Until the Beginning (17 page)

“THAT IS ONE NASTY-LOOKING CONCOCTION,”
says Avery, glancing with disgust at the spoonful of the Rite elixir . . . Amrit. “But, hell, I figure I’ve eaten every kind of wild animal hunted by man; a little girl’s blood mixed with rocks and plants won’t kill me. At least not permanently.” He chuckles at his joke.

Whit hands him a glass of water, and Avery raises it like he’s making a toast. “Well, here goes everything,” he says. “Bottom’s up!” He sticks the spoon of elixir in his mouth, swallows every last drop, and then follows it quickly with the glass of water. I watch his Adam’s apple move up and down as he drinks the whole glass, and then holds it back up to Whit for a refill.

“That stuff’s downright vile,” he says, wiping his mouth with his arm and making a face like he’s bitten a sour apple. “And you
got every single person in your clan to take it?”

“Every person over twenty,” Whit confirms.

“Well, here’s to you,” Avery says, and drinks down the second glass of water. He hands Whit the glass, and then lies back down on the bed, while the doctor fiddles with the devices attached to the billionaire rancher. There are silver disks attached to wires stuck all over his chest, head, arms, and legs, and a black cuff around his arm. These are all connected to machines that are beeping and making up-and-down lines that measure, I suppose, Avery’s blood pressure, heart rate, and other vital signs.

“Do you want me to give you something for pain or nausea?” the doctor asks.

Avery turns the question on Whit. “Do your people take anything?”

Whit shakes his head.

“Then no,” the rancher says. “I want conditions to be the same as they are for you. Can’t take the risk that one small change might mess up the whole process.”

Whit can’t help but look at me at this point.

“But all of the conditions
aren’t
the same,” I find myself saying.

“What’s different?” Avery says, crooking his neck so that he can see me.

I pause and glance at Whit, whose face is a blank page. “We surround the head with candles and prepare the body with minerals, herbs, and precious stones. We sing, and the children dance,” I say. “Vows are taken, and sacred words are spoken.”

“Yeah, well, I know a sacred word, too. ‘Bullshit.’ That’s what
you and your clan have been swallowing along with your priceless elixir for the last three decades. Whit here told me the whole story. You all served as a field trial for the drug, and like with any religion, your leader kept you pacified by lies and spiritual juju.”

I turn to Whit, who is rubbing his forehead with his fingers. Once again, I want to slap him halfway to Antarctica, but that would give Avery the pleasure of knowing he had upset me. I fight to pull a blank expression over my shock and turn to leave.

“Where you think you’re going?” my assigned guard, O’Donnell, grunts.

“My job’s over. And your boss said something about food.”

“No one’s leaving until I say they are!” Avery bellows, and the electronic beeping kicks up a notch as the doctor tells him to calm down.

I have to leave this room. I can’t stand being this close to Whit anymore without wanting to hurt him. I eye the scalpel that Whit used to cut my palm—it’s lying on the counter where he left it. Since I abandoned my crossbow and knife in my dad’s hut, everything has looked like a weapon to me—the silver tongs Avery used to pick up ice, the metal poker standing next to the fake fireplace in the trophy room—everything sharp or heavy or potentially lethal has been calling out to me.

Being unarmed in this situation reminds me of the defenselessness I felt in my old nightmares about surprise brigand attacks. But in those dreams I found the closest weapon I could and fought them. I don’t have that option now. Because Avery has a
hostage, and I don’t dare do a thing until I know Badger is safely back with his family.

But that doesn’t mean the scalpel can’t come in handy later on. I lean back against the counter, positioning myself directly in front of the instrument, and slide my arm back toward it. My eyes flicker to the guards. O’Donnell watches me with a smirk on his face.

Just then Avery lets out an anguished cry, and the guards are on their feet, looking his way. I grab the scalpel, retract its blade, and slip it into my back pocket. By the time O’Donnell looks back at me, the deed is done, and I’m making my way to Avery’s side. He’s holding his stomach and cursing loudly, using word combinations I never knew existed.

“Stomach pain is a typical reaction to the drug,” Whit reassures him as the beeping noise and wavy lines go berserk. My old mentor looks back at me with a question on his face, and I shake my head. He knows I can ease the pain. But he’d have to shoot me to get me to do it. The song I sing while I’m in my trance, the way I touch the person’s face, arms, and feet, the aromatic plants I hold under their nose—they all help to ease the suffering. But if Avery says he doesn’t want any juju, well, by Gaia I’m not going to give it to him.

Retreating to a corner of the room, I sit on the floor and glance up at the clock. Avery’s got a good half hour of intense pain before him, and I feel like enjoying every minute of it. I lay my head against the wall and close my eyes and think about Miles back at
our camp at the top of the mountain. I hope he’s forgiven me for leaving him behind. He’s probably fast asleep, snuggled under the blanket on the tent floor. What I wouldn’t give to be back there with him, just for a moment.

CROUCHING IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PORCH, I
peer through a window that looks into an office. Everything is made of wood and leather: The room is like a set for
Masterpiece Theatre
. For a minute, I’m tempted to break in and use the phone or even the computer sitting on the leather-topped desk. If I could reach the police I could tell them what was happening, but what would I even say? That a crazy rancher has kidnapped forty-odd people and is keeping them hostage on his exotic-animal gaming reserve?

The police probably already know Avery, and would laugh it off. Hell, he probably owns the local precinct anyway.

Scenarios pass through my mind like action-movie trailers. I need a better plan. Something that’s not going to end up looking like a scene from
Kill Bill
.

Moving through the hedges to the left, I look in on a bedroom. Although the light’s on, no one’s in there and nothing is out of place—it looks unused. I don’t dare turn the corner to follow along the back of the house, since I’m pretty sure I could be seen from the barracks if I did. So, shuffling behind the hedges I head back to the porch the way I came, passing the office and a huge front hallway complete with winding marble staircase.

To the right of the hallway is this vast library-looking room, with taxidermied heads of every sort of animal you can think of. I move from window to window, getting a full view.

There’s a big fireplace, complete with fake fire glowing inside the hearth. Though bookcases line the walls, there are very few actual books. Instead, the shelves are filled with guns, knives, and other hunting objects placed on little stands like they’re works of art. At the far side, there’s a door, and through the next window I see that it opens into a long hallway with doorways on either side. The door across from the library leads to a multi-car garage. A Hummer, a Rolls-Royce, and the doctor’s sedan are parked inside. Outside is the ATV I saw Juneau arrive in with Whit and the guards.

I make my way around the side of the garage, and see that the house continues behind it. The only window on that side looks into a kind of den-looking space. The lights are off, but by the glow of a cable box I make out an enormous flat-screen TV.

And I don’t dare go farther, since the barracks are just down the hill from the back of the house. I step back and look up at the second floor. It is dark, except in the corner room above the den,
directly above me, where a soft light glows from the window.

Poe has been following me around the house, hopping from position to position as I peer into the windows. I wonder if I can send him up to look through the window and then Read his mind when he comes back. “Go up there,” I whisper, pointing toward the window. He cocks his head to one side and stares at me.

I make the clicking noise and bend down to pick him up. I hold him against my chest and look up at the window, and then close my eyes and picture him flying up to it. I let him go. Squawking and flapping a bit, he lands on the ground and walks a safe distance away from me, then resumes his staring.
Bird wrangling is obviously not one of the skills the Yara provides,
I think.

I glance back up at the window. It looks like I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. I shake the drainpipe running down from the roof gutters to see how sturdy it is. Sturdy enough.

Placing my crossbow on the ground, I grab the pipe. And using the white bricks as footholds, I shuffle my way up the side of the building until I’m at window-level. Leaning sideways, and grasping the sill for stability, I find myself looking into a bedroom lit only by a small lamp. Next to it sits a woman in a white uniform—the kind a housekeeper or nurse would wear. She reads a book and casts occasional glances toward the bed.

I lean farther and see a young child in pajamas lying on top of the covers. The lighting is too dim to make much out besides the fact that it has dark hair, and is toddler-age.
So Avery has a kid,
I think. Either his wife’s not around, or they have a full-time nanny, which wouldn’t surprise me. And then I remember the
note that Poe brought from Juneau’s dad. Avery took a three-year-old from the clan when they tried to escape. This must be that child. I’ve seen all there is to see in the room, so I slide back down the drainpipe and take a minute to mull over things.

Juneau and the others must be in one of the interior rooms. I didn’t see a kitchen, so it must be on the far side of the house facing the barracks. They could be there. They’re not on the top floor, unless they’re sitting around in the dark. Judging from the depth of the rooms, and the enormity of the house, I’m guessing there are one or two rooms in the middle.

I walk back around the garage and peer in the window looking into the hallway. Halfway down, there is a door on the left-hand side with a security panel next to it—the kind with numbers to type a code into. A windowless room could be a bathroom, but I doubt even Avery’s bathroom holds something valuable enough to need a password. Could be a prison—his own personal dungeon—or a safe, or something else he doesn’t want his goons to wander into.

As I watch, the door flies open and people start walking out. I duck down for a second, and then pop my head back up when I realize they’re walking away from me, down the hall. Leading the group is Whit, and just behind him walks a camouflaged guard holding a gun. Then comes Juneau—my heart squeezes painfully when I see her—and following her is another guard with a gun. Juneau isn’t carrying anything—neither her backpack nor her crossbow. Which isn’t surprising. It’s not like they’d let her bring weapons with her.

But again, I wonder why she hasn’t thought of some way to disarm them. Or disappear and slip away. Is it just because of the boy?

When I saw them outside, I had thought that maybe Whit would defend against any tricks Juneau could come up with. But the guard behind him doesn’t seem to be obeying his orders. It looks like Whit himself is being kept against his will. Which is a total about-face from when he was driving the jeep and ordering the guards around.

I see them disappear down the hallway and take a left before the TV room. If my hunch was right, they could be going to a kitchen. But they could just as easily be going to a cellar or even upstairs.

I’ve got two people unaccounted for: Avery and the doctor. I realize they could appear at any moment. But I know I have to make my move while I’m sure Juneau and the guards are away.

I creep around the corner into the garage, toward the door that leads inside the house. I turn to look for Poe. He has trailed me and is standing a few feet away.

“Can you avoid squawking or making any loud bird noises?” I whisper to him. He angles his head with the same you’re-crazy look, and then with a flap, launches himself into the air onto my shoulder.

I turn the doorknob slowly. As I suspected, it is unlocked and doesn’t set off an alarm. Who needs security with an entire army within shouting distance? I ease the door open and glance down the hall. No one’s around. I shut the door quietly behind me,
tiptoe across the carpeted floor and enter the bookless library.

It smells like a mixture of Old Spice cologne and cigar smoke, and I have the overwhelming urge to sneeze. Pressing hard on my nose bone, I creep the entire length of the room, past all the animal heads, which I imagine are turning to stare at me as I pass. Taxidermy is so freaking creepy.

I pass the fake fireplace on my right, and then a big copper bar that looks like it was stolen straight out of a saloon on my left. Poe is digging his claws into my shoulder, squeezing for all he’s worth. Maybe being surrounded by dead things is as traumatic for him as it is for me. I ease open the door to the front hallway and peer out before closing it behind me and tiptoeing across the hall toward Masterpiece Theatre. I’m not even halfway across when I hear voices coming my way.

“You’re following me to the
bathroom
?” I hear Juneau say. “Do you realize how weird that is?”

I book it through the hall, steadying Poe with one hand and my crossbow with the other, and throw the office door open, thanking the WD-40 gods that the hinges don’t squeak.

“I’ve been told not to let you out of my sight,” comes a man’s voice. I inch the door inward until it’s open just a crack.

“You’re holding Badger hostage. Your boss made it clear I have to wait here until he awakes. That’s more than eight hours guaranteed that I’m not going to run,” Juneau says. I hear a door in the hallway open. “But suit yourself, pervert,” she says, and the door slams shut.

Badger. That’s the name of the kid—now I’m sure he’s the one
I saw in the bedroom upstairs. As for the rest, it doesn’t make sense. Why would Avery bring Juneau here and then go straight to bed? Unless . . .

I shudder as a new thought grabs me. Maybe Avery doesn’t own a pharmaceutical company. Maybe he wanted the Amrit for himself. And maybe he’s just taken it.

Juneau said she usually performed the Rite, and Whit’s excuse about wanting her to be safe was obviously a sham. What if he can’t do the Rite without her? And what if she’s just been forced to do it for Avery? It took me around eight hours to regain consciousness after the Rite. That’s got to be what Juneau’s talking about. Avery’s lying dead somewhere in this house, and Juneau’s being kept here until he awakes.

I hear a toilet flush and a door open. “Still here?” Juneau asks in an eat-dirt voice.

“Just shut up and get your ass back to the kitchen,” the guard says as their voices disappear down the hall. Easing the door closed, I breathe a sigh of relief. I set Poe carefully on the floor, and crane my neck to inspect my shoulder. “Dude, for a raven you’re acting suspiciously chicken,” I say, touching the spot tenderly. “I think you drew blood.”

There is a grandfather clock ticking in the far corner. It reads ten thirty. That means Avery will be waking up around seven.

I’ve got all night to do something. But I don’t even know where to start.
How about with something you’re good at?
I think. And sitting down in front of the computer, I click the mouse and pull up Avery’s desktop.