Child Thief (42 page)

‘I have to.'

‘Let me help.'

‘No. Your job is to take Dariya and Aleksandra. Keep them safe.'

‘But—'

Turning to look at him, I let Viktor see the intent in my eyes, and Viktor nodded, knowing he wouldn't change my mind. I would be alone for this. Alone and focused on only one thing.

‘We'll take Petro home.'

‘We have no home any more,' I said. ‘You can't take him.'

‘But we can't just leave him here. We can't leave him out here for—'

‘Petro's gone,' I said. ‘This isn't him any more. There's nothing left that was your brother. I'll bury him here.'

We both knew I couldn't bury him deep. The ground would be hard and almost impossible to break.

‘We have to think about Dariya now,' I said. ‘We have to think about your mother and Lara. Petro's gone; there's nothing more we can do about that.'

I looked down at Petro's face. His eyes were closed now, almost as if he were asleep if not for the paleness of his skin and the smear of dried blood across one cheek.

‘It's time for you to go,' I said to Viktor.

They gathered their things, and Viktor mounted the horse, reaching down to help lift Dariya. Aleksandra put her hands on Dariya's waist as if to lift her, but Dariya moved away and came to where I was sitting.

Aleksandra and Viktor watched as the child came and stood by me. She looked smaller than her years now. I had seen this girl grow just as I had watched my own daughter grow and I knew her almost as well. She had spent much of her life in and out of my home, and Natalia had always remarked on how she'd seemed older than Lara. But now she looked smaller. More vulnerable.

She looked at me, long and hard. Unblinking.

‘Are you going to kill the Baba Yaga?' she asked.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, I am.'

33

Grief expands. If allowed, it can push out all other thought, consuming all other emotion until nothing else exists. Uncontrolled, it smothers clear thinking, can take a man close to madness. I had no time for it, so I pushed the grief into a corner of my mind and closed a door on it. If the child thief was coming, he might be on his way now, perhaps skirting the edge of the lake, staying within the forest, advancing on the place where I now sat holding my son. I had to act now.

There was no way of knowing if the child thief was going to follow me, or if he was too badly wounded to do so, but I had to make a decision, so I chose to wait for him. I would wait a while and, if he did not appear, I would make my way to the place where I'd last seen him. I tried to detach myself from what the child thief had done – the people he'd murdered and the fear with which he'd infected Dariya. I tried to take myself back to the days when it had been my job to stalk men, or lie in wait for them. I would do the same thing for this man. He was no different. He was just a man.

I had no time to bury Petro; that would have to wait until my job was done. Instead, I dragged my son's body to a place where the trees grew closest, not looking at him as I did it. I didn't want to see him. I didn't want anything to distract me from what I had to do.

I dug away some of the snow at the base of a tree and put Petro into the dip, rolling him onto his front, with his chest on the higher section, so it looked as if he were using his elbows to raise
his torso from the ground. I covered the rest of his body over with snow and found a straight branch to tuck in beside him, protruding as if it were the barrel of a rifle.

‘It's just a body,' I said, speaking in a whisper. ‘Not Petro. Just a body …'

When I was finished, I walked a few metres away into the forest and turned to see what I had done. From this distance it looked as if a hunter had concealed himself in the snow.

I took a branch from a tree close to me and used it to sweep across the surface of the snow as I returned to where Petro lay. It was intended to be a poor effort to disguise my tracks so the child thief would think I was tired and had become sloppy, that I was not a threat to him. My only advantage was that I knew what the child thief was capable of, but he knew nothing about me.

With that done, I climbed onto a low branch of the tree closest to Petro, first testing my weight on it to be sure it would support me. I looked down at my son, seeing only the top of his head and the stick which I had laid beside him. I raised my eyes and looked out into the forest for a moment, then turned and stretched to the next tree, climbing across to it, making my way through four or five trees without touching the ground, without leaving any trace of myself in the snow.

My intention was to drop down now that I was away from the place where Petro was concealed. I would cover myself in a similar way and wait for the child thief to come to where Petro lay, led there by my failed attempt to cover my tracks. But when I looked up, I saw that the oak whose branches now offered me support was tall enough and thick enough to give me a different kind of cover. Something better.

Two metres above the branch I was standing on, the tree split into three separate trunks, each with its own tangle of smaller branches, and the place where it split would give me the perfect place to conceal myself. My dark clothing would be well camouflaged against the bark and I would have a good view of the
surrounding area. If the child thief came within a few metres of the place where Petro lay, I would see him.

I checked the rifle was secure on my shoulder and began to climb.

The sky was clouded grey, glimpsed through the branches above, and the sun was diffused behind it, giving away nothing, but I didn't spend long looking up; my eyes were constantly moving, scanning the trees, expecting the slightest change in the forest; my ears tuned to the weakest sound, ignoring the faint wind that moved through the naked, tangled branches with the sound of rushing water. The occasional disturbance as a broken twig fell to the ground, bustling through the branches.

Somewhere to the right, the dark shapes of nests filled the trees, but they were silent except for the call of a single crow, either unaware of my presence or so used to me now that it bore no fear.

I sniffed quietly behind my scarf, breath moist against the wool preventing it from rolling out into the cold air and betraying me. I had barely moved since settling. Both legs were drawn close to my chest so I was in a semi-foetal position, leaning back against the thickest trunk, the rifle resting between the V-shape of the other two. If I turned my head, I could almost see all around, and that was the only movement I allowed myself. My legs were stiff with cramp, my back was aching from the base of my spine and the muscles were frozen stiff in my shoulders, but I didn't need any of those parts of my body. All I needed was one good eye, something to steady the rifle and a finger with which to pull the trigger. And when I glanced at my hands, I saw they no longer shook.

But as time wore on and the sky greyed further, the temperature began to drop and I felt an easy numbness trying to overcome me. There was a heaviness in my eyelids and weariness lowered itself over me. I shook my head to stay awake, raised my eyebrows and stared so hard the cold air hurt my eyes and made them stream with cleansing tears. But none of those things made any
difference now. My body and my mind needed rest. They needed to stop and they were threatening to do it right now.

My aches dulled to numbness. My thoughts began to empty. My muscles felt heavy. The crow's incessant call faded to something barely noticed.

And then it stopped. The bird became silent. And in that silence I heard a single footfall in the snow.

The stillness that followed that first single footstep stretched for a long time. The child thief was close. I could feel him. As if he were something more than human. As if he were just breath that moved through the trees, a feral part of the forest that would always be there.

I pressed back against the trunk of the tree as if I might melt into it to find the perfect camouflage. My steady finger poised over the trigger of the rifle.

And then another footstep. Tentative. Slow. The gentle crush of snow beneath a boot. The crow called once more, a disturbed and irritable cry as it jumped from its perch, flitting out across the forest, a jitter of movement in my peripheral vision. I turned my head. Another footfall.

The grey sky was darkening further, an ethereal gloom descending over the forest, the faint shadows falling long across the forest floor. A breeze stirred the branches, wrapped itself around me before moving on, taking my warmth. And then there was movement. Not the natural movement of the shadows touched by the wind, but the lengthening and shortening of a shadow. The movement of a human being coming into my line of sight, just a few metres away.

The child thief, just below me, had skirted the lake as I had expected. He had made his way to this side, stalking deeper into the forest so he could come at me from behind the spot where we had been. He'd tried to outflank me, expecting me to be waiting for him, rifle trained on the open expanse of the lake.

I wanted to see his face. I wanted to know the face of the man who would steal a child and make a game of it, but the child
thief's body was turned away from me, only the back and side of his head were visible. A large hat of good fur was pulled low on his brow, but the flaps remained unrolled so his hearing would be unimpaired. His coat was long and dark.

I swivelled my rifle on its resting place so it was pointing in the child thief's direction, and I leaned forward to sight through the scope. Closing my left eye, I watched the magnified form moving away, towards the spot where Petro lay. I willed him to turn around. I wanted to see his eyes when I took the shot. But the child thief continued forward.

I fixed the cross hairs on the back of his head.

My heart quickened, but I concentrated to control it. I inhaled through my nose, halting to keep the breath in my lungs so my whole body was still.

I tracked his movement with a gentle turn of the rifle.

I tightened my finger on the trigger and began to squeeze, waiting for the moment between heartbeats when my body would be most still.

The rifle kicked back against my shoulder and the child thief's head jerked forward as the bullet pierced his skull and exited somewhere through his face, taking with it bone and tissue, spraying it across the snow in front of him. He dropped to his knees, his body falling forward so he went down face first with his hands by his side.

The sound of the gunshot evaporated leaving only a ringing in my ears. The smoke clung around my head, the smell of it strong in my nose, and then it too vanished and became nothing.

Immediately I drew back the bolt of the rifle, ejecting the cartridge. I drove another into place without pointing the barrel away from where the body lay. I wouldn't take any chances with this man. I knew he was human, just a man, but Dariya's talk of the Baba Yaga had stirred something primal in me.

I let my lungs empty in a rush and took in another great breath, my body hungry for the oxygen. And then I stopped. Something wasn't right.

I had missed something important.

I stared at the body below, the stain of blood sprayed out in a fan, and tried to see what was missing.

And then I realised. There was no weapon.

The man I had shot was not armed.

I sat up, drawing the rifle away from the place where I'd supported it, and began to turn, knowing I'd been tricked.

The second shot that broke the peace of the forest was fired by the child thief. I saw him too late, propped against the trunk of a tree, resting the barrel of his weapon in the nook of a branch. He fired before I had time to sight on him, and my natural reaction was to flinch, to make myself small.

The bullet struck the bark beside me, showering it into tiny pieces, spitting into my eyes, stinging the exposed skin of my face. I turned my head in a sudden movement, shifting my body weight, one hand rising for protection. Beneath me, my feet slipped on the damp bark and I toppled backwards from the tree, a moment in space before I thumped to the ground, pain shooting along my spine. My own rifle, once the child thief's, slipped, caught on a branch, then broke through and fell towards me, the butt plate of the stock smashing into my cheekbone in the place that Lermentov had struck me with the altar cross.

I felt a wave of nausea and a rolling blackness that wanted to take me into its arms, but I opened my mouth and shouted away the pain. I yelled at the forest and let the child thief hear my rage. I was not going to be taken.
Nothing
was going to take me.
Nothing
was going to stop me.

I forced myself to move, turning onto my side to push to a sitting position. Intense pain fired through my lower back as if a glowing bayonet had been forced between the vertebrae and stole my breath, but I had no time to rest, no time to recover. The child thief would be moving in on me now, coming to finish his game.

I struggled to a kneeling position and took up the rifle lying in the snow. My face throbbed where the weapon had struck me; flakes of bark gritted my eyes; my muscles and bones were battered and painful, but I pushed on, crawling to the base of the
tree, edging my way around to look out at the place where I had seen the man. And there he was.

The child thief.

A movement in the forest. A dark shape coming slowly, advancing on my position. In his situation I would have been tempted to rush this spot; to get in close before my enemy had time to recover from his fall. But the child thief was calm and selfcontrolled, taking his time, looking for his moment, stepping from shadow to shadow, tree to tree.

I edged back, slipping onto my stomach and resting the rifle barrel across some fallen dead wood, pulling the stock into my shoulder. I put my right eye to the scope, leaving my left open to keep watching him. I pressed a painful cheek to the cold wooden stock and waited.

For a while I saw nothing. Everything was still. Somewhere behind me the crow cawed loud and raw as if it were angry with the day. Then something moved to the right of the place where I had seen my hunter. Only the slightest twitch, but it was enough to catch my eye. I turned the barrel of the rifle to point in that direction and waited for another sign.