by Lauren Esker
"Except my leg," she murmured in a fit of gallows humor. Her running leg should still be in the backseat. "If I have to go jogging, or outrun some asshole with a hunting rifle, I'm all set, right, Noah?"
The fact that he wasn't responding didn't stop her from talking to him as she drove. She had to. It was the darkest and loneliest part of the night, and it had been a very eventful twenty-four hours, with only one brief nap in the evening. Radio stations in the mountains were intermittent, cutting in and out. The wind through the broken window helped her stay awake, and when she could feel herself starting to nod off anyway, she talked to Noah.
"You're gonna hate the place where I'm taking you. Assuming it's still there, but I don't have any reason to believe it wouldn't be. I assume if they got, I don't know, run off the land or something, that I would have heard about it. Mom would have called me to gloat, if nothing else."
No answer from the passenger seat.
"One thing about it, Noah, if you thought I was a freak before, this is gonna double down on my freakitude. I hope you'll still like me once you've met my folks. Although you gotta keep in mind, they're not bad people, not really. Well, my dad is a cult leader, so I guess ... But he means well, he does. It's just that he never met a wacked-out conspiracy theory he didn't believe in."
She glanced over at Noah, a still shape slumbering in the passenger seat. Once again she thought of the tiger, the long expanse of rippling striped fur in the firelight.
Not all conspiracy theories were fake.
"Who knows," she said wearily. "Maybe Hank the Crank is really the sanest of us all."
By now she no longer had to stop to check the map. She knew these roads. There should be a 25 mph sign coming up ... ah, yes, there it was. She slowed to the required speed and motored through the tiny business district of her childhood hometown. It didn't look like anything had changed in the years since she was last here. The handful of businesses were shut up for the night, but it didn't seem like anything had gone out of business, and nothing new had been added. There was the big vacant lot where the farmer's market was held every Wednesday, and the ice cream place, and the diner with the BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY! sign. The only thing she didn't remember was a riotous rose garden flanking both sides of the path leading up to the door of the little town library. "I guess Mrs. Winslow is into roses now," Peri murmured.
She passed the turn-off to the school, where she'd never been, since the handful of kids in Hank's compound were home-schooled. For the first time since she'd left, Peri wondered what had happened to those other kids. Had they grown up as loony as their parents, or had they done what Peri had done, and gotten as far away from the whole mess as possible, as soon as they could?
Except now she was back.
"They say you can't go home again," she told Noah. "I guess we're about to find out if that's true."
The road to the compound had changed more than she'd expected. She remembered a narrow, uneven dirt road, but it had been graveled and widened—within the last couple of years, she guessed from the smooth gravel not yet worn down to washboard ruts. As she drove, she passed more mailboxes than she remembered. The compound used to be just about the only thing on this road, except for a handful of equally reclusive neighbors. Some of the new houses, visible through the trees, looked pretty nice.
"So change even comes to the middle of nowhere," she remarked to Noah, who failed to respond, as usual.
The compound used to be the last thing on the road, but now the road continued onward. Peri missed the turn-off at first, even though she could see the lights of the compound blazing above the trees. She had to turn around in someone's driveway and go back. At least the final stretch of road to the compound, which she supposed was more of a driveway now that it wasn't the end of the road like it used to be, hadn't changed in the slightest. It was still narrow and rutted, one car wide, with weathered, hand-painted NO TRESPASSING signs that might even be the same ones from when she was a kid. A prettier sign, with flowers painted on it, read BLUE MOUNTAIN FARM.
The gate that appeared in her headlights looked the same, too. It was metal, with red paint flaking off to reveal rust underneath. A newish steel padlock secured it to the gatepost. Peri left the engine running and hopped out of the car. The key was exactly where it had been throughout her childhood, stored in an old motor-oil bottle a few feet off the road, tucked into the moss at the base of a pine tree and masquerading as a piece of trash. She unlocked the gate, drove through, and locked it again behind her, returning the key to its resting place.
Even more confrontational NO TRESPASSING signs awaited her beyond the gate, these with additional sentiments such as THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON, IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE IN MY SIGHTS, and a new sign that (unlike the rest) looked like it had been storebought rather than hand-painted: FORGET THE DOG, BEWARE OF OWNER.
"Friendly as ever, I see," she commented, and drove slowly out of the trees, crawling into a parking space among the compound's motley assortment of mud-splattered farm trucks. She turned off the engine and sat for a minute to collect herself. Somewhere nearby, a dog had started barking. Visible through the trees, the compound's lights blazed with cold blue-white fire, one set to light up the barns, the other cluster on top of the hill near the watchtower.
Home.
Or at least it had been, once upon a time.
She hadn't lived here since she was twelve. That was when the accident had happened and Mom came to get her. After that, Peri had moved to Idaho to live with her mother and started going to public school. She hadn't talked to her father more than a few times since then. For a long time she'd told herself that she would never voluntarily come back here.
Apparently all it took was proper motivation.
She took a deep, fortifying breath, smiled a little at the rush of unexpected nostalgia brought on by the scent of cow manure, and got out of the car. "Hello?" she called softly.
Several dogs came running to meet her. They shied away when they realized she was a stranger and commenced barking from a safe distance. A couple of the friendlier ones came up with hesitantly wagging tails and allowed themselves to be petted.
"Who's there?" a male voice demanded.
Peri squinted into the flashlight beam stabbing her eyes. When the light swung from her face to the car, she got a look at the person behind it, and her heart lurched straight into her throat when she saw that he had the flashlight in one hand and a rifle in the other. It was pointed at the ground rather than at her, but she'd had way too many guns in her general vicinity today.
However, his voice was familiar. She finally managed to place it. "Liam? Liam Webb?"
"Who is it?" He didn't sound at all friendly.
"Peri. Hank's daughter."
"I'll be damned." Liam slung the rifle on his back. "Hey there. Shut up," he snapped at the dogs.
He'd been nothing but a little kid when she saw him last. Now he was in his early twenties, about Zach's age—which made her realize that Zach was almost certainly dead. She swallowed hard as tears began to sting her eyes. She hadn't even liked Zach, but suddenly it all seemed to come crashing down on her, the fear and the running and the fact that she'd almost died tonight.
It was the sight of Peri bursting into tears that seemed to freak Liam out more than anything else. "Uh, whoa—are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She wiped at her eyes. "I have a ... a friend with me. Some bad things have happened. I just needed somewhere to go."
Liam put out a hand to hesitantly pat her arm. "Hey. Uh, don't cry. It's gonna be okay."
She wasn't sure if she believed him, but for the first time in awhile, she no longer felt like she had to keep looking over her shoulder.
Chapter Nine
Noah woke up confused, aching, and starving.
He lay awake for a little while, trying to get his bearings. The last thing he remembered was being shot outside the burning safehouse. Or ... no ... there was something else: his car, silh
ouetted against the flames, and Peri like an unexpected guardian angel with mermaid-colored hair, yelling at him to get in.
After that, there was nothing but an occasional snatch of memory. He'd been in the car? And now he was lying in bed in a place he was pretty sure he'd never been before.
It looked like a farmhouse. There was a low, sloping wooden ceiling and a nightstand beside the bed with a lamp and a pile of paperback books on it. More books were stuffed into bookcases beside the bed, crudely made from rough, unfinished boards nailed to the wall.
Whoever they'd found sanctuary with liked to read, it seemed.
Noah pushed himself up on arms that trembled with weakness. His chest was bare ... actually, all of him was bare under the blankets. This allowed him to see that someone had washed the blood off him. The bullet wounds had healed up to puckered pink scars. That would explain why he was so hungry; he'd done a heck of a lot of healing while he was asleep. Looking down at himself, he could see that he'd visibly lost weight. His ribs were more prominent than normal, and some of the muscle mass of his arms and abdomen had dwindled.
Shifter healing ability was nothing short of miraculous, but it couldn't draw energy out of thin air. Healing was hard on a shifter's body. Noah's stomach growled; he wanted calories and protein, but would settle for just about anything that would fit in his mouth.
Also, finding a bathroom would be good.
He swung his legs out of bed and discovered folded clothing on a chair beside the bed. It wasn't his, but whoever had guessed at his sizes had done a pretty good job. He put on loose workout pants and a slightly oversized T-shirt with a picture of a big-eyed gray alien and the words ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO on the back. His leather jacket with the tiger-striped shoulders was hanging on the back of the chair. It turned out to have his wallet in the pocket, although he noticed with concern that his gun was nowhere in sight, and neither was his phone. When he put on the jacket, he found that it smelled like smoke, and still, ever so slightly, like blood.
Being dressed made him feel slightly less vulnerable. He pulled back the gauzy curtains draping the room's single small window to look outside, but the view did little to enlighten him. He was on the second floor of the house, in a room facing the woods. There was nothing to see except a lot of pine trees, a couple of old trucks moldering among heaps of brush and stumps, and a stretch of fence with some goats browsing behind it. The land sloped gently upward, becoming more steep as Noah followed it with his eyes, until it became a mountain looming over the house. From the angle of the sun across the mountain's lower slopes, it looked like early afternoon.
He tried the bedroom door. It wasn't locked, and opened to reveal a steep flight of stairs—he could hear voices from below—and a bathroom door standing open directly across from him. He was relieved to find that the bathroom was fully plumbed, with a tub and a working toilet. When he flushed, he heard a pump kick on somewhere in the house. There was another window here, and he stood for a moment looking out.
From this side of the house, he had a better view, but it still didn't help a lot with figuring out where he was. A farm? There were a number of buildings in sight, some of which appeared to be houses and others he assumed were barns—not picturesque red-painted barns with gambrel roofs, but low shed-style buildings with corrugated tin roofs growing patches of moss. The woods had been cleared for a large pasture with horses, goats, and a couple of cows; he'd seen the edge of this from the other window. There was also an extensive garden with row after row of green growing things he didn't know the names of.
A handful of people were in sight, doing farm-type work. A woman in a straw hat was weeding in the garden, and a couple of men seemed to be working on a tractor, lazily passing back and forth a Thermos of coffee or something stronger.
There were more mountains visible here, fencing in the farm on all sides. Noah glimpsed winding loops of a road leading out of the valley, and a dirt parking lot with a number of trucks in it, along with a bright splash of red that could be his Camaro.
And that was about all he could figure out without talking to people.
He turned away from the window to splash water on his face and drink from his cupped hands. In the water-spotted mirror over the sink, he looked tired and unwell, with pink blotches from freshly healed abrasions along one side of his face. The uncomfortable thought occurred to him that Peri might have seen more than she ought to. Had she seen him get shot? Had she seen him heal?
Had she seen him shift?
No help for it. He twitched the jacket into place over his shoulders. It was stiff and patchy despite his earlier attempts to clean the blood off. He shuddered and tried to put that behind him.
He left the bathroom and padded down the stairs. The voices got louder. One of them was definitely Peri's.
Ducking his head to avoid a low ceiling beam at the bottom of the stairs, he found himself in a small, comfortable living room, crowded with a mismatched assortment of furniture. Peri, wearing an oversized sweater that looked hand-knit, was sitting on a big overstuffed couch talking to another woman who held a baby in her lap. They fell silent at Noah's arrival. "Hey," he said awkwardly.
"Noah!"
Before he realized what she was going to do, Peri jumped up and hurried over to throw her arms around him.
"Oomph." His answering hug was hesitant at first. Peri pressed into him, her arms tight around him, and he gave up on his inhibitions and squeezed her back.
It was good to know she'd made it out of the fire okay. He hadn't been entirely sure until he saw her, safe and alive, that what he remembered hadn't been a dream or a hallucination. She really had saved him while driving his car—which meant she'd very likely seen him shift.
But he couldn't ask her about it until he could get her alone. And if so, it didn't seem to have left her frightened of him in the slightest. He hesitantly stroked her hair, which had lost most of the gel holding it up; she'd pulled it up into a short, straggly ponytail at the crown of her head.
"Are you okay?" he asked the ponytail, since he couldn't see her face.
"I'm good." She pushed away—Noah tried not to feel too much regret when her body peeled away from his—and cleared her throat decisively. "So, Noah, this is Ramona. She's my dad's wife. Ramona, this is my friend Noah."
Ramona rose from the couch, shifting the baby to rest in the crook of her left arm so she could hold out her hand to shake Noah's. She was a tired-looking woman in her late thirties, her straw-colored hair pulled back in a sloppy braid.
My dad's wife. Now he knew where he was. He'd heard that Hank "the Crank" Moreland had a place out in rural Washington somewhere. Peri had taken him to her dad's retreat for rural conspiracy-theory nuts. Well, it beat getting shot at, he had to admit.
"You're Peri's stepmom? Thank you for giving us a place to stay."
"Any of Peri's friends are welcome here." Ramona had a soft, thready voice, hardly more than a whisper. "It's nice to meet her at last."
Noah glanced at Peri, who looked uncomfortable. "You hadn't met before?"
Peri shook her head. "No, I haven't been back to the farm in ages. I heard Dad got married again, but that's all I knew."
Noah looked down at the baby nestled against Ramona's chest. It was a girl, judging from the pink onesie. "This is your sister?" he asked in sudden, soft wonder.
"Her name is Wendy," Ramona supplied. "Do you want to hold her?"
Noah tried not to let his face show his frozen terror at the idea. Peri's mouth twitched with her efforts to stifle a smile.
"Not ... just now, thank you, ma'am. I was actually hoping there was something around here to eat."
"There are leftovers from lunch," Peri put in. "Come on, Noah, I'll show you. Ramona, I've got this. You said you had to change her, right?"
She hustled Noah off to a small kitchen dominated by a large cookstove. Noah glanced over his shoulder and saw Ramona taking the baby into a room behind the stairs.
"You don't get along?" he
asked Peri quietly as she opened the refrigerator.
"I don't even know her! And I definitely don't do babies. I mean, I'm not saying I wouldn't ever have one of my own, but I really don't do other people's babies." She laid a crusty loaf of bread on the table and pried the lid off a large Tupperware container. The smell of roasted meat drew a loud rumble from Noah's hollow stomach. "So, there's mayonnaise and mustard if you want them on your sandwich. I can go out to the garden and pick some tomatoes and things."
"This'll be fine." He had to hold himself to a sedate pace and not try to cram half the loaf of bread into his mouth. He did see Peri's eyes widen a bit when he used the entire loaf to make himself two enormous sandwiches, using most of the meat.
"Are you really going to eat all that?"
Mouth full, Noah gave her a thumbs-up.
He was too engrossed in his food to pay much attention to what was going on around him for the next few minutes. Peri put a large cup of coffee at his elbow, then vanished for a bit. When he looked up again, she was leaning against the refrigerator, eating a peach.
"Locally grown," she remarked, holding it up. "Just starting to come into season. They don't grow so well here as along the coast, but the farm has its own orchard."
Noah swallowed the last bite of his second sandwich. For the moment, the starving monster in his middle was sated, though he knew from past experience that he'd be ready to eat again in an hour or two. "Have you seen my phone?"
"Yes," she said. "It's in your car, along with your gun. Phones don't work out here, by the way."
"Then I need to use the house phone. I need to check in."
"Look." She sat down at the table and leaned close to him. "You've figured out where you are, right? These people don't trust the government, and they really aren't going to be happy if they figure out I brought a fed home with me. I suggest not doing anything to raise their suspicions."
"Peri, I ran out on a gunfight, I don't even know if my partner on this assignment survived a house fire, and I have some very important things I need to tell the people I work for. This isn't because I can't stand to be out of touch for a few hours. It's life or death."
