The Children and the Blood

by Megan Joel Peterson

  Yet for all the problems, he still had the gun his father left him, so he wasn’t defenseless. And a day after losing his badge, a replacement had shown up by courier, courtesy of the giant, and bearing the implicit message that breaking the law was little of Brogan’s concern.

  He’d left the package on the table, and had yet to bring himself to take the badge from the box. Crossing the line was one thing. Being reminded of it so openly was another.

  Of the giant, he’d seen almost nothing. Within a week of meeting him, Brogan headed east with a vague statement about securing additional support. A few of his associates remained in Monfort though, with the understanding that if he were to find anything, Harris was to contact them immediately.

  Which was fine. He preferred the solitude. But a life as a private investigator had turned out to be amazingly annoying compared to that of a police detective, and being an unsuccessful one was starting to make him crazy.

  His target wasn’t the issue. He wanted to find the little girl alive as much as anyone, and he tried to convince himself, as Brogan asserted, that locating her would draw the older girl in. But he also knew that the longer this took, the more chance there was that Ashley would send someone else up in flames. He had to find her soon, if only to stop his conscience from making him lose more sleep than he was already. And from slowly eating him alive.

  Though it didn’t help that his current best lead in accomplishing that goal was a teenager with a spy complex so blatant, he may as well have been wearing a sign.

  Resting his head against the car window, Harris tweaked the volume on his police scanner and resisted the urge to sigh as Travis Braun slipped into the electronics store for the third time this week. Without department resources and all manner of useful things, tracking what exactly the boy purchased would have been difficult, if not for the store’s bags having the transparency of tissue paper.

  Minutes passed. The boy emerged and promptly glanced around surreptitiously. Harris rolled his eyes.

  Walkie-talkies again. The prior two models hadn’t cut it apparently. Who did the boy think he was kidding?

  The kid pulled from the parking lot, and Harris waited a few moments and then followed him away from the store. As leads went, the kid wasn’t very helpful. But with the other boy’s parents gone and no other friends on hand, Travis was the best link he had to the car thief, Cole.

  He exhaled as the truck turned a corner. As much as anything else, the boy was a mystery. Cole Smith, son of the thoroughly unremarkable Robert and Melissa Smith, was a young man with no criminal record, history of drug use, or even a detention to his name. Over the weeks, Harris had wracked his mind for explanations of Cole’s involvement, though none stood out above the rest. The parents were in it with him. He’d murdered them before leaving. Cole was dead and the parents were actually in control.

  Or Ashley’d used the boy, in which case all this was pointless because while Harris was sitting here trying to find them, the whole family could’ve already been killed.

  He’d exhausted every avenue he could explore, trying to determine which theory rang true. But the teachers at Brighton Modisett had been closemouthed as clams, owing to tiny things like the law and the school’s reputation of educating those for whom impropriety simply wasn’t conceivable. From the security guards at the neighborhood gates, he’d gained equally little insight. Most of his attempts at unofficial questioning invariably degenerated into mention of their applications to the police force, and not-so-oblique requests for recommendations if they happened to provide any help.

  It was maddening.

  Winding his way through town, Travis pulled to a stop on a hill overlooking Cole Smith’s neighborhood. It was a daily ritual, and as with each time before, Harris came to a halt behind the bushes, and waited as the boy scanned the suburban terrain.

  Minutes passed. He was taking longer than usual. Pulling out his binoculars from behind the seat, Harris studied the teenager, using the foliage as a screen.

  Dropping his own binoculars, Travis cranked the engine and drove away.

  Brow furrowing, Harris waited and then crept his car toward the spot where the boy had parked. He looked out at the neighborhood, watching Cole’s house.

  Nothing. No lights. No cars in the drive. Same as every prior day.

  Lowering his binoculars, Harris watched the kid roll through a stop sign and roar toward the city, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

  After endless weeks of tracking the would-be spy, any anomaly was worth noting. And though Harris couldn’t see any change, the kid had clearly noticed something.

  He lifted his cell and placed a quick call to the security guard station.

  “Louis here.”

  “Harris. Have you seen any sign of that boy I asked you about? Cole?”

  “Nope,” came the cheerful response. “Promise I’ll call if I do, though.”

  He thanked the man distractedly and hung up, still studying the house.

  Something spooked Travis, and that something hadn’t been Cole. Or anything at the house. Or anything the virtually useless guard saw. Yet something had changed, and for the life of him, he couldn’t tell what it’d been.

  Uneasily, he drove after the pretentious little spy who remained his only lead.

  *****

  Inside the cabin, something crashed to the ground.

  Sitting on the picnic table, Cole glanced toward the house. From her perch on the porch steps, Lily sighed but didn’t bother looking away from her pile of woven grass blades.

  The back door slammed, and a moment later, Robert stalked off into the forest, grumbling furiously.

  So that call hadn’t gone any better than the last fifty. The mysterious cripples were still nowhere to be found.

  Taking a deep breath, Cole shook his head and returned to cleaning his gun. After a week of arguing, Robert had finally shut up about Cole keeping the weapon he’d snagged at the campground. No matter how rabidly myopic the man could be, even he’d had to concede that two armed people would stand a better chance of protecting them against wizards than one.

  Not that they’d seen wizards. Or any other human beings besides each other for the past month. And while he’d hated Robert before, it was nothing compared to how infuriating he found the man now.

  First had come the attempts to slip off with Lily, thwarted primarily by the fact the girl wouldn’t stray more than a few feet from Cole’s side. Then came the fake identification cards, bought and paid for by Robert, but then summarily locked up to keep them from even touching the IDs without his permission. The final straw had been the refusal to part with any more information about the wizards or their war. Information was power apparently, and Robert knew ignorance kept them dependent upon him.

  Cole wasn’t certain he’d ever hated the man as much as when Robert went close-lipped about everything. In light of the elaborate setup of the past eight years of his life, and Lily’s entire family being murdered with no explanation as to why, Robert’s smirking silence had almost been too much to bear.

  Lily had finally screamed at the man, and threatened to run away if he didn’t tell them all he knew. The surge of anger out of her had taken Cole by surprise as much as Robert, though when he’d asked about it later, she’d just looked defiant.

  “Ashley’s out there in this,” she’d said. “And if I can find out what’s going on, and why people hurt our family, maybe I can help her.”

  He hadn’t had the heart to argue.

  Bit by bit, they’d learned about cripples, the wizards and all that went with that world. The details, paid for by minutes on end of Robert’s vitriolic tirades, painted a spotty picture of a situation where, but for seeing a few people glow, Cole possessed a million vulnerabilities and absolutely no advantages. No magic, but it could kill him instantly. No way to recognize wizards, but they could easily identify him. No defenses, except for the dubious benefit of getting migraines around magic, and the chance of maybe getting a luck
y shot with a gun. And while Robert ranted about the world being unfair, Cole kept returning to the same thought over and over again.

  In Robert’s world, he was useless.

  And yet Vaughn had died to keep him hidden.

  Branches snapped as Robert marched back out of the forest, and Cole suppressed a grimace. He knew that look only too well. The man wanted to attack something, hurt something. Life went better when he stayed away long enough to cool down.

  “And just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Robert snapped at him. “You cleaned that thing twice already. I’m not letting you have any more bullets just because you polish it up nice.”

  Cole paused, weighing potential responses. With ammunition at a premium and Robert paranoid as hell, the man had let Cole empty what ammo the weapon held in practice, and then forbidden him a single bullet more. That Cole hadn’t ever learned to shoot didn’t seem to enter the equation, nor did the fact that defending them from wizards might require him to know how. Robert only cared that Cole might shoot him instead, and thus banned him from even approaching the locked cabinet where the bullets were stored.

  The buzz of his phone saved him the trouble of replying, and without taking his eyes from the man, he pulled the cell from his pocket.

  “Hey, Travis,” he answered.

  Glaring angrily, Robert headed for the house, belatedly trying to produce the semblance of a jolly smile for Lily. The girl ignored him.

  “Dude,” Travis said breathlessly. “Your mom is back.”

  Cole blinked. “What?”

  “Your mom. That neighbor you told me about just showed up. The old lady pulled into her driveway and when she got out, Melissa climbed from the back seat. She stopped at the neighbor’s, but she’s got bags so I’m guessing she’ll be back at your place any minute.”

  “You sure it was her?”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “Sorry,” Cole apologized distractedly, his mind whirling.

  “What do we do?”

  “Stay there. I’m coming to you.”

  “Are you sure–”

  Cole hung up.

  He stared at the ground without seeing it. For all his ranting, Robert hadn’t produced a single scrap of information on why the wizards worked so hard to keep Cole from knowing about them. Their motivations hadn’t interested the man, just their protection. But his comment from the campground had stayed with Cole. While Robert knew nothing and didn’t care, Melissa was a different story altogether.

  And now she was back.

  “What happened?”

  Lily’s quiet voice broke into his thoughts. Pushing up from the porch, she glanced back at the house nervously and then walked over to him.

  “Cole?” she persisted when he didn’t answer.

  “Melissa’s back,” he told her, keeping his voice low and hoping Robert wasn’t near the open cabin windows.

  Lily bit her lip. “What do you want to do?”

  “I need to go back there.”

  The girl paused. “We,” she corrected.

  He hesitated, reluctant to drag her into what would undoubtedly be a dangerous situation. But the only other option was leaving her with Robert, and he wasn’t so stupid as to believe either of them would still be here when he got back.

  “We need to,” he agreed. “Can you distract Robert for me? I need to get something.”

  Her eyes darted to the gun, and unease moved across her face.

  “Lily, please?”

  She drew a small breath, pushed aside the discomfort and then nodded resolutely. Turning on her heel, she marched into the cabin.

  At the sight, an amused smile pulled at his mouth, and he buried it swiftly for fear she might see. Climbing from the table, he tucked the gun behind his back and followed.

  Inside the cabin, Lily made a beeline for the rear bedroom and then paused outside the closed door. In the next room, Robert could be heard attempting yet another call to the elusive cripples. She glanced questioningly to Cole.

  He hesitated and then shook his head, motioning her away from the door. “Just knock something over if he starts to come out,” Cole whispered.

  She nodded and backed up beside the broom propped by the back door.

  Cole hurried to Robert’s jacket on the couch. Patting down the pockets, he found the man’s Swiss army knife and swiftly fished it out before heading for the cabinet. Trying to keep his hands steady despite the adrenaline racing through him, he pulled out the narrow metal toothpick and attacked the lock.

  He could hear Robert talking. The words were unintelligible. And the damned lock wouldn’t budge.

  Cole grimaced. He hadn’t attempted to pick a lock since he was twelve and had been trying to run away. And he hadn’t succeeded then either.

  As symmetry went, it was infuriating.

  The lock gave.

  Exhilaration ran through him like electricity. Beyond the cabinet doors, ammunition sat beneath a manila envelope. Ignoring the envelope for the moment, he scanned the piles, spotting the magazine Robert had taken from his weapon. Noting with mild shock that Robert had actually reloaded the thing, he grabbed it and then shoved it into the gun. Snatching the manila envelope, he ripped it open and then drew out their IDs.

  Paul Wood. Hannah Wood. He grimaced at the names Robert had bought, but it wasn’t important. They had to go.

  “Come on,” he whispered to Lily as he shoved the cards into his pocket.

  Lily nodded and followed him across the room. At the front, he glanced back. Robert was still on the phone. From his excited tone, it sounded like things were finally going well.

  He hesitated, but there was nothing for it. Either they went now or not at all.

  Quickly, he motioned the girl ahead of him and then jogged down the steps. Near the dirt track edging the cabin property, the pickup sat behind Robert’s station wagon. Thumbing the key fob, he pulled open the door and then climbed inside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Robert shouted, coming out the front door. “Get back here!”

  The engine turned over. Robert rushed down the steps, fumbling for the gun in the old western style holster he kept at his waist.

  “Go!” Lily cried.

  Cole yanked on the gearshift and smashed the pedal to the floor. Spewing dirt, the tires caught and the truck raced onto the path as gunshots cracked through the air.

  “Get down!” he ordered the girl.

  He needn’t have bothered. She’d plastered herself to the seat the moment Robert reached for his gun.

  In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of the man running after them on foot. More gunshots echoed through the forest, though nothing hit the pickup. Curving sharply, the path followed the steep downward slope of the tree-lined hillside, and in moments, Robert was lost from view.

  Drawing a shaky breath, Cole loosened his grip on the wheel. “You okay?” he asked Lily.

  Pushing up from the seat, she peered through the rear window. “Uh-huh.” She paused. “We’re not going back there, are we?”

  The plea in her voice was easy to hear, and he shook his head. “You think he’d let us?”

  She echoed the motion, certainty on her face. “Not you. Me…” she scowled.

  He suppressed a smile at her disgusted expression. For weeks, the man had tried to coax Lily into thinking him a wonderful person, while remaining oblivious to the disrespect he showed everything else. Candy appeared for her, obtained from God knew where, and endless invitations for games assaulted her at every turn, all conveniently designed to draw her away from Cole. After the first week, she’d begun feigning deafness, if only to make Robert stop talking to her.

  “Do you think Melissa will know why…” she trailed off, gesturing illustratively when words failed.

  “You’re glowing?”

  She nodded.

  “Maybe. We have to get the chance to talk to her first.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  A frow
n flickered over his face. That was the million dollar question. “Let me think about it.”

  She grimaced and then nodded, obviously wanting an answer but reluctantly willing to give him time. Turning to the window, she watched the trees go by.

  The dirt track wound down the hills and eventually reached a rough concrete road. Bouncing along, Lily glanced to him from time to time, saying nothing.

  And slowly, the fragments of a ridiculous plan began to come together.

  He took out his cell and hit redial. “Travis?”

  “Dammit, you didn’t let me finish!”

  “Sorry, I–”

  “That cop is still following me! I think I saw him when I was checking your place, and now he’s practically sitting outside my house!”

  Cole swore and then winced. Lily just stared at him, waiting to hear what was going on.

  “He’s freaking me out! Every time I think I shake him, he turns up somewhere else! Grocery stores, gas stations, school… he even followed me to church! I’m going nuts here and–”

  “Okay,” Cole interrupted, trying to think. “Where’s he now?”

  “Down the street, sitting in the Ulbright’s driveway like he owns the damn–”

  “Fine. Look, does Ellie have a cell phone?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Can you get it?”

  “I guess…”

  “Do that,” he checked the clock on the dash, calculating distances swiftly. “And then wait half an hour. Call the cops. Tell them you’ve seen the little girl on TV over by Pendleton’s grocery store, that she’s with a guy matching the description of that drug dealer, and that she looks like she’s been crying. Or something. Make it dramatic enough to get the cops’ attention.”

  “Yeah… yeah…” Travis said, latching onto the idea. “Bastard’ll rush over there and leave me alone.”

  “He’ll be back when he finds out it’s a trick, so for Pete’s sake, don’t call till it’s been at least half an hour. We need some time before he comes looking for you. Then head to that new hotel construction site north of town. You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah.”