Four Summoners Tales Part 23

sight of something moving at the end of the woods. He saw himself. Standing there, with Eleazar, watching Jonas

Meek beat his mother to death and laughing. He was laughing.

Addie When Addie woke, Eleazar and Preacher were gone. It was growing dark, and she knew she wouldn't find them, but she still raced down the path they would have taken, only to get a quarter mile along it and realize she wasn't even sure this was the way they'd gone. She made her way back to the clearing and tried to search again, to no avail.

And what good would it do if I found them? It's too late. He's gone. Preacher's-

She couldn't finish the thought. Her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground, weeping as she hadn't wept when Charlie died, hadn't when her parents died.

Preacher was gone. Dead. Possessed by that thing, and if she found him, all she could do was what she'd done for Charlie- set his body free. Did that even matter? Their souls were gone. In heaven, she hoped. In heaven, she prayed.

Preacher had given his life for her, and she wasn't even his child. Now he'd never see his real child, because of what he'd done for her, a stranger who'd come into his life and slept in his house and eaten his food. He'd let her in and he'd given her everything. Absolutely everything.

There had been, she realized now, always a part of her that didn't quite trust Preacher and Sophia's motivations in adopting her. They were good people. The best she knew. But surely no one could be that good, no one could voluntarily take her, not when her own parents had begrudged every morsel she took from their larder.

She'd always suspected that there was more to it, that the town paid Preacher and Sophia to care for her. That still made them good people-of all those in the village, she'd known them for the shortest length of time, and yet they were the ones who'd taken her in. But surely they were receiving some compensation. They ought to have been.

Except they weren't. She knew that now. They'd taken her because they'd been worried for her. They'd kept her because they cared for her. And now Preacher had given his life for her because . . . well, perhaps because he loved her.

Addie picked herself up then. She dried her eyes, and she walked to Charlie, and she said her good-byes. He wasn't there. He hadn't been there for three days. But she said them anyway, hoping he'd hear, wherever he was.

Then she gathered her bow and her knife, and she set out. She had a job to do. A job for Preacher.

There was death in the village that night. Addie could hear it as she walked back toward Chestnut Hill. Screams. Horrible screams, as the "children" awakened and everyone learned the truth. They'd murdered people outside the village and put them into the bodies of children, and now the children had awakened, possessed by those vengeful spirits.

This was what Preacher had been running to stop when Eleazar caught him. He'd known what was coming, and he'd wanted to warn them. If he were here now, he'd race to that village and save whom he could.

Addie decided he'd done enough for the village. They'd brought this on themselves, and even if Sophia would say there were many who were innocent,Addie disagreed.They'd let Eleazar into their town. They'd ignored Preacher's warnings. Now they should face whatever wrath their actions had unleashed.

They would not all perish. Likely only a few. She supposed that was terrible enough, if they were innocent of murdering Timothy James and the others. But she did not think as Preacher and Sophia did. It wasn't how she'd been raised, and there were parts of her that all Preacher and Sophia's goodness could not heal.

Addie had spent the last two years haunted by the grave sin she had committed the night her parents died.What she'd done. Or, perhaps, what she'd failed to do.

She'd heard the fight. A dreadful one. The worst ever. She'd listened to her father beating her mother.That was nothing new, but this was not like any other time. Her mother's screams were not like any Addie had ever heard.

Addie had lain in her tattered blanket by the fire, feigning sleep as her father beat her mother to death, and she had done nothing to stop it. Her mother never stopped the beatings he gave to Addie, so why ought Addie to interfere and risk turning that rage on herself?

When it was over, the house had gone silent. She'd risen then, and seen her father sitting in his chair, shotgun in hand. Her mother's body lay crumpled and b.l.o.o.d.y on the floor.

"You'll hang for this," Addie had said, and what she'd felt, saying it, was not horror or fear but satisfaction.

"No, I won't," he'd replied, and put the gun between his legs, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.

For two years, Addie had lived with that. With listening to her mother die and not intervening.With telling her father what she thought and making him splatter his brains across the room. It was her fault. Her sin. For two years, she'd regretted it, and now she did not. Now she realized they had brought it upon themselves, and had she interfered, she'd only have been lying there with them.They had not raised her to interfere, so she had not. As she would not now.

So she circled wide around the village, ignoring the screams, and continued on.

Addie found Sophia in Timothy James's cabin. She told her that Preacher was gone. Sophia wept as if she'd break in two, so much that Addie feared for the child.

She told Sophia what had happened. Or part of it.That Eleazar had returned the old man to Charlie's body. That he'd returned the souls of the murdered to the children's bodies. But there Addie's story for Sophia changed.

In Addie's version, Preacher had made his escape. He'd run to the village to warn them. He'd arrived too late, the children reawakening, but he'd fought for the villagers. He'd warned who he could and then he'd helped fight off the threat. He'd fought for his village, and he'd lost his life doing it. He was a hero.

That part was true. He had sacrificed his life-for Addie. And she would never forget it. He'd given her a family, and now she'd protect that family with everything she had, in every way she could.

So she told Sophia the lies that would set her heart at rest, and then she gathered her up, got her on the horse, and took her away from that place of death, off to find a place where she could bear and raise Preacher's babe, and where she could be happy.

Where they all could be happy.

Pipers

Christopher Golden

1 Ezekiel Prater drove his ancient Ford pickup along Doffin Road, enjoying the cool night air that streamed through the open windows. His daughter, Savannah, had never understood why he had spent the time and money to restore a sixty-year-old vehicle, but she sure liked riding in it.

"Turn it up, Daddy," she pleaded from the pa.s.senger seat, barely turning from her open window. "I love this song!"

He smiled and obliged her, though it was one of those bubblegum pretty-boy songs all the young girls seemed to love and anyone over the age of sixteen wanted to scrub from their brain. Zeke felt eighty years old when such thoughts entered his head, but he couldn't help himself. Savannah's preferred entertainment might have had rhythm, but it didn't sound much like music to him.

"So, who's going to be there tonight?" he asked.

The wind blew through the cab of the old pickup and carried his voice away. Savannah put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, letting the breeze whip her hair across her face. His heart melted just looking at her. Savannah had gotten her big blue eyes and the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose from him, but the copper skin and dark brown hair and lovely, sculpted features had all come from her mother, Anarosa, who'd found the lump in her left breast too late.

Zeke felt the familiar pinch of grief, but by now it had become his bittersweet friend, his rea.s.surance that he had found love in his life. Seven years had pa.s.sed since Anarosa's death and he still missed her constantly. Once in a great while he would find himself realizing that he had gone an entire day without thinking of her and the guilt would nearly suffocate him. Savannah always saved him with some bit of prattle about her day, a fight she was having with a girlfriend or a boy who had paid her some special attention.

He turned down the music.

"Hey, bud," he said when she shot him her patented irritated-teenager look. "Who's going to this thing tonight?"

"Most everyone, I guess. We talked about this already."

"Refresh my memory.Terri,Vanessa, Abby . . . ?"

"Abby can't make it," Savannah said, twisting slightly in her seat to face him, the seat belt fighting her. "She went to Austin to visit her brother."