Last Safe Place, The (35 page)

Why hadn’t he?

Was he …
afraid?

While the other voices attack him like a thousand screaming harpies, The Voice says nothing. That silence is deafening.

Yesheb endures the squalling in his head all the way up the road to the turn-off beside a complex of red stone buildings. It continues as he struggles to maneuver his way up a trail strewn with rocks, pitted by huge potholes
and knobby with exposed tree roots. When he gets to the first switchback, the noise stops in mid-babble like somebody hit the mute button. Yesheb is instantly alone, abandoned. Trembling and demoralized, he struggles to pull it together for his assault on the cabin. His gentle assault. His “kind” invasion.

Then he lifts his eyes and actually looks at the switchback and gate. His stomach heaves. He had not expected anything like this! His men had warned him, of course, but he’d dismissed their concerns.

Yesheb sets the emergency brake on the idling vehicle and steps down out of it, scrambles up the wet trail to the gate, unlocks it and shoves it open. He sinks down on the edge of the concrete gate footer for a few moments looking at the almost vertical hairpin turn carved out of the rock. How can he possibly—

Then he hears the loud rumble of an engine. Someone is coming up the trail behind him!

He jumps up, loses his footing on the slippery rocks and slides back down to the trail below. Scrambling to his feet, he leaps into the jeep, fumbles to disengage the emergency brake, then panics and slams the accelerator all the way to the floorboard. The tires spin and catch and the jeep leaps forward into the switchback.

His fear saves him. He’d never have taken the curve that fast—and he needed the speed to make the turn. He roars through the switchback, bounces heavily over a rock at the top of the trail and skids to a stop. For a moment, he sits panting, then jumps out of the jeep and locks the gate behind him. As he charges up the rutted trail to face more switchbacks—aerial photographs showed seven of them—he clings to the knowledge that he only has to make it
up
the trail to the cabin. He won’t have to come back down. He will be taking a much more comfortable mode of transportation when he whisks his bride off the mountaintop and away into their future.

The thought of his beloved Zara both calms him and pumps adrenaline into his veins. He feels his resolve return. He will win. He will prevail. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft
is
The Beast of Babylon. It is a destiny that was laid out for him the moment he first displayed his power. The day he devoured his twin brother in their mother’s womb, he began the journey that will end in victory on this mountaintop today!

P
EDRO PULLED TO
a stop short of the first switchback and banged his fists on his steering wheel in frustration. The gate was locked. Of course, there had only been the slightest possibility that it would not be, that the man—Pedro did not even know his name!—who had taken the key was so arrogant he did not believe anybody would follow him. Or knew the police would be too occupied with the prison break to respond, which opened up another whole can of worms Pedro was not prepared to fish with right now.

The night of Anza’s birthday party Gabriella had asked him if he believed in evil.

“The kind of man who delights in hurting other people—is he crazy or evil?” she had asked.

He had responded, “Both!”

Certainly the look in that man’s eyes was the very definition of madness, but was that all? Or was there something bigger than insanity driving him? The stalker had actually felt … cold. Sure, the man had been soaked to the skin, but Pedro would have sworn he radiated a chill into the air around him that had nothing to do with being wet.

And the things he knew. Not just information but Pedro’s
soul,
what he wrestled with in the darkest ditch of the night when no one was there to see. Almost like—

Pedro shook it off. It did not really matter at this point whether the man was a who or a
what
… a distinction without a difference. What did matter was that he was roaring up the mountain right this minute to
kidnap Gabriella!
The terror that thought struck in Pedro’s heart knocked down the fortifications denial had so carefully erected and scattered the last vestiges of protest and doubt like a flock of startled chickens. His feelings for Gabriella were real and deep and he was nauseous at the thought of what that man would do to her.

And Gabriella was not the only one whose life was in danger. The madman needed “innocent blood” to offer as a sacrifice on their nuptial altar. Pedro had read the book! And the innocent blood on that mountain was Ty’s.

He switched off the ignition, jumped out of the jeep, reached back in, grabbed the rifle off the backseat floorboard and emptied the box of
shells into his pocket. He would have to make his way up the mountain to St. Elmo’s Fire on foot and he took off running—strained to outdistance his fear that whatever horror the stalker intended to inflict on Gabriella and her family would be over before he could get there to protect them.

* * * *

Gabriella sat propped up with pillows on her bed with her computer on her lap. It was an exercise in futility and she knew it. How could she possibly write when her mind was fuzzy from lack of sleep, her gut was tied in a knot and her hands were trembling?

Maybe if I put my fingers on the keyboard they’ll hop around and write without me.

Couldn’t be a whole lot worse than the tortured verse she had composed with her mind fully engaged. But she was coming along; bit by bit it was coming back to her.

She sighed, then reached out her hand to the .38 on the bedside table. Her security blanket. And she’d use it, too, she told herself fiercely. If that maniac came anywhere near her, she’d … She didn’t pick the gun up, merely touched it, felt the gun barrel as cold as a stone.

Except not all stones were cold. She looked up at the geode sparking on the dresser on the other side of the room. That stone had been warm. Even though it had been lying in the shade with all the other rocks, it had been—

The memory downloaded into her mind like a file off the internet. Between one heartbeat and the next, she
knew.

Gabriella jumped up off the bed and raced down the stairs to the big fireplace that covered the wall between the family room and the kitchen. She scooted aside the pile of kindling and inspected a spot where the bottom of the hearth connected to the bricks going up the wall. She reached out and pushed on a brick on the bottom, wiggled it back and forth like a little kid’s tooth to loosen it. Then she tugged on it and it slid out into her hand with a grating sound, revealing a small cavity behind it. Gabriella reached into the opening and her fingers felt something round and hard. She drew it out of the hole into the light and stared at it in wonder. Though the crystals were dirty, it was still incredibly beautiful—bleeg. Just like the other half of the geode on her dresser upstairs.

Getting slowly up off her knees, Gabriella went into the kitchen and turned on the water in the sink. When the accumulated dust of years inside the hearth was washed away, the crystals in the geode sparkled. All the ones in this half of the rock were the same size and shape, about as big around as the end of her little finger and multicolored like the prism of colors in the other half. They made a solid carpet of crystal that would have formed a canopy over the large, clear, center crystal before the rock was broken in half. No, not a canopy. A sky. The colored crystals were arranged in rows—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. A rainbow.

T
Y SAT IN
the deck chair on the balcony outside his room with P.D. stretched out on the damp wood decking beside him. The rain had stopped—for now—but he could hear thunder growl higher up on the mountain. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt—the mist kept fogging them up.

The lightning that sparkled in the clouds above Antero looked like Christmas lights blinking in a gray cotton ball. Ty was watching, waiting to see a bolt actually strike the peak. He shouldn’t have to wait long. He’d already seen two strike the mountain near the wash above the tree line. But he was waiting for a single bolt to snake down from the clouds to the highest tip of rock—so he could draw a picture of it while the image was still fresh in his mind.

Ty’s mother had purchased all manner of art supplies—colored pencils, pastel chalks, acrylics, oils, brushes and paper—for him to use to entertain himself on rainy days—said she’d had to “make do” when she was here as a little girl and didn’t want him to suffer the same fate. Of course, that was before video games. Like in the Stone Age.

But even Ty had eventually tired of playing with his Nintendo. Grandpa Slappy had taught him how to play blackjack, but his grandfather had gone into his room to take a nap after lunch, so Ty had settled himself on the back deck to capture a storm over the mountain. He’d done a painting with watercolors of the view from the front porch right after breakfast—the valley and mountains on the other side. Mom had stuck it with magnets onto the refrigerator door. He wanted to paint something more dramatic this time.

Only another scene kept getting in the way. Whenever he tried to concentrate on the image of lightning striking the mountain to sketch it on the
art tablet, his mind’s eye saw something else—teenagers dangling a boy off a bridge over a river.

The story Grandpa Slappy had told Ty haunted him. It was like a movie where he was inserted into the action. Sometimes he was Skeet, dangling there above the river. Sometimes he was Grandpa Slappy, watching in horror from the woods. But usually he was the fat kid, the one with tears on his cheeks who paused in his escape to stare into Grandpa Slappy’s eyes. The kid who hadn’t meant any harm and ended up killing someone, and who had to live with the guilt of what he’d done for the rest of his life. Ty hadn’t meant to hurt anybody either, but he’d gotten his own father killed.

They’re fighting. Again. They’re always fighting. No matter what his mother says or does, his father yells at her for it. The coffee’s too hot. The music’s too loud or too soft or not what he wants to hear.

And Ty is terrified. That’s nothing new, either. He’s always frightened when they fight, so scared he goes into his room and closes the door and puts the pillow over his head so he can’t hear it. But tonight the yelling wakes him up. It’s so loud he can’t go back to sleep, even with the pillow over his head. There’s an edge to Daddy’s voice he hasn’t heard before. Mommy’s voice is different, too. More scared than usual. So he gets out of bed and sneaks down the stairs. His parents are fighting in the family room; they can’t see him watching from the shadows of the bottom step.

Daddy has just gotten home. He still has his jacket on. And he’s drunk. He usually is when they fight. But tonight he is so drunk he can barely stand up. He’s sort of swaying, has to hold onto the back of a chair for balance. His words are so slurred Ty can’t make out what he’s saying. It is something about the book Mommy wrote.

Daddy says he knows why the book’s so good, because it’s a—then he uses a big word Ty doesn’t understand. Sounds like “auto buggy.” Daddy shouts that she’s a witch, a demon.

He has a jar in his hand and he holds it out toward her and she backs up from it like it’s a snake. But there’s a wall behind her so she can’t get away. Daddy says he’s going to make the outside of her match the inside.

And then he lets go of the chair and—

P.D. began to growl. The dog was standing up, his body rigid, his teeth barred, making a sound that Ty had only heard one time before. That time in the airport when …

Ty followed Puppy Dog’s gaze and saw a jeep materialize out of the mist, inching along the winding trail through the last of the grove of aspen trees. He couldn’t see the face of the man who was driving it, but he didn’t have to.

It was the Boogie Man. He had found them and had come to take Ty away to hurt him really bad, maybe even … kill him.

Ty’s mouth was instantly so dry he couldn’t swallow. How could it get dry like that so fast? His heart banged in his chest so hard he could see the front of his shirt move with every beat.

Hide!

He dived out of the chair, spilling the sketch pad and pencils on the floor, then hunkered down below the level of the railing so the man couldn’t see when he got closer.

“Hush!” he commanded P.D. in a whisper just as the dog was about to bark.

Ty peeked through the slats of the railing. The jeep was coming slowly, sneaking up on the cabin. Ty had to warn—

No, wait. Think!

The man had threatened Mom and Grandpa Slappy—even hurt Mom!—the last time he came looking for Ty. He’d do the same now. They’d try to protect Ty and end up getting hurt.

Ty had to run, get away. As long as Ty wasn’t around, the man would leave Mom and Grandpa Slappy alone. There wasn’t any reason to hurt them when it was Ty he wanted.

The boy turned and crawled back into his room, made a hand motion and P.D. followed. Then he grabbed his jacket off the bedpost, slid his arms into it and sneaked a look out the deck door. The jeep had cleared the aspen grove and was silently approaching the cabin.

“I gotta run away, boy,” he told P.D. His voice quavered but he managed not to cry. “And you gotta stay here.” A plan had formed in Ty’s mind, and where he was going, P.D. couldn’t go with him.

“Down,” he said. P.D. dropped to the floor. “Stay.”

Then Ty crept out onto the deck below the railing and crossed to the steps on the far side that led down to the porch. He peered through the slats and as soon as the jeep was close enough that the cabin blocked it from view, Ty raced down the steps. To stay out of the jeep’s sight line, Ty cut directly across the meadow on the south side of the cabin to the creek and the trees. Then he crossed the creek and plunged into the woods. Once in the trees, he turned and started running toward the mountain.

Back in Ty’s room, P.D. lay on the floor, his hackles raised, his teeth barred, growling quietly. But he didn’t bark because he’d been instructed not to. He didn’t move, either. Placed on “down stay,” he wouldn’t budge from that spot until somebody summoned him.