’re talking crazy here.”
“Yeah,” she muttered. “I know. But while I’m talking crazy, there’s something else you need to know. Something important. Like I said, the rogue was using the Sellars woman to speak. She was the first human the rogue consumed and that helped shape who she was. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “So what?”
“So the Great Mother is old. There’s going to be another Young Mother one day. Probably not all that long from now either. And then another. And another. Until one succeeds or the Great Mother finally drops dead without another to take her place.”
“Holy….”
“Yeah,” Maggie stared grimly down the river again. “And there’s only one way to keep that from happening. The People are going to have to make sure the next Young Mother is one of us. Get it? And there’s only one way to do that.”
Billy realized with dawning horror what she meant.
“But,” he whispered, “we don’t do that anymore. We haven’t done something like that in over a century. And not one of our own. Not one of us!”
“Yup, ya’ll have fun with that.” She started dragging the boat toward the river again. “I’m done with sacrifices.”
Billy watched in numb shock as she struggled to pull the craft to the water’s edge. It was an enormous thing to digest. The idea of the Great Mother being mortal was something that had never crossed his mind. Now it felt like the foundation of his universe had turned to sand. She was just there. Always there. A powerful but silent presence in the background that connected all of them within her sphere of influence.
She had been an unquestioned part of his life since birth…just like Maggie.
“You’re really going to do this,” his voice reflected the betrayal he felt. “You’re just going to leave.”
She didn’t answer.
Now it really hurt.
“God DAMN you! You actually think I’m just going to stand here and let you do this!”
Maggie finally got the boat to the water and hunched over it in an obvious attempt to regain her breath. Even as he raged at her, the length of time it took her to recover scared the shit out of him. He hadn’t known it was possible for somebody to be so hurt and still function.<
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Then she slowly straightened, with great care, and walked back toward him. She moved with stiff effort, until they stood almost nose to nose on the sandbar.
Billy glared at her without flinching, but painfully aware of the two inches he gave away in height.
“Keep your nose clean, Billy,” she said. “I mean this. When they decide to feed somebody to the next Young Mother, it’s probably going to be a Spirit Singer who got in trouble over something. That way they can all feel better about it.”
“You’re wrong. We won’t do that.”
He had to believe it. There were levels of insanity he refused to believe that his family and people would sink to.
“Fine, I’m wrong,” she answered. “But when they do, don’t let it be you. You hear me? Because if it is, I’ll have to come back and shoot a bunch of people.”
“Oh, thanks.”
He still thought her worry was uncalled for but had to admit, at least to himself, it felt good to hear her say that. It was sort of her way of saying they still had each other’s back…although it would have felt a little better if he thought she were exaggerating.
The boy also realized right then he was going to let her go. He briefly wondered if there had ever been any doubt.
“Okay, Maggie,” he sighed. “You win. You’re still dead. Congratulations…I think.”
For one of the few times he had known her, her face softened. The relief he felt from her almost embarrassed him.
“Thank you, Billy.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he grouched. “I just needed a final episode of crazy to make the day complete.”
She attempted a sardonic grin and turned to leave…and he immediately moved up to support her when she wobbled. The fact she allowed it without rebuke wasn’t lost on him.
Billy helped her to the big canoe, then tried not to noticeably hover as she eased herself inside. He noted it still held the supplies from the outsider couple the rogue had taken. At least she could hole up somewhere and recover a little for a few days. Her weight settled the canoe against the sand and he had to pull it free. Then he waded into the dark river as he pushed the craft toward deeper water.
Spiderstalk Page 53
