Heartless A Shieldmaiden's Voice: A Covenant Keeper Novel Page 21

  “You can’t be married,” Bakrahn said.

  Fastest’s dark eyes went from Carole’s face to Joseph’s and back. He sucked in a very loud breath as realization dawned. Somehow he knew, and if Fastest caught on so quickly, Carole had no doubt that so would the warriors.

  Confused, both Bakrahn and Estrellas looked from Fastest to Carole.

  “No! She can’t be married,” said Estrellas, “her heart has the touch of a unjoined woman.”

  Suspicion was beginning to dawn in Bakrahn’s shocked eyes.

  “Run!” Joseph’s voice sounded only in Carole’s mind. “Focus on what your eyes see, not your mind! Go, protect your family!”

  Before Carole could react or wonder, the desert ground beneath her vanished, replaced with swirling whitewater. It rapidly rose to cover her ankles. For a moment Carole remained frozen, the icy pressure from the water almost knocking her down as it climbed to her knees and higher.

  Joseph pushed her towards the veil’s exit, the touch of his heart against hers loving but firm. “Focus on what your eyes see, not your mind.” For a moment it made absolutely no sense, but Carole concentrated, focusing on what her eyes saw, not her mind. Suddenly she knew it wasn’t real. There was no water. She felt it, she thought she saw it, but it didn’t soak her soiled dress. There was no bank containing it, or source for the water, and she hadn’t sensed its approach. It had just appeared. A boulder also appeared magically beneath Joseph, confirming her assessment. Water swirled around his robes without dampening them. Carole now stood hip deep in the flood, but completely dry, and knew with absolute certainty this flash flood was a daydream of her father’s making, just like his dream from last night.

  Trying to obey Joseph’s command to run, she stumbled forward a few steps, but her gaze returned to those struggling in the swirling water. They didn’t know it wasn’t real. Fastest had fallen flat on his back beneath a whirlpool, and appeared to be calmly holding his breath. Both Warriors of ilu seemed to be trying to tread water as waves crashed over them. With the ground firm beneath her feet, Carole managed several more steps forward. Hands against the edge of the veil she felt the hard bubby texture she remembered. She glanced back at her father. How will he get out? Will Fastest be harmed? From here she could easily see right through her father’s daydream. The warriors were struggling. In the guise of helping them her father shoved Estrellas further beneath the waves. Face buried against the ground Estrellas took in mouthfuls of desert dust. He appeared to be in danger of suffocating on dirt.

  Bakrahn lunged after Estrellas, moving through the desert with jerky, swimming movements, but managing to keep to his feet. With his back to Joseph, Bakrahn took a deep gasping breath and ducked down, tugging uselessly at Estrellas, managing only to throw more dirt over his head. Bakrahn struggled, fighting against the weight of imagined waves, still managing to keep to his feet. Joseph reached as though to push him over. His hand bumped the sheathed sword jutting past Bakrahn’s jeans, and his hand closed on the hilt.

  In that split second Bakrahn abandoned his reach for his brother and spun in place. He pulled one mighty fist back and punched Joseph full in the face. Joseph’s head snapped back so hard and far he bent over backwards, head down, his feet swinging a full circle up and through the air, spinning around in a complete circle, his dark robes flying around him before he landed flat on the ground.

  Carole slid to her knees, all the breath knocked out of her body with her father’s. She knew the water had vanished for everyone. Ice hot pain froze her heart. In that split second she knew that Nomno, Father Joseph Tural, her father, had once again become someone new, only this time she couldn’t know his name or follow—not even in her dreams. He was dead.

  Fastest, lying flat on the ground, shot into the air and double round-house kicked Bakrahn in the head, first one side and then the other. Caught off guard, the warrior dropped straight to the ground, unconscious. Estrellas hadn’t risen from his imagined drowning, dirt clogging his mouth and nose. That part of Carole’s brain that lived to fight watched, but the pain in her heart knew only Joseph.

  Fastest roared at her, “Go, Cahrul! I can’t keep them down long without hurting them! Ernie’s going to suffocate!”

  “FATHER!” Carole screamed. “Father!” It came out a hair-raising primal sound echoing across the desert as she raced to his side, throwing herself into the dust beside him, unwilling to believe what her heart knew. Clawing over his dark priest robes, she ran her hands up his spine, searching for his injury. “I can fix it, I can fix it. How do you do it? How? You said we can all do it! You didn’t tell me how! Fastest! Help me! You have to help me!”

  Behind her the part of her brain that always watched, knew Fastest gave Bakrahn another faint kick in the head.

  “Go! Your father is gone. There’s nothing you can do, and you will die too if Bert wakes up!”

  “No!” she wailed. “No!” She knew it was true. He’d gone from inside her heart in a horribly familiar way, taken the same path as Mom and Gran, his presence, his love, vacuumed away and gone with him, leaving only icy hot emptiness behind. “No!” She covered her father with her body, screaming her agony into the very earth. “NO!” I need him! I need him! Give him back! Please! ilu? Please!

  Fastest ran to her, wrapping his arms around her middle and hauling her to her feet.

  “He’s with his God now! Did you not feel his spirit soar? Don’t be selfish. If he is watching you, don’t cause him pain!” He pushed her roughly towards the exit. “Father Tural died so you wouldn’t have to! Rutak died so you wouldn’t have to! Do something with your life! I have a car parked on the far road, this side of Happy Acres. Go! Take it. You have to get ahead of these warriors!”

  “Why’d they kill him? He’s just a Priest! He didn’t do anything!”

  “He reached for his sword! You don’t attack a Warrior of ilu and live to talk about it, not even in your dreams.” Fastest ran back to Bakrahn and kicked him another good one. “Rutak taught me that long ago! You have to go! Ernie’s suffocating, and I can’t keep kicking this guy without really hurting him!”

  “They’ll kill you!” Carole realized. “We have to kill them! I’ll do it!” She moved towards Bakrahn. Fastest planted one hand on her chest and shoved her towards the exit.

  “Don’t you start that! What is wrong with you? I’d let them kill me first. Grandfather would never forgive me if I hurt Bert and Ernie, and neither would your father!” He dashed to where Estrellas still hadn’t moved, and bent beside him. “I’ll give you a two minute head start before I help him! I hope you can still run fast. Then I’m dragging them out of the veil. They can’t get back in again without help, so I guess that means I’ll be living in the veil after all.”

  Standing near the exit to the veil, wind and the scent of garbage blowing over her, Carole looked back at her father’s body prostrate on the ground. How could this have happened? What could she have done to prevent it? Why did everybody she loved die?

  “For the love of God, would you go?” Fastest shouted at her.

  “I—I can’t drive!”

  “The keys are under the driver’s seat. Figure it out!”

  The image of Ted and Beth in her dream floated into Carole’s mind; Beth perched on the side of the helicopter, Ted bleeding. They were still alive, and she needed to keep them that way. She ran.

  FOR FOUR MONTHS Carole lived with a street gang and went by the name of Ka. Half of her heart seemed to have died in the desert with her father. The other half starved for Beth and even Ted, for any shred of reassurance they might provide. At least she’d done what she could to ensure their safety. If Ted ever figured out why he was being transferred from city to city around the globe, he’d surely never forgive her. Apparently her skills meant something to someone. After flat out lying that she’d killed Fastest, the powers that be had agreed to her request. Carole had no doubt that wherever in the world her kind hid, it wasn’t in cities.

  The gang leader squa
wked a high pitched order for attention, and she tried to focus on what he said. This assignment was dangerous. She couldn’t afford to allow her thoughts to stray. Fortunately her heart was better off dead in the desert, and starving for Ted and Beth than in this warehouse in Singapore. There was no love here. Not a man in the gang had seemed drawn to her. Most of them, she was fairly confident, were terrified of her.

  “Cargo ship come tonight. Girders and rebar. Usual. Chi-nu usual too. We guard heroin, we skim heroin. You get caught. You die. You let someone else skim, I kill you myself.”

  Rin, a wisp of a young man, led the Chi-nu. Seventeen years old, he stood just over five feet tall and weighed about a hundred and twelve pounds. His entire upper body was black with tattoos of demons. He was the singularly most evil person Carole had ever known. When Rin spoke to her, the voices went completely silent, allowing her to focus on the innuendo in every comment. The focus may have saved her life over the months. The life Rutak Tural had given his last for. The life that had cost her father his. If she could eradicate this demon and his kind, their sacrifice would mean something. Carole tensed, focusing on the leader as he turned soulless eyes in her direction.

  “Ka!” Rin had a grating high pitched voice, and he spat every word that crossed his lips. “You will tell me how you skim, so we can continue when you die!”

  Remaining seated, legs crossed yoga style, Carole leaned forward in a reverent bow. Rin did not like that she was taller, and he verbally contemplated killing her for it at least weekly.

  “I will tell you, Rin, before I die.”

  Rin laughed, a series of rat-a-tat-tat ha-ha’s, cold like verbal gunfire. He liked the answer, though, because he motioned her permission to go. Rin had very little use for women, and leaving the warehouse Carole was careful not to turn her back on him.

  CAROLE’S ABILITY TO skim kept her alive, her height the least of her troubles among the Chi-nu. Rin had allowed her in the gang for purely mercenary reasons. As the first female admitted into his inner circle, he seemed to search for a reason to get rid of her. He hated Americans, and though she spoke flawless Chinese and passed herself off as Australian, Rin said it was the same. Until she came along he’d recruited skimmers from the street children of prostitutes, and stole baby girls from a local Monastery where they were regularly abandoned. If the stolen babies were pretty, he sold them to nondescript ships that passed through port. If they weren’t, he put them in his ugly doll collection in a warehouse. For the first time in her work as a NOC, Carole had gone rogue. Maybe it was simply because she was a mother, and maybe it was because of Rutak’s charge to use his gift wisely, but one day she’d dropped into the Monastery and walked right into the Abbot’s office and told him how the babies were being stolen. It put an end to Rin’s baby trade and the loss of income pissed him off, but he never suspected her.

  Carole moved lightly over worn concrete sidewalks, and lifted a wallet from a drunken sailor leaning into the face of a pretty prostitute. The voices raised a ruckus about dishonor and stealing, but Rin liked wallets and this was life on the street. Good or bad, she was an excellent thief. She wondered what her father would have said if he’d known about her work. Would he have judged her like Fastest did? Glancing up and down the street, she felt fairly confident that she wouldn’t run into one of her kind in the squalor of these streets. Racing down an alley, she headed uptown.

  After what had happened in the desert, the four months among the Chin-nu were bearable for one reason, Friday’s skimming. Once Rin freed her, Carole had the entire day to prepare and meet the ship. Most skimmers spent the day devising new ways to hide the heroin. Carole spent it with Beth. Almost. Disguised as Ka, Carole dressed like an Asian punk rocker, her short hair dyed black and spiked. She wore black lipstick, shaved off her eyebrows, sported her gang’s tattoo on her neck, and had seventeen piercings on her face alone. Uptown shopkeepers didn’t allow her through their doors.

  Sensing Beth in the distance, Carole jogged closer. Hiding behind a rack of brightly dyed dresses displayed on the sidewalk, she soaked in the touch of her daughter and felt grateful that the closet of the CIA she now belonged to had done this for her. Risking a peek around the dresses, she spotted them.

  Beth’s new nanny was a canny native of Singapore, and Friday was market day. The petite and pretty nanny wheeled Beth in a stroller while bartering for goods. Beth twisted in her stroller and bellowed, “Hi, Mom.” Sometimes Carole regretted coercing her daughter into speaking only with her mouth, because everything Beth told her was loud and clear to anyone who understood English, which was the bulk of Singapore.

  “I like chewy bugs!” Beth leaned forward in the stroller, using her hands to emphasize her words. Nanny parked the stroller next to a bin of vegetables, negotiating price with a shopkeeper. Beth shouted at Carole while pointing at a bowl just out of reach. “Daddy won’t let me eat them, but nanny does!”

  The nanny dropped a couple of the deep fried Asian delicacy into Beth’s reaching hands and went back to arguing with a shopkeeper. Beth talked while she munched on the big brown bugs, her advanced vocabulary marred only by her chewing.

  “Why are you hiding in black hairs? Where’s the yellow ones? Does your face hurt like that, Mom?” Carole shrugged and shook her head in answer to the questions. She pretended to look over a bin of mangoes, shooting covert grins at Beth, who munched her treat and narrowed her eyes, studying her mother’s piercings from the distance. Beth finished chewing and added, “Monkeys eat poop.”

  At the conclusion of the nanny’s finagling, the petite woman passed Beth another bug, turning the stroller away. Carole dared follow, but kept well behind, coming only close enough to feel Beth’s heart occasionally before dropping safely back to avoid the nanny’s attention. Beth continued to bellow random tidbits in her direction, switching from English for the grand finale. “Nanny keeps the change!” The comment, spoken in clipped, neat Malay, made several heads swivel in the nanny’s direction. The tiny woman with waist-length dark hair defended herself to passersby in rapid-fire Malaysian.

  The random expositions of her daughter reunited Carole with her heart. The dishonor and evil of the Chi-nu, and the ache for her father, coupled with the chronic black dreams unleashed by the voices over her work, made the months move slowly. But for four heavenly hours every Friday, Carole followed Beth and her nanny, and Beth had yet to disappoint. At noon nanny took Beth to preschool and left her. Able to sense her, Beth shouted out a farewell to her mother. Today it was a profound, “Diqi eats crayons, Mom. I eat chalk.” It was time to go then. The preschool didn’t take well to a gang member lurking around, ogling the children.

  Nanny took the market haul back to the apartment. It was a small space over a restaurant that specialized in duck soup. Ted met her there for lunch. Carole had only followed once and knew better than to do that again. Besides, it was time to change into her skimmer disguise.

  UNLIKE RIN, LONGSHOREMEN had uses for females, and Carole ignored the voices and used what little advantages she had. Friday afternoons she showed up at the dock wearing indecent jean shorts, a tank top that would fit Beth, flip flops, and clutching a kid’s Kuti-Kuti lunch box. The ship docked. Some people departed and new ones boarded. Carole’s job was simply to stand watch over whatever crate she was pointed to that day. Her boarding process usually involved some grabbing and groping, but Carole moved fast, and when she elbowed some dock rat to his knees, the bulk of the men loved it. Skimming was the easy part of her assignment.

  There were eyes on her the entire time, and she knew that there were bets placed on how long she’d last. She also knew that the men were planning on doing worse than slitting her throat and tossing her on the garbage scow once they caught her. She wondered if they thought she was deaf or didn’t care if she heard them argue over who would get to do what.

  Disguised as her alter ego, Ka, Carole sat on the crate and ate her lunch. Most of the crew bet on that lunch as the vehicle for skimming the hero
in. It actually contained a box of brown rice, a cup of miso soup, and two pieces of fruit. After consuming her lunch, she painstakingly repacked the empty boxes, sat patiently on top of the crate, and at sundown she left. On her way off the ship they searched her empty boxes, and found nothing. Tonight the captain made her open her mouth and he shone a flashlight inside, then conducted his weekly pat down, taking his time and grinning throughout. Then he patted her on the head, told her she was a “Good Girl” and let her go, at which point Ka spit at his feet, made an obscene gesture and left.

  RIN CAUGHT CAROLE as soon as she entered the warehouse through a top window. With the rest of the gang at his back he had her dragged down the catwalk. At a nod from him, they started to yank off her clothes. Carole beat two of them unconscious, then stood in front of Rin and yanked the tank top and shorts off, spinning briefly, completely naked, before pulling her clothes back on herself.

  “Where you hide it, Funt?” Rin invented his own obscenities, and Carole felt they were certainly fouler than the run of the mill ones the gang used.

  Carole glared at him. “Where I always keep it, in my lunchbox.”

  “No bugging way, Girlie! I watch you myself since you leave ship. It empty on ship, it empty now. Check her on inside!” he ordered the gang.

  Carole yanked open the box to reveal the mountain of powder. “They touch me again and I throw it.”

  “Don’t get bitchy. You do good work here, Ka, I let you live. We go to your home now.”

  Anxiety prickled up Carole’s spine. Her home?

  “We go Australia in morning. Except Milo. I kill Milo. He boring. Play with ugly dolls tonight. Last time.” Rin walked off like a runway model.

  CAROLE HID ON the roof of the duck soup shop until midnight, when the nanny climbed into the shower. Ted lay watching TV as she dropped through the open window and landed behind him. Ted’s reflexes were impressive. Ducking a lamp he threw at her, she hissed, “Ted! It’s me!”