Forsaken

by Leanna Ellis

  He used every ounce of persuasion to convince her of his love, of his tenderness, of his intensity, of the depth of his feelings. At first she felt stiff in his arms, but she began to relax and then melted against him. And finally she clung to him with equal fervor. The heartache and heartbreak pulsed between them, drew them together, bound their hearts as one. Could she find her answer here with him? Could she let Jacob go and find her future with him? Levi pulled back, breathless and hopeful, peering deep into her eyes.

  “Hannah, do you trust me?”

  In her eyes, he saw that she truly did. Behind the hurt over all she had lost, her love for him broke through like the sun’s rays piercing rain-filled clouds.

  “Oh, Levi…” She wrapped her arms around his waist, held him close, pressed her face against the beat of his heart. “You have to go, Levi. Jacob…Akiva will hurt you. And I can’t bear to think about…anything happening to you.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about.” He lifted her chin until she met his gaze. “Roc Girouard is coming here. He will help us.”

  “But how?”

  Chapter Sixty

  Did you see him?” Katie sat on the edge of Hannah’s bed. She was dressed in her white nightclothes, her hair long and loose and flowing about her shoulders.

  Hannah hung her prayer kapp on the wall peg, still feeling light and buoyant with love for Levi. “Who do you mean?”

  “The Englisher. Roc. Think he’ll be staying the night again?”

  “How should I know? It isn’t any of my concern.” But Hannah knew why the Englisher had arrived: to tell her Jacob was evil, but she would not believe it. Yes, he had changed, but everyone changed. She had too. She wasn’t the same wide-eyed innocent she once was. Neither was Jacob. If he’d left the Amish ways behind, the district wouldn’t shun him because he had never been baptized. Living as the English did would not make him evil.

  Still, she had agreed to meet with Roc and Levi tonight. Maybe then she would get the answers she needed. And when Jacob returned, she would tell him of her choice.

  Now that her heart had opened to Levi, could things ever be as they were before? Or had life irrevocably changed? She could already see her life playing out with Levi, living a simple, plain life, working alongside him, building a home, a family, a future.

  But they were not married yet, and he would not tell her what to do until that time.

  You are being obstinate, Hannah. The whisper came to her and she wasn’t sure if it was her conscience, the voice that had called to her, or maybe even God.

  Tonight, she felt distracted and disoriented, impatient with Katie and her babbling. She must get Katie to go to sleep.

  “He is very handsome.” Katie hugged Hannah’s pillow to her middle. “Do you think he would take me for a ride in his fancy car?”

  “Don’t go making yourself a nuisance. Leave the Englisher be.” She gave her little sister a stern look, then yawned, stretching her jaws wide along with her arms, and hoped to spur a reaction in those wide, bright eyes of Katie’s. “It’s late, ja?”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Well, I am. And you should be.” She gave Katie an affectionate chuck under the chin. “I will give you more chores tomorrow then.”

  Katie laughed and leaned back onto the bed, tucking the pillow beneath her head. “Can I sleep in here with you?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “But I get lonely in my room.” The mischievous smile that had been there only moments before disappeared under a haze of seriousness. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  Her question startled Hannah. “Why would you ask that?”

  “What if I told you I thought I saw Grandma Ruth in my room? I woke up and she was sitting in the rocker beside my bed.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’re lonely then,” Hannah teased but stopped when she saw the fear in Katie’s eyes. “You must have still been asleep. Fear not. There is nothing to fear. Remember: For He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways.”

  Katie plucked at the sheet and considered the verse from Psalms for a moment before asking, “Are you going to sneak out tonight?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I’ve seen you before.” Katie giggled. “Maybe I’m a better sneak than you.”

  Hannah crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, you think so, eh?”

  She nodded and grinned. “It’s all right. I never tell. Are you going to see Levi?”

  With a huff, Hannah grabbed her sister’s hand and tugged her off the bed. “Come on, it’s time for bed.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “You most certainly cannot.”

  “But I never get to go. I never have any fun.”

  “You should be in bed. Sleeping.”

  “Oh, all right.” Katie hugged her, pressing her cheek against Hannah’s stomach. “I like Levi. I can’t wait till you marry him.”

  “Katie, no one has said…”

  But the little girl grinned. “I can tell. And I like him better than Jacob.”

  That stopped Hannah as if a finger pressed against her heart. “You do? Why?”

  “Levi includes me. Jacob always gave me things to make me skedaddle.” With one last hug, Katie hurried off to her own room, saying, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to run around and have fun.”

  ***

  They were waiting for her.

  With wariness, Hannah approached the two men standing just inside the barn entrance, her arms folded to keep her cape closed about her, and she gave a brief nod to Levi, who greeted her at the door. Roc, however, hung back in the shadows, leaning against the wall in an insolent manner. He had a dark look about him—dark hair, dark eyes—though not black as Jacob or Akiva’s—and a perpetually dark expression.

  “Come in, Hannah.” Levi gestured toward a hay bale, his eyes deep, serious pools. “Would you like to sit?”

  “No, danke. This shouldn’t take long.” She took one step inside the barn, where everything smelled normal with the hay and oats and animals scents but where everything seemed suddenly peculiar. Lantern light flickered along the walls, casting odd shapes and shadows about the stalls.

  Levi closed the door behind her, the metal wheels sounding louder than normal as they slid the door along its track, then the bolt latched and jarred her. “You remember Roc?”

  “Of course.” She folded her hands together and stared at him across the way. “But why are you here?”

  He didn’t move, didn’t straighten, but his voice came out sharp and straightforward. “I’m here to warn you.”

  She felt her jaw reflexively tighten, and her gaze shifted from Levi back to the Englisher. “About Jacob?”

  “Akiva.” His use of the other name startled her. “I don’t know Jacob, the man you once knew, Levi’s brother.” Roc scuffed the bottom of his boot as he walked toward her, but he stopped still a few feet away and regarded her with a slow perusal. “He is the one that killed your lamb.”

  Her gaze swerved toward Levi for confirmation. He simply nodded, his expression grim. Her heart clamored inside her chest. “Snowflake? And why would he do such a thing? How do you know this?”

  “I know. And it’s not all he has done.” Roc sat on a hay bale and waved toward another that had been arranged for just this purpose. “Let me tell you a story.”

  She kept up her guard, but she already felt a trembling deep inside her and crossed her arms over her belly in an effort to hold herself together. Levi watched her beneath the brim of his hat, and, feeling nervous, she finally sat, the scratchy stalks poking into her cape and skirt like little warning signals.

  “You can tell I am not from around here. I am not Amish. Where I come from, it is about as different from this place as hell from heaven. New Orleans is my home, where I grew up and became
a cop…a police officer…right out of school. I loved it, but my wife…well, it’s not easy being married to a cop. Bad hours. High stress. For the wife even more so. She always worried I wouldn’t come home.”

  “I am sorry,” Hannah interrupted, “but I do not know what this has to do with—”

  “I’m trying to tell you that I didn’t always live like this. I had a normal life. A home. And then Katrina happened.”

  “Katrina?”

  “Summer of 2005. Hurricane Katrina swept through. Being a cop, well, I was there. Saw folks who should’ve left stay…and die. Saw things no one should ever see. The destruction of my home. My town. Everything I’d known.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “There wasn’t any law or order anymore. God had forsaken us. And I couldn’t blame him. I saw dead folks. Killings. Rapes. Looting. You name it. But even that wasn’t the worst of it.”

  His gaze remained on her, boring into her. “We found bodies, folks died in ways we couldn’t explain. Even babies. At first, the captain said it was alligators coming into the city to feed. And we saw plenty of ’em among the floating caskets. But what we found was fresh bodies, their necks chewed and their bodies drained of blood. There wasn’t a satisfactory explanation.”

  She plucked at her sleeve. Whatever she had expected Roc to say, it wasn’t this. “What about your wife?”

  His gaze shifted then, only slightly, but enough to convey his own struggle with emotions that obviously haunted him.

  She sensed foreboding, a tension in Roc’s body. She didn’t want to care about this man or his problems, and though she tried to steel herself against any emotion, her heart skittered in response to his words.

  “My wife…Emma…she died.” The anguish in the Englisher’s eyes spoke to her on some deeper level, and she recognized the pain as her own. “Not during Katrina. Later. Just over a year ago.”

  Her insides ached the second he spoke those words, and her heart turned toward him with sympathy and understanding because she knew what it was like to hold love and lose it.

  “And I became a drunk,” he continued, his voice hoarse, “lost my job. Lost the will to live.”

  She hurt for this man, who so obviously grieved the way she had been grieving, but his story was different from hers. She clutched her hands in her lap, her nails biting into her palms. “What does this have to do with Jacob? With Snowflake?”

  “My wife didn’t just die. She was murdered.” His eyes went flat as if all the emotion had been drained from them. “Just recently another young woman in New Orleans was murdered the same way. And then, up here, another murder. And another. And—”

  “Seems to me, you are the only connection with these murders. Not Jacob.”

  He shook his head, and his look pierced her. “I’m hunting the animal that killed my wife.”

  “Animal?” Confused by all he had said and what he was trying to tell her, she wondered if she’d missed something.

  “That is what they are. Animals. Without conscience. Without feeling. Without anything other than a selfish need driving them. That is your Jacob. Akiva.”

  His words punched Hannah in the stomach. The shock of it radiated outward, along her nerve endings, rattling her as hard as if he were to grab her arms and give her a hard shake. “But Jacob would never—”

  “He’s not the Jacob you knew. He’s Akiva now. And he’s a killer.”

  “How do you know all of this?” She stood, her legs more wobbly than she anticipated. She wanted to run out of the barn but fear and the need to know more kept her rooted in place.

  Roc stood too but didn’t step toward her, his movements appeared jerky, awkward. “Look here, I know you don’t want to face this about your”—he glanced at Levi as if groping for the right word and settled on—“friend. You loved him. I get that, know how it feels. But in a sense, Jacob did die. He was changed, maybe even by that woman who is with him.”

  “What woman?” She glanced from Roc to Levi and back.

  “She’s one of them. They kill without thought. Without care. They kill because they have to have the blood to live. It’s survival. Them or us. And I’m gonna make sure it’s them this time.”

  A trembling rocked through Hannah and she reached out to grab something, anything, but her hand found only air—until Levi reached for her, held her, lifting and supporting when her legs threatened to give in to the pressure. Her head was shaking in denial. She stared at the Englisher and saw the darkness of grief well up in his eyes. “I’m sorry you lost your wife. Really I am. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me. It doesn’t.”

  A tick in his jaw pulsed. His gaze flattened, like a shield going up between them. He’d given her one tiny glimpse of his pain, an attempt to convince her, but she was as resistant as he had been at first.

  “Tell her, Levi.”

  Levi’s lips compressed, dimpling his cheeks. “Hannah, I saw him…I saw Jacob…” He shook his head as if reconsidering what he was about to say. “I saw the change, the way he became.” Abruptly, he released her hand, and she teetered again, shaken and unsteady, while he looked helplessly at Roc. “She sees and hears what used to be, not what is.”

  “Levi,” she spoke, sounding steadier than she felt, “you’re talking about Jacob! Your own brother.” She shook her head decisively. “I will go to Jacob and speak to him. He will tell me the truth.”

  “You are naïve.” Roc’s statement sounded cold.

  Levi approached her but this time he didn’t reach out to her, didn’t touch her. “I will go with you. Protect you. I saved you once, and I will do so again.”

  “What do you mean? You saved me.”

  “When you almost drowned in the creek.”

  She shook her head. “But that was Jacob.”

  “I found you, Hannah. I pulled you from the creek. I forced air into your lungs again.”

  “But Jacob—”

  “You are not remembering it right. Think back, Hannah. I am telling you the truth. Only the truth.”

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Levi walked Hannah back to the house. Even though he was physically beside her, he seemed distant, as if his thoughts were far away and his emotions locked inside his chest. Had he locked her out? Was he disappointed in her? Angry? Her steps harmonized to his pace, but he didn’t offer her his arm or even a hand. And she realized she wanted that connection, needed it more than she had ever imagined.

  Their footsteps clomped loudly against the porch steps, and she hoped they wouldn’t awaken her grandfather. At the door, he faced her, his eyes dark and serious, his jaw tight. “I will be here all night if you need me.”

  “Levi, it isn’t necessary.” Her hand lifted as if to reach out to him, to assure him, but she held back. “Jacob will not hurt me.”

  “His intentions are not pure. I will be here.”

  His tone ignited a spark of fear inside her. Fear for Levi. Fear for Jacob. “What will you do?”

  “What I must.”

  “But—”

  “Hannah”—the timbre of his voice resonated through her—“it is no secret, my feelings for you. I love you. I want to marry you.”

  Her heart beat in a heady rhythm, but her throat tightened, closing down on the words she would say, wanted to say, and that Levi was waiting to hear.

  “But this thing with Jacob,” he continued, “it must be decided once and for all. I do not understand what he has become and I’m not sure I want to. But a line has been drawn and decisions have to be made. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, her throat convulsing with all the emotions bombarding her, and she laid a hand directly over his heart and felt the rhythm of it matching her own. “You know my choice. You cannot doubt it. But I must be the one to tell Jacob. I must speak to him.”

  “It’s more dangerous than you know, Hannah. It is not our way to fight, and yet,
I feel that is what we are in: a fight for our lives…for your life. It is too late to save Jacob or I would fight for him too.” He ran a hand through his hair and settled his hat firmly back in place. “I always thought the armor of God was more symbolic but now…” He glanced downward. “Maybe it’s not. The Old Testament is filled with battles waged.” His gaze returned to hers, imploring in their slant. “I wish you could understand the danger you are in.”

  “Jacob will not hurt me. This I know.”

  Levi grabbed her by the arms, pulled her toward him so that their hearts were but a beat apart. She raised up on her tiptoes. His gaze bore into her. “Didn’t you hear what Roc said? Jacob is not who you believe he is. How can you know how he will react? He is an animal.”

  “You don’t know that!” She jerked back until his fingers released her.

  He pulled away then, stared at his hands as if surprised by his own actions, and then he rubbed them against his chest. “Hannah, we’re talking about my brother. Do you think I would make that claim lightly? Without much prayer and thought?” His tortured features compressed. “He is my bruder.” His voice cracked, revealing his heart, the pain and struggle he’d been through. “And yet he is not. Not anymore.”

  A long silence separated them and yet at the same time pulled them closer. Finally, she drew a ragged breath. “I will go to him. He will listen to me. He told me it is my choice.”

  “But he has ways of convincing you.”

  “I understand he”—her voice cracked into shards of brokenness—“he deceived me. He lied to me. Jacob would never have lied.”

  “I am not so sure about that.” Levi’s statement made Hannah wonder if he had experienced a different side of Jacob than she had. “But you are right, this Akiva has deceived you. And he might yet again.”