A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(76)

I volunteered to drive. I was more alert than Eli. “Look at the map, if Felix didn’t take it,” I said.

Eli found it folded in the glove compartment.

“I think we need to get off this highway,” I said. “We got half a tank of gas, so if we find a good paved road to turn left on, we can dip south a bit and then meet the highway again farther west, if the roads are real bad.”

Eli had to switch on the overhead light to study the map. It was hard on my eyes. I was glad when he switched it off. “We’re coming to an intersection in seven miles,” he said.

I kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if there were any lights behind us. Not yet.

“You got any idea how Felix left?” I said, since the darkness and monotony of the empty road were about to make me crazy. I was hungry and thirsty, I felt grubby, and worst of all I felt separated from Eli in a way I couldn’t pin down. Maybe because I thought he and Felix knew each other better than he and I did, and that hurt, which was stupid. Felix and Eli had trained together and lived in the same circle for years, I figured. Felix probably knew Eli’s sisters. Maybe he partnered with them at dances, if Russians had dances. Felix didn’t think I was good enough for Eli. I could not talk to Eli about that. It would mean I thought Eli and I had a future together, which was something I tried not to imagine, because it wasn’t going to happen.

I spotted some lights, way back.

I said, “Someone’s behind us.”

“Turn right as soon as you can.”

I saw a decent road coming up, and I turned.

“First open area you see, park.”

We went a ways before I spotted a good place. The side of the road was open, both north and south, for about ten feet. Looked like there had been a small fire there that had gotten out of hand for a few minutes. I pulled over to the right.

“Go into the trees. If they try to kill me, shoot them all.”

Without a word, I grabbed my rifle from the back and took off running. Had the guns all ready, of course, and they were fully loaded. I always checked that first thing in the morning, if I hadn’t remembered to do it last thing at night. The sky was lighter by the minute. The sun was just up.

I found a good tree and scrambled up it so I could get some oversight. When I looked down, there was a sleeping black bear about ten feet away in a natural depression in the ground lined with old fallen leaves and pine needles.

I tried not to picture what would have happened if the bear had woken as I started up the tree. You never could tell with bears. Sometimes they did their best to get away from your area. Sometimes they charged. I had not been careful to be quiet.

I made myself forget the bear and sight through the Winchester on Eli, who had gotten out of the car to lean on the trunk. He wasn’t wearing his hat, and he hadn’t had time to tie his hair back, but at least today he was wearing real clothes. He did not look my way. After a moment I could hear the car coming up fast.

And then it skidded to a halt.

Three people piled out of it, two women and a man. The women were both redheaded, and though it was hard to tell in the light, I thought they were twins. The man was black. They were all wearing grigori vests, which settled that.

Eli had said that I had to wait to kill them until they tried to kill him. There was a long, uneasy silence among the four grigoris.

“Where is the woman? The gunnie?” The black man had a heavy accent. I couldn’t place it.

“I left her to make her way home,” Eli said. “You needn’t bother to look for her. You won’t find her. Why are you here? I did what I was sent to do.”

“We don’t believe you should have come at all,” said one of the women, her voice calm and confident.

“Why?” Eli sounded truly surprised. “This was the wish of our late tsarina, that people here should see a better way, that black people should be free. Kasper, you should understand that.”

The black man said, “There’s more to this than freedom, Eli. There are economic…”

“Oh, bullshit!”

I’d never heard Eli say that before.

Then he said, very clearly, “There is no point in waiting.”

That was clear.

The red-haired woman on the left raised her hand to fire some kind of power at Eli. It was too dark to be sure I had a killing shot, but I could hit her. I shot her and she went down. Quick as a wink, I shot the other woman, a gut shot. By that time, Kasper was running back to their car, and he was harder to hit. But I winged him in the right shoulder, and when he was on his way down I shot him again. Took care of him.

And the bear woke up, of course. It charged Eli.

“Get in the car!” I screamed, and by some miracle he made it into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. I didn’t want the car any more banged up than it already was, and I prepared to shoot the bear. I didn’t want to. It went against my grain to kill an animal I couldn’t eat.

And then a good thing happened. A deer, really a fawn, maybe startled by the gunfire, blundered into the clearing and ran for the other side.

The bear took off after it.

I didn’t question luck, good or bad. I was down the tree and dashing for the car. Eli leaned over to push open my door, and he took my rifle from me and put it in the back seat. When I was sure the bear wasn’t coming back, I took the grigori vests off the dead people and handed them to Eli. I had to shoot one of the women again; she wasn’t quite gone. I had to move their car, too.