Ritual Sins (11 page)

She started past him through the door, but he dropped his arms, imprisoning her. She couldn’t go forward or back without touching him. She stood motionless, and he was reminded of a white rabbit, facing certain death. She lifted her
head to glare at him, exposing her soft, vulnerable neck. If he were a wolf he could tear her throat out.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said, defiant despite her fears. “If you knew that, why did you invite me?”

But she was no rabbit, and he had no interest in her throat, her life’s blood. He smiled down at her, oh, so gently, and he felt her shiver. “Maybe I was bored,” he said. “Maybe I wanted to see if I could get you off my back. Maybe I wanted to see if I could get you on yours.”

He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to put his mouth against hers and see what she’d do. She’d panic, of course. Especially when he used his tongue. It would be worth it, just to taste her shock, just to risk being seen by some of his blind-eyed followers. He leaned toward her, hungry. Like a wolf.

“Luke?” Bobby Ray Shatney’s voice was soft and respectful and faintly slurred from the Thorazine, and for a moment Luke didn’t turn his head, still concentrating on his victim. She was looking up at him with a lovely combination of surprise and anger, and if Bobby Ray hadn’t chosen to interfere she would have learned just what she had to be afraid of. He let the moment linger, then released her, turning to the newcomer. Rachel
scuttled through the doorway like a startled crab, barreling into Bobby Ray.

“Blessings,” Luke said softly. “What is it?”

“Catherine sent me to find you. It’s time for the commitment.”

He’d forgotten. Angel McGuiness’s smashed body needed to be buried with all the new age pomp and circumstance befitting a lost member of the flock. He wondered for a moment whether Rachel felt any remorse, whether he should force her to come with him and see what her curiosity and thirst for vengeance had wrought. If she hadn’t been so determined to bring him down, Angel would still be safely locked away. She wouldn’t have had to take a swan dive off the fourth-story roof of the healing center onto a cement walkway.

But Rachel wasn’t a woman who spent much time considering her own shortcomings, her own guilt. She was too caught up in blaming others. Which was just fine by him—it only made her more vulnerable. And in the end, her guilt would overtake her, destroying her.

But not before he had her.

“Of course,” he murmured. “Why don’t you escort Rachel to my rooms while I take care of this? She wanted some moments of peace and quiet.”

He could see that she wanted to protest, but
Bobby Ray had already put a courteous hand under her elbow and was leading her away. Luke watched them go with a faint note of foreboding. Alfred made sure that Bobby Ray was drugged into docility, and he believed firmly in Luke’s divinity. There was no way he could prove a danger to anyone in the compound, even if he wanted to. Rachel was entirely safe with him.

Nevertheless, Luke decided that Angel didn’t need much more than a cursory service, committing her crushed body to the sun-baked earth of Santa Dolores. Our Lady of Sorrows.

Suddenly she could breathe again. Rachel glanced at the young man who led her down the corridor, doubtful, but he seemed the soul of sweetness. He was probably the youngest person she’d seen there, maybe in his late teens. Another lost innocent led astray by the master con man, she thought grimly, shaking off the oppressive feeling he always left her with.

She felt mauled, and yet he hadn’t touched her. Her entire body felt bruised, sensitized, aching, as if he’d put his hands on her.

But he hadn’t touched her. And he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare.

“Where did Luke go?” she asked the boy. On closer inspection he wasn’t that much younger than she was—maybe in his early twenties, but
there was something curiously unformed, childish about him. With his angelic face and tousled shock of dark hair he seemed like an overgrown Tom Sawyer, all ingenuous charm and awkwardness.

“To bury Angel,” he replied in his sweet, quiet voice.

She shouldn’t have asked. It wasn’t her fault that Angel had died. They should have known better than to leave a newcomer with that kind of responsibility. Besides, Calvin had been behind it all. If anyone was responsible for Angel’s death it was the jealous little man who’d confessed to it. There was no reason for her to feel a speck of guilt, and she refused to acknowledge it.

“Don’t you want to be there?” she asked Bobby Ray in a curious voice.

He shook his head. “I never liked Angel,” he said evenly. “She was crazy.” He smiled at her with liquid innocence.

“I would have thought Luke would expect compassion for the afflicted,” she said.

“Luke doesn’t expect anything of us. We simply learn to exist, in our own way. That’s the power of the Foundation of Being.”

He seemed so earnest she wasn’t about to dispute it. The room he led her into seemed similar to the others, if a little larger and a little emptier. White adobe walls, plank flooring, a few cushions on the floor. Hardly conducive to comfort,
she thought wryly. She would have rather had an overstuffed sofa and a large-screen TV.

However, at least Luke wasn’t anywhere around, which was the best thing that could be said about anyplace at Santa Dolores. She rubbed her arms, feeling suddenly chilled. There was a fireplace in one corner, and the smell of burning piñon pine was crisp and resiny in the stillness. She half expected Bobby Ray to leave her, fading away like most of the ghostly creatures who called themselves Luke’s People, but he was still there, watching her, as she warmed herself by the fire. Luke’s private quarters, she thought. A perfect place to start searching, if only she were left alone.

“You really don’t need to stay with me,” she said. “I just wanted someplace where I could be by myself, and Luke suggested his rooms.” She glanced around the empty space. There were no other doors but the one through which they’d entered. “Where does he sleep?”

You would have thought she’d asked where he kept the bodies, the way Bobby Ray reacted. “Luke is celibate,” he said repressively.

“So am I,” she shot back. “I didn’t say I wanted to sleep with him, I just asked where he slept.”

“Here.”

The thin pallet in the corner didn’t look much more comfortable than a bed of nails. And yet Luke didn’t strike her as the self-denying type.

“Why?”

“It’s all he needs,” Bobby Ray said simply.

“Humph,” Rachel muttered. “You must think he’s some kind of god.”

Bobby Ray moved closer, his placid face oddly shadowed, his eyes so dilated they looked almost black. “Not exactly,” he said.

For a moment she felt a little shiver of doubt. It was no wonder she was spooked—this entire place reeked of death. She’d been there less than twenty-four hours when someone had tried to kill her, someone who killed herself immediately afterward. It wasn’t surprising that she was looking for monsters beneath the most innocent of faces.

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

He wasn’t a physical threat, the way Luke was, even though he came up to her and took her hand. She let hers lie in his cold one, waiting.

“I wrote you the letter, Rachel. I’m the one who knows the truth about your mother’s death. About all the deaths here at Santa Dolores.”

And he put his hand over hers, trapping her.

R
achel should have felt elation. She should have felt joy and triumph, knowing that revenge was moving closer. Instead she looked into the innocent face of Bobby Ray Shatney and wondered why she suddenly didn’t trust him.

“You knew my mother?” she asked warily. “You were here when she was?”

“I’ve been with Luke since I was eighteen. I’ve known everyone who’s ever been here. Those who are still here. Those who left of their own free will. And the people who just disappeared without a trace.”

“Have there been many of them?”

“The ones who disappear? A few. They were the unbelievers, the ones who wanted to destroy Luke. It could happen to you.”

“It’s not going to,” she said firmly. “Not with you to help me.”

Bobby Ray looked so incredibly young, with his soft cheeks, his faintly dazed expression. “I don’t know if I can,” he muttered.

“You said you were the one who wrote me. You said they murdered my mother, you said she never had cancer and that she knew what was happening to her!” Her voice was shrill, but there was no way she could calm herself. “You have to tell me what you know.”

“I’m not sure,” Bobby Ray said. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. They give me these drugs, and they confuse me.” His eyes were strange—unfocused and yet oddly watchful. “I loved Stella, you know. She was like a mother to me. My own mother died when I was young, and Stella had such a soothing touch.”

Rachel just looked at him. He was older than some of the young men Stella had slept with, and she’d never had a soothing, maternal bone in her body. But he looked so sad, so lost, that she didn’t want to doubt it. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she murmured gently.

For a moment she couldn’t read the expression on his face. “I’ve got to get out of here. Luke will be coming back soon. He trusts me, but he doesn’t trust you.”

He was already backing away from her, heading
toward the door. “But we need to talk!” she protested. “Come to my room later and we can …”

He shook his head. “Your room isn’t safe. He’ll be watching. Listening.”

“How?” she asked bluntly.

“Luke knows everything.”

“He’s not some kind of tin god. He’s only human, for heaven’s sake.”

Bobby Ray shook his head pityingly. “Don’t underestimate him. He’s not like other people.”

“That’s for sure,” Rachel muttered.

“I don’t know how I can help you. Things are so confusing to me now. Stella said she wasn’t sick, and I believe her. She told me she didn’t think anyone had really been sick, that they were killing her for her money. She wanted me to get in touch with you, to try to help her before it was too late. But I wasn’t in time.”

“She wanted me? She wanted my help?” Rachel heard the longing in her own voice and hated it.

Bobby Ray nodded. “She said you were the only one who could help her.”

“And I didn’t. I didn’t come in time.”

Bobby Ray shook his head. “It’s too late now. Leave this place. Luke’s too strong, too powerful. Get out while you still can.”

“But …”

He was gone before she could scream at him. Before she could tell him she couldn’t give it up,
she couldn’t let go, couldn’t just forget that her mother might have been murdered.

It could all have been one of Stella’s ornate fantasies, of course. Stella loved to be the center of melodrama, and dying of breast cancer might have been too mundane for her. She would have been entirely capable of turning the whole thing into a giant conspiracy, just to get more attention. And she’d drag everyone into that fantasy with her—Bobby Ray and Rachel and any other gullible fool.

There was no way she could find out. They hadn’t done an autopsy, and her remains had been cremated and scattered in the New Mexico desert. Any trace of Stella had been washed away by acid rain months ago.

She sank down in front of the fire, staring into the glittering orange depths. She’d been an unwilling audience to Stella’s histrionics all her life. She’d been told to be patient, to be quiet, not to interfere, not to get in anyone’s way, from the time she was old enough to obey. She’d seldom seen Stella during her early years, and Rachel had never decided whether that was a blessing or a curse. The caretakers she’d hired had been efficient, responsible, and far from loving, and Rachel had been a skinny, sallow-faced child, prickly, full of anger at the world. As a child she’d read voraciously: books were her comfort,
her parents, and her friends, and early on she’d identified with Mary Lennox in
The Secret Garden
. The thin, sour, unwanted child who’d been transformed by the magic of a garden and love.

But there were no secret gardens for Rachel Connery. Only the eager, fumbling hands of her third stepfather.

It was Stella’s longest marriage, a testament to the cruelty of fate, Rachel always thought. The touching had started when she was nine years old, culminating in rape when she was twelve.

She could barely remember what happened when she told her mother. Stella wouldn’t have listened. Those years were hazy now, thankfully so. Rachel had withdrawn into a dark, private place where no one could hurt her and by the time she slowly, cautiously emerged, Husband Number Three with his filthy habits was long gone, and Stella had embarked on her series of boy-toys.

And Rachel had been patient. Waiting for a sign of love or affection from her preoccupied mother. Waiting for the ice that had locked around her to melt. Waiting for miracles.

The time for patience was gone. She was suddenly chilled, and she wrapped her arms around her body, wishing she had a sweater. Wishing something could warm her, melt the ice inside her.

At least Luke didn’t know anything about her.
Didn’t know about old vulnerabilities, new pain. There was no way he could reach her, hurt her. Not if she didn’t give him that power.

And she wouldn’t. Not for twelve million dollars, not for that mindless peace the others seemed to be enjoying. She would never let him get to her.

She heard the door open behind her, and she stiffened her shoulders, prepared to do battle once more. The light cast the elongated shadow across the room, but she knew at once that it wasn’t Luke. She seemed to have developed an unnatural instinct about him, which she could only hope would help her in the long run.

“I brought you some food,” Calvin said. The tray he carried was almost as big as he was, and there was no enticing smell of coffee this time. Rachel accepted its absence with a fatalistic shrug. The lack of caffeine was only adding to her edge.

He set it down on the floor in front of the fire, looking at her expectantly. There were two bowls of some lentil-veggie mash and a loaf of fresh baked bread. No butter, but Rachel was beyond caring. “Who’s the other plate for?” she asked, reaching for the bread.