“I thought that . . .” Hannah started to laugh, from relief.
“Hannah, have a care for that animal.”
She looked down at it and shrugged, but got up. Asher was standing there stone-faced. The severe look would have had more effect were it not for the clothing situation, but it was stern enough to sober her.
“What is it?”
He scanned the roofline for a moment, then looked to where the snake still lay curled up lazily. Giving a little shudder he turned and walked inside, motioning for her to come into the house and leave it safely outside.
He came to the kitchen a few minutes later fully dressed and sat down at the island. Hannah looked at the clock and shrugged, then began pulling pans out of the cupboard. Asher looked about to launch into something serious, and serious conversations were easier with busy hands. And no matter what time it was, Asher would always eat.
“Is the snake still out there?” she asked.
“I hope not. Though I do not know how it will get out. Surely not as easily as it got in. As easily as anyone could get in.”
Hannah threw sausages into a pan, adjusting the heat under them before she turned around.
“But no one did.”
“But they could have. If that had been what it seemed . . .” He shook his head. “Hannah, you might have been taken before you even had time to cry out. I might have woken in the morning to find you gone, or lying there dead. It’s time we left.”
She turned away without speaking, chopping her way through the onions so she had an excuse for tears when she had to face him.
This day had been coming, it was inevitable. That didn’t make it welcome.
Life had fallen into a rhythm over the last weeks, more regular and comfortable than she ever could have expected. Yes, she’d been hurting and healing, but she had also explored and cooked and read for hours on end in the warmth of the courtyard. They’d eaten together companionably and drank wine from old, dusty bottles on the back patio, and occasionally he would break out into ringing laughter at something he found funny, or tell another story about something that had happened lifetimes ago. He teased her about her habit of cursing under her breath and would magically produce books he knew she would like. He would reach out and examine a stray strand of her hair, marveling how he never saw the red until they were in the sun, then absentmindedly tuck it back behind her ear.
It was a pleasant fiction. Hannah wasn’t naive enough to fall too far into it, but she didn’t fault herself either, for being a little enamored, with this place and with him. There would be something wrong with her if she wasn’t. This house was magical, and he was kind to her, caring, warm as the sunshine in this, his own environment.
No, Hannah wasn’t a fool. She was smart enough to see the reality of what she was to him, but she also was selfish enough to enjoy what she wasn’t afraid to call happiness while she could.
Suddenly she felt his hands on her shoulders. Hannah jumped, sending the knife spinning away across the floor; she hadn’t even heard him get up. He turned her around to face him.
“Say something,” he said.
“When do we have to leave?”
“I had thought to wait a while longer, but now, I think we should leave as soon as it is light. We have grown too comfortable in our seclusion; it was foolish of me to delay this long.”
“Where are we going?”
She twisted out of his grasp and reached up to take down plates from the cupboard, mostly to hide the expression on her face. Hannah had grown comfortable, that was true. And to leave in the morning? It was just a few hours away. It was so soon.
“I made contact with someone who is going to provide us with some identities. It would be next to impossible to go on for too long without some. It would obviously not be safe to use your real name, and any number of my aliases might be compromised as well. We will leave here and get them, and from there . . .”
Hannah turned to the stove. Asher didn’t finish and she didn’t ask another question, just finished cooking. By the time everything was done and she had filled the plates, she was able to turn around dry-eyed and manage a small smile.
“If this is my last meal—here, I mean—do you think it would be safe to eat outside?”
They ate in silence, then sat with their coffee, listening to the anhingas calling to each other and the slap of alligators as they slid into the water. Hannah fingered the necklace absentmindedly while she sat, staring out into blackness that was just beginning to show a faint line of light above the cypress trees.
“Asher, who did this necklace belong to?”
Hannah had been wondering about it since he’d put it around her neck. Asher reached over and picked it up from her chest, running a thumb across the surface.
“It belonged to my wife.”
She wished she hadn’t spoken. “I’m so sorry.”
He let it fall back gently against her skin, and the weight of it pulled down against the chain, heavier now than it had been a moment ago.
“You need not be sorry. But me, I am ashamed. So many years have gone by that I cannot remember her face clearly, or the faces of my sons. What I can recall I question, because time has smoothed away the details as surely as it has smoothed away the surface of that metal.”
He turned to her and she looked away, a guilty feeling in her stomach. He reached out and touched her chin, turning her face back toward his.
“Hannah, do not be saddened on my behalf. Sadness after so much time is different. It is a reminiscence, like reading about grief in a book, feeling it but not feeling it truly. It causes me no pain. I struggle to remember them clearly, but I do recall the story of that pendant. Maybe because I can see it and touch it still.”
She reached up and ran her finger around the irregular edge of the metal.
“My wife brought it with her to our marriage, as she had into her first, though not in the same form,” he said. “It had belonged to her mother before her. Sara learned her skills as a midwife from her mother, who had saved the woman and unborn child of a nobleman. It was an unusually difficult labor, and in gratitude he gave her a silver cup.” Asher toyed with his coffee mug, turning it over in his hand, examining the pattern around the rim. “It was a great gift, of immense value, but they were poor and a large family. It was their prized possession, but at some point their need became great and her father shaved off a curl of the silver to settle a debt. A hard winter came and another piece was carved away to buy food. As her sisters and brother were married, a piece was cut away each time to help them on their way.
“Sara was the youngest, and when she went to be married the remainder was given to her, a piece a little larger than you wear. She carved it yet smaller after her first husband’s death so she and her children could survive. When we were wed I bored the hole so she could wear it, and I was proud that we never removed even a sliver from it after that.”
Hannah felt weighted down by the silence, feeling the heaviness of his words. She wished she hadn’t let her curiosity lead her to open that drawer, and she wondered what had made him pick it up and put it around her neck.
“This was where I was sitting, it was just like this,” he said.
It was an unexpected change, and she hadn’t followed, her mind still on his story.
“I’m, sorry what? I was woolgathering.”
“Did you just say woolgathering?” He chuckled. “You speak like you are a hundred years old sometimes.” He was abruptly lighthearted, or at least it seemed that way in comparison to her borrowed sadness.
“You would know,” she replied with a forced smile. “What did you say?”
“I said this is where I was sitting. When I died and came back near you for the first time.”
“You were expecting it, though, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “It was my time again. It is a different feeling, to know you are about to die, even when there is a fair chance it will not be permanent. It is hard to describe wha
t it is like to know a life is coming to a close, but not where you will find yourself when you next open your eyes.”
She said, “You mean how almost every other person on Earth feels?”
“I guess you are right,” he said. “If I should live out my entire span of years, without meeting my end prematurely, you will be forty-five.”
And you will still be exactly the same, she thought. Young and beautiful and perfect. The thought wasn’t disturbing. Hannah accepted that she was living on borrowed time, and she was grateful for every moment. Compared to his life, hers wouldn’t amount to much. Compared to almost anyone’s maybe. But you had to work with what you got.
She reached up and pulled the necklace over her head.
“I think you should take this back.” She held out her hand, the chain puddled in her cupped hand. He didn’t reach out, and he didn’t say anything. “Ash, I probably won’t be around to wear it that long, and what if it got lost then, when I die? And I know you say you don’t really remember her, but you remember this, and it keeps them close that way. This is important to you.”
He reached out his hand, but instead of taking the necklace, he closed his hand over it, and over hers. The metal made a cold core in the middle of their hands.
“You are important to me. It is a gift.”
Asher held her hand in his for a moment, fingers wrapped around her closed fist, swallowing it up in his. He stayed like that for a moment, going completely still.
“What is it?” she said.
“I forget how very, very small you are. How very fragile. And I am afraid for you.”
He swiftly let go and stood up. “Pack your things. I want to leave before the sun is risen.”
29
“How much longer, do you think?” Hannah asked. She eyed the little green dot on the GPS that was them, watching it crawl steadily west on Route 16.
“We are about thirty miles outside of Macon, so we should be there around ten.”
She looked around, trying to judge if anything felt familiar, but unsurprisingly, nothing did.
“I lived near here for a couple years,” she said, “but it was a long time ago.” Hannah didn’t really remember a great deal about it; she’d probably been all of five when she and Joel had moved. The things she recalled were more snippets of memories, like the cardinal red uniform she’d worn to kindergarten or waking up under the pink canopy in her bedroom.
“You lived near here?” Asher pulled off at a gas station, eyeing the fuel gauge.
“I’m pretty sure I was born here too, or at least in the state, but I don’t remember much of anything. Some of that might even be just what my uncle told me. I know he was stationed at Robins Air Force Base for quite a while. The name always stuck because when I was little I pictured it with the birds all over it. After that we lived in Biloxi for a while, two different places in California, in Japan, South Dakota, and in Alaska. The house that burned down in Pennsylvania is actually the longest I’ve ever lived in one place.”
She sat and studied the people coming and going from the convenience store while he waited for the tank to fill, all the while keeping his face low, watching their surroundings. Hannah realized she had no idea what day of the week it was. Probably a Saturday or Sunday, seeing far too many school-age children being hurried along by their parents for it to be a weekday.
“If Michael is your father,” Asher said once back in the car, “I wonder how you ended up being raised by your uncle. That you survived to be raised by anyone is miraculous. I have never heard of Michael letting any of his children live beyond their first few years.”
Looking out the window as they pulled out of the parking lot, she shrugged. “My uncle always said he didn’t know anything about my father. I don’t think he really wanted to, since it was clear my mother moved in with them to get away from him. I think he didn’t want to look for him too hard either, on the off chance he decided he wanted me or something.”
They passed a sign for the Macon exit and Asher steered into the turning lane.
“I never really looked too hard either,” Hannah said. “I poked around a little online, did one of those ancestry DNA tests where you spit in a tube and all that, but not much else. I never really came up with anything.”
“And the DNA test? I considered trying one of those when they first became available. I am curious as to what it would discover.”
She snorted. “You’re so old it would probably come back with a caveman as your closest relative. Not that I made out much better. They just sent it back saying it was contaminated. I tried two more times and then I just gave up.” Spitting in a tube and walking to the mailbox had been the extent of the effort she’d been willing to spend looking for her father.
“Looking for him seemed like an insult to Joel, anyway. He’d done the stand-up thing and raised me, and he wasn’t even really my uncle. I don’t think he and my aunt were ever legally married. He didn’t wear a ring, and I never found a marriage certificate or so much as a piece of paper with her name on it. And the only picture I ever saw of her was of my mother and her together.”
She wondered more than ever what the truth really was.
Asher looked over at her. “There are a great many unanswered questions. How did they find you now? Why would anyone bother after all these years? It is fortunate it appears you are wanted alive, to be taken to him, but why? My fear is that he wishes to see you dead by his own hand.”
Hannah rolled down the window against the heaviness of the conversation, letting the sticky heat of the sun soak into her bones. She watched the scenery fly by on the highway next to the green Ocmulgee River until they crossed it. The remaining distance counted down on the GPS until they turned into the shady green entrance of a state park.
“This is where we are meeting.” Asher checked the time, then pulled into a parking lot under a low overhang of trees. “We are early, as I had planned. This is obviously illegal, but I have it from a trusted source that his work is reliable and that he has a total lack of curiosity as long as his price is met, which is equally important.”
Hannah nodded. She wasn’t thrilled, but she understood the necessity.
“And what’s his price?” she asked.
Asher turned and pulled a small duffle bag from the back seat, hefting it in his hand before slinging it across his chest. “You do not want to know. We are meeting him farther into the park, about ten minutes from now. I am going to scout things out. Stay here, in the car. Lock the doors.”
He got out, tossing her the keys before she could protest. “You have your gun?”
She nodded. Asher slipped into the trees and was gone.
The SUV they had come in was a big, growling beast of a machine painted a matte gun-metal gray, one of three shrouded hulks she’d seen in the garage when they left this morning. It made her wonder what would become of her poor, beat-up compact. What would the owner of the cabin back in Pennsylvania think when they found the sad little car abandoned in their garage?
Hannah cracked open one of the darkly tinted windows against the heat that had descended the minute the engine was turned off. There wasn’t a breath of air to move the leaves above, and Hannah reached over to start the engine.
“It is all clear. Time to go.”
She jumped at Asher’s voice outside her window.
It was cooler outside. She pulled her clammy shirt away from her back, feeling a droplet of sweat sliding down to the gun tucked in the waistband. She probably should get a holster sometime. This whole maybe shooting herself thing was happening way too frequently.
“I can see him at the spot we arranged to meet, and no one else appears to be around. Just stay behind me.”
She hung back, following him along a narrow paved path, past carved wooden signs with line drawings of the park trails and the track of the river.
“Lincoln?” Asher spoke quietly to the man’s back. He was sitting on the bench seat of a picnic table, facing the river in
front of them.
He didn’t turn, keeping his arm casually resting on the small bag lying on the table.
Asher’s arm shot out, stopping Hannah. She had seen it too, the black pool spreading under the table. The man they had come to meet wasn’t sitting upright on his own steam. He was pinned in place by a long metal blade like a sword snapped off at the hilt. It ran downward at a sharp angle through his unnaturally opened mouth, emerging from his back where it buried itself into the table. Asher reached forward and snatched the bag out from under the man’s arm, shoving it at her.
“Run.”
This time she didn’t hesitate. Hannah could hear him just behind her as they charged back the way they’d come. Her ankle screamed at the effort, but she ignored it, nearly covering the distance to the tree line before she heard a thwang, and then a thud.
She heard Asher grunt with pain. Looking back she saw him reaching over his back, clawing at something.
“Go!” he roared, ordering her ahead, falling in place behind her, though not so close now, moving erratically.
A flash of red zipped by, narrowly missing her face and lodging in a tree. Hannah ducked lower, trying to make a more irregular target, glancing back at Asher who was too big to miss as he doggedly struggled to keep up with her, losing ground.
They finally broke through the trees into the parking lot. She heard a whipping sound, and another grunt. Asher skidded to his knees, then fell forward. Two red darts stood out like flags from his back.
She grabbed his arm and tried to haul him up.
“Hannah. Go.” His voice was slurred, groggy.
“Get the hell up!” Hannah yanked him upward with all of her strength, feeling the pop in her ankle, only able to get him as far as his knees. God, he was a tank.
Then she saw her, the lean figure in black striding calmly out from the trees, long rifle casually draped over her arm. Hannah dropped Asher ungracefully and sprinted to the SUV as Amara raised the gun to her shoulder, shaking her head in amusement. Hannah climbed up into the driver’s seat and started the car, the gears screaming as she skipped several. On her first try she stalled it trying to get it into reverse. Jamming the stick into place she whipped it backward, then went forward, stalling it again, throwing herself toward the windshield. In the rearview mirror she could see Amara shaking her head again, taking a moment to brush a strand of hair from her face before she took aim. The gears ground and squealed, and Amara came closer, not pausing to even glance at her brother face down on the pavement.
Echoes (Book 1): Echoes Page 24
