The Permanent Efficacy of Grace
5.
Despite her concerns, O'Hara doesn't seem to intend to start driving. He sticks to the woods, heading south for maybe half a mile before abruptly looping up and heading directly north. As the day wears on and warms up, the frost disappears, but the ground turns muddy and tracking him just gets easier—a little too easy, in fact. He loops around in circles now and again, though he always ends up ultimately heading north, and Rook can't budge the feeling that she's being toyed with.
Sure would be a great time to have some backup, she thinks as she starts limping up her third mountain of the day with a pained little exhale, and she fiddles with her radio, thinking about calling on Sharky. She decides against it. Aside from her existing qualms… well, she hasn't looked in a mirror today, but she's pretty sure she's looking kind of haggard. The arrow wound seems to be healing pretty well, it hurts but not too badly, but her side throbs, the chills are running through her whole body by now, and she hasn't felt hungry or thirsty all day, which probably isn't a good sign. She doesn't want to take the chance that Sharky will take one look at her and decide that she has no business tracking a serial killer across the Henbane right now, not when she's following such a strong trail. After what she saw in that barn, she really doesn't want to let this guy get away.
It's only when she realizes that she's on the outskirts of the Henbane, heading up to the Whitetail Mountains, that she pauses. She has just passed the woods outside of Adelaide's marina, crossed the road quickly only to pick up the trail again, and she stops for a second, looking at the boot-prints continuing steadily north. (Part of her can't believe she's followed his trail this long and still hasn't caught up; another, more realistic part of her knows that she's dragging, moving much slower than usual, and if O'Hara is in even reasonable shape then it makes sense that he's outpaced her so far. She's convinced, though, that if she keeps it up, he'll flag before she does, and she is armed to the teeth and ready to take him out once she overtakes him.)
After staring at the path for a long minute, she picks up her radio again. "Faith, come in. You there, Faith? It's the Deputy again."
Faith answers quickly enough that Rook thinks she might have been waiting for the call. "Deputy. Any word?"
There's concern in her voice, and it rings a little truer than her we're worried for your soul spiel usually does. Well, that's encouraging. "No real news. I'm still on his trail but he's about to pass out of the Henbane and into the Mountains." She hesitates, and when Faith is silent, she decides to just get it over with. "If you would… get in touch with Jacob, tell him what I'm up to, ask him not to send his stupid hunters after me while I'm on the trail, that would be awesome."
"You don't know which channel he uses?" Faith sounds entirely too innocent. Rook rolls her eyes.
"Yeah, but he doesn't want to hear from me right now. Ever. I think he'd actually listen if the request was coming from you."
"He'll know you asked."
"Maybe, but I feel like just the sound of my voice will have him ignoring rational thought," Rook says dryly—and she doesn't really care what Faith reads into that; rumors are all over the county by now, and if Faith doesn't know about the breakup yet just from the family grapevine (unlikely), she's smart enough to piece it together. "Just… please. For the sake of the people this fucker has already taken out." And for my sake, she doesn't add, not quite confident enough that the affection Faith has shown her the few times they've met is real and not just put on as a part of her role with the cult, or just Bliss bullshit.
The radio chirps again long before Faith answers. She hears her breathe in, then out, then finally, she says, "I'll talk to him. No promises, Deputy."
"That's all I'm asking. Thank you." Rook turns her radio off and packs it into her bag. She takes a pull of water from her canteen, ignoring the way it makes her stomach twist and squirm like it's full of snakes, and then, dragging a deep breath into her lungs and pretending not to notice that it seems to highlight the fatigue she's feeling in every muscle of her body, she follows O'Hara into the mountains.
Rook doesn't realize what he's doing until he does it.
If she was at a hundred percent, she'd have figured it out at the first loop, recognized the unnecessary double-tracking for what it was, an effort to wear her down, but she's been so focused on just putting one foot in front of the other and not losing his trail. It just doesn't cross her mind that he's been leading her from one end of the county to the other all day in anticipation of a confrontation, not in an attempt to avoid one.
Then, in the woods just north of the lumber mill, just as she's starting to wonder if she'll be able to head him straight into the Veteran's Center, where Jacob's people seem pretty capable of making short work of him, she loses the trail. It's right in the middle of a muddy clearing—or the bottom of a ravine, maybe, given the shallow rocky cliffs bordering the area. The tracks just stop.
Rook reaches the end of them and freezes. She tries to catch her breath—feels like she's been winded all day—and stares at the last boot print, over an inch deep in the mud, and then the absolute nothing that follows it. She looks around, tries to identify marks in the mud or detritus that could be covering further tracks, but the forest floor is unmarred, with the molding piles of fallen leaves undisturbed as far as she can tell.
She realizes that the only way the prints could stop without disturbing anything nearby is if he backed out using them again just a split-second before she hears the leaves rustle behind her, and she whirls around right as something stings her in the neck.
She slaps a hand to the sore spot, lashes out automatically at the shadow at the edges of her vision, but it vanishes before she can make contact. She keeps turning, trying to find her attacker, but her vision blurs at the motion and just the one sharp turn makes her feel nauseated, so she abandons the idea, trying to draw her pistol instead.
It's like her holster has grown teeth. She pulls and wrestles at the gun, but it doesn't budge, and suddenly she's just… looking up at the sky. It takes her a second to register that she's on her back on the ground, but funnily enough, the fall didn't hurt. Nothing hurts, actually; right now she just feels sort of floaty and warm, and it's such a nice change from how raw and awful she's felt all day (and for days before this) that she just relaxes and looks up at the gray sky through the tree branches. She can't really remember what she was supposed to be doing, anyway.
She doesn't know how much time passes. Seconds, minutes, hours, maybe, but suddenly she becomes aware that a face has drifted into her vision, and she frowns and tilts her head in the rustling leaves and does what she can to focus on it. It's a man. She can't tell how old he is. She can't really focus on his face, not when there's a bright glowing red clown nose in the center of it.
She frowns. "Who are you?"
He smiles, a warm, toothy smile. "I'm your best friend."
Her frown deepens. "No, that's Sharky. You aren't Sharky."
He bends close to her, and the world whirs. Suddenly she's upright, on her feet, her hands in his. He's kind of a big guy, only an inch or two taller than she is, but dense, and when she reflexively tugs her hands back, he doesn't let them go. He's wearing a shiny black apron over white clothing spattered in rusty brown. She pulls harder—she wants to touch that nose, it doesn't look real but she can't see any seams on it, either—but he just holds tight and says, "Let's dance."
"I don't dance with strangers," she objects weakly, a reflexive line, her default defense against approaches on nights out, but he pulls her into a lazy circle.
"Oh, I know exactly who you are," he says. His voice is a little strange, lilting and a bit high-pitched for his size. Rook blinks hard as the forest behind him blurs with movement. "You're the Junior Deputy. You're famous. What's your kill count since you came here, I wonder?"
She shakes her head, then stops, because it just makes the dizziness worse. "Oh… I don't talk about that."
"You should. I would be proud. Me—well, I've still just got rookie numbers. But I'm working on it."
Somehow, she's not sure how, her hands are resting on his shoulders, and he has one arm around her back, pulling her close to his chest, which seems somehow soft and hard at the same time. His face is so close to hers, and she stares at it, trying to figure out why she doesn't know it when he's talking to her like this, but her train of thought keeps vanishing, gone in the dark every time she tries to pin it down.
He says, very quietly, "I've thought often about making you the star of the show. But now, up close…" He sighs, shakes his head, clicks his tongue regretfully. "You really aren't that impressive. I don't know that you deserve it." He stops their movement. The forest stabilizes behind him. He stares intently at her, and she looks just as intently back, her vague thoughts telling her he's not your friend, you don't know him, this is dangerous, but her body feels heavy and sluggish and it seems like the hardest thing imaginable to even just lift her hands away from his shoulders.
He says, after a moment, "I think I'll just bury you. Alive, though I'm not sure how long you'll stay that way."
She feels something at her stomach, something between a poke and a burn, and finally her hands move, though she doesn't really remember asking them to—they brace against his broad shoulders and push, and he moves an obliging step back. There's something in his hand, something that shines red, and she looks down at her stomach where she felt that pang. A flower of matching red is growing wetly at the base of the gray Cheeseburger t-shirt she'd thrown on that morning.
She frowns again, confused, and looks back up at his smiling and friendly face. "Who's bleeding?" she asks.
He laughs—a voracious, high-pitched near-howl that sounds familiar, though she can't remember why, and chills her to the bone. Then he grabs her hand, and she spins, and spins, and spins.
Jacob is fine. He's been fine all week.
He's working extra-hard now, especially now that his plan for the Whitetails has been thwarted—that's okay, he's got backup ideas, other captured Whitetails he's priming through trials and conditioning to do what has to be done, and he's more aggressive than ever in the face of the setback. (He's lost a lot of them. He might be moving too fast, but Joseph is ramping up his talk about the Collapse, and they really don't have much time to finish preparing, and he really wants to get the mountains fully under control before everything goes to shit. He doesn't have time to coddle the Weak.)
He doesn't spare a thought for the Deputy, beyond what he absolutely has to. The news that she'd been sprung from the convoy transport had been unwelcome, to say the least (he should have known better; he should have accompanied her himself, no way she'd have gotten free if he'd been on guard, but he'd been blinded by his own anger and frustration at the time and nothing seemed more important than getting her out of his sight), but it's not all bad. John called him up a couple of days ago to report that Jacob's indiscretion (he pronounced the word a little too gleefully, making Jacob white-knuckle the radio and think you're lucky I'm not in the room with you, you shit-sucking little prick) might actually be working to their advantage now, that he'd had reports of Resistance firing on the Deputy whenever she showed up, and that she was currently MIA, probably hiding from her own people as much as she was hiding from theirs.
Joseph is pleased, despite the Deputy's escape. The news that her whole world seems to be caving in on her has made him extra-benevolent, and he hasn't said a word of reproach to Jacob since their meeting in the church. He has asked Jacob to attend services almost daily, though, and, feeling the need to do some kind of penance, Jacob has obliged him, though lately standing at the back of the stage and watching the devout Faithful wearing their naked idolization of his brother on their stupid faces has been making him feel itchy, angry, enough that he leaves the second he can get away and goes back to the Veteran's Center to force the Chosen to spar with him with increasing frequency. (He's broken a few bones—none of them his. His knuckles are a painful, pulpy mess, roughly the consistency of raw hamburger. He's not sure where all this energy is coming from or why he can't seem to dispel it no matter how physical he gets.)
Then, maybe a week after he sent the Deputy away, he gets a call.
He's turned his radio off for the day, tired of the chatter and hoping to avoid a summons to Joseph's compound for the fifth day in a row, but it turns out to be futile bid, because a Chosen comes running into his office after less than an hour's quiet. He glares, and the Chosen's eyes are wide and fearful, but they put a radio down on his desk, and he instantly hears why: "Brother Jacob?" comes Faith's honeyed voice over the frequency. "Brother Jacob. Come in. This is important."
"Get out," he growls at the Chosen, who wisely flees. He picks up the radio and says, "Faith. What's going on?"
Despite her claims that this is important, she's silent for a long stretch, ten, maybe fifteen seconds, and just when he's about to rip her a new one for bothering him for no reason, the radio chirps. "The Deputy found a serial killer."
He feels his brows shoot up. Whatever he was expecting, that hadn't been it. "Come again?"
"In my region. He's apparently been killing indiscriminately, ours and theirs alike. I sent some people in to check out her claims. He's stuffed bodies like dummies, used them as props in his haunted house."
Am I having a goddamn stroke?
He's too baffled by this turn of events to make a verbal answer. Faith knows him better than to wait around for one. (He'll never tell her this, but she's his favorite Faith. Not only did she take to his training with a whip-smart toughness that he would never expect from someone who looked like her, but she's not hesitant with him and his brothers like the others were, molded herself into the family dynamic and made herself indispensable mere days after meeting them, before she even became Faith. She's the only person he's ever met who he thinks could actually have been blood-related to them—and he'll never speak that thought out loud.)
She says, "She's been tracking him up through the Henbane, but she's reached the mountains now, and she asked me to ask you not to have her hunted down."
Right at that second, another Chosen shows up at the door, her eyes shining with urgency. Jacob says, "What is it," although he already knows.
"The Deputy crossed the border from the Henbane Region ten minutes ago," she tells him. "Orders?"
"Wait," he says simply, resisting the urge to ask then why didn't I hear about it nine minutes ago, and triggers the radio again. "Why didn't she ask me herself?"
"She seems to think you don't want to hear from her," Faith replies, and he hopes he's imagining the wry note in her voice.
"She thinks that just because she's hunting a goddamn serial killer then this whole war gets suspended? She gets a truce, no holds barred?"
A pause, then Faith says, "Well, he seems to be a pretty nasty serial killer."
Jacob shakes his head. Unbelievable. "I'll handle it," he says into the radio.
"Jacob…" Faith sounds worried, maybe a little bit exasperated, but he's done with this conversation.
"Over and out," he says, and switches off the radio before she can protest. He looks at the Chosen—a good recruit, named Thatcher, he recognizes her now. "You got eyes on the Deputy?"
"Sir," she says, standing at attention. "Our hunters are tracking her now."
"Where?"
"Just over the region line, heading northwest. Towards the lumber mill. Should I tell them to take her out?"
"No," he says, that weird energy from the last week roaring happily in his chest, thrilled at having some direction. "We're going to head her off ourselves. Get Horowitz, Marston, and O'Shea, they've got five minutes, they're coming with me. Does anyone have eyes on the guy she's after?"
"Yes sir, White male, approximately six feet tall, two-thirty. He's maybe a quarter-mile in front of her. Hunters say he's got bloodstains on his clothes, armed with a knife and a pistol."
He nods. "Get three or four people you trust; head out with us. I may need you to pin him down once we stop her."
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
She leaves in swift silence. Jacob takes the couple of minutes he's given his people to get ready to arm up, ignoring the fact that the tension in his chest feels nervous (ridiculous). He packs his knife and his rifle and a handgun in his thigh holster, the usual gear, because it sounds like they'll just be facing up against the Deputy and whoever this apparent killer is—the Deputy might be a threat in ordinary circumstances, but not surrounded by his hunters with their Bliss arrows and Jacob and several of his Chosen, while the killer, whoever he is, seems like no threat at all, given his limited firepower and the fact that he appears to be running away from her.
At five minutes exactly, he hits the courtyard, and Thatcher has managed to ready everyone by then. He makes eye contact with Marston, motions with his head towards one of the vans, and the two groups load up in their separate vehicles and head out.
The hunters, to his disappointment, lose her in a particularly thick snarl of forest outside of the lumber mill—the news makes him unbearably tense and twitchy—but as their little convoy draws close to the mill, one of them sparks the radio and whispers, "Eyes on targets. It looks like he's stabbed her, sir."
Jacob hadn't brought his own radio, but all of his men have theirs, and he immediately grabs one from the closest—O'Shea—and says, "What?"
"Sir," says the hunter. "He's confronted her, sir. It looks like he stabbed her in the abdomen."
"Shoot him, goddamnit," Jacob says, without needing to think about it at all. "Shoot him now."
There's a tense, near-unbearable silence for about a minute. Then the radio clicks back on, and a different hunter, sounding sheepish, says, "We missed him."
Jacob's tone is deadly. "You what."
"The arrow flew wide," the hunter says apologetically. "He scattered. He left her and he's taken cover in the woods."
Jacob presses his snarling mouth hard to the radio and says, "You follow him. You catch him, and bring him to me, or I swear to God I will skin you and staple it to the goddamn gates."
"Yes, sir," says the hunter after a brief, sullen silence. Not long after, the van reaches the Deputy's last reported location, and Jacob is throwing the back doors open wide, jumping out to look for her.
She's off the road. He spots her shape through the trees, down at the floor of a shallow ravine. He doesn't hesitate or wait for his backup—rifle in hands, he treks fast down the edge of the ravine (slides is probably the more accurate word) and stops short the second he gets a good look at her.
She's standing upright, though there's a weird slump to her, like she's been drawn up by puppet strings, and her back is mostly-turned to him. She's staring up at the sky like she's confused.
"Rook," he says, his voice sounding rougher than it should, not pointing the rifle at her, but holding it at the ready, just in case.
She spins at the sound, nearly loses her balance, her arms windmilling out to keep her upright, and he takes an instinctive step closer. She stays on her feet, though, and her eyes come to rest on him, though it takes a second before he sees any actual focus. Then she smiles, and the sight of it makes his stomach drop for some indefinable reason. "Hey!" she says warmly.
He moves a little bit closer, conscious of the fact that she's still armed. He hears his people sliding down the ravine behind him. She's obviously drugged to the gills, he can see it from the glaze in her eyes and her weird stance, somehow tense and drunken all at once. He squints at her and, trying to ignore the sudden pounding of his heart, he shows her three fingers and says, "How many fingers am I holding up, Rook?"
She makes an effort to look, he can see it, but almost immediately, her shoulders drop and she raises her eyebrows very seriously. "Oh, I don't know, that seems like your business."
That's about when he spots the fresh blood soaking dark into her gray t-shirt—stupid, he should have seen it first thing—but even without it, she looks like she's on death's door. There's an unnatural blanch to her skin, making her look more gray than anything, and she looks gaunt, he swears she must have lost ten pounds in the single week since he saw her last. Fuck it. He slings his rifle behind his back by its strap and advances on her quickly, and she steps towards him as well, but stumbles almost immediately.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," he says, catching her by the elbows and holding her upright—her hands grasp him by the forearms, their grip weaker than he's used to, coming from her. "You okay?"
It's a stupid question, asked more by reflex than anything else, but her wide eyes catch his and she says, "Oh, I'm fine. How are you?"
He transfers both of her hands to one of his forearm—she's putting more weight on them than should be necessary, and her skin is unnaturally hot against his—and reaches for her shirt and pulls it up to view the damage. There's a fresh stab wound, all right, on her left, bloodied enough that it's hard to tell the severity of it, and there's a bandage to her right, over the same injury she'd been nursing last time he saw her. He reaches down, pulls the bandage off, and then hisses involuntarily when he sees the full mess of her abdomen. The stabbing is bad enough, but that fucking bullet wound—it's angry-looking and discolored, with yellowish pus forming around its edges. Fucking infected. He should never have let her leave with it bruised and re-opened like that.
He looks at her face. If anything, she's a worse fucking shade of gray than before, and faintly, unlike her, she admits, "I'm not feelin' too hot, Jake."
Her knees crumple then, but he's ready for it, sweeping one arm beneath them, the other behind her shoulders, and he lifts her up—she's a tall woman, strong, heavy, but the sudden and powerful adrenaline burst makes carrying her easy for him just now. He turns around, looks at the questioning Chosen, and says, "Thatcher, you and your crew, join the hunters, find the son of a bitch she was following and bring him to me. Now." His voice is miraculously steady.
"And us?" Marston asks, never a man of many words.
"Ride with me. Back to the Veteran's Center," Jacob adds, climbing the ravine via a shallower path he hadn't noticed on the way down. "Now. Fast. If she dies…"
For once, his propensity for creative threats fails him, his mind stuck on that idea, if she dies. He feels panic flaring, a foreign sensation to him for years and years now, and he looks down at her face. Her eyes are open and wide, searching his face like she thinks that somehow she'll get answers from him. He clenches his jaw, looks away, focuses on getting up to the top of the ravine, and Horowitz, lighter and quicker and on the road first, opens the back of the van for him. Jacob laboriously climbs in and settles Rook on his lap, still bridal-style, because doesn't want her sitting upright, wants to keep as much strain off her stomach as possible right now.
"Drive," he barks as O'Shea and Marston load themselves into the front. "We gotta get her to a medic, now." If they're confused at his sudden shift in attitude towards the Deputy, they're smart enough not to say so, and the engine revs as O'Shea guns it and swings them in a quick loop back towards the Veteran's Center.
The blood has saturated the whole bottom of her shirt. Jacob works his hand under the warm wet fabric, finds the stab wound, and presses his palm against it as hard as he can. Rook convulses in his lap at the pressure and makes a low, groaning, awful sound, the sound of an animal in pain. "Shh, shh, shh," he says, barely conscious of the sounds leaving his mouth, his mind a terrible rush of what if she's in shock, what if she bleeds out here in the back of the van, what if it's all too much for her and she fucking dies? "I know, honey. I know it hurts."
She's drawing in trembling, rapid breaths through her clenched teeth and when he looks at her face again, she's staring at him, the whites of her eyes huge, her pupils just little black pinpricks. She says, shakily, "I didn't think I would see you again."
He pulls on a smile that feels more like a grimace even to him. "Probably should've known better."
She laughs at that—of course she does—though it turns to coughing almost immediately. Jacob presses hard against her belly and says, "You just hold on, Dep. I'll get you taken care of, you just gotta tough it out till then. Understand?"
She nods, or tries to, but the drugs or the pain or the infection or the blood loss overwhelm her, and he sees her eyes start to roll back in her head. He shakes her, barks her name—"Rook. Rook!" but she doesn't respond, her eyelids sliding closed. He uses the arm behind her shoulders to fish an arm out, and checks her pulse—it's there, but it's thready.
Jacob pulls her closer and bows his head over her. He hasn't prayed with any sincerity in many, many years, privately convinced it doesn't do a damn thing. He does it now anyway.