Gideon

by Alex Gordon

  After a few moments, a weird sound emerged from Cateman, a dust-dry croak that replayed over and over. The remains of laughter. The effort drained him—he faded into the pillows even more, and his eyes rolled back, revealing crescents of yellowed sclera.

  He has no eyelids left. Lauren swallowed hard. Can he even see me? She leaned forward, elbows on knees. Nose fatigue had taken up residence—she could barely detect the rot emanating from the bed. “You took in my father after the deaths of his parents. Convenient, their dying. Left you a clear shot at the key you needed to free Nicholas Blaine. But you needed to make sure that you had him, so you set Emma before him like a dinner before a starving man, and let nature take its course.”

  Petrie leaped to her feet. “Stop it! I let you in—”

  “You let me in because he wanted to see me. And you’ll do what he tells you, right to the end.” Lauren shrugged. “I have no proof of anything. I just think it odd that everything bad one hears about Mullins seemed to have originated from Catemans, yet Catemans seem to need us so much.”

  Cateman took a deep, rattling breath, then released it in gasps. “Your father—was no—saint.”

  “He was young, and alone, and when he didn’t give you what you wanted, you tried to destroy him.” Lauren looked across the bed at Petrie, who stood as still as her Master. “Can he be moved?”

  Petrie hesitated, then she shook her head. “There’s nothing left to him. He’d fall apart if we tried.”

  Lauren stood and walked to the window, pushed aside the heavy drape. Black outside, but not night, swirling shadow that chattered and runneled and scraped the panes. She wondered whether Waycross and the others had managed to get away, or if Blaine’s horde had chased them down.

  “You know what he wants?” Petrie still stood in the same place, tears coursing down her cheeks. “He wants you to take him out of here. He doesn’t want to be caught by them. You can pass through the thin places, so you can take him where he needs to go.”

  Lauren watched the snow. “And why would I do that?”

  “Because it’s right.”

  “What do I get in return?”

  Petrie drew up straight. “I am to answer one question—one—” She stammered as Cateman raised a shaky hand, then let it fall once, then again. “Two. I am to answer two questions.”

  Lauren returned to the bed, lowered to the edge. “What do I do?”

  Petrie waved toward the bed, then turned away. “Just guide him.”

  As if on cue, Cateman lifted his bandaged hand.

  Lauren grasped it, felt the slide of rotting tissue beneath the damp gauze. Closed her eyes and with her free hand felt the flow of the room, the currents and eddies of all the realities that led across the borderland to the wilderness beyond. Blaine’s darkness polluted most every stream, but here and there she found a clean thread and followed it. The flour amid the eggs and milk. Her cloud. Her source. Her beacon amid the despoiling, encroaching dark.

  After a time, the thread thickened to a line, a path, a trail, that opened into an expanse of treeless rolling land, hills so blank and smoothly curved that they could have been cut from paper. The first cleansing stretches of the wilderness.

  Lauren felt a tug on her hand, and turned to find Cateman walking behind her, struggling to keep up. Petrie had wrapped him in gauze from face to feet, and as he stumbled, it unwound, streaming behind him in the undetectable breeze, revealing skin halfway to healed, scabbed and crusted, angry red lightened to pink. His lips moved, the sound emerging muffled, a voice under glass.

  Then his eyes widened. He stopped, and when Lauren tried to pull him along, he refused to move.

  Lauren followed his gaze, and saw, at first in the distance, then closer and closer still. The woman was young, with a cameo face framed with waist-length black hair parted in the middle, the ends wafting in the almost-breeze. She wore a dress the color of flame, bound at the waist with a gold cord, but as Lauren drew closer, the cord vanished for a beat, then appeared again around the woman’s neck. Her face was now bruised, her nose bloodied. One of her pierced earrings had been torn away, leaving the slashed earlobe, drops of blood bright as ruby against her skin. She glanced at Lauren only once, then looked down at Cateman.

  Eventually, she smiled.

  Cateman struggled in Lauren’s grasp, but she held tight until she reached the black-haired woman in the flame-colored dress. Then she stopped, studied the face of the first woman her father had loved, and after a time, Emma Cateman studied her in turn.

  Then Lauren shook loose Leaf Cateman’s grip and backed away, leaving him with his late wife. His skin had healed completely now, and he stood naked, pink and pleading, his voice barely above a whisper. Then he sank to his knees, one arm stretched out, grasping for the hem of the flame-colored dress.

  As Lauren turned to go, she saw Emma unloose the cord from around her neck. A few strides later, she heard the muffled scream.

  The wilderness, she realized then, could be many things, but one thing it always was, was wild.

  Lauren opened her eyes. She still stood beside Cateman’s bed, still held his hand. His cries for mercy still rang in her ears.

  She heard a woman’s voice at mumbled prayer, and turned to find Amanda Petrie kneeling on the floor at the foot of the bed, hands over her face, begging the Lady for mercy.

  “You need to leave.” Lauren lowered Cateman’s hand to his side. “Go across to the Pyne house. No one is there, but the wards should still be working.”

  “Where did they go? Virginia and the others?” Petrie struggled to her feet. “I thought they were there with you?” When Lauren didn’t answer, she shook her head. “They won’t escape this.”

  “Neither may you.” Lauren departed the bedroom, Petrie at her heels. “But you’ll be as safe as possible until it ends, one way or the other.” She descended the stairs two at a time, down to the first floor, then waited for Petrie at the foot. “First question. What happened to Emma?” She watched Petrie’s mouth work soundlessly, and knew the woman wanted to keep her secrets to the end, to protect her late Master even if by doing so she broke her pledge to him.

  “She—she gave your father one of Master’s Books. One with the spells.” Petrie glared at Lauren, eyes bright with anger almost forty years old. “She betrayed the Master after he raised her up from nothing.” She swallowed, looked away. “Of course he killed her. Executed her. It was his right.” She dug a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose. “Then we—years ago, we had our own cremation unit at the funeral home.” She sighed. “Now we contract all those out. Changing times.”

  Lauren just nodded, and bit back the other questions that begged answers. Had Emma loved her father? Or had she felt guilty about using him, and sought to make amends?

  But there was one question that superseded all those. Lauren felt she knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it out loud. “The Catemans have served Blaine for a very long time, haven’t they? Since the beginning?” She waited, as Petrie grabbed the banister in a white-knuckled grip, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, until finally she twitched her head in the smallest of nods.

  “So, we’re done.” Petrie shook herself, a beast of burden freed from the yoke. She reached into her pocket again, but instead of a tissue, she removed a folded handkerchief. “The Master said I should give this to you. It’s been in my family since—since the fire.” She held it out.

  Lauren took the bundle, felt something hard beneath the cloth. She unfolded the handkerchief, and uncovered a small silver locket.

  “It got passed down.” Petrie wiped her hands on her pants legs. “Great-uncle Joseph—he fought in the Civil War and lived through the fire—he had it in his things.”

  Lauren looked down at the round case, the etched letters EB in the center, framed by tiny flowers. Opened it, and found a short lock of black hair nestled within, bound with a faded thread of blue ribbon. She closed it and tucked it inside her pants pocket, then turned and walke
d to the door. Opened it, then stood aside to let Petrie pass.

  “We should have killed you when we had the chance. Master would have lived out his life chasing his dreams, not hurting anyone. Instead, he died in nightmare.” Petrie raised her eyes to meet Lauren’s, eyes bright with hate that would survive until the end of days.

  Lauren simply nodded. “You need to go now.”

  Petrie looked out over the cul-de-sac, the milling throng that filled the sidewalk and the shadows that filled the sky. “I won’t make it.”

  Lauren dug her thumbnail into the back of her wrist, sawing back and forth until the blood welled and ran. But before she could swipe her wrist across Petrie’s forehead, the woman shied away.

  “Keep your filth to yourself. Keep it.” Petrie stumbled as she hurried down the steps, hesitated as the horde crowded near the gate and jeered. Then, head high, she strode down the walkway. She slowed when she reached the gate and found Lolly waiting for her. “I am Mistress Amanda Petrie, and I order you back.” When Lolly failed to budge, she brushed past him and out into the street—

  —at which point Gideon’s demons closed in around her like wolves around a calf. Petrie screamed once, then vanished, as howls of laughter rent the air.

  Lauren waited until the melee subsided. She held her breath, closed her eyes, and strained for any sound of a snowmobile engine, wondered if the silence she heard instead meant good news or bad.

  Then she went back inside and closed the door. Heard no sound but the ones she made, sensed no life but her own.

  She felt it then, the gentle tug. Heard the brown voice in her head.

  I’ve let you in. . .

  Lauren started toward the back of the house, on her way to meet Nicholas Blaine.

  CONNIE PETERSBURY LOOKED up at the sky, or rather, what the sky had become. Low, black, and thick. Alive. She could hear whatever lived in the mists that tumbled overhead, yammering about the freedom to come, the terror and the joy and the meat. Fresh meat.

  Connie shifted back and forth. The threads of warmth had diminished, the growing cold pushing her closer and closer to the riverbank. Ashley waited there now, sitting cross-legged on a rock, filing her nails to a point. Getting ready for the fun.

  “Almost time, Aunt Connie.” She smiled her black-toothed smile.

  “You just came back here to torture me, didn’t you? You look like something from one of those TV shows you used to watch. Walking death.” Connie tested the water again, and again. “Don’t get excited, my girl. You ain’t got me yet.”

  “Only a matter of time.”

  “Time ain’t the boss of me.” Connie swirled currents with her fingers, tried to tease out whatever traces of life she could find. “Not anymore.”

  In the distance, she heard noise, getting closer and closer. Engines, running rough, straining for all they were worth. Caught glimpses of the snowmobiles as they shot past. The flash of a familiar barn coat, and a White Sox cap.

  “You go, Virginia. You go, girl!” Connie pumped her gloved fist in the air. Savored the excitement of a friend’s escape attempt. You go, girl. She ignored Ashley’s mocking laughter, tried not to think of the bad end she knew would likely come.

  She tested the water. Tested the water.

  Then she felt it. A warm golden thread. Thin, though, and getting thinner.

  She sank her hand up to the wrist into that warm line of hope, and prayed.

  Lauren walked out into the Cateman backyard. The strange snow that had fallen the night before still lay in piles on the brown lawn, lending a metallic tang to the air.

  She didn’t see the body at first. She saw the shovel handle sticking out of the ground, and thought that someone had tried to dig their way out, or clear a path to the firewood stacked by the back fence.

  Then she saw the flash of red hair. Walked slowly until she could see it all, the splayed limbs, the blood-splashed snow, the way the shovel blade to the back of the neck had neatly severed Dylan Corey’s head from his body.

  Acid rose in Lauren’s throat. Her knees buckled and she sagged to the snow, then rocked back and forth, the distant gibber of Blaine’s horde counterpoint to her pounding heart. After a time, she brushed the snow from Corey’s cheek, felt the skin cold and stiff. Sensed some remnant of him, the barest fragment scrabbling for purchase, still trying to hold on to life. Then it vanished, the final wisp of an extinguished flame.

  Lauren rose. Then a surge of anger struck, driving away the shock, the fear. She grabbed the shovel by the handle, yanked it clear, tossed it aside. Pulled off her coat and spread it over Corey so that it covered his head.

  Varmints—that’s how you deal with varmints—

  Lauren stared at the shovel as Waycross’s words flooded back—

  I followed the spell to bind an outsider. . .

  —then her own.

  Blaine’s not really an outsider. He’s known to us. She walked to the shovel, picked it up, thought of a man she had just come to know. A man who kept turning up wherever she happened to be.

  The man who had met her as she entered Gideon.

  The man who saved her life.

  Lauren walked to the shed. Raised her hand to knock on the door—

  “Please. Come in.” The chocolate voice, warm as a flame.

  Lauren undid the latch, and stepped inside.

  The man who once called himself Tom Barton sat at a table in the center of the room, eating a slice of pie. After he ferried the last bite into his mouth, he scraped the plate with his fork, the metal grating against the china with a sound like fingernails across glass.

  “I must beg your pardon,” he said, in a voice with no trace of wheedle or peeve. “I don’t mean to be rude.” He licked the fork clean, then set it down and sat back, crossed his legs, clasped his hands around his knee. “But good Mistress Cateman discovered that if she rewrapped foodstuffs in the places outside Gideon at which they were purchased, it allowed me several minutes to enjoy their flavor before the air of Gideon settled and rendered them dust.” He jerked his head toward the cot in the far corner of the room. “You and the good Mistress have met, I believe.”

  Lauren looked toward the cot just as what she took to be a bundled blanket shifted. A face appeared amid the pile, eyes glaring daggers.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Jorie sat up and the blanket fell away to reveal her naked torso, breasts and stomach dotted with bite marks.

  “The good Mistress came to me for comfort. It seems her good Master has taken a turn.” Nicholas Blaine smiled. “You just came from his sickbed, I believe. How is he?”

  “Dead.” Lauren leaned on the shovel because she needed to sit down and knew she didn’t dare. She needed to be able to move, and quickly.

  “Really?” Blaine’s voice held a trace of doubt. “You stayed with him until the end?”

  “I helped him pass into the wilderness. Then I left him with Emma.”

  “Did you?” Blaine’s brow arched. “That was . . . poetic.” He tapped the tabletop with his open hand. “My compliments. Brava.” He stilled, gaze settling on the shovel. “I see you found the superfluous Mr. Corey.” His eyes narrowed. “Put that down.”

  Lauren shook her head. “I don’t think—” Her words stopped as something grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and lifted her, whipped her back and forth, then slammed her against the wall. The shovel flew from her grasp and whatever held her dropped her—she slid down the wall and sagged to the floor, gasping for breath.

  “I said to put it down.” Blaine stood, and walked around the table toward Lauren. As he moved, he straightened his bowed back, his hunched shoulders, grew taller with every step. Rheumy eyes cleared, revealing the blue of twilit skies. His hair had grayed over the years, and fine lines crazed the smooth skin, the ridges and thicknesses of the few burn scars that remained. Thirty-seven years it had taken for Nicholas Blaine to heal, but heal he had.

  “Now, I have been extremely patient with you, but that time is past.�
� He crouched in front of Lauren, gripped her chin between his thumb and index finger, and twisted her head until she faced him. “You have work to do.”

  “She can’t do it—she told us.” Jorie tucked the sheets about her waist. “He didn’t teach her anything.”

  “And yet, here she is. She who walks through my woods unscathed.” Blaine released Lauren, then stood and looked down at her, head tilted, as though he were studying a particularly interesting ant. “Earth, air, fire, and water, Miss Mullin. Tell them what they need to hear to let me go.” He turned and walked back to the table.

  Lauren worked herself into a sitting position, stopping every so often as battered muscles seized. “I don’t believe I’m in the proper frame of mind.”

  “Try harder.” Blaine perched on the edge of the table, one leg swinging, a pendulum marking off her time.

  “She hurt me, you know.” Jorie pointed to her eye, the bruising like shadow in the harsh light of the shed. “She did something while she was hiding in our yard like a sneak and it made me fall and hit my head on the counter.” She cupped her hand over her eye. “You should make her pay for that.”

  Blaine’s leg stilled. “What did you do, Miss Mullin?”

  Lauren tried to sort through all that had happened over the last few days. So much. “The ointment. I had tried to wipe it away, but there was still some left and it made me sick and I started to go under and I told it just to stop.”

  “You deflected the curse. That . . . is not easy to do.” Blaine’s look sharpened. “I should have sought you out from the start. I would have saved so much time.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Jorie slid off the bed and stood. “I killed my husband for you.”

  Blaine laughed. “Don’t use me as an excuse. Leaf was husband to you in name only, and you had wanted to kill him for quite some time. I just gave you a little push.”

  “You’re cutting me loose?” Jorie flicked a finger toward Lauren. “For that?”

  “For the most raw power I have ever encountered on this side of the divide.” Blaine turned to Lauren. “With a single exception, you understand.”