The Children and the Blood (32 page)

Her eyes slid back to Bus, but he was studying a car driving down the neighboring street. How could this not have occurred to her? She’d been so focused on hunting the Blood down, and yet…

Nauseated and working to hide the feeling, she headed for the kitchen window.

Meatloaf eventually emerged from the oven, and accompanied a meticulously prepared salad to the table. Carter gave Ashe a humored smile as he passed, careful not to let Elsa see. Upon joining them in the living room, Spider was instantly assigned to setting the table, to which she wordlessly complied. China plates and antique silverware appeared and, unfolding a napkin and laying it on her lap, Elsa smiled. “It’s so nice to have you all back again.”

Carter made a noise of agreement and sat down.

Glancing up, Elsa caught sight of Ashe. “Oh, do come sit at the table, dear,” she called.

Ashe glanced to Carter. He hesitated and then looked back at Bus, twitching his head toward the front window. Elsa made a movement as though to call him over as well, but at a soft sound from Carter, she bit back her protests with a look of faint displeasure.

“Yours will reheat,” she told Bus.

He thanked her and then tweaked back the kitchen curtain, watching the road.

“So I was talking to Serenity,” Carter started after a few moments.

“Carter, no,” Elsa said sharply, setting down her salad bowl. She paused and then took a breath to calm herself. “We’ve been over this.”

He said nothing else, and Spider kept her eyes on dinner. A minute passed in silence.

“You told Blackjack you saw one of the Blood,” Carter said.

Elsa’s fork clattered onto her plate and she turned to him angrily.

“One of them killed her family,” he said, nodding toward Ashe.

Elsa’s eyes darted to her and away. For a moment, she seemed to struggle with herself. “He was horrible,” she allowed, her quiet voice carefully controlled.

“Does he know you’re here?”

Annoyance flickered and then was smothered. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“You mean you don’t know,” Bus called from the kitchen.

The anger returned and she gave him a glare before burying the expression beneath deliberate good manners. “I will not discuss this again.”

Silence fell, broken only by the faint clink of silverware.

“What’d he look like?” Ashe asked softly.

Elsa looked up from her meatloaf, defensiveness at the ready before the question sank in. The expression dwindled into a mixture of fear at the memory, and pity.

“Tall,” she said after a moment. “And big. But not fat. More like a giant than a man. He was white, and had reddish-brown hair. He was riding in a black sedan, but not driving it, and stopped to speak to a few other men outside the bar before he left.”

“Wizards?” Carter asked, his attention on the meatloaf.

The old woman gave him an irritated look which he pretended not to see. “Surely not. Mitzi would have warned me.”

Spider closed her eyes briefly, and then kept eating.

“When did you see him?” Carter asked.

Elsa hesitated. “Once yesterday,” she admitted. “And again today.”

“Then you’re staying away from the windows and keeping that dog downstairs, while we watch the bar to see if he comes back tomorrow,” Carter said with finality.

“Now, I can’t stay hidden the whole time,” Elsa protested. Carter’s gaze slid to her and she flustered. “Norman is coming by in the afternoon to help with the garbage, and he’ll be concerned if I don’t answer the door.”

“Norman.”

“He lives down the street,” she explained. “And you needn’t look at me like that. I’ve known him for thirty years. He was a great friend to George before he passed on, and he stops by every other day to take out the garbage, bring me groceries, that sort of thing. He’s terribly protective, and just the most thoughtful man – but not more than George was, of course.”

She paused. “Though he might be surprised to see you all here.”

“We’ll stay out of his way,” Carter assured her.

Elsa returned to her dinner, missing the quick look he gave Spider and Bus.

Dinner completed in silence, and Elsa thanked Ashe after she helped wash the dishes.

As Ashe left the kitchen, Carter stopped her momentarily. “You take first watch,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Back window. I’m going to keep an eye on the front.”

She nodded, glancing toward Elsa, who was watching them with thinly veiled suspicion as she put the dishes away. Biting her lip briefly, Ashe walked to the bookcase and then drew a random novel from the shelf. Flipping it open, she carefully pretended to read by the backyard window, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Carter smile.

Cautiously, she studied the neighborhood, while glancing to the book intermittently. Sunset gilded the grass and leaves, and threw long shadows in which nothing moved. Overhead, birds darted between the trees, making their own dinner of the early evening insects.

But her heart was pounding. If a wizard appeared, or even one of the Blood, she still had no plan.

She hadn’t felt this helpless in weeks.

A warm weight brushed her leg and she looked down. Bumping her hand, Tala signaled her ever-present need for attention before leaning on Ashe with her deep brown eyes on the yard.

Relief hit her. Tala could spot the wizards, and nobody would think anything of it. And if someone came near and the dog didn’t react, she’d assume it was one of the Blood and call for Carter.

It wasn’t much of a strategy, but she couldn’t think what else to do.

Digging her fingers into the dog’s coat, she watched the sun slip behind the houses and silently begged the animal not to leave.

He’d had some success, and Harris supposed he should be pleased. Over the past few weeks, he’d determined with reasonable certainty the identity of the boy from the security camera outside the café. With only one person missing for a month from the school, it hadn’t been hard to narrow down the suspect list. He’d tracked the boy’s friends, retraced his movements from the day before he vanished, and discerned the obvious fact that something strange was going on.

On the flipside, he’d yet to catch anyone, see hide nor hair of the younger girl, or find the boy anywhere.

So really, success was a debatable word.

Following their discussion, Brogan had summarily taken care of IA, though in Harris’ opinion, his solution left a lot to be desired. Memory returning, the ostensible FBI agent recalled voices in the hall prior to the explosion, and thus claimed the girl had an accomplice who must have taken out the cameras and arranged her escape. As cover stories went, it lacked a certain finesse, since now Harris’ claims of the girl being a human torch automatically left him looking insane.

He’d been dropped on leave faster than he could say psychosis, and now was required to attend counseling sessions twice a week.

It was insulting. And damned inconvenient.

They’d taken his gun and badge, as he’d expected, and to the department he became something of a pariah. For their part, Malden’s family quickly learned of his apparent breakdown through the grapevine, and now treated him with kid gloves the likes of which he’d never seen.

On some level, he supposed Rhianne and the kids’ reactions were to be expected. Due to heavy doses of painkillers and general trauma, Scott couldn’t remember the afternoon of the fire, and Brogan’s story contained no trace of anything abnormal. In light of that, the most rational conclusion seemed to be that stress had made Harris lose his mind.

Except that now every conversation began with questions of how he was feeling and whether the counseling was going well.

Yet for all the problems, he still had the gun his father left him, so he wasn’t defenseless. And a day after losing his badge, a replacement had shown up by courier, courtesy of the giant, and bearing the implicit message that breaking the law was little of Brogan’s concern.

He’d left the package on the table, and had yet to bring himself to take the badge from the box. Crossing the line was one thing. Being reminded of it so openly was another.

Of the giant, he’d seen almost nothing. Within a week of meeting him, Brogan headed east with a vague statement about securing additional support. A few of his associates remained in Monfort though, with the understanding that if he were to find anything, Harris was to contact them immediately.

Which was fine. He preferred the solitude. But a life as a private investigator had turned out to be amazingly annoying compared to that of a police detective, and being an unsuccessful one was starting to make him crazy.

His target wasn’t the issue. He wanted to find the little girl alive as much as anyone, and he tried to convince himself, as Brogan asserted, that locating her would draw the older girl in. But he also knew that the longer this took, the more chance there was that Ashley would send someone else up in flames. He had to find her soon, if only to stop his conscience from making him lose more sleep than he was already. And from slowly eating him alive.

Though it didn’t help that his current best lead in accomplishing that goal was a teenager with a spy complex so blatant, he may as well have been wearing a sign.

Resting his head against the car window, Harris tweaked the volume on his police scanner and resisted the urge to sigh as Travis Braun slipped into the electronics store for the third time this week. Without department resources and all manner of useful things, tracking what exactly the boy purchased would have been difficult, if not for the store’s bags having the transparency of tissue paper.

Minutes passed. The boy emerged and promptly glanced around surreptitiously. Harris rolled his eyes.

Walkie-talkies again. The prior two models hadn’t cut it apparently. Who did the boy think he was kidding?

The kid pulled from the parking lot, and Harris waited a few moments and then followed him away from the store. As leads went, the kid wasn’t very helpful. But with the other boy’s parents gone and no other friends on hand, Travis was the best link he had to the car thief, Cole.

He exhaled as the truck turned a corner. As much as anything else, the boy was a mystery. Cole Smith, son of the thoroughly unremarkable Robert and Melissa Smith, was a young man with no criminal record, history of drug use, or even a detention to his name. Over the weeks, Harris had wracked his mind for explanations of Cole’s involvement, though none stood out above the rest. The parents were in it with him. He’d murdered them before leaving. Cole was dead and the parents were actually in control.

Or Ashley’d used the boy, in which case all this was pointless because while Harris was sitting here trying to find them, the whole family could’ve already been killed.

He’d exhausted every avenue he could explore, trying to determine which theory rang true. But the teachers at Brighton Modisett had been closemouthed as clams, owing to tiny things like the law and the school’s reputation of educating those for whom impropriety simply wasn’t conceivable. From the security guards at the neighborhood gates, he’d gained equally little insight. Most of his attempts at unofficial questioning invariably degenerated into mention of their applications to the police force, and not-so-oblique requests for recommendations if they happened to provide any help.

It was maddening.

Winding his way through town, Travis pulled to a stop on a hill overlooking Cole Smith’s neighborhood. It was a daily ritual, and as with each time before, Harris came to a halt behind the bushes, and waited as the boy scanned the suburban terrain.

Minutes passed. He was taking longer than usual. Pulling out his binoculars from behind the seat, Harris studied the teenager, using the foliage as a screen.

Dropping his own binoculars, Travis cranked the engine and drove away.

Brow furrowing, Harris waited and then crept his car toward the spot where the boy had parked. He looked out at the neighborhood, watching Cole’s house.

Nothing. No lights. No cars in the drive. Same as every prior day.

Lowering his binoculars, Harris watched the kid roll through a stop sign and roar toward the city, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

After endless weeks of tracking the would-be spy, any anomaly was worth noting. And though Harris couldn’t see any change, the kid had clearly noticed something.

He lifted his cell and placed a quick call to the security guard station.

“Louis here.”

“Harris. Have you seen any sign of that boy I asked you about? Cole?”

“Nope,” came the cheerful response. “Promise I’ll call if I do, though.”

He thanked the man distractedly and hung up, still studying the house.

Something spooked Travis, and that something hadn’t been Cole. Or anything at the house. Or anything the virtually useless guard saw. Yet something had changed, and for the life of him, he couldn’t tell what it’d been.

Uneasily, he drove after the pretentious little spy who remained his only lead.

*****

Inside the cabin, something crashed to the ground.

Sitting on the picnic table, Cole glanced toward the house. From her perch on the porch steps, Lily sighed but didn’t bother looking away from her pile of woven grass blades.

The back door slammed, and a moment later, Robert stalked off into the forest, grumbling furiously.

So that call hadn’t gone any better than the last fifty. The mysterious cripples were still nowhere to be found.

Taking a deep breath, Cole shook his head and returned to cleaning his gun. After a week of arguing, Robert had finally shut up about Cole keeping the weapon he’d snagged at the campground. No matter how rabidly myopic the man could be, even he’d had to concede that two armed people would stand a better chance of protecting them against wizards than one.

Not that they’d seen wizards. Or any other human beings besides each other for the past month. And while he’d hated Robert before, it was nothing compared to how infuriating he found the man now.

First had come the attempts to slip off with Lily, thwarted primarily by the fact the girl wouldn’t stray more than a few feet from Cole’s side. Then came the fake identification cards, bought and paid for by Robert, but then summarily locked up to keep them from even touching the IDs without his permission. The final straw had been the refusal to part with any more information about the wizards or their war. Information was power apparently, and Robert knew ignorance kept them dependent upon him.