“Your aim still matters,” he volleyed. “And Sammy made a lot of money fixing junk like TVs, tech screens, and computers. He’s valuable enough these days, too.” He paused. “We’re not as helpless as we act sometimes.”
Everyone went silent, and the old guy made a disappointed sound. As he wandered back to the rooted wall, his gaze remained on the woman a moment too long, and Gabriel noted this, right along with the rest of this group’s dynamics.
He didn’t blame the denizens for keeping shut-mouthed. Everyone had learned to ease back from standing up to any threat that might turn out to hold a danger. Once, just before things had gone to ruin, people had believed in the law of this land. But as it broke down, folks lost hope, retreating into their families. Into themselves.
Into almost nothing.
Gabriel could see the evidence of that here, among the shadows on the walls, among the silhouettes of what these people used to be.
He glanced at the visz lens. Even Mariah had been different, no doubt. They all had.
He rested his forearms on his legs, hunched over. Now was the time to step into the reason he’d sought out this area. It didn’t even matter that Mariah would now hear the true motivation he’d possessed for coming to the New Badlands.
“Bet you all don’t get many wanderers coming into your sphere,” he said.
Sammy shook his head. “Not many at all. There are a few who’ve come. Less who’ve gone.”
“I know of a certain woman who headed out this way.” Gabriel glanced around the room, finding that he’d captured everyone’s focus again. “Abigail Trenton. Truthfully, I was also hoping to find her even as I found myself a new home.”
Again, none of them met his gaze, so Gabriel couldn’t scan their thoughts even if he deemed it safe to try. And if he vocally swayed them, Mariah would see it on the visz—their change in personality would be that obvious, just as Chaplin’s had been before Gabriel had toned down the hypnosis with the dog. He’d seen how Mariah had noticed the change in her companion, so Gabriel had needed to adjust.
He would go about it the old-fashioned way, questioning these people, just like any normal human would do. In fact, Gabriel liked the notion of that quite a bit.
Just like any normal human.
Abby would’ve approved.
“You ever hear her name?” Gabriel added. “Abby?”
Both Zel and Sammy shook their heads, but the oldster motioned toward one of the doors in the room. “We had an Annie here not too long ago, but not an Abby.”
Gabriel’s gaze locked onto that door as he straightened in his seat.
“She left a while ago,” Zel said, but her tone held some warning for the old man.
He clearly didn’t like being told what to do, and he stared at Zel while he spoke, as if savoring this act of defiance.
“About a year and a half ago, she laid claim to a piece of water-rich land round here.”
Chaplin huffed a bit, as if anticipating what the oldster would say next.
“But that was before,” he continued, with a challenging glance at the dog, “Stamp and his boys came along.”
Gabriel’s spine stiffened. Stamp? Had he gotten to Annie . . . ?
Abby?
Bloodlust ripped heat through his veins, and he fought the fangs, the urge to let loose and just peer into anyone who’d look at him.
But he wouldn’t let himself, and it felt . . . decent. Safe, even.
It felt right, way out here, in a place where no one knew just what he was. Abby would’ve liked that, he thought. A new start.
The old man’s eyes were shiny while he watched Chaplin, as if he hated this story of what had happened to Annie. As if he were angry and sad all at the same time.
It was hard to decide what the oldster was feeling. Vampirism had taken the raw emotion out of Gabriel, leaving only memories of what he
should
feel. Sometimes he even told himself that this was why he’d been so drawn to Abby—because she made him go beyond experiencing mere hunger and need. Because she was a way to access what he’d lost along the way.
Seeing the oldster made Gabriel want to feel the rage and vengeance, too, because to Gabriel, empathy was what separated the good guys from the bad, and the absence of it had put him on the wrong side. But he still had to have some good within him, and he meant to discover it again by finding the woman who’d disappeared from his life.
He summoned the concept of anger and how it used to feel.
“Are you insinuating,” he said to the old man, “that Stamp got to this Annie and that’s why she’s not around anymore?”
Zel interrupted. “Annie left. That’s it.”
“And,” Sammy added, “since Annie’s gone, you might think of moving on, too. If you’ve got no reason to be here beyond your friend, you’ll want no part of our business.”
Gabriel shifted in his seat. So Annie had just up and left. It sounded enough like Abby.
Being this close to finding her inflamed his vampire instincts, and in spite of everything he’d just told himself about being a better man—a real man—Gabriel found himself looking at Sammy, compelling him to connect gazes.
As if unable to resist, Sammy glanced at him, and Gabriel peered into his eyes.
Slam!
A wall of black, just like with Chaplin.
His body ringing with the force of being blocked out, Gabriel lost patience. When Zel looked at him, he peered into her, too.
Slam!
The oldster, who seemed to have finally taken Zel’s silent warnings to heart, also proved to be a block when Gabriel glanced at him.
Slam!
Gabriel fought the loose clench he had on his control, felt it slipping, sliding as he yearned to throw one of them against a wall and
really
look into their eyes.
But going deeper into them would probably expose
him
. Worse yet, it would cause him to lose the possibility that there was more to him than appetite and destruction.
He fixed his gaze on the visz monitor where Mariah might be watching, and the thought of her disgust at what he really was made him build a facsimile of despair that felt real enough.
It was only when one of the tunnel doors creaked open that he lost his focus.
Gabriel turned toward Annie’s door to find a man with long, trimmed sideburns and an expensive whale-hide hat stepping through, a genial smile on his face.
Zel, Sammy, and the oldster tensed, as if frightened to be discovered in the open.
This wasn’t one of their crowd, Gabriel thought. And he was coming through
Annie’s
door.
As a second man entered, he knew they were Stamp’s crew—they stank of the hubs: dirty, used. Their vital signs varied from one another, but there was an excitement in their pulses that confused any sure rhythms because the blood had to drag through arteries clogged by too much processed food.
Spastic. Hopped up on chemical sustenance and entertainment. These men had to be what they called “distractoids” in the hubs. The appeased ones who lived among the bad.
Last night, after the heat had waned, one of these people had found Mariah’s visz lens and had harassed her. And tonight, they’d found a real entrance. . . .
Gabriel tuned his hearing to a longer range, trying to detect any near-distant cries from Mariah, even back in her home, but he heard nothing.
And that was when he reached out with his mind, not thinking about it at all, merely reacting.
He mentally shut down her visz lens so she wouldn’t come running down here with her guns. He would handle this, just as he’d done last night with Chompers.
Two other men came through the door.
They were all dressed in the sand-colored heat suits they’d probably been wearing in the elements while they’d been wandering through the last of the daylight, nosing around. The bulk of the material was pushed down to their waists, kept up by suspenders while revealing hemp shirts and long gloves on one arm that protected the small screens many urban hub people had implanted in their arms for easy, lazy access.
Even when Gabriel’s old buddy Chompers took up the right side of the group, the teeth around his boots jangling, Gabriel didn’t react.
No, he didn’t do that until Chompers stepped away from the person who was taking up the rear, revealing him in full.
A tall rangy youngster in his early twenties, almost disappearing into the background except for the gun-barrel black of his eyes. A presence more than a person—a near specter who seemed to fade in a crowd though you realized he was there more than anyone else. His pulse was slow . . . cool.
Unlike the other bad ones.
Without introduction, Gabriel guessed who he was, and the threat of the infamous Johnson Stamp made his fangs pulse at his gums while his gaze heated.
7
Gabriel
T
hrough the seething film of Gabriel’s peripheral vision, he caught Zel and Sammy trading looks, as if neither one of them knew what to do. Chaplin even backed up toward Gabriel, pressing himself against his master’s legs, awaiting a command or maybe even . . .
Gabriel didn’t want to think it, but he did.
Maybe the canine was as reluctant to stand up to Stamp as Mariah and these others were.
But when, near the wall, the oldster took a bold step forward, Gabriel revised his thought. The old-timer was either the bravest of any of them or just plain foolish.
He pointed toward the door through which the four newcomers had entered, and Gabriel’s vision went that much hotter, though he tried to dial it back, lest his irises reveal the change his body was battling.
Annie.
Abby?
Either way,
had
Stamp and his crowd been instrumental in whatever had happened to her?
Gabriel lowered his gaze to the ground while bringing his level of ferocity down to a manageable limit, then looked up again.
The man-boy in charge of the newcomers leveled his gaze at all the other doors around the room, including Mariah’s.
The old man was pointing at Annie’s door. “That ain’t your quarters.”
Three of the men glanced at their apparent boss, seemingly for direction. But the youngster remained mute, refocusing his dark gaze from those doors to every single denizen instead.
His employee—the smiley one wearing the whale-hide hat—spoke in his place. “Weer ur nu frndz.”
We’re your new friends?
Gabriel thought. This clown wasn’t gauging things so well, but that was no shock. Most times, Text speakers were better at reading screens than actual body cues.
The oldster stared atWhale Hide for a tense moment, and the room itself seemed to slant during the rough pause.
As Whale Hide opened his mouth to say something else, the old man chucked his canteen at the intruder, and it clipped him at the shoulder, splashing his shirt with water.
The man and his cronies flinched, their lips parted as if to protest, and Gabriel hunched, ready for whatever came next.
But he held back.
No vamp powers if you end up fighting,
he thought.
Don’t let any of them know what’s in their midst. You’d be signing a death warrant for these people because Stamp would think they’re sheltering you.
Ever so slowly, the youngster with the cold eyes turned to survey his comrade’s shirt.
Chaplin seemed to chew on some muttered canine sounds as the three intruders looked to their boss once more. But the young guy merely sighed, hooked his thumbs into his suspenders, and stared at his boots for a moment.
Zel and Sammy planted their hands on the crate table, as if bracing themselves. Gabriel’s body shuddered, still fighting his instincts.
When the youngster finally glanced back up, his tone was even. “I find the waste of water to be more offensive than the gesture, sir.”
Old American. Gabriel hadn’t expected to hear it from this kid’s mouth. But if he’d come out to the New Badlands to capitalize on the water, it’d make sense for a businessman, who’d still use the formality in the world at large.
As the kid locked gazes with the oldster, Whale Hide pulled his watered shirt away from his chest, then bent to touch his tongue to the moisture. Without even glancing backward, the youngster’s hand whipped out to lightly smack the man.
Gabriel’s shoulders hunched even more.
The kid tore his gaze away from the oldster and addressed everyone else. “We’ve been looking high and low for neighbors, and just today, we happened upon an entrance in the ground. Cleverly hidden, all right, but finding it was inevitable.”
“Did ya ever think,” the old man asked, hardly scared off, “that we weren’t making an effort to welcome you? Round these parts, housebreakers are shot.”