Strange Country Page 3

  None of the chores she meant to do lay outside the iron hex ring, so she leaned the poker up against the side of the barn before she began. She carried it pretty much everywhere these days, because there might be a gap in the ring, because it paid to be prepared, because the world was a dangerous place. She grabbed two small square bales from a stack against the lee wall of the barn and crossed to the corral. A lean-to covered the near end where the horses could get shelter in bad weather and contained a long hayrack against the fence. She dumped both bales into the rack, hopped up on the railing, leaned over, and cut the strings of the first bale, pulling the twine from underneath the bale as it spilled sideways. Then she did the same with the second bale. The horses she’d inherited from Pabby approached quietly, almost like shadows themselves, and took what felt like their assigned places, four of them at one end of the rack and the fifth by itself at the other. She’d need to move one of the big round bales later in the week, but these would do for now.

  Afterwards, she made a quick circuit of the perimeter. Pabby’s mother had buried the giant hex ring around the house, the barn and part of the lower pasture almost fifty years ago. It kept out ghosts, black dogs, reapers, and, Hallie figured, pretty much any other supernatural creature, including, she hoped, Death. There was a break in the ring back when the walls to the under had been torn, though she’d repaired it since. Eventually she intended to dig up the whole thing in sections, inspect it, and repair it where necessary. Later, when she actually owned the place. For now, she settled for checking it regularly. Not that she could see anything or tell if there was a break, since it was buried six feet deep.

  She checked it anyway.

  It was still dark and her feet crunched on the frost-hard grass as she walked. She could see headlights way off to the south and she wondered if it was Boyd, knew that he was working nights, and that he drove past the ranch at least once each shift. Usually not more than that. He covered a big area. But it was enough, she thought, to know that he was out there.

  It was while she was watching the lights curving along the road that something lighter than the shadows beyond the yard light caught her attention. Whatever it was, it fluttered like an old flag a dozen yards along the driveway. It hadn’t been there when she came outside. Or she hadn’t seen it. But it had been darker then and still. She looked around now, her back to the front porch—force of habit, because there was no one and she’d known there was no one, because she always looked. Always.

  She grabbed the fireplace poker from where she’d left it earlier. The iron was cold even through her gloves, but the weight of it felt reassuring in her hand. She headed down the driveway and stopped when she reached the edge of the ring. She had only a few more feet to go, just six steps. Six steps outside the ring. She didn’t have to do it. Not right now. She could wait until it was light, until she could see exactly what it was from inside the ring, until she could be absolutely 100 percent certain there were no reapers or anything else from the under waiting out there for her.

  Yeah.

  She pulled in a breath and let it out.

  Damnit.

  She lived here. This was her place. She would go where she needed to go. Had to. She closed her eyes. Opened them. Took another deep breath. Her hand gripped the poker like a lifeline.

  She stepped out of the ring.

  Something rustled in the tall grass to her right and she took an immediate step backwards, hand gripping the poker like it was a baseball bat. She stepped forward. Nothing. A frigid gust of wind heeled the brittle grass over with a long sigh. Then the wind died and it was quiet. When Hallie moved again, the scrape of her boots against the dirt seemed like the only sound in the universe.

  Six steps.

  It was a fence post, an old wooden one that she didn’t remember being there before, not this far up the drive. Lashed to it with what looked like half-unwound baling twine was a piece of heavy paper with thick writing that she couldn’t make out in the dark. She took the note and kicked at the post with her foot, hit it solid with the sole of her boot. It shattered, like it was a thousand years old, crumpling to dust. She could see what remained, in the weak light from the yard and the fading moonlight, ash and char. There was a smell too, something she couldn’t identify, old and dry and brittle.

  She didn’t even look at the note until she was across the ring once more, because who knew what had brought the note and the post. Something old and dark, she bet. Something she didn’t want and had never asked for.

  Goddamn.

  With a sound half like a growl, but mostly like frustration, she returned to the house, walking around to the side door into the kitchen. She stomped her boots on the mat and let the storm door swing shut behind her with a snap. She put the iron poker by the door, sorry she hadn’t gotten to use it on something, pulled the lined leather work glove on her left hand off with her teeth and read the note.

  IT IS TIME TO FACE YOUR FEAR, it said.

  Followed by a set of coordinates— +43° 46' 22.85", −102° 0' 17.38".

  No signature. The words—and it looked like they had been written with a black crayon rather than a marker—were in block letters.

  What the hell?

  Clearly it was related to the phone call. Equally clearly she had no idea what it meant.

  She laid the note on the kitchen table.

  It had been outside the hex ring, which meant supernatural. Probably. Well, pretty certainly.

  Unless it was a joke.

  She shed her other work glove and her jacket, but left the hooded sweatshirt and her boots on while she made coffee. As the coffee brewed, she went in the room at the back of the house that had once been a downstairs bedroom—technically, two downstairs bedrooms, so tiny, they made one normal-sized room when the wall between them had been removed several dozen years ago. She fired up the desktop computer she’d bought in Rapid City three weeks ago, and looked up the coordinates. Right in the middle of the Badlands.

  It had to be a joke.

  Except so many things had turned out not to be jokes or myths or fiction lately that she was pretty sure she couldn’t count on that.

  A ghost? It would be the first ghost who had ever brought her a note.

  Death?

  She’d expected him for months. Thought maybe she’d imagined the whole thing at the end, imagined him asking her to take his place, though she knew that she hadn’t. He’d told her he couldn’t exist in the world—in dreams, yes, she could see him there, but not in the physical world, not where others could see him. For a while, when the walls were thin between the living world and the under, when reapers pursued their own missions and people fell through to the other side, he’d existed as a black shadow.

  But that was over. The walls were back. He wasn’t here. He couldn’t be.

  Still, Death would come; it was inevitable.

  Just not now, she thought. Not today.

  “It is time to face your fear,” the note said. But Hallie was good at that, at facing things. That was what she did. She’d been through Afghanistan, Martin Weber, Death, for hell’s sake. It wasn’t as if she felt like she was invulnerable or even like she could handle anything—that was the kind of thing that got you killed. But this—the note, the phone call before it, all of it—was so obviously set up to frighten her. Hallie didn’t like doing the thing that was expected of her. Especially if what was expected was that she should be afraid.

  The coffeemaker beeped and she crossed to the counter to pour herself a cup, then returned to the table to study the note. The writing was crude, like it had been written with someone’s off hand. The paper the note had been written on was thick and rough. She could see fibers in it, like someone had made it themselves from wood pulp. There was charring around the edges as if it had been thrown into fire and then snatched back out. She had no idea if any of that meant anything, because she didn’t know what the note itself meant or who it was from.

  She looked at the clock. Quarter after six
. Boyd got off shift in forty-five minutes. She’d call him then, ask him to meet her for breakfast at the Dove in Old Prairie City. Between the two of them, they would figure this out.

  She heard a sound outside, like a truck changing gears as it came up the drive—a big truck, not a pickup. Automatically, she looked out the kitchen window, but of course she couldn’t see anything, because it was still dark outside and the lights were on in the kitchen. She went to the back door, shrugged into her barn coat, and grabbed her gloves. She briefly considered grabbing the shotgun in the hall closet, but whoever had left the note had done it silently. They hadn’t driven a big old truck up her driveway—she’d have heard them. And they weren’t going to come back with one now.

  Once she was outside and around the corner of the house, she recognized the truck—Laddie Kennedy. Laddie and his brother had lost their own ranch several years ago when cattle prices were down and they couldn’t pay off their bank loans. The one thing Laddie wanted was to ranch again, and the dozen head of cattle he ran on Hallie’s pasture were the result of years of saving and scraping and making do. In exchange, Laddie gave her information. About the dead mostly, who talked to him. And sometimes about the future. Maybe. Laddie himself said he wasn’t completely sure whether he could actually predict the future or was just a really good guesser.

  Either way, Hallie found him useful. And she didn’t mind the company. Which was something too. Still, she had no idea why he was coming up her drive at 6 A.M.

  He pulled into the yard and parked beside Hallie’s pickup truck. The sun was still below the horizon, the only indication that dawn was approaching an almost imperceptible lightening to the east. Thin clouds hung low, hazing the moon and blotting out the stars. Laddie’s truck, parked slantwise in the yard, was nothing but a dark shape, like a three-dimensional shadow cast by the yard light. Laddie climbed out of the cab, followed by a rangy coonhound that circled Hallie once and Laddie twice and then disappeared into the shadows behind the barn.

  Hallie waited, but Laddie didn’t say anything right away. He looked pretty much as he always did, sheepskin-lined denim jacket, old jeans and broken-down boots, no gloves and a gimme cap with frayed brim pushed to the back of his head.

  “Didn’t know if you’d be up,” he finally said.

  And yet, you’re here, Hallie wanted to say. Instead, she asked, “Do you need something?”

  Laddie looked around, whistled up the dog, who came loping over with its tongue hanging out despite the crisp air. He let it back into the cab of the truck, then turned back to Hallie. “You got coffee?” he said.

  Hallie led him around and into the kitchen. He looked at the note on the table, but didn’t say anything as Hallie picked it up and set it on a shelf out of immediate view. She poured coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and waited. She wasn’t patient, but she’d been back in Taylor County long enough to remember this—no one talked until they were ready.

  4

  “Lately,” Laddie began. He’d taken off his cap and hung it on the back of his chair. His hair, which was light brown, graying almost imperceptibly at the sides, spiked up in the front from the hat, and he ran his fingers through it briefly as he continued. “Lately, the dead have been talking to me all the time.” He ran a hand along the rough stubble on his chin, more gray than brown, and looked at a spot on the kitchen wall where an old picture of Pabby’s had once hung. “I mean, all the time. Day and night. Most of it doesn’t make any sense. That’s the way they are, you know. Most of the time they tell me things that are important to them—how they died or how they wished they’d died or who didn’t come to their funeral. But usually it’s just one at a time, maybe two. And it can go days that I don’t hear them at all unless I ask a question.”

  He took a long draw of coffee, both hands gripping the chipped earthenware mug. “But things have been different for a while now. Maybe since whatever you did back in the fall.” He held up a hand without looking directly at Hallie. “And I don’t want to know the details about that. Don’t even tell me. But it seems likely that it’s since then. I don’t know if it’s something that can be fixed or should be fixed, because once you start messing with things like that, who’s to say where it’ll end or if you’ll just make it worse.

  “But—” He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small stone, which he laid on the table between himself and Hallie. It was round and smooth, the size of a large marble, light gray shot through with veins of a deep blue that seemed to flash in the glow from the overhead fluorescent light. “I’ve been thinking maybe I could get rid of this.”

  The stone, Laddie had told Hallie when they’d first met, was the reason he could hear the dead talk. He’d always been able to maybe—kind of—predict the future, but then when he’d been in Belgium on leave from the army, a carnival fortune-teller had handed him the stone. Since then, he’d heard the voices.

  “I thought you’d tried,” Hallie said, because that’s what he’d told her—when he gave it away, it always came back.

  “But someone gave it to me, right?” He frowned at the stone as if he could will it to give up its secrets. “And if they could give it to me, then it stands to reason.” He drained his mug, rose and brought the coffee carafe back to the table, filled both his mug and Hallie’s, and sat back down.

  “Would you give it to someone else?” Hallie asked.

  Laddie rubbed a hand across his chin. “Maybe it— Maybe it wouldn’t work the same for someone else,” he said. He started to say something, then stopped and stared at a spot on the wall for a long time. “I kind of figured I owed it to the dead, you know, when I first got stuck with it. You’re never a hundred percent sure that the enemy you kill is, well, your enemy. In Iraq, I mean. Sometimes you wished you knew, but you don’t. When I first came back, I just wanted to understand, the dead and the stone, how it all worked. I thought maybe there was more to it than just talking, like maybe there were other things the stone could do or I could do.”

  He rolled the stone underneath his thumb. “But then, I … I figured what you were asking me—would I give it to someone else, would I risk that it would be the same or maybe worse for them. I mean, maybe it would give someone else some terrible power—kill people with a touch or something.”

  “Could it?” Hallie asked. “Could someone kill with a stone like this? Jesus.”

  “I—I don’t know,” Laddie said, though Hallie had the feeling he knew more than he wanted to tell her. “I know, or I think, that it’s more powerful than what I get out of it. Once, a long time ago, I went to see someone who knew a thing or two, someone who studied magic, you know. I asked them if they’d ever seen anything like it, if they knew how it worked. They were real interested, of course. Which, I guess you would be because it is kind of amazing.” He shifted in his chair, leaned forward. “You get used to it after a while, like it’s just everyday life, but it kind of ain’t.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. She knew exactly what he meant.

  “They said this stone, that it stored magic. They hadn’t seen one before, but they’d read about them, I guess. They said, this person I went to said, the stones attract people with an affinity for magic. Like, you know, how I could always kind of tell the future. They told me it was a gift.” He said the word “gift” like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Why didn’t you give it to them?”

  Laddie laughed without humor. “I did. Thought it was great. Everybody happy.” He looked at the coffee in his mug. “Didn’t work out.”

  “Do you want me to take it?” Hallie asked, because she could, she assumed. And she thought maybe that was why he’d come to talk to her.

  Laddie didn’t answer right away. “What I want—,” he finally began.

  Hallie’s cell phone rang. It was still on the counter charging, and Hallie reached for it without thinking, unplugging it from the wall as she did so. “Hello?”

  “Hallie?”

  It was Brett Fowk
er. “Did I wake you?” she said, not waiting for Hallie to respond, like she didn’t actually care one way or the other. “Well, I’m sorry, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Know?” Hallie sat up straight, like bracing for a blow. No one ever said those words if it was going to be good news.

  “There’s been—” Brett took a breath. She sounded calm, her voice even and clear, but Hallie knew her, had known Brett since before school.

  “Oh, you better just tell me,” she said.

  “Prue Stalking Horse was shot last night,” Brett said, said it in a rush, like the sudden release of pressure.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, dead, Hallie!” Brett sounded exasperated, like Hallie should have anticipated this. “Dead. Someone shot her on the front steps of her house.”

  “Prue Stalking Horse?” She looked at Laddie. “That can’t be—” This was Taylor County, South Dakota. People didn’t get shot on the front steps of their houses. Well, once in a while—a family dispute or a twenty-year-old feud over deer hunting or property lines. But, Prue Stalking Horse? Prue wasn’t like most people in Taylor County. It wasn’t that she saw ghosts, or black dogs followed her around or anything. She didn’t dream about Death—as far as Hallie knew. But she knew about those things, which most people didn’t or didn’t admit to. She knew about everything. She’d helped Hallie during recent events, though she claimed she was neutral about the supernatural. Prue was careful was the point. She was nothing if not careful every single day.

  “What happened? How do you know?” Even about things like this, even about murder, sometimes people got it wrong.

  “I was on call last night. For the ambulance. I heard it on the scanner.”

  “You saw her?” Hallie knew, in some vague intellectual way, that Brett had passed her EMT certification the previous month, that she was a member of the West Prairie City volunteer fire department’s ambulance service while she finished her master’s in Rapid City. In her head she pictured minor injuries from traffic accidents, broken legs from horses, drunken brawls at the Bob. Because she didn’t want Brett to see the things she’d seen, wanted there to be a different life somewhere in the world, where people never got shot and if they did, no one had to see it.