Never ask how Earnest Riggs had crossed the girl’s notice.
“Wait for daylight,” the marshal said into the silence. “Just let it settle down. We’ve got about—what time is it?—it’s got to be toward dawn.”
“I can go look,” his daughter offered.
“No!” Peterson said sharply. And more quietly, “No. Not a good idea.” Peterson didn’t want his family scattering out, and neither did Ridley.
“That thing is running us wherever it likes,” Jeff Burani said. “We’ve got people down there at the bottom end of the street. Miners in barracks. Loggers in the hostel. The riders don’t want to split up, but we can’t be everywhere and we can’t move fast enough. We can’t protect just our houses and our families, the miners’ll lynch us!”
All those things were true. But those things were only half their danger. The marshal was advising they wait for daylight—but Ridley didn’t think it was going to hole up, if he had his guess. It might go right over the wall again and come back for more mischief tomorrow night.
Which might give them time to do something about Brionne Goss—but they hadas close to agreement in present company as they were going to get on that issue, tonight: the key people knewnow—and the panic he had feared if they knew the danger in Brionne Goss wasn’t, thank God, happening. The event was with them, and this one select group of villagers were at least willing to use their heads and try to out-think the beast that had come in on them—
Which wasn’t a horse, wasn’t Carlo Goss, and wasn’t a rogue cat. This thingwas a better climber. It was smarter around structures, very fast—which might be human intelligence feeding images into it—but it also figured out the tunnels as a means to play a hideous game of hide-and-seek so that they hadn’t gotten a clear shot at it. That was smart. And a rogue of whatever species didn’t by all he knew acquireabilities, it just lost all sane braking on the abilities it had until it killed itself. So this thing wasn’t a rogue. It wasn’t any threat Rogers Peak had ever seen, and the only reasonable conclusion was that a stray from the outback, maybe attracted by the crisis in the ambient, had come into the area like a willy-wisp to the smell of blood.
“It’s attracted to the girl in Darcy’s house,” he said. “It’s concentrating its mischief up at this end. But never there—because it’s being elusive and that would give it away. That’s what I’m thinking. The girl’s attracted it and the girl’s guiding it, consciously or unconsciously. She’s got to be silenced. Stopped. Put out cold.”
“That’s pretty hard-minded,” John Quarles said. “That poor child, rider-boss, —”
“I don’t say do her any lasting harm, but if we quiet Brionne Goss it mightforget why it was here. At least it won’t have a human mind steering it. Slip her something. Darcy’s a doctor, for God’s sake. She’s got to have somethingin the office that won’t hurt her. This thing’s mapping the village for that girl. It’s going all around the village, but not there. It will. And thenwhat happens?”
“You can’t even tell us what it is,” the marshal’s wife said.
“I can tell you it’s not from this side of the mountains. I can tell you it’s damn smart. I can tell you while we’re arguing, it’s picking up our intentions in the ambient and telling a thirteen-year-old girl what we’re apt to do, and it’s only begun to do its work on this mountain if we don’t stop it here, Lucy. I’ll swearthat to you.”
“I’ll go put it to Darcy,” John Quarles said. “She’ll listen to me.”
“Not alone,” Ridley said. “Line of sight. Rifles lined up and us watching.”
“I’m aware the beast is dangerous,” the preacher said. “But if your theory is right, diminishing the threat to the girl andthe beast might actually lessen the danger.”
“I’ll have that porch in my rifle sights. —Listen to me, preacher. I’m asking you, don’t endanger anybody including that girl. Trust mygood wishes and if you hear anything untoward on that porch, drop flat instantly and I’ll shoot right over you. Don’t confuse our aim. Trustus. All right?“
“I’ve every confidence,” Quarles said, and handed his shotgun to the marshal. “But most of all, I’ll trust in the Lord.”
Quarles walked out through the falling snow, then.
Brave, Ridley gave him that, as he slid down from Slip’s back and lifted his rifle—not the only one drawing a bead on that area.
“Stay still,” Callie was saying to Jennie, and to all the people around them.
“She’s just real mad,” Jennie said quietly, her thoughts rising very softly to the top of the ambient. “She knows we’re here. She knows Randy’s here. She knows about the preacher coming to the door. She’s not happy at all. She wants it to come and drive us away.”
Jennie was sending too much, Ridley realized that too late. Jennie and Brionne were trading fartoo much, and what had been a quiet struggle between two kids was suddenly reaching after all of them. The rifle wanted to shake in his hands as he stared down the sight and widened his focus to the whole porch, any movement in the snow-obscured night.
Then he knew something else—a wider ambient than had existed. It had direction. Distance. Outside the wall.
Horses. On the road.
<Danny and Cloud,> it was. More than one rider. But that was definitely <Cloud.> And Jennie and Callie knew it from him.
<Danny> hit the ambient and shivered in the air, force added to their force.
He thought then of calling out to the preacher to come back. But he thought if a preacher could ever bein the ambient, John Quarles was there right now, and if ever they had the chance to reach Darcy, they had it now. Quarles knew something had changed just now, surely. He hadto be aware of the arrival.
<Danger flared through the nerves, and Danny still ran. Tara was beside him and he kept going, the way they’d challenged each other all along. The light was coming in the east, and they were on that last stretch of road that led them to a village under assault, a village where <blood> and <fear> had run riot and <desire> crazed the ambient.
They wanted, too. They wanted to be there, and around the next turning of the road, obscured in a thin veil of snow, Danny saw the village wall. He knew then they’d arrived and he pushed himself despite the ache in his side to keep running and not even to waste time getting up on Cloud. A jarred and frantic portion of the working brain said that in a crisis no one might be able to reach the gate to open it for them, and he might need to be on the ground to try to open it from outside. If the village had left the rope outside that made that possible.
He ran, he told the ambient <riders coming> as he stumbled down the last of the road. Cloud wanted <taking him up,> Cloud wanted <Shimmer and Slip and Rain, inside the wall, sensing danger. Horses listening to them as they came. Riders aware of them. Danger present—>
They reached the lesser gate through a trampled space that said that this gate at least had opened—but not in hours, Danny judged by the rounded edges of the prints. Horses were <inside the village,> at the other end of the street, no one was near the wall, and neither village gate had budged since yesterday.
Bad business. And the pull-cord wasn’tout.
“Damn it!” Tara said, and with her knife through a gap in the timbers tried to raise the heavy bar inside. Danny lent his hands to the effort, both of them pushing and struggling until finally it waslifted as high as they could hold it, and it wouldn’t clear the trip-latch.
They were atEvergreen, there was all hell broken loose inside as they listened to it, and nobody could let them in the gate.