01 Do You Believe in Magic - The Children of Merlin (36 page)

The night stars were cold and
judgmental. Why had it taken his father to tell him that something
about the accident wasn’t right, that Maggie was in danger?

Idiot!
Now he was likely
to be a day late and a dollar short, and Maggie would pay the
price. Tris’s fixation on her had been a big neon finger pointing
her out as a target.
His
fault she was in danger. And she
was
in danger. However long he held out against believing in
his own destiny, he sure as hell believed in hers. She belonged
with his family more than he did. He only wished he had some power
he could use to save her, but as usual, Tris Tremaine came up
short. No magic powers here. His father believed he’d be able to do
something with engines, if and when he got his power, but shutting
engines off didn’t seem like it would do much good right now. All
he wanted was to go faster. And if he was up against those shadowy
others his father seemed to think were out there, and they had
powers, how was he supposed to help Maggie? A Smith and Wesson .45
was no match for... for what? If his mother was a Healer and his
father an Adapter and his unknown assailant was a Cloaker, what
other powers were out there?

It was as if the earth had
opened up and revealed a whole new world sitting just beneath its
crust. Tris felt powerless. All he could do was rev the Ducati and
shoot through the night.

The sagebrush ahead flickered
with light as he came around a rare curve in the road out here.
Even as Tris’s mind processed what he saw, the flicker was gone. It
was as if....

An engine revved in the night,
almost drowning out the Ducati’s snarl. Pain seared his left thigh.
A clink and then another came from the Ducati between his legs.
Tris whipped his head around. Nothing. But those were bullets and
that flicker on the sagebrush was another vehicle’s lights right
before they’d been cloaked.

He swerved to the left where he
saw nothing, but heard an engine. Car engine. At least it wasn’t a
semi. His knee and the bike thumped against metal. The Ducati
ricocheted to the right. He heard a squeal of tires to his left. He
jerked the bike back toward the center of the road. The thud as a
fender nudged the Ducati bumped Tris forward. He wrestled the
handlebars back to stability. Two could play at this game.

Tris waited until he heard the
engine right beside him again. He gunned the Ducati and leaned into
where he knew the car must be. He bounced off the hard surface. The
car flickered into sight as it swerved to the left and hit the
uneven shoulder. Tris caromed across the highway to the right, the
bike leaning as it wanted to lie down. He hauled on the handlebars,
stuck out his right boot, and threw his weight left. The bike
righted itself. Tris slowed and turned back. The sedan was rolling
over and over out into the desert. Tris watched as it came to rest
upside down. In the glow of his headlamp, he saw a man crawling out
the window on his hands and knees. The smell of gasoline permeated
the night.

Tris turned the bike and gunned
it. Behind him, an explosion roared. The desert night glowed red as
Tris shot away.

Jesus Christ! His father was
right. Somebody who could make himself and his vehicle invisible
had tried to kill him. Twice. And that guy might have friends.

If they knew about Maggie, they
might know where she lived.

Tris became aware of the pain in
his left thigh. He reached down and felt the slick wet. Blood. Kind
of a lot of it. Too bad. He couldn’t let a bullet in the thigh stop
him. But he began to have a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going be
enough to help Maggie. The final disappointment. Tris Tremaine lets
the woman he loves come to harm.

He pushed the Ducati harder, the smell
of gas still stinging his nose. He might be a loser, but he was all
Maggie had at this point.

*****

The exploding gas tank knocked
Jason flat against the desert and sent his senses reeling. He had
failed the old woman. There was no avoiding it now. No avoiding
her. He’d thought he was so big and tough. The badass confidence
was all a lie. A lie he told himself to keep the nightmares at
bay....

It all came washing over him,
the crypt, its damp walls only part of what was making his skin
clammy. Hardwick chaining him to rings in the walls next to what he
knew was his father’s coffin. Brittany there, grinning, waiting.
And he knew. He knew right then what would happen. The old woman
picked her way around the coffins in the crypt and stood over
him.

“
Please,” he’d begged. “Don’t
do this. Don’t you understand? I can’t kill Selah. I love her.
She’s everything to me.”

“
She’s got a soft power. Who
needs the ability to take pain away? And she doesn’t believe in the
cause enough to do what needs to be done. She’d be a drag on
us.”

“
She wouldn’t.” He’d almost
been sobbing.

“
You knew I required ultimate
loyalty when you took your oath. You break it, there are
consequences,” she rasped in the dim light. She pointed to Brittany
who raised her arms. The old woman joined her. Power swirled in the
room. Jason could hardly breathe. It sat like a weight on his
chest.

The coffin lid lifted, pried
open by Brittany’s power. Jason shrieked. He didn’t want to see
what was in there, even though he knew. And he knew what the old
woman could do. His teeth began to clatter. “N-no!” he
stuttered.

But that didn’t stop the
tattooed hand that emerged from the coffin and gripped the side. It
wasn’t desiccated. That was most horrible of all. He’d know that
hand anywhere.

And he was back at fifteen, all
the anger, the gibbering fear clutching at him. What his father was
going to do to him wasn’t anything new. It had been going on since
he was about five. The beatings, the whippings, being forced to
suck him off, to spread his buttocks for his father’s cock. But he
hadn’t gotten used to it, ever.

And it was going to happen
again.

His father’s shadowy form rose
from the coffin. “Where am I?” he asked, confused.

“
Right where you belong,” the
old woman said. “Look, I’ve got a present for you.” She pointed to
Jason.

Even in the dim light, he could
see his father’s eyes gleam. “You, you tried to deny me, boy. You
hit me ... with a rock or something....” His father was bearing
down on him. “You ... you killed me.”

He had. God, he had. At fifteen.
And now he was going to have to do it all over again if he ever
wanted to escape. But this time he was chained up.

Jason shook his head and moaned
out on the desert under the stars. The old woman had let Hardwick
give him a knife, after a few hours. And he’d done it again, crying
and wailing and stabbing, over and over.

But the old woman could bring
his father back again. And again and again. That was her power. She
could raise the dead. And that meant Jason would never be free.

Later that night, he’d killed
Selah. Slit her throat with the same knife that killed his father,
and held her in his lap as her life drained away. From that moment
on, he belonged to the old woman, body and soul. Until she died.
Only then would he be free.

So there was no doubt what kind
of punishment she’d arrange for him now. And there was no escaping
her. She’d find him. And if she didn’t find him immediately,
someday she’d acquire a Finder, and the Finder would locate him.
There was no escape at all.

He got to his feet, glanced back at the
burning car, and trudged back to the road.

*****

Maggie sat huddled in a corner
of Elroy’s room. She’d listened to him rant and rave for hours.
After she’d thrown herself at the plywood-covered window and the
door without result, she’d descended to pleading, though she knew
that wouldn’t work. Not with a man who murdered his wife and her
maybe-lover and kept the secret for all these years. No wonder
Elroy drank. He came by his cirrhosis honestly, or dishonestly.
He’d even killed her dog. Somewhere deep inside she’d always
suspected that. He didn’t want her to have anything to love. But
she’d never suspected he killed her mother.

After a long time, he quieted
down. She heard clinking and muttering. The light from under the
door had dimmed with the fading day and was replaced by artificial
light. Her butt was numb, but she was too exhausted to move. What
did he intend to do with her? Keep her in here until she starved to
death? She was hungry, as stupid as that was under the
circumstances. If he opened the door, she was pretty sure she was
stronger than he was. But if he shot her.... Well, then she’d
follow her mother and the propane guy into a sandy grave.

She had a long time to think
about what it meant that Elroy had murdered her mother. He was a
loon, of course. But it also meant her mother hadn’t deserted her.
Maggie had always somehow felt responsible for driving her away. In
the memories she had of her mother, her mother was always unhappy
and wan. But that might not have been because she regretted having
Maggie, the way Elroy said. It might have been because she knew how
dangerous he was, with his obsessive control and jealousy. Maybe
her mother
should
have left.

Maybe she actually stayed
because of Maggie. Her mother might actually have loved her.

That thought was horrible
because she’d spent so many years hating her mother for deserting
her. But it was also strangely freeing because Maggie hadn’t been
dumped by the one person who was always supposed to love you
unconditionally. And she hadn’t inherited some tendency to
infidelity either. She was her own woman....

She’d always known Elroy was
crazy. Maggie had distanced herself from his ranting and berating.
That might be why she always called him Elroy, rather than Dad, or
Pa, or whatever. What was surprising was that he hadn’t killed her
after she started leaving the spread to rodeo and sell her horses.
By then, he needed the money she brought back from those jaunts for
alcohol, after he lost his trucker job. Must have frosted his
ass.

A diesel pickup truck of some
kind by the sound of its engine pulled up to the house. The door
opened, and then the door of the shack.

“’Bout time you got back,” Elroy
slurred. He had spent time between rants with the bottle.

Heavy boots came up on the
porch. “She here?” a deep voice asked, ignoring Elroy.

“Yeah. Locked up in the bedroom.
Where’s my money?”

“In good time. I want to examine
the merchandise first.”

“Be my guest,” Elroy
wheezed.

Maggie blinked against the
darkness. Her father had...
sold
her? Panic rose through the
fog in her brain. For what? A white slavery ring? A snuff film? Or
just a night of rape?

Oh God oh God oh God oh
God.
This could not be
happening
.

The heavy boots clunked across
the living room. Maggie shoved herself to her feet. She wasn’t
going to let this guy find her crouched in a corner. Maybe he
wasn’t as big as he sounded. She still had a mean right uppercut.
She was definitely not going down without a fight. Outside the
room, the chair was knocked away from the door.

The doorknob turned. The door
rattled as the newcomer realized that Elroy had at least partially
nailed the door shut. “You need to nail the door shut for a little
five-foot-nothin’ girl?” Had he seen her? How did he know her? Who
was
this guy?

“She’s little but she’s tough,”
Elroy pouted.

“Gimme your hammer,” the guy
said, disgusted.

The next sounds were of nails
squealing as they came out of the old wood. Again the doorknob
turned and this time a channel of light blinded Maggie.

“Come out here, girl.” The
silhouette now mostly blocked the channel of light.

Well, at least she’d be out
where she might be able to make a break for it. Maggie stumbled to
the door, her feet half-asleep, holding her hand up to block the
light from the overhead bulb. “What... what do you want with
me?”

“A little talk.” He reached in
and grabbed her wrist in one huge hand. She was shackled as surely
as if with iron. He dragged her into the middle of the room. She
got the impression of brown hair and brown eyes, and a kind of a
lumpy face as if he’d been in a lot of fights. He was dressed in
black pants and a black shirt and a long coat of black denim or
something. Elroy looked smug from where he sat at the claw-foot oak
table.

“What about?” she managed,
standing up straighter and shaking her head to clear it.

“What’s your power?” he asked,
out of the blue.

“I... I don’t know what you
mean,” Maggie stuttered.

So fast she couldn’t even
flinch, he slapped her. Her head snapped to the side. “Let’s try
that again. What’s your power?”

“I don’t have any power, I
swear,” she said, her eyes tearing of their own accord. Her cheek
felt like it was on fire. But this wasn’t anything she hadn’t felt
before. She knew she’d live and that, if she had to, she could take
a lot more where that came from.

“Tremaine tracked you all over
hell and gone. Took you home to mama. That means you got a power.”
The big guy’s teeth were uneven, like they’d been knocked around
some and never straightened. “Why else would a Tremaine be
interested in poor white trash like you?”

“She got a way with animals,”
Elroy ventured. “Like I tol’ you.”

“That true?” the big guy
asked.

Elroy had already spilt the
beans. No use denying. “Yeah.”

“Well, it ain’t much of a power.
But that must be it.” He had an idea. “You talk to them? Maybe see
through their eyes?”

She shook her head. “I just calm
them.”

The guy shrugged. “I guess.”

“Now, I want my money. I held
her here, just like you said.” Elroy stood shakily.