Page 42 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“The mice are providing a distraction,” I said. “The back door’s clear. You can take the kids and run for the Galway. It doesn’t mind you. If it doesn’t already know Jane, it should. I bet it’s going to love her. It loves all the Healy girls.”

“Our things . . . ?”

“After the Covenant’s sure they’ve killed us all, you can come back for them.” I gestured toward the door. “Between your wards and Thomas’s, I’m pretty sure they can’t burn the place down, even if they try. They may get through the front door, but they won’t get much further. The traps Thomas left will see to that.”

Laura looked at me for a long moment, silent and solemn. Then she nodded, turned, and scooped Jane off the floor before she ran out the back door with the children in her arms, not looking back.

The gunfire from the front of the house continued. I wanted to reload and start shooting. I didn’t dare. If I killed them all, the Covenant would just send more; that was how they operated. I needed them to believe they’d won, somehow. I needed them to go away and give up.

Walking back into the living room, I slumped onto the couch, letting my head loll. “Mary, if you’ve ever cared about me, I could really use you right about now,” I said.

“This is a fine pickle,” said my babysitter, the cushion next to me sinking under the weight of her as she settled on the couch. “How are you getting out of it?”

“Covenant knows I’m here,” I said. “They know the kids are here. I think they know Laura’s here. So they’re expecting two women and two children. I know you can carry dead things through the lands of the dead. Can you get me some corpses?”

Mary paused. “You want me to raid the local morgue?” she asked, finally, sounding horrified and intrigued.

“I don’t care if it’s local. Local might not be for the best. I need bodies, Mary, bodies that won’t be missed and won’t be identified. And I need the Covenant to think they gunned us all down when they attacked the house, so I need them before they realize they’ve been tricked.”

Mary disappeared. I closed my eyes. Either she was coming back with the bodies or she wasn’t, and if she wasn’t, this wasn’t going to work. The gunfire outside was starting to taper off, and I was starting to think it might be curtains for me when she popped back in, one arm wrapped around the ribs of a blonde woman with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. She didn’t look anything like me, but if someone didn’t know me, she might have been enough to fool them, especially because of the whole “corpse” thing. As a general rule, living people don’t like looking closely at corpses.

Mary shoved her toward me and vanished as the woman fell limply to the floor, cold and dead and nameless. I looked at her and wished I could feel anything beyond faint relief.

Mary reappeared with a dark-haired woman who could pass for Laura, and who had been shot through the throat, and then again with two children, both riddled with bullet holes. Them, I couldn’t look at directly. Them, I had to turn my eyes away from. Them, she didn’t drop, but settled on the far end of the couch.

Then she turned to me, eyes cold. “Never ask me to do anything like that again,” she said, voice like a crypt door slamming closed.

“The crossroads didn’t—”

“The crossroads can go hang,” she snapped. “This protects you and it protects the babies you abandoned, so the crossroads can’t stop me, but don’t you ever, ever ask me to steal bodies for you again. The fact that I can doesn’t mean I should. Do you understand?”

It was so rare for Mary to be truly mad at me—usually it was the other way around—that for a moment, all I could do was blink at her. Then I nodded and stood, pulling a knife from inside my shirt. She frowned.

“What are you doing?”

“That’s the one thing we don’t have: blood splatter. These people weren’t killed here.” I ran the knife down the side of my arm, careful to avoid the major veins, and swung around, holding my arm up so the blood splashed out in a wide arc. Some of it splattered against Mary, bright against her pale skin, before it fell through her and hit the floor. She blinked at me.

“I can’t decide whether that’s clever or self-destructive,” she said.

“It won’t hold up to any real forensic analysis, but it has to be good enough either way.” I glanced to the kitchen. “I need to go. Can you stick around and haunt the place, make sure they don’t stay here too long or get past the living room?”

“For now,” said Mary, and vanished.

That would do: I wasn’t getting anything better. I turned and ran, trusting the wards would hold, that the blood would be enough, that the lie would be believed. It was a thin hope, pinned on a flimsy deception. We would have to get lucky a dozen times for it to work.

But getting lucky is sort of the basis of my life, and if I couldn’t count on that, what could I count on? So I ran, away from the house, toward the woods that had always been my sanctuary. I was still bleeding; I’d leave a trail the Covenant could follow, if they had dogs or tracking spells. I couldn’t go looking for Laura and the kids; I’d only put them in danger. So when I hit the edge of the woods, I paused, looking in all directions, and then took off along the tree line, away from the Red Angel, heading for the deeper woods.

I’d ran for what felt like the better part of an hour—long enough for the bleeding to slow and stop as the wound on my arm clotted over, although it still threatened to start bleeding again if I moved it too much—before the ground turned marshy underfoot, and I realized I’d gotten turned around somewhere in the trees. I was coming up on the lakeside, well away from the Red Angel but still very close to the water.

The trees thinned ahead of me, giving way to a clearing dominated by a decrepit old barn that looked like it hadn’t been occupied in decades. I slowed and angled toward it, intending to take shelter and give myself a chance to catch my breath. Cover could only benefit me if I was being potentially pursued by hostile Covenant assassins.

The barn door wasn’t locked. It creaked ominously as I pushed it open, the wood swollen with moisture and smelling of damp rot. Inside, the farming equipment had long been removed or scavenged. Good thing, too, since this wasn’t good farming land. Why had someone bothered to build a barn all the way out here?

Maybe out here hadn’t been “all the way” when they did it. The Galway didn’t move as much as some forests, being made up largely of slow-growing trees, but it did move, and given time, it would reclaim whatever was taken from it. Someone could have logged enough space to start a small farm, thinking they’d grow it into a larger one, and found themselves unable to handle the distance from Buckley proper, abandoning the land when they realized how hard it was going to be to be so isolated. Maybe there was a house the same age as the barn a little deeper into the trees. Given how far I’d traveled and how close I was to the swamp, maybe it was the house I’d found after the jackalope census, the one that basically belonged to the swamp hags now.

Whatever the reason, the barn was here, solid and still stable, even if it was rotting, and the walls were intact enough to provide cover for as long as I wanted to rest. I could wait until the sun went down. The Covenant people wouldn’t be able to navigate the woods after dark the way I could, and by that point Laura would be well away from here with the kids.

I’d be safe until then.