Seeker (37 page)

The surge of hatred was immediate and overpowering. At once, John felt himself back in the old barn, staring at the withered figure of his mother in the hospital bed, being taunted by Briac because he
was not good enough, would never be good enough, to take his oath. Briac had treated John and Catherine like they were small and weak and easy to kill. But no more. John’s house was rising again, and it was time to put an end to Briac Kincaid.

He laid down Quin’s strange stone sword, and his fingers brushed over the gun in his pocket. But instead, his hand went to his whipsword. It had seemed only appropriate to bring it today for his return to the estate. With a graceful motion, he flicked it out.

Briac’s arms were frozen above his face, as though warding off a blow. John knelt and pushed them aside, but very slowly the arms moved back into place, and Briac’s eyes came into focus on John. He was waking up.

There were shouts from the woods and then a single gunshot. John looked up, panic rushing over him. His men were excellent marksmen, but still, they might make a mistake.
Please don’t hurt her
 … He strained his eyes in the direction of the gunshot, but he could see nothing except trees from where he knelt. He would have to trust his men to follow orders.

With effort, he forced his attention back to the clearing, and he noticed that the Big Dread was moving his arms and legs now. The actions were both jerky and sluggish, with jumps and starts followed by tiny, slow movements. He too was waking up.

John felt his attention drawn to something in the Dread’s cloak, an object sticking out of an interior pocket. Its color and shape … John forgot both Briac and the gunshot as he crawled over to the Big Dread, reached into the man’s cloak, and wrapped his fingers around a cool stone handle.

It was another athame. He could feel the dials beneath his grasp as he pulled it from the Big Dread’s cloak. Briefly he took in its full shape in the daylight of the clearing … And then suddenly there was motion everywhere.

The Young Dread’s head whipped upward so she was staring at him and the athame in his hands. She’d been entirely willing to ignore him until the moment he touched the stone dagger.

Behind John, Briac was moving, rolling himself slowly out of reach. At the same instant, the Big Dread swung up to a kneeling position in one smooth movement, bringing himself face to face with John. The Big Dread froze again, just as quickly, but his whipsword was now in his frozen hand, its point nearly touching John’s chest and vibrating—a residual motion after being cracked out into a solid weapon.

The Dread himself looked completely inanimate again, as did Briac, and John thought it might take a few moments for them to move a second time. The Young Dread was still clutching the old man’s robes, cradling his upper body on her lap, but John sensed she was preparing to lunge at him. His only chance was to run now, without giving any warning.

Immediately John was on his feet, clutching the newfound athame in his left hand, his whipsword in his right, sprinting out of the clearing.

For a long while, he simply ran, not daring to look back. Then, in a section of the woods where the trees were more sparse, he caught up with his own men.

“Quin?” he said urgently. “Did you—”

Gauge shook his head. “It was just a shot to pin her down.” He nodded toward a wide tree trunk thirty yards ahead. John understood—Quin was cornered there. His panic eased.

He allowed his eyes to sweep over the forest behind him. There was no sign of anyone pursuing him. He looked back to the tree where Quin was hiding. No matter which athame he had, he would need a partner to teach him to use it. And he wanted Quin. Even if she’d never heard of an athame or Seekers, he would want Quin.
Don’t turn your back on me, please
, he implored her.

John’s other man, Paddon, was circling around through the woods to close in on her from the opposite side. Paddon gestured to Quin’s location and opened his mouth to speak.

Like magic, a knife handle appeared at the back of his neck. Paddon spit out a spray of blood and pitched forward.

John turned to see the Young Dread moving with long, steady strides through the trees, another knife already in her hand, ready to throw.

There was a rustle of leaves from beyond the wide tree trunk. Quin was not waiting to see who would be the Young Dread’s next target. She was flying deeper into the woods, heading away from them, in the direction of the barn on the cliff.

John took off after her. He could hear the Young Dread continuing behind him, but she hadn’t killed him yet. He chose to take that as a hopeful sign.

Quin’s legs were going to give out. She’d done more running in the past two days than she had in all of the previous year, and her muscles were not going to put up with too much more. Also, she was running out of woods. The trees were thinning ahead, with blue sky now visible through their branches.

The Young Dread had killed one of John’s men, but the last time Quin had dared to look over her shoulder, the other man was still chasing her. And John, of course—he wasn’t far behind.

The sight of that man flying forward, a knife buried in his neck, had not affected her as much as it should have.
So I am used to death?
she asked herself, immediately knowing the answer:
Yes, I am much too used to death
. There were still gray areas in her mind, but more and more was becoming clear.

A few moments later, she came out into the open. A hundred yards ahead of her was the edge of a cliff, and below that was a river. She could hear the water from where she stood. Near the cliff’s edge was an old stone barn. And to the left of that barn was another path,
leading back into the woods. The memory came to her—that way would take her to the castle ruins.

She hesitated. If she took that path, they would follow, and she needed a rest before running again. And what was her plan? John had the lightning rod. Without it, her athame was useless. She must get it from him. The only other choice was to give him the athame, teach him to use it, and be done with running.

She found herself walking toward the barn.

“Quin, stop.”

It was John’s voice. Without stopping, she turned her head and saw him at the edge of the woods, alone. He glanced back into the trees, searching for his remaining man.

“Maybe the Young Dread got both of them,” she told him as she reached the barn doorway. She was close to the cliff now—the far side of the barn was nestled against the verge—and she could hear the river more loudly.

“Quin, just stop. Come on.” He had pulled the gun from his pocket and was going through the motions of cocking it. The lightning rod wasn’t in his hands. He must have it hidden in his clothes.

“Are you really going to shoot me?” she asked. “I don’t believe it.”

Without waiting for his answer, she crossed into the shadows of the barn. It smelled just as she had known it would, of damp soil and old straw. She moved through its cool interior to the ladder on the far side and climbed quickly up to the sleeping loft. From there she could see out the huge circular windows beneath the roof, giving a view down the cliff and along the river, to the distant hills beyond.

“I wanted you to help me back then,” John said, calling up to her from the doorway below. “That day in this barn.”

Quin was silent.

“What’s the symbol of your family?” he asked.

“A ram,” she answered.

“There’s a fox carved into the pommel of that athame—the symbol of my family.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “You don’t even want it, Quin. Why would you stop me from having it?”

It was true, she hadn’t wanted it. She’d wanted to forget the athame and everything else. And she’d been a pawn. But now?

She peered over the edge of the loft to see him standing beneath her. He was holding the gun, but it was hanging at his side, like he was embarrassed about its presence.

“I’m coming up there,” he said, taking hold of the ladder.

Quin braced herself, forming a simple plan. She took a deep breath, in and out.

All at once, he was up the ladder and stepping onto the loft. Instead of moving away, as he would be expecting, Quin moved forward and grabbed hold of him. Stepping back, she twisted around and threw them both off balance, sending John stumbling over the edge of the platform. He saved himself by clutching a rafter, but his gun fell, clattering to the barn floor.

For a moment, his legs dangled over the brink and he fought to get back onto the loft. Quin reached over and felt along his back as he struggled, around his waist, her hand searching for the lightning rod. It wasn’t there. She brushed something hard inside his jacket, a solid object, but much too small. Had he given the rod to his men? Had he left it in the woods?

She ducked away from him. There was a long, narrow board connecting the sleeping loft at one end to a group of rafters at the other, beneath the second window. She was halfway across it when John spoke.

“I don’t want to force you, Quin,” he said. As she glanced back, she saw that he’d regained his solid footing on the loft and was stepping onto the plank behind her. “Wouldn’t it be better to be together? I want you to choose to be with me.”

“What about what I want?” she asked him as she crawled through the rafters toward the second window. “I want you to be the John I knew before. The one who wanted to do honorable things, to help people.”

“I
am
him, Quin.” He was moving across the board toward her.

She climbed onto the sill of the window. It was just an opening, without glass. From the sill, she reached out, grabbed the ridge beam beneath the eaves of the roof, and swung herself out of the barn.

She looked to her right, expecting to see the branches of a large elm tree. She and Shinobu had climbed that tree dozens of times as children. She had hoped to be down its trunk and into the woods before John recovered his gun and followed her.

But the elm wasn’t there. There must have been a storm sometime in the last year and a half, for the tree had fallen over, tearing out a large chunk of soil with it. Now, with a jolt to her stomach, she saw that it was a straight drop out the barn window, past the remnants of the tree trunk, and down the face of the precipice to the water. A cold breeze was whistling up the cliff, and her feet were flailing in the open air.

She swung her legs frantically to the beam overhead, and as she did, she was given a view of the barn from a new angle. There was a carving next to the window, which until now had been hidden by the elm tree: three interlocking ovals were chiseled deeply into the stone of the barn, making a simple diagram of … It looked like an atom.

She didn’t have time to study it. John was climbing among the rafters, only yards away from the window, and she was hanging over a cliff. She wrestled her way up onto the roof.

Picking a path across cracked slate tiles to the other side, Quin peered over the roof’s edge and found that it was too far to jump to the ground. She might be able to lower herself down and drop—but there was no time. John was already climbing up onto the slate behind
her. On one side, it was too far to jump, and on the other was the sheer cliff drop to the river below.

She turned to face him. The idea of fighting John, when she hadn’t trained in a year and a half, was almost laughable. Even so, she drew her whipsword and cracked it out. Maybe because she was thinking of Shinobu, she chose the shape of a katana, a Japanese samurai sword. As she swung it up above her head, it felt like Shinobu was behind her, encouraging her. She would be no one’s pawn.

“You’re out of practice, and I’m not,” John said from the other end of the roof, his whipsword still curled at his side. Almost gently, he added, “I don’t think you can beat me, Quin.”

“You’re a good person, John. Despite what you’ve done so far. If I give you the athame, you won’t be, and neither will I.”

“The athame doesn’t make us bad. It only gives us the freedom to choose. That’s all.”

She shook her head, gripping her whipsword more tightly. “Really? Think about what you’ve done already, trying to get it. You shot me, you shot at Shinobu, you cut my mother’s throat! You cut her, John!”

“I tried very hard not to hurt any of you! Why don’t you see that, Quin? And why do you only care what
I’ve
done?” His face was changing. She could see him trying to fight his anger, but he was losing. “What about your father?” he asked, the words full of malice as he moved carefully across the roof toward her. “What’s
he
done to get the athame? What have those others done?” John’s whipsword was in his hand now, like it had a mind of its own.

She knew she was not yet in full possession of her mind. And yet, there was something more here—she sensed he was saying something more than she had ever known. He was about to tell her things she didn’t want to learn.

“That’s the point,” she answered, checking her footing, bracing herself. “Whatever he’s done, I don’t want you to be like Briac.”

“I am
not
a torturer,” he told her, the words bursting from him as though he had no control. “I am
not
a beast!” John’s whipsword cracked out, and he struck at her, his temper taking over. “I’m not like Briac!”