Banished (12 page)

“The one you told her to make up? When you wrote to her?”

“Yes. And she said I’d better not let any of the authorities find out I was in town, or they’d take me in for questioning or worse. Now I understand she was just trying to make sure that I never came back. Because if I ever found out about you, I might fight for you. And she was not about to lose you.”

That was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I had the whole story of why I’d grown up without a mother. She hadn’t abandoned me on purpose.

And if Prairie had come for me long ago, I wouldn’t have Chub. I looked over the seat at him, rosy-cheeked in sleep, his mouth a sweet little O.

Until Chub, I had grown up with no love at all. But he had given me a reason to keep going, to keep trying.

Prairie had saved me last night, I thought as we reached the exit. But maybe Chub had saved me first.

We coasted off the highway, almost directly into an enormous parking lot. I was starving, and I knew Chub would be too the minute he woke up.

“We’re going to eat here?”

“I’m afraid so. There’s a McDonald’s in the Walmart. I’ll pick up what we need while you take Chub and get breakfast for the two of you.”

“What about you?”

Prairie smiled, unexpectedly and genuinely. “If you would get me a sausage and egg biscuit, I would be very grateful. I haven’t had one of those in ages. Oh, and some hash browns, maybe. And an orange juice. And a giant coffee, all right?”

She pressed some money into my hands and I closed my fingers over it. “How do you like your coffee?”

“Black’s fine. Listen, Hailey, you’ve got some bruising. It might be better if you …” She reached out and pushed my hair across my forehead, arranging it so that it hung over the side of my face.

Prairie had taken off her jacket. At least there was no blood on her silk top. She’d combed her hair and put on lipstick, but she still looked like she’d been up all night.

“I need to walk Rascal,” I said, leaning over to check on him. He was lying on the floor of the car, head resting on his paws.

“Okay, I’ll get Chub ready.”

By the time I had taken Rascal for a quick trip to a grassy median, Prairie had Chub out of the car. He was pointing to the giant store and making excited noises. I opened the car door and Rascal jumped obediently into the backseat.

As we walked through the huge parking lot, I decided two things: first, today was the day I was going to start drinking coffee. And second, I too would drink it black. Cream and sugar were things that could slow a person down.

By now, back in Gypsum, the Ellises would have realized their car was missing, wouldn’t they? They would have gone out to get the paper, or let the cat in, and if they glanced over to the carport … although it
was
Saturday. Maybe they were sleeping in.

A quarter mile away, if the cops hadn’t already been called to the scene, Old Man Burnett was waking up to discover a giant hole in his barn and a car crashed in his creek. Not to mention Prairie’s car, that old brown Volvo, abandoned behind the barn.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to stumble on the carnage at our house. Gram was well known to a few people in Gypsum and the surrounding county, but they weren’t the kind to call the authorities. It would probably be someone else—someone selling aluminum siding or checking the water meter—who would end up making that awful discovery.

Inside the store, an old man with a bright blue vest shoved a shopping cart toward us. “Welcome to Walmart,” he said.

“Thanks, I … we’re just going to, uh, have breakfast,” I said, certain he would see how nervous I was and know something was wrong. But as Prairie slipped into the crowd of shoppers, he turned away from me and pushed the cart at the people who came through the door after us.

I saw a sign for the restrooms and dragged Chub toward them. Inside, there was one of those changing stations that pull down from the wall. I wondered if it would hold Chub, who weighed forty-two pounds now, according to Gram’s old peeling scale.

“In here,” I said, pulling him toward the largest stall. There were two other women at the sinks, one washing her hands, one putting on lipstick. I hoped they would just assume that Chub was using the toilet himself.

I realized I didn’t have any diapers or wipes with me. How I was going to clean him? He was bound to be soaked. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wet them at the sink before we went into the stall.

Chub said something I didn’t understand and tugged impatiently at his elastic waistband. I helped him out of his damp diaper and then, to my amazement, he clambered up on the toilet.

A dozen times at home I had put him on the toilet, promising to read him stories or get him a cookie, anything I could think of to get him used to the idea of using it—and he always scrambled right back down and ran away.

But now he had done it on his own. He finished up, climbed back down and pulled up his pants.

I helped him wash his hands at the sink—he loved the foaming soap dispenser—and as we were drying our hands, a short woman with frizzy red hair turned to me and said, “Oh, he’s sure a sweetheart. Is he your little brother?” and before I even really thought about it, I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She gave us a big smile and as we followed her out of the restroom I thought, Well, why not? There wasn’t anyone who was going to argue. We could be related, both of us with pale freckled skin. And later, if he grew up looking totally different, if we were in the habit of thinking of each other that way—maybe it wouldn’t matter.

Maybe we had a chance to be normal after all.

At McDonald’s I ordered myself the same thing Prairie had asked for, and hotcakes and sausage for Chub. We ate quickly, and I tried not to look around at the other customers. I figured if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me.

When Prairie wheeled up with her shopping cart full of bags, I was feeling better. We made our way back to the car, and she handed me a large box.

“Here’s a car seat,” she said. “See if you can get it figured out while I put the rest of this stuff in the trunk.”

It ended up taking both of us to set the seat up, Prairie reading from the instruction book and me fiddling around with the straps and the seat belt. Rascal didn’t seem at all interested in the process, barely looking up as we worked. Chub patted the plastic sides of the new seat with a thoughtful look on his face. I crawled back into the front seat. Prairie stuffed the instructions and the packaging back in the box and tossed it in the backseat. Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her purse.

“I thought …,” she said, and then hesitated. She reached in the bag and took out a small blue stuffed giraffe with glossy yarn forming a loopy mane down its long neck. The legs were loose and floppy, and it had a sweet face, with long eyelashes embroidered above little button eyes. She handed it to Chub, who held it close to his nose, turning it this way and that.

“Raff,” he said. “Prairie. Raff … giraffe.”

He really was talking. How was this happening? Was it because of me? Could I be healing him somehow, without even trying? I’d healed three times: Milla, Rascal and Chub, all in the past few days. Maybe it was now such a part of me that I couldn’t turn it off.

It didn’t seem possible … but so much of what had happened was unbelievable.

I handed Prairie the paper sack with her biscuit and hash browns. I fixed the coffee cup’s lid so she could drink, folding back the little plastic tab, just like I’d learned to do twenty minutes earlier when I’d drunk my first cup of coffee.

Prairie nibbled at the food while she drove slowly out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate. She consulted her phone now and then, and I realized she was following downloaded directions.

“Where are we going?” I asked as she turned onto a multi-lane road lined with strip malls.

“Well, that’s a little complicated,” she said. “Keep your eyes out for a—Oh, there it is.”

She turned into a parking lot in front of a row of low-slung buildings and passed a dry cleaner, a Thai restaurant, a bakery. She parked in front of a Hertz car rental agency, then turned to face me with a serious expression.

“This is going to sound a little strange,” she said, “but we have to make it look like we’re renting a car.”

“Make it
look
like? But we’re not really renting it?”

“Yes. How can I … Okay. Remember when I told you that Banished men used to have visions? That they could see the future?”

“Yes …” A prickly feeling had started at the base of my spine. I sensed that what was coming was more bad news, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear more. But what choice did I have?

“Purebloods can still do it. Some of them, anyway. Well, a few.” She bit her lip and stared at her hands, which were clasped tightly. “Rattler can.”

“Rattler
Sikes
?” As if there was any other Rattler. Just saying his name dialed up the prickling to full-scale fear.

Prairie nodded. “Rattler and I have a … history. When we were kids, he used to like to follow me around. Even then he had visions, and they just got stronger over time.”

“But that means he knows exactly where we are!” The thought made me want to jump out of the car and run.

“It doesn’t work quite like that. He can’t see all of the future, or even choose what parts to see. He just … opens his mind, and he gets flashes. Pictures, pieces of the future. Sometimes he has visions of things happening at the same time but in a different place.”

I remembered his unfocused gaze in the kitchen, the way he went very still, as though he was focusing in on something no one else could see.
Something’s not right. A car … men. It’s men in it
.

He’d had a vision of Safian’s men.

“But what are we going to do?” I demanded, panicked.

Prairie laid a hand on my arm. “Stay calm, Hailey. That’s why we’re here. We’re going to create a few scenarios, throw him off. We’ll make it look like we’re renting a car. We’ll drive to the bus station. I’ll take a few different routes, make it look like we could be going south or west. We just need to confuse him so he doesn’t know which way to come after us.”

“But eventually he’s going to—”

“Stop,” Prairie said gently but firmly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Rattler can only see me when we’re connected, when there’s some energy between us. Right now we’re scared and we’re bound by what happened at Alice’s, but we will get past that. We’ll put it behind us and the connection will be broken and he won’t be able to find us.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re connected?”

“The Banished … we’re drawn to each other, like I told you before. And there’s an energy around that. But if you were to leave, that energy would slowly fade. Your mind and your heart would focus on other things and the attraction would die down. The connection would be broken. Not forever, but you’d be functioning on your own, outside the influence of the other Banished. That’s what I did, when I went to Chicago. The energy faded for me, and Rattler was a part of my past, and he couldn’t see me anymore.”

“But when you came back to Gypsum—”

“It opened it all up again. The connection, the energy. But we can fight it. I’ve fought it before. I’ve gotten away from Rattler before.” There was strong conviction in her voice, but edged with something I didn’t like at all, something dark and terrifying.

It almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

But it wasn’t like we had any other options. “What can I do?”

“You and Chub take Rascal for a walk. There’s bottled water in the trunk and a plastic bowl. Give me five or ten minutes.”

I did as she directed, glancing in the plate-glass window as I took care of Rascal. She was having a conversation with the man behind the desk, who was consulting his computer monitor. Chub was happy to be out of the car, and he walked along beside me, picking up rocks and sticks that caught his eye.

In the bright light I could see that Rascal had blood along his neck and back, and I realized that Chub must have bled on him in the Volvo. I wiped him off with some of the bottled water and a handful of tissues from the box the Ellises kept in their car. He didn’t mind, didn’t even seem to notice. I put my hand in front of his face to lick, but he just stared at the lanes of traffic whizzing by. I wondered if he was thinking about chasing cars, but he didn’t seem interested. He hadn’t wagged his tail or perked up his ears at all, and I wondered again if he was having some sort of reaction to his accident, if something inside him was broken.

But when I said, “Rascal, come,” he trotted along right away and jumped back in the car. If there
was
something wrong with him, it wasn’t brain damage.

When Prairie came back out she seemed a little calmer. “One down,” she said. After consulting her phone again, she pulled out of the parking lot. “Next stop, the bus station.”

“Prairie,” I asked after we’d driven for a few minutes, “what happened to Rattler? At the house?”

“Oh, that …,” Prairie said. A ghost of a smile flickered across her face. “I, uh, take kickboxing. That was a roundhouse kick. We’re not supposed to use it in class. Well, anyway, I always wanted to try it.”

“I guess it worked.”

“Yeah—I guess so.”

Rattler wasn’t dead. He’d sold us out and nearly gotten me kidnapped, and as far as I knew, his only injury was from being kicked by Prairie. I wished he
was
dead—and then I wondered if he was “seeing” us even now. It made me shiver with fear and revulsion.

I barely paid attention as Prairie took smaller and less crowded streets, driving through a series of neighborhoods that grew shabbier and dirtier, before she turned into the parking lot of a bus station.

“This time we’ll all go,” she said.

We left Rascal in the car with an opened can of dog food that Prairie had bought at Walmart. We were gone for about a half hour, pretending to buy tickets. What really happened was Prairie asked a lot of questions about when buses were leaving for various places, and at the end she took a couple of folded paper timetables and tucked them into her purse. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for a while. I read an old magazine that someone had left behind, and Prairie got Chub a lemonade from a vending machine.