The Vigilantes (The Superiors) (35 page)

“Then don’t. You cannot change your mind later.”

“You strong enough to get out of here now? I gotta fill in this here hole, and it’s near dark already.”

“I will help you,” Draven said.

Together they filled in his grave.

Both of them stood up, and Sally handed Draven a backpack. “This here’s one of your packs. I can’t find th’other one, so I don’t know which one you needed more, but this is what I can find. I hope it has something you need.”

Draven turned the bag upside down, looked at the bottom, and then righted it and put it on. “Thank you.”

“Well alright then, I reckon I best be going.”

Draven reached for her so fast Sally didn’t even know he meant to touch her before he had her in his arms, hugging her so tight she near lost her breath.

“Thank you, Sally. I owe you my life. I wish there were some way for you to contact me if ever the need arises. My name is Draven Castle, do not forget. If ever you have access to the information system, you will look for me, yes?”

“Sure I will.”

“I hope this thing you have done for me will not turn your family against you.” He put his hand to his throat and made a face, and Sally knew it cost him to say the things he had to say. But she let him, ‘cause she reckoned those were things that he had to get said before he left.

“I sure hope so, too. I reckon if they get to suspecting I did it, I’ll just say you done hypnotized me. But I need you to take the chains in your backpack so I can say you got away your own self.”

“Sally.” Draven put his hands on each side of her face and lifted it. “I told you once I could never love a human, that it was wrong. But I was wrong. I love you.” He kissed her forehead, and she had the strangest urge to kiss him. But when she put her face to his, he turned away. “In the real way, Sally. Not like that. You have…given me life, made me want it. Talking with you, knowing you, has been the only thing in the last half year that kept me sane…I want you to know I owe you my life.”

“Thanks. I reckon I love you, too.”

“I cannot repay you for this…but I want you to find that other bag.”

“I can’t bring it out here, Draven. I go in and come back out with a bag, Tom’s gonna see me.”

“Not for me. For you. In the bottom, there’s a hidden pocket under the lining. Inside, I hid the money for the sapien girl, for when I found her.”

“Oh no,” Sally said, wishing he’d done told her that before she went to all this trouble. “I reckon I could find a way to get it to you, but it might take a good while.”

“No, Sally, it’s for you. I know it’s not anything compared to what I owe you, but it’s all I can give you now. It contains perhaps eight hundred anyas. It is not for your family, Sally. It’s for you.” He looked at her hard, still holding tight to her.

“Holy mother of Moses,” Sally said, hardly daring to breathe. “That’s more money than I’d use in six lifetimes.”

“It is not so much. Find a home, away from your uncle, perhaps all of them. You are not a child anymore, Sally. You do not have to indulge him. And you can take care of yourself, I have seen that. They cannot force you to participate in anything you know is wrong. You’re a better person than any of them will ever be.”

They looked at each other, and Sally started up crying again. They could hear Tom calling for Sally from back at the house.

“Circle ‘round the house and go down the road that goes southeast,” she said hurriedly. “You’ll come up on a road right by a stream. Turn left and follow that til you find an old abandoned town that’s all fallen down. Take that road right through town and keep going and you’ll come to Princeton in a few days, I reckon. That there’s where you’re likely to find your girl. It’s the only city in these-here mountains.”

Draven kept her in his arms and pressed his lips to her forehead while she swallowed back her tears. Even with him being all covered in about thirty layers of dirt and grime and filth and blood, she still wanted to hug him back real hard, so she did.

“You said your sister was the good one,” he said real quiet. “But I imagine you’re the better one. Perhaps she had a good heart, but yours is good as well as your mind and body. I imagine you can do more with that than only a good heart. Your family does not deserve you, Sally. I hope you find one that does.”

He kissed her forehead again, pulled away, and wiped her tears off with his thumbs.

“Now you just go on, before Tom comes out. You done got me all dirty.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, and one more thing. My family’s coming back along that road I done told you about. They better get back here alive. And if I was you, I’d stay off those roads and in the woods a little. You know they can kill you, too.”

“I will not harm them.”

“Alright then. Good luck finding your girl.” Sally watched the bloodsucker start off through the woods, and when he disappeared from sight, she turned and headed back to the house. She could hear Tom hollering, and she wondered how she could explain her appearance. For a minute she tried not to cry, but she was real sad. Draven had said the nicest things anyone had ever said to her. And she’d just let him go free. But like he said, she were a woman, and women cried, so she let herself cry some.

When she’d had her cry and got too irritated with listening to Tom hollering for her, she wiped off her face as best she could and headed in. She left the shovel out by the woodshed again, but she knew it would still be there come morning. She didn’t reckon she’d ever see the bloodsucker again.

pART three

freedom

Chapter 48

At first, Draven moved slowly. For the past six or seven months, he’d rarely moved his body more than to change position and ease a bit of pain. Seven months was nothing, a snap of the fingers, compared to his long life. But it felt like the longest part of his life. More had happened to him in the past year than in the rest of his life combined.

Only that wasn’t entirely true. Only more pain had happened to him.

As he moved through the trees now, he remembered how the forest had frightened him when he’d come upon it the past winter. How every twig had seemed lethal, every branch a menacing weapon waiting to impale him. Now he smiled at the thought. The woods posed no threat. It was the people in the woods who were dangerous. What they could make from the wood. Once, he’d imagined a broken limb as the most dangerous thing he’d encounter. He’d watched his every step, each movement holding the potential for disaster. Now that he knew the truth of that fear, the exact sensation of being impaled by a wooden object, perhaps his wariness should have grown.

But it hadn’t. Why fear an indifferent tree branch when he’d been staked dozens, perhaps hundreds of times? When he knew what it felt like to be staked with hawthorn, cedar, pine, ash, and aspen. When he knew the different pain of a wound healing from each, the difference between a thick stake and a small sliver, a dagger and an arrow, a blunt, a splintered, and a smooth stake, a serrated blade and a grooved one, one notched and one swirled. Now he knew what a stake felt like going in and coming out fast, or slow, if it had been carved with the grain or against. He knew the feeling of a short blade and one that went all the way through, of a burning stake and one coated with ice.

A branch on a tree was not a weapon. It was only a branch.

A human had to make a stake. A human had made the stake that went into his throat, and a human had put it there. And a human had taken it out. He must remember that, too. He must remember his promise to Sally. He intended to keep this one.

Draven touched his throat. His skin had closed over the wound already, and his leg hardly hurt. The speed with which his body was healing amazed him. Once, a year before he’d known of this place, an escaped sapien had staked him, and he’d healed slower than he did now. Considering all that had happened to him, his resilience surprised him. Although he was still hungry, he’d almost forgotten the sensation of hunger’s absence, and he hardly noticed the discomfort.

His side and his thigh still ached, especially his thigh. The wounds from which Sally had removed the three stakes that morning had healed almost completely. Irritation set in, making them itch as they healed and ejected the dirt that had entered the wounds before they closed. The three newer wounds hadn’t closed fully, and cold night air chilled the wetness of his spilled blood. But for now, he worried only about running into the vigilante humans. He had entered the mountains without weapons last winter. He had thought the forest, animals, and time would be his only enemies.

He had been a fool, and he knew that now, and he knew also that he needed to find a good weapon. But he couldn’t stop until he’d departed the forest in which Sally’s people hunted, where they might chance upon him on their way home. So he maintained his pace, stopping only briefly to tear his shirt into strips and wrap it about his wounded limbs. After so long without clothes, they now felt strange to Draven. In addition, the fibers in the material clung to his broken skin, as irritating as if it were full of a thousand microscopic needles.

He saw a family of deer and came down upon them, surprised at his own speed. With his leg wrapped and a hole in his thigh, he’d imagined he’d be weak and slow, but he seemed as strong as he’d ever been. Stronger. The deer tasted disgusting, furry and foreign, but he ate from it nonetheless. When he had done with it, he’d appeased his hunger and gained still more speed. He began the descent down the side of the mountain.

He did not know what had come over him, what blessing had given him such power, but he didn’t stop to question it. Soon he came out on the road near the stream that Sally had mentioned. The smell of water and the sound of it rushing over the rocks stopped him. After a moment’s pause, he plunged down the slope, ignoring the sting of twigs scratching his bare chest and arms. When he reached the water’s edge, he dropped the backpack and sank into the stream. He wanted a river, careening and wild, to wash him away. To dive into it, to pierce its current and plow against it until it gave in and turned to his will.

But he met only a stream, flowing gently over smooth stones. He struggled out of the jeans that had belonged to Sally’s father, with the undershorts he’d worn for seven months stuffed into the pocket, and washed them in the stream. After looking at the shorts, ragged and stained with blood on blood on blood, he gave up hope of keeping them. The jeans, also stained, had three holes where stakes had torn through, but he kept them nonetheless.

For a time, he lay in the stream doing nothing but letting the frigid water course over his body. He scrubbed himself all over, found a bar of soap in the bag Sally had given him, and scrubbed himself again. He hadn’t known how much he missed being clean. It seemed he’d never stop feeling like he wanted to scrub his skin off. Cleanliness after so long lying in filth almost brought discomfort. He felt bare, somehow, exposed.

He wanted to stay there forever, so clean and new, raw and red from scrubbing, and naked. When he lifted his face, he felt the breeze for what seemed the first time in years, saw the stars again, millions upon millions watching over him, creating millions more in the water around him.

But he knew he must find somewhere safe before daylight, safer than a spot in the ground, where they’d found him before. So he climbed from the stream, wrung out the jeans, and hung them on the backpack. Inside the pack he found a pair of his white linen trousers and a loose shirt, along with some extra supplies Sally had packed for him. She hadn’t found his other pack, but she’d made sure this one had plenty of clothing and gear. But tonight, Draven did not spend time looking at what she’d given him. An urgency pressed upon him, an instinct to move far from his place of torture. After burying the undershorts near the stream, he drank as much as he could and started along the road again.

He stayed clear of the road and traveled instead along the stream, and when that died out, he paralleled the road. Already the pain in his side had ceased. The healing had occurred more quickly than he’d imagined possible. Perhaps his body had adapted to all the injuries and had accelerated its healing process.

The smells of dust found him, along with the smells of the forest, and…living things. He scanned the area, waited, and tried to identify the scents. Leaving the shelter the trees provided, he stepped onto the road. The pavement lay cracked and rutted and pushed upward by roots passing under it and wind over it and ice through the cracks. Wispy brown grass now grew through the cracks and swayed with each breeze. The breeze blew the wrong way for his purpose, and he could not catch the scent again. He returned to the woods and tried to move quietly. Then he saw the town.

Draven moved into it quietly, looking about as he went. A strange mixture of smells greeted him—mold, decay, Superior, sapien, the awful smell he’d found at the door that wouldn’t open on the front of Sally’s house, and something living that he could not identify. Somehow they all seemed familiar. Draven wondered for a moment if his senses had failed him, if under the conditions he’d encountered, he’d lost his ability to track scents.

But of course that could not happen.

As the scent of sapien grew stronger, Draven identified the strongest and most familiar scent. Larry. He hadn’t simply scented a sapien, he’d found Sally’s family. She had told him they would take this road. She had not told him they’d remain in the town. The smell hung too heavy for a track—he had scented saps, not just their trail. Draven followed the scent but stayed inside or near the crumbling buildings. Sapiens couldn’t see in the dark, but they would hear him if he upset a pile of rubble.