Secrets of the Guardian (Waldgrave Book 3) (20 page)

They drove down the road to a local steakhouse. It was a large cabin type environment with vaulted ceilings and pinewood fashioned tables and chairs; the sound of chatter from the surrounding tables and the clanking of flatware on ceramic plates filled the grilled-meat scented air. They boasted to have some great salads, but Tom got a steak while Lena ordered an appetizer of fried cheese sticks as her dinner. Tom was as bright and chipper as ever—conversing, and refusing to let his last moments be sad. They joked, they took turns feeding Brandon, and Tom told every story of Olesia he could remember so that Lena could tell Brandon someday. Everything was going great, and Lena was even edging on optimism, until halfway through the meal.

“I don’t think I have much longer.” Tom said, lifting his glass of iced tea and taking a deep gulp.

“What?” Lena said, her smile falling slightly. “Tom, there’s no reason to think—“

“Those two guys over there—they followed us in. They keep looking at us.” He nodded in the direction of a table behind Lena.

She turned around just in time to see the two men at the table avert their eyes. They were both dressed extremely casual, and there wasn’t anything particularly striking about them, but the longer Lena stared the more she realized that they were indeed casting regular glances in her direction as they ate.

She turned back to Tom. “Don’t be paranoid. They’re probably just two guys who think I’m a little young to have a baby.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. He looked off into a corner as he murmured, “This is the backcountry of the Carolinas. They’ve seen younger.”

Lena turned to look again. Two guys eating dinner, maybe in their late twenties, wearing jeans and heavier snow jackets. Jackets on—that wasn’t too weird, was it? It was a little warm in the restaurant; no one else was wearing a jacket. They were planning to leave quickly. Jeans—probably human-borns. What were the human-borns doing following her?

Lena spun back around to face Tom again. She was being crazy; there was no reason for human-borns to be following her…unless it was Rollin. Or, they might have been hired to find her by the New Faith. How would they have found her anyways? She was overreacting.

She reached out to touch one of Brandon’s flailing hands and held it between her thumb and finger, gently stroking his soft, smooth skin. She smiled at Tom. “Don’t worry so much.”

Tom glanced back over at the other table, and then smiled at Lena. They finished eating without interruption, enjoyed an extra side of fries, and generally had a good time, until it was time to go.

When they left, Lena managed to convince herself that it was a coincidence that the two men also left, leaving a wad of bills on the table and not bothering to get change. But when they followed them back to the hotel, and didn’t get out of their car, Lena knew something was wrong. They went back to their room without discussion, Tom carrying Brandon in his arms, and Lena hauling the empty carrier as they half ran into the room.

As Lena turned the lock on the door, threw the carrier onto a bed, and ran over to the window, Tom spoke very quietly. “I told you. I told you. This is it, Lena, this is it. You have to take him and leave. Now.”

“Stop…just stop!” Lena peeped through the curtains. They were still there, sitting in the car. One of them was looking at a map and talking on a cell phone. The other seemed to be picking at his nails.

Lena took a deep breath and tried to swallow her anxiety. 
We need to put Brandon down for bed.

The guy on the cell phone immediately stopped talking. Both of them were looking in the direction of the window. Lena spun around and sat down next to the wall. “Shit.”

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Tom asked.

Lena could hardly bring herself to look him in the eye. It must have been at the airport; they knew she would need an airport eventually, and it saved time to station the guards there. They had sat out in front of the airport for too long, just sitting and watching—it wasn’t typical behavior. It was easy to spot as odd. They had followed her until they were sure it was her, even underneath winter clothes and with a different haircut, and now that she had settled, they were making the call. She had brought them back to the hotel, and now they were cornered; they probably had an hour before the two guys in the car had enough people there to somehow extract them from the hotel without causing a scene.

Tom was moving around the room very quickly, throwing things into a backpack. He took several blankets and laid them out on a bed, then set Brandon down and started bundling him in layer after layer.

“Tom, stop. I have to think. There has to be a way.”

“There’s no time to think.” He said simply. He finished bundling his son and then walked off to the bathroom and returned with a towel set, which he wrapped up in a receiving blanket and put into Brandon’s baby carrier. “I’ll lead them off. You have to get Brandon out of here.”

Lena stared at him from the floor like a doe in the headlights. “No. No…no! Tom, no! It doesn’t have to be like that!” She got up from the floor and started walking towards him. “We can…we can sneak out together, or we can call the cops right now and—and—“

But it was ridiculous to think it would work. The Silenti had been evading and going over the heads of law and government for ages; if they separated Lena from Brandon, she doubted she would ever see him again. The Silenti had their fingers in the social welfare system—placing orphans was one of their strong points.

Tom was pale. He smiled weakly. “All I have to do is look in your eyes to know that you’re walking out of this hotel with my son. Lena, I’m not. I was never going to get out of this alive.”

Lena stared at him, aghast. He was right, and she knew it, but it didn’t make it any easier. Her mind was still racing, trying to find a way to get him out with them, but the look was as fixed in his eyes as ever. She leaned in and hugged him, just wanting to feel that he was real one last time, until he finally pushed her away. He grabbed one of the small carry-on size shoulder bags he had bought when they had first set out from South Carolina and very carefully eased his tiny bundled son into it, leaving the zipper that ran along the top of the bag open halfway. Having had a bottle over dinner, Brandon was full and sleepy; he was probably going to sleep through the whole ordeal.

Tom handed Lena the backpack he had loaded up. “This has everything you’ll need until you can buy the things you need to replace for him.”

Their eyes met for one fleeting moment, and Tom pulled her back into a hug. 
You’re going to be okay. Remember that.

Then he picked up the baby carrier with the bundled up bathroom towels in it and was out the door before Lena could find herself and stop him. She walked silently back over to the window.

Tom walked out into the parking lot and buckled the carrier in like he always did. He slid into the driver’s seat, the lights came on, a plume of hot exhaust came out the back as the car started, and then he was pulling out of the lot. Lena turned her gaze to the other car—one of the guys had gotten out and was walking through the snow toward the hotel lobby entrance as his companion took the vehicle and made to follow Tom.

Lena turned back to the hotel room. It was now or never.

*****

She hardly felt conscious through the next half-hour of her life. Later on, she would have trouble even recalling how she made it out of the hotel.

She put on the backpack, shouldered the carry-on containing Brandon, and walked out the door. Turning away from the lobby, she went to the nearest hall exit and went outside into the blistering cold night, and then she walked a good deal of a distance knee-deep in snow, staying just off the main road in the trees, until she came upon a house that still had a first floor light on.

Teeth chattering, she looked around. She wasn’t going to walk much further in all of the snow, and she couldn’t risk keeping Brandon out in the cold. Her jeans were soaked clear through up to the thigh and she wasn’t able to feel her feet. She trudged up to the front door of the small house and remembered to pull Brandon out of his bag before knocking. It took a moment, but the door eventually opened, revealing an awkward kid of about sixteen wearing a baggy tee-shirt and sweatpants the color of dirty dishwater.

He stared at Lena for a moment, then turned and called over his shoulder. “Mom! It’s for you!”

There was a sound of plastic-bottomed convenience store slippers on linoleum as the kid walked away from the door and a bleach-blond woman in a lavender bathrobe came into view. Lena readjusted Brandon in her arms; he had woken up at some point, but wasn’t crying. She brushed her hand across one of his cheeks; he was a little cold.

“Well my, what the hell happened to you now?” The woman said in a husky drawl. As the woman looked Lena over, she suddenly realized that her face was burning. She brought a hand to her cheek and felt that it was wet—she was crying. “You get on in here with that baby…”

“My…my car broke down…” Lena started, teeth chattering and voice breaking, as she crossed the threshold and followed the woman into the kitchen. But as the door closed behind her, and she was suddenly enveloped by the warm smell of a T.V. dinner cooking in a microwave somewhere close by, she felt the numbness that had held off her emotions through the snow beginning to melt away. Tom was gone for good; another orphaned child rested in her arms. The blond woman was prying Brandon away from her and pushing Lena into a chair at the card table that apparently functioned as a dining room set. Hot tears were beginning to pour down her face.

“No such thing! Ain’t you got no cell phone? Everyone has a cell phone nowadays. You better be telling me what this’s all about before I call the cops!” Lena looked up at the woman, cradling Brandon against her shoulder, staring sternly down at her as her son looked bewildered in the doorway.

“I…my phone…I…” But she just couldn’t do it. She looked down at her knees. “Please don’t call. I haven’t done anything wrong, I promise.”

The woman stood over her for a minute longer before moving away into the kitchen.

“Dan, go to bed! And check in on Mags when you go up!” She snapped from the other room. As the boy moved off, she came back holding a bottle of brandy and a glass. “You ain’t breast feedin’ are you…?” The woman looked Lena over for a moment. “You ain’t breast feedin’. Drink this, then tell me what the hell you’re doing out in the cold with a baby this young.”

She poured a glass and shoved it into Lena’s hand. Brandon was starting to fidget and whine.

It’s okay. It’s okay, Bra
ndon, it’s okay, I’m here…
 She took the brandy in small sips as the woman opened another folding chair to sit down next to her. After she regained her composure, she tried again. “My car broke down—“

“Bullshit.” The woman said simply. “This ain’t your baby. You’re too young and there ain’t nothin’ motherly about you. Just tell me what the hell happened and I might be more inclined to help you since you look like you’ll be needin’ it.”

Lena glared at the woman. Of all the doorsteps in this miserable tiny town, she had to wind up on this one. She took another gulp of brandy and wiggled her feet in her sopping wet shoes. “Fine. He’s not my baby, he’s my cousin. I inherited him because I’m the last relative he has.”

The woman gave Lena a sidelong glance. She raised her eyebrows. “Is that a fact?”

“That’s a fact.” Lena said, drinking down the last of the brandy and setting the glass on the table.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” The woman asked.

Lena shook her head.

“You running away from somebody?”

Lena nodded. The brandy had warmed her up; she was fighting to keep her wits about her and not say too much.

“But not the cops?”

Lena shook her head. “Not the cops.”

The woman looked down at Brandon, then gave Lena a sidelong glance from under her drastically pale bangs. “This about a man?”

Lena took a deep breath in and tried not to shake as she let it out. She poured herself another glass of brandy and only spoke once the cup was raised to her lips. “Yes. He wants to take him from me.”

She wasn’t sure if this blond, lavender-robed woman had any intention to help her, but she knew she was the best option at the moment. Going back out into the cold meant death for Brandon at least, whether the Silenti found them or not.