Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(28)
Author: Kim Harrison

It was close, and I pulled my eyes open to find Pierce had cradled my head in his lap. "Okay," I breathed. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," he said, and I smiled, snuggling in so I could hear his heartbeat. Maybe it was mine. "Stay with me," he said. "Just a few minutes more. They’re almost here."

Distantly I heard the sound of thumping feet overhead and loud voices. The heater clicked on, and the warm breeze made my hair tickle my face. Pierce brushed it off me, and I opened my eyes, smiling up at him blissfully.

"Holy shit!" a deep voice said. "There’s a hole in the floor."

The girl revealed us with a little sob. Standing under the hole she peered up, screaming, "Get me out of here! Someone get me out of here!"

"My God, it’s the girl!" another man said. "Damn, he was telling the truth."

"Just a little longer, Miss Rachel," Pierce whispered, and I closed my eyes again. But an icing of fear slid through me, almost waking me up when my mom’s voice cut through the babble, high-pitched and determined.

"Of course Robbie was telling the truth. You smart-assed agents think you’re so clever your crap doesn’t stink, but you couldn’t spell your way out of a paper bag."

"That’s my mom," I whispered, and Pierce’s grip on me tightened.

"Rachel?" she called, her voice getting louder, then, "Get your sorry ass out of my way. Rachel! Are you down there? My God, she circled a vampire. Look what my daughter did! She got him. She got him for you, you lazy bastards. Ignore my kids when they come to you, huh? I bet the news crew would like that. You either drop the charges on my kids, or I’m going out there and give them what they want."

I smiled, but I couldn’t open my eyes. "Hi, Mom," I whispered, my breath slipping past my lips. And then to Pierce, I added, "Don’t mind my mother. She’s a little nuts."

He chuckled, raising my head and rocking me. "I expect a body would have to be to raise you properly."

I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t, so I just smiled. There was the brush of wind against me as people moved about us. Someone had finally gotten Sarah out of here, and the sound of two-way radios and excited chatter had replaced her blubbering. "I’m sorry," I said, feeling like I’d failed them. "Someone needs to circle him. I’m passing out."

"Rest," Pierce whispered. "They have him. Let your circle down, Miss Rachel. I’ve got you."

I could hear a faint call for an ambulance and oxygen, and I had a fading thought that I was going to spend the last half of my solstice in the hospital, but we had done it.

And with that, I let go of the line and let oblivion take me, satisfied to the depths of my soul.

EIGHT

They say when you’re ten, you think your parents know everything. At sixteen, you’re convinced they know nothing at all. By thirty, if you haven’t figured out they really did know what they were doing, then you’re still sixteen. After watching my mom work the I.S. like a fish on a line, I was suitably impressed that she knew everything in the freaking world.

Smiling, I tugged the wool blanket tighter around me and scooted my folding chair closer to the small fire Robbie had started in the backyard. My mom was beside me, pointedly between my brother and me as we toasted marshmallows and waited for sunrise. I hadn’t been outside very long, and my breath steamed in the steadily brightening day. It was a few hours past my normal bedtime, but that’s not why my arms shook and my breath was slow. Damn, I was tired.

I’d fully expected to wake up in the hospital or ambulance, and was surprised when I had come to in the back of my mom’s car, still at the crime site. Wrapped in an I.S. blanket, I had stumbled out looking for Pierce to find myself in a media circus. Robbie and I had stood in the shadows and watched in awe as my mother worked a system I hadn’t even known existed. Through her deadly serious threats disguised as scatterbrained fussing, she not only managed to get the charges against me for willful destruction of private property dropped, but got them to agree that I didn’t have anything to do with their doors being blown out, much less fleeing their custody with an unknown person. The I.S. personnel were more than happy to give my mom whatever she wanted if she would keep her voice down, seeing as three news crews were within shouting distance.

Apparently the vampire I’d helped bring in had a history of such kidnappings, but because of his clout, he’d been getting away with it for years. I hated to go along with the shush work, but I didn’t want a record, either. So as long as my mother, Robbie, myself, and the girl kept quiet-her parents being placated with enough money to put Sarah through the university and therapy of her choice-the vampire would be charged with kidnapping, not the stiffer crime of underage enticement.

It didn’t bother me as much as I’d thought it would. He was still going to jail, and if vampire justice was like any other kind, he’d probably wake up one night with a wooden spoon jammed through his heart. Vampires didn’t like pedophiles any more than the next guy.

So Robbie’s and my trip to the I.S. had been dulled to an anonymous tip, making the I.S. out to be the heroes. Whatever. Along with the notoriety went any charges they might file against me. Mom had grounded me, though. God, I was nearly nineteen and grounded. What was up with that?

Of Pierce, there had been no sign. No one remembered seeing him apart from my mom.

A sigh shifted my shoulders, coming out as a thin mist catching the pink light of the nearing sunrise.

"Rachel," my mom said, reaching to tug the blanket closed around my neck, "that’s the third sigh in as many minutes. I’m sure he will be back."

I grimaced that she knew where my thoughts were, then searched the sky and the strips of clouds throwing back the sun in bands of pink. I’d known he’d be gone by sunrise, but I wished I’d had the chance to say goodbye. "No," I said, bobbing my marshmallow in and out of the flame. "He won’t. But that’s okay."

My mom gave me a sideways hug. "He looked like he really cared. Who was he?" she asked, and a hint of alarm slipped through me. "I didn’t want to ask in front of the I.S. because he rushed off as if he didn’t want to be noticed." She huffed, taking my stick with the now-burning marshmallow. "I don’t blame him," she muttered as she blew the little fire out. "They would have probably tried to pin the entire kidnapping on him. I don’t like vampires. Always shoving their nastiness under a rug or onto someone else’s plate."

Fingers gingerly taking the burnt marshmallow off, she smiled, her eyes brilliant in the clear light. In witch years, she wasn’t that much older than me, always dressing down to make herself match the other moms in the neighborhood. But the morning light always showed how young she really was.