by A. L. Tyler
“I’m sure they will.” Rollin took a sip of wine and then sighed. “But this is where we differ, Miss Lena Collins. None of what I’m doing is for me. I know I’ll never sit on the Council. Someone had to bring attention to our cause and suffering, and I’m that person. The person who may have to die. The person who gets to sit on the Council is someone else.”
“And you’re at peace with that?” Lena asked.
Rollin looked into her eyes. “I am.”
Lena leaned back in her chair, the piece of bread still poised in her hand. “I still don’t think it will work.”
Rollin raised his eyebrows as he took another drink from his glass; he looked amused, but his voice was still low and serious. “And what would you propose, then?”
Lena quickly took a bite of her bread; her mind was racing. It would either work, or it wouldn’t, but Rollin was acting new to wine—she could already sense him loosening up. She reminded herself that guns and alcohol weren’t a good combination, and tried to keep her voice light. “Oh, well…I don’t know. Knowing how the Council works, I’d say you’re screwed. I know I’ve made some bad decisions in the past, but I think a new alliance is in order here. I’ll give you Waldgrave as a good-faith gift. It was built with human-born slave labor, so it really should belong to your people.”
Rollin almost laughed. “That’s quite a gesture, but it’s not yours to give if I understand the situation correctly.”
Lena’s heart skipped a beat. She tried not to seem too anxious. “So Griffin dodged another bullet?”
Rollin stared at her for a moment, then gave her an impressed nod. “Clever. Very clever. ‘Dodged’ is not the word I would have used, but he was alive the last time I saw him. He got a phone call off before he passed out, so we’ll hope he’s okay. God knows who I’ll be dealing with if he dies. We can only hope whoever it is values you as much as he does, right?” Rollin raised his eyebrows and took another drink.
Lena took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. He really would kill her—she was certain of it. He was already anticipating not coming out of the ordeal alive. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s very much like Daray in that respect, because he just won’t die. He’s here to make my life a living hell, and it would just be too easy for him to die. But really, if you have no intention of killing me, then I see no reason that we can’t be friends.”
Rollin almost rolled his eyes as he sat back in his chair and put a foot back up on the table. Befriending a murderer, the man who killed your mother no less, because you see a personal benefit in it. How very much like a Council Representative.
He didn’t seem to like her any more than he ever had, but at least he was willing to discuss it. Lena raised her glass. “Call it upholding the tradition. But as you said, you’re the one who dies. I’m making a deal with the one who gets to sit on the Council.”
“Oh?”
She leaned forward in her seat. “I’m about to do away with the false religion, and as you well know, we’re going to need fresh blood to keep the Council together. I want the names of everyone responsible for the deaths in Texas, and I want to know who’s funding you. Give me the names and I’ll give my Council seat to whoever you want to have it.”
Rollin thought for a moment. He watched her closely, and Lena had to wonder what she had said that he found so interesting. “The Council has to approve your choice, though. You can’t just give it away.”
Lena shrugged, thinking it through. “I can get the votes. Between Griffin and I, we could definitely get enough votes. Let me go tonight and he might be grateful enough to go along with it.”
“If I were stupid enough to believe you wanted to help us, what would make you keep your word? If I let you go, you could just lead them all back to us. I require assurances. Collateral.”
Lena thought. She gazed at Rollin as his eyes wandered down to the wine glass in his hand; he watched the liquid slide around the glass as he gently rocked it in his hand. She needed collateral—something she could give him as assurance that she would keep her word. But she didn’t have anything valuable enough to warrant letting her go, and she desperately needed to get to Daray before he expired or she risked losing the portal forever. The thought occurred that she could offer up Devin, but she just couldn’t bring herself to sink to that level.
“My word. All I have is my word.”
“Not good enough. Now, I think it’s time you went back to your room. You haven’t eaten much; would you like to take food with you?” Rollin stood and walked around to the other side of the table. He stood two feet in front of Lena, looking down on her.
“No. Nothing.”
She heard the door open behind her, and her hood was replaced and her hands bound. She was taken back to her room and settled onto the floor, where she spent a very uncomfortable night.
A younger woman with greasy hair and crooked teeth came in to feed her breakfast the next morning and to let her into the bathroom. She took a shower and was permitted to watch the television for an hour before the woman left her tied and hooded again. At lunch, Rollin came by to see her. He set a plate of food on the table before taking her hood off.
“Unfortunately for both of us, Griffin is incapacitated.” He said, studying her face.
Lena stared at him for a moment, shocked that she was receiving so much personal attention. It didn’t seem to fit with his character that he cared so much about her; he wanted something. “So?”
Rollin turned a chair so that he could sit in front of her. He crossed his arms. “We have some decisions to make, and it would make both our lives infinitely easier if you cooperate. Option one involves you writing a letter to prove you’re alive and in my custody. Option two—and I only offer this because your own self-serving interests happen to coincide with my ends—is that I let you go, providing you can give me collateral, and we may have a future as political allies. I want the portal.”
Lena stared at him. She almost laughed; then she realized that he was serious. “You don’t believe in it. You said last night—“
“And you said you have it.”
“I did not!” Lena shrieked, frantically going over their conversation again. Clearly, the wine had been playing tricks on Rollin.
Very calmly, Rollin leaned forward in his chair to bring their faces closer. “You said you were about to do away with the religion, and that means you know where it is. We all know why you’re out here. Whatever it is, I don’t care—all that matters is that everyone else thinks it’s of interest. If you want to walk out of here, and save us all from a bloody revolution, you’re going to tell me where it is.”
Lena was aghast. Her situation was getting worse and worse—she wasn’t sure if she would have given it to him or not if she had the option. But she didn’t have the option, because she had been bluffing before. All she knew was that Master Daray knew where it was, or at least where he had last seen it, and he was dying. She needed to get to him to find the portal, and she needed the portal to get to him. She looked into Rollin’s cold eyes and tried to sound convincing.
“I can’t tell you where it is. We didn’t find it.”
Rollin smiled. “There’s only one reason he would have risked bringing you back here, and that’s if you had something to report. If you hadn’t found anything, you would have stayed away. If you don’t know where it is, then why did you bother returning?”
Lena thought hard. They had returned because of Master Daray, but she wasn’t going to tell Rollin. She wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to tell anyone, because that one piece of information was so explosive that Lena wasn’t even sure what would happen if it ever left the realm of the secret she was keeping with Griffin.
Lena looked back at Rollin and silently shook her head. In one swift movement Rollin punched her on the right side of her face. He didn’t flinch.
Neither did she.
His expression as impassive as ever, Rollin got up and left, not even bothering to replace her hood. Len
a would have rubbed her cheek, where Rollin’s fist had impacted the hardest, but her hands were still tied. She could taste blood, and when she spat onto the carpet she was sickened to see that her saliva was tinted a much deeper red than she had expected. She stared at the spot and the gravity of her situation was very suddenly upon her again.
She looked around the room; it was a long shot, but he might have brought in a knife with her food. There had been knives on the table the night before. Lena stared squarely at the motel door, weighing the chances that someone would walk in and catch her, and then struggled to her feet and over to the table.
Chicken, mashed potatoes, and an apple. No knife. Not even a fork.
She turned back to the room. The phone, usually stationed on the nightstand, had been removed along with the alarm clock. There had to be something here to help her—it wasn’t a very good motel, and there was bound to be some sort of twisted, sharp piece of a broken bed frame or a cabinet handle somewhere. She walked over to the door and peered through the peephole in the door.
There was no one there. Shocked, Lena continued to look. Rollin couldn’t possibly be that stupid…there. She was on the second story, her room opened up to an outdoor balcony walkway, and in the parking lot below she could see two figures sitting in a station wagon in front of her room. They had to be the guards; putting people directly in front of her door at all hours of the day would have been too suspicious.
She turned back to the hotel room and tried to think. She made a quick walk of the perimeter of the bed in the room, checking the metal frame for any ripped metal edges, but couldn’t find any. She checked the bathroom, the inset closet, and every metal drawer handle in the room, but they were all intact. The coffee pot was made of plastic, and despite her best efforts to crush it in the bathroom door frame, it remained unharmed. She was in the one undamaged motel room in the country.
Lena walked back to the center of the room and tried to think. She was so tired; she had barely slept the night before, and a migraine was starting to build behind her left eye. She wasn’t even sure what she intended to do if she found something to cut the cord wrapped around her wrists. There were probably guards in the rooms on either side of her, and doubtless there was some sort of code or signal that would indicate she had gotten out. She wouldn’t get far after leaving the room.
Lena walked back over to the food on the table. The plate was made of plastic; she might have been able to break it, but whoever came to clean up the plate would probably notice if pieces were missing, and if they had half a brain, they would question why she had broken the plate in the first place.
Defeated, Lena sat down in the chair next to the table. The coppery sting of blood was still in her mouth and her cheek was starting to throb. She sighed and looked down at the food again. She wasn’t feeling ambitious enough to tackle chicken or an apple without her hands, so she bent forward and tried to eat her mashed potatoes with some figment of dignity.
She was almost to the bottom of the plate when she hit a lump. A large lump. She tried to push it out of the way so she could eat around it and had the unpleasant experience of receiving a paper cut on her tongue. She sat back and studied the plate again; there, very distinctly jutting out of remaining pile of mashed potatoes, was the edge of a piece of paper.
Potatoes. Devin.
Lena grabbed the note with her teeth and placed it on the table. She stood up and turned around to use her hands to unfold the small note, and then turned back around to read it. It was only the size of a small note card, but he had written more than Lena had ever seen him write before.
Lena, I’m so sorry about all of this. I don’t know who to trust anymore. He’s only got people set to check on you at meals, but the door is always being watched. It’s not much of a chance,
Behind her, Lena heard the door open. She slammed her head down to the table, grabbed the note, and started to chew. There had been a time written at the bottom of the note, it might have been eight or three o’clock, and she thought she’d seen ‘a.m.’, but Lena wasn’t sure. She swallowed the note and turned around.
It was the same woman from earlier. She cleaned and bandaged the small abrasion on Lena’s cheek, gave her some ice to chew on, and took the rest of her food away. She put her hood back on before leaving, and Lena wondered how she was supposed to know what time it was while she didn’t have a clock.
*****
CHAPTER 17
Later that day, Lena was taken to Rollin’s room for dinner again. Once her hood was removed, she immediately looked over at the clock. It was seven. Rollin was his usual expressionless self as he put food on her plate.
“Have you reconsidered your position at all?” He asked.
Lena avoided his gaze. She could see that her life was about to get very hellish.
“Think about it this way. You can sit here and wait to be rescued at the speed of government, if they decide you’re worth the effort, or you can give me the portal and walk free. If all the bullshit is true, it’s not like I can hurt it.”
Lena swallowed and looked across the table. He was acting like Griffin was dead, and she wasn’t sure if he was faking. Despite herself, she heard her voice crack. “I don’t know where it is.”
“Then tell me what you do know. I’ll tell you if it’s worth anything to me.”
Lena stared down at the food on her plate. Since the results of her last bluff, she wasn’t sure if she should try again, but she certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of any more abuse. She silently prayed that Devin had been referencing the immediately upcoming three or eight a.m.
“It’s…I don’t know exactly where it is. We were following the path. We went to Hays, Kansas, and I saw the guy that killed him. I didn’t recognize him, but I got the distinct impression that he was an Old Faith believer, and that he was bringing it back here. We were trying to pick up the trail again.”
Rollin had picked up his dinner knife and was carelessly spinning the blade against the table as he rolled it back and forth in his hand. He had his head nodded forward, and the lamp in the corner was casting unusually dark shadows around his eyes. “And you thought you would still be able to find it?”
Lena shrugged. “It never made it back to Waldgrave, so it has to be here in the backcountry somewhere. Unless if somebody killed that guy, too, in which case it could be anywhere.”
Rollin sighed and watched the light glinting off the knife as he twisted it to and fro. “Then you don’t have it.”
“But I could find it!” Lena tried to catch his eye, but he only gave her a disappointed, disinterested glance. “If you take me out tomorrow, back to where—“
“No.” He got up and retrieved a pen from the nightstand and brought it back to Lena. He placed a napkin squarely in front of her. “Write it to whoever you want. Just include details that prove it’s you—nothing cryptic. So help me, if they show up here, you’ll be dead before you even know they’re here.”
Lena turned the pen over in her hand. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a part of the motel stationary. She still had no clue where she was. She poised the pen over the napkin, and then started to scribble.
Howard—the coat worked wonders. I’m going to sew a new interior on it when I get home. Tell Hesper I wish we were in Australia again, and to give Maren a kiss for me.
Lena
P.S. I really hope Daray’s suffering.
Lena handed the note over to Rollin, who read it slowly. “Maren?”
Lena forced a smile. “Her daughter with Eric Mason. They really must have stopped talking about her after the marriage, huh?”
He stared back down at the napkin. “Yes…around the same time the third one was born. Not that he’s worth as much as you are to me, but you wouldn’t happen to know where little Darius is hiding?”
Lena folded her arms. When it finally registered that Rollin had asked her a question, she responded in a half-startled tone, afraid that he would take her silence as time that she h
ad used to cook up a lie. “That’s a worthless pursuit as far as I go, because they never told me. Family business. I’m not even sure I know where Mrs. Corbett is now.”
“She’s dead. Recently.” Rollin gave her a humorless look.
“Oh.” Lena busied herself studying the hem on her shirt so that she wouldn’t think about what he had just said.
Rollin tucked the note away without a word and someone came in to take her back to her room. Just before her hood went back on, she saw that it was seven-fifteen. Her hands were tied behind her back.
Back in her room, she made a snap decision to hope that Devin was right. If Griffin wasn’t in charge of negotiations, she was just another Council member. Her days, and possibly her hours, were numbered; the Council weren’t likely to grant Rollin’s wishes, no matter how much Howard begged. For some of them, Lena’s death would be an all too convenient solution to many of the problems that had occupied their time in recent years.
If no one was coming again until breakfast, now might be all she had. She made quick work of getting the hood off by rubbing against the side of the bed, and went over to the television and turned it on with the volume all the way down so that she could keep track of the time. Seven-thirty. She looked around the room again; the bonds on her wrists were too tight to wiggle out of, and she was still clueless as to what she could use to cut them. She walked over to the mirror to study the knot, and tried to pick at it with her fingers for what felt like hours. She couldn’t get the leverage she needed to pull the knots free.
Then it hit her. The mirror.
The wall-mounted mirror over the sink was too big, but there was a smaller framed one hanging on the wall in the bed area. She ran over to the framed mirror and stood on the low dresser, leaning against the mirror and using her body weight to unhook it and lower it down onto the dresser. Using her teeth, she laid it flat and then slid it onto the floor, where she stepped on it, sending spidery lines sprawling across the entire surface.
