Redemption Road(124)

She needed him close.

“Oh, God…” She curled in the dirt, praying he’d think it was her ankle, that he wouldn’t see the blood. She felt it though, hot on her stomach, and soaking the shirt. She rocked onto her hands and knees. He was through the door.

Coming.

“It’s my ankle.…”

His shadow moved closer. Hair swung across her face, and when he touched her, she swung the rod with everything she had. It struck something hard. A shoulder. An arm. She didn’t know, didn’t care. She felt the shock and saw a slash of red in the gloom. She hit him again, stumbling once and falling toward the door. His hand caught her ankle, and she fell facedown, the door just there, light burning her eyes as she pulled herself through, kicking back twice, hitting some part of him as she fell out into the grass, smelling it, feeling it tear beneath her fingers. She dragged herself faster, finding her feet and falling again as the car rose in front of her and seemed to spin. She was dizzy, her legs not right as she lurched at the car thinking, Keys, road, escape. Halfway there, she risked a look back.

He was coming fast.

She wasn’t going to make it, falling against the car as she left a smear of blood and ran for the door on the other side. She heard a thump and saw him on the hood, sheet metal buckling as he leapt and caught her and tried to drag her down. She shrugged out of the shirt, felt the bloodstain slide across her face, and ran for the trees. It was what she had, shadows and hope and desperation.

He had the speed.

He caught her three steps into the woods, cupped the back of her head, and slammed her face into the trunk of a tree. Something burst; she tasted blood. He did it again, flung her down; and though his face was swollen and stained with blood of his own, it was the eyes that sucked all the heat from the day.

They were that dark and empty.

That terribly unforgiving.





33

Adrian sat in a broken-down room staring at a small fortune in gold. Half a million in the room. Another five and change still in the dirt. He thought of Elizabeth’s last words. Stay away from me. Stay away from this place.

Could he really do that?

The only feelings he’d known were fear and lonesomeness and rage. The love was for a dead man, and that had been a shadow for so long he didn’t know what to do with the feelings he had now.

Liz was real.

She mattered.

Flicking the curtain, he peered out at a fifteen-year-old Subaru he’d rolled off a dirt lot in exchange for a handful of coins. He’d been ready to leave before news of his wife broke. He was going to go west—Colorado or Mexico—but things were different now. His wife was dead, and there was this thing in Liz’s voice, a quiet desperation not every man would recognize.

“What do I do, Eli?”

He touched his lips where Liz had kissed him.

Eli didn’t answer.

*

The girl passed out as he carried her to a shady place beside the car. The tremble stopped, and she went limp on his shoulder, a tiny thing he could lift with a single arm. But she was a fighter, and there was clarity in the fighters.

They were more like Liz.

The eyes went deeper.

He put the girl in the grass and checked himself in the mirror. His neck was cut low, near the collarbone. He touched a bloody lump on his scalp, then pulled an old towel from the car and pressed it against his neck. The cut hurt, but he accepted the pain because he’d hurt the girl, too. It was the shock of pain and wounded pride. They drove him to needless harm, yet that was the cycle. Sin feeds sin. The spiral draws deeper and down. He studied the girl’s face, swollen and bloody, and it wasn’t the first time he’d hardened himself. Julia Strange was not an easy kill, either. He’d found her in the church, alone and on her knees. No one was supposed to be there, and even now he wondered what his life would be had he left a step sooner. But she’d heard him and turned. And when she’d looked at him with those bottomless eyes, the sight of her anguish jolted him. She’d been beaten and humbled, but the hurt ran more deeply than the swollen jaw or bloody lip. It plumbed the depths of her eyes and rendered her into something … more. The glimpse lasted but a moment, but he saw the hurt, and beneath the hurt, the innocence. She was a child again, and lost. He wanted to take away the pain; that’s how it started. But he didn’t know what he’d find in her eyes, or what the finding would do to him. Even now it was a blur: the whirl of emotion, the feel of her skin beneath his fingers. That’s where it started; she was the first. Thirteen years later, it would end with Elizabeth. It had to, so he hardened himself.

But for now there was the girl.

He was gentle as he stripped and cleaned her. He kept his thoughts chaste, as always, but wanted to be done because already it felt wrong. The altar he’d made was in the trees and was only of plywood and sawhorses. He tried to keep the frustration in check, but she didn’t look right when he roped her down and spread the linen. Too much yellow was in the light, and not enough church. He wanted the pinks and reds, the vaulted hush. He dragged a hand through his hair, trying to convince himself.

He could make it happen.

It could work.

But the girl was a mess, her face battered from the tree, a red stain where her stomach wound leaked through the linen. He was bothered because the purity mattered, as did the light, the location. Would it work like this? He pushed the question down. He was here. So was she. So he leaned close, hoping to find what he needed at the bottom of her eyes. It never happened fast. It took trial and error, his hands on the neck not once or twice, but many times.