The Wild Road (7 page)

All the fight went out of him. He lay as still and dull as a rag doll, but his gaze rolled sideways, searching out Lannes, and the terror the gargoyle saw in that brief glance was rich and real and desperate. Orwell flung out his hand, and for one brief moment, the walls surrounding his mind tumbled down.

Lannes caught flashes: a forest, a wild garden filled with dried cracked fountains and a shining red dome. An old graveyard and crows staring with death in their eyes. He saw children sitting in a circle, holding hands. He felt power.

The woman raised the dumbbell above Orwell’s head. Lannes, still caught in memories not his own, could not move fast enough to stop her.

She crushed the old man’s skull.

She felt the impact of slamming a heavy weight into Orwell Price’s head. She heard the crunch of bone and saw with sick horror the dent she had made in his face. But she could not stop herself, not for all her strength. And when she screamed, nothing came out of her mouth but a sigh of satisfaction-and when she kept screaming, her voice split against the inside of her skull like a bird tearing its wings against a wall of knives.

Hush, said that satisfied voice. This will be over soon.

Stop, replied the woman, desperate and grieving. Please, stop.

Not until I am free, whispered the voice, and the woman felt a presence like fire lick at her mind, burning her down to the soul.

Then, nothing. The ghost in her heart disappeared, and its sudden absence made the woman feel so light she thought she might float away. Her mind felt raw, as though her thoughts had scratch marks, or as though open sores pocked the inside of her skull. Pain pulsed between her eyes, but only for a moment, replaced by overwhelming languor. Her eyelids drooped. She wanted to sleep.

Instead, she told herself to flex her fingers and curled them into a fist. Her legs tingled and her feet ached. Her lungs felt as though she had been breathing flames.

She had her body back. Her mind. And a murder on her hands.

The woman yanked herself from Orwell’s warm corpse and felt hands touch her waist. She shrieked…then remembered Lannes and spun around on her knees, desperate to see his face; something, anything familiar.

For a moment, he was nothing but a blur inside her vision: darker, larger, his face craggier and his hair longer- and then everything coalesced with crystalline clarity, and he was as she remembered.

Except, there was a hollowness in his eyes, a bleakness in the way he looked at her, which made the woman want to throw her hands over her face and run.

She almost did. He grabbed her wrists. His skin was warm, his grip strong.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice strained. She could not answer him. Too dumbstruck. Still horrified by what she had watched herself do. He stared a moment longer; then, almost reluctantly pulled her close. She did not resist. She did not touch him back. She could not. He kept her arms pinned to her sides and his voice filled her ear, a low murmuring rumble. She started shaking. He held her tighter, against a chest that was broad and smooth and felt suspiciously like warm skin. She thought she felt blood, but when she looked there was nothing. Her hands, though, glistened red and sticky.

Déjà vu.

Lannes pulled away just enough to stare into her eyes. Again, for a moment his body blurred, and something just behind his shoulders wavered like a ghost-but then she blinked and nothing odd was there. He was just a man.

Looking into his eyes was like getting hit in the face with cold water. She shuddered, trying to free herself, and glanced down. Got another shock. The front of her sweater was smeared in blood-bright red blood, where there had been none only moments before. Black spots filled her vision. Lannes caught her, and she was too numb to shake him off.

“You’ve been hurt,” she mumbled, hardly able to speak.

“I’m fine,” he whispered.

“We need to call an ambulance.”

“No.”

“Look, blood.” But the only blood was on her hands, and not his body. He had no visible wounds. She was losing it. She’d already lost her mind.

Her gaze fell again on the old man. The dumbbell was embedded in his face. Blood pooled around his head. He was so very still. Maybe she had missed a step. Perhaps the blood on her hands and sweater was from him. It made sense.

The woman tried to go back to the old man, but Lannes held her still. “Don’t. It’s too late.”

“No,” she said, and he let her go, though she felt his palm trail warm and heavy down her spine as she scrambled away from him toward Orwell. She only got halfway. She had to swing back, palm pressed to her mouth, fighting not to vomit.

“I killed him,” she rasped. “Oh, God, I killed him.”

“You’re wrong,” Lannes said, his voice strained. He started to stand, but moved stiffly. The woman did not think. She tried to help him, reaching for his back.

He flinched. “Don’t touch me.”

The woman backed off. Red-hot shame poured through her. Lannes, staring, said, “No, don’t…that’s not what I meant.”

But she understood. It made sense. She had just killed a man.

No, she told herself in the next breath. It had not been her. Not just her, at any rate. Someone else had been in her mind. Not that anyone would believe that.

Tears filled her eyes. She stumbled sideways, looking for a phone, and found one beside some withered and yellowing issues of Playboy magazine.

“What are you doing?” Lannes asked sharply.

“I need to report this to the police,” she shot back. “I can’t just leave him.”

“You have to,” he growled. “We made too much noise. We need to get out of here.”

The woman hesitated, torn. It was not right. Not right at all. But after a moment staring at the phone, she nodded. No arrest. No confessions. She did not want Lannes to get in trouble. And she needed her freedom if she was going to learn the reasons for what had just happened.

She did not, however, return to Lannes. She saw a door in front of her. Ignoring his hisses to stop, she hobbled into a bedroom, standing for a moment in its dark shadows and smelling the overwhelming scents of moldy old carpet and dirty body. Rumpled covers filled the bed, and stacked boxes lined the cracked wall. More clothes were on the floor. No pictures. Nothing personal. Nothing that rang a bell.

She heard Lannes in the hall, breathing hard. He took up the entire space, was almost too large for the house. She smelled blood and at first thought he was bleeding, but his chest appeared miraculously unscathed by the bullets Orwell had fired, and the dark brown carpet-if there was blood on it-hid stains well.

“Find anything?” asked Lannes, and when she shook her head, he said, “Come on, then. We have other options.”

She could not imagine what those were, but she was already having trouble thinking. Her mind felt numb. Death on one side, life on the other. She washed the blood off her hands in the bathroom, and closed her eyes rather than look at her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

But when she passed Orwell’s body, her stomach rebelled-as did her heart. She remembered again his terror, and the impact of the dumbbell as it crushed his skull. She could still hear the echo of that presence speaking through her. Using her to kill.

A sob crawled up her throat. Lannes grabbed her arm, practically lifting her off her feet in his haste to get her to the door. He glanced back at the dead man. “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

“You couldn’t know,” she whispered, feeling awful. Like a monster.

Lannes gave her a hard look. “I’m not sorry he died. I’m sorry you’re suffering because of him.”

She stared. He opened the front door and shoved her into the sunlight.

Nothing felt right. She had awakened in a nightmare that was only growing larger, stranger. She could not imagine where it would end.

The woman rubbed her hands together, felt they were sticky, and stared at the odd dark puddle collecting against the Impala’s leather seats beneath Lannes. It took her a moment to figure out what it was.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “You are bleeding.”

“It’s fine,” he rumbled. “I’m fine.”

She saw no wounds, nothing that could be the source of all that blood. “Lannes-”

He cut her off. “Orwell recognized you.”

His abruptness, and his words, took her off guard. “I don’t know how. You have to believe me.”

“Belief isn’t the issue. I want to know why. Why that note changed everything when he saw it.”

“I’m being played,” she said instinctively, still staring at the blood leaking onto the seat. It was very strange, the way it looked, almost as though it were coming not from his body but out of thin air.

“Look at me,” Lannes said sharply, glancing at her before returning his gaze to the road. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“You just saw me kill.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“There’s no way you can know that.”

“You know it.” He shot her a grim look. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

She leaned back against the passenger door, feeling as though she were seeing Lannes for the first time. “How could you know that?”

“Maybe I have an instinct,” he muttered, looking uncomfortable. “Or maybe I just believe in strange things.”

“No,” she whispered. “You watched me kill an old man. A normal person… a normal person would call it as they see it. They’d believe they know what I am. Murderer. Psychopath. Not…not something else. Not innocent.”

Lannes said nothing. She could not bear to ask. Saying the words, speaking of what had happened in Orwell Price’s home, would feel like reliving it again. Which she was already doing-tasting every nuance, trying to understand how and why. Had someone truly been controlling her? How was such a thing possible? It was easier to believe she was crazy.

She looked down again at the blood on his seat. Just blood and no wounds. As though the air was bleeding. She closed her eyes, dragging in a deep breath, and heard several metallic clinks that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She looked again, searching for the source of that sound, and saw steel glinting on the car floor behind his heels.

Bullets. Slick and red.

The woman began to reach down, but Lannes knocked the slugs away from her.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t look? Don’t touch?” she asked him, beginning to tremble. “What is this?”

He shot her a fierce look. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Let it go,” he growled. “Please.”

Please. She had used that word on him, with the same pleading anger. It hurt to hear almost as much as it had hurt to say. The woman leaned back against the passenger door, the seatbelt cutting into her neck, and stared at Lannes’ profile. He was too big for the Impala. He drove with his shoulders hunched, slouched in the seat. He crowded her with his broad shoulders.

Words filled her. She swallowed them, turned away to stare out the windshield like some head on a stick, all feeling gone from her body, nothing but eyes and ears. Her heart was dead. She could not feel it.

Lannes drove south out of Chicago. The woman did not care. She sat very still and kept her hands curled in her lap. Hands that still felt filthy.

Two hours later, after driving just below the speed limit through a countryside of wide-open spaces, Lannes pulled off the highway, bought gas and drove into the parking lot of a one-story brick motel lined with blue doors.

Lannes pushed open his door and uncurled himself from the driver seat. The woman also stumbled from the Impala, trying not to hiss as her feet throbbed. The air was cold. Her eyes felt dry and were burning. Lannes hesitated, glancing at her over the roof of the car, but she did not walk around the hood to join him.

“We need to rest,” he said. “A place to think.”

“Okay,” she said.

He hesitated. “I don’t think it’s safe to get two rooms.”

The woman thought it might be a great deal safer to have two rooms-safer for him, anyway-but she said nothing, and after they stared at each other for a long moment, he went inside the front office to rent a room. She watched him go. Wondered distantly whether if it would be one bed or two. It did not matter. She was more afraid of herself than of him now.

In the end, it was two beds-in a small white room with orange curtains, brown carpet, and a television that was bolted to a plastic dresser that had been carved with hearts and arrows. The woman hobbled straight into the bathroom, socks flopping. She fumbled with the soap, digging her nails under its paper wrapper, tearing it free. Ran the faucet until the water steamed. She washed her hands. She scrubbed her skin until it was red and burning, and did not stop.

She made the mistake of looking into the mirror and found nothing but a stranger, a woman with haunted hollow eyes and pale cheeks lost behind tangled hair. A woman who might forget herself at any moment.

A large hand reached in and closed around her wrist. Lannes rumbled, “Stop. You’re hurting yourself.”

His hand was warm and strong. Her wrist looked very tiny in his grip, and his skin felt strange. She went still, remembering how he had told her not to touch him. Remembering the blood on her hands when she had. Blood on her sweater, in the car. Bullets on the floor.

Lannes let go long enough to turn off the water and pull down a towel. He made her drop the soap in the sink and began drying her hands. She did not resist.

“He let us in,” she whispered suddenly, and Lannes stopped, looking at her. “He let us in because he knew me. Someone like me. A woman… who was supposed to be dead.”

“That’s not your fault,” Lannes murmured, and pulled her back into the bedroom, making her sit on the edge of a dark mauve floral comforter that felt more like plastic than cloth. He walked around her and tugged down the covers. Then he knelt, studying her feet, which were still snug in the floppy socks he had given her. The fabric was grimy now, more gray than white.

He began tugging off her socks-awkwardly, like he was afraid of hurting her. The woman stopped him and kicked them off herself. Her feet throbbed. When she stretched them, the cuts in her arches felt as though they were splitting apart.

She crawled backward, under the covers. The sheets were cold. She curled into a ball.

“Sleep,” Lannes whispered, standing beside the bed. “Don’t be afraid.”

She was afraid, more afraid than she could imagine anyone ever being. But the softness of the pillow felt good, and the room was dark, like a cocoon. She tried to say something to Lannes, but her throat would not work.

I’m sorry, she thought, exhausted.

Then she fell asleep.