“You know,” I continued, barely able to breathe for how intimidated I was, “sentries—the soldiers they named you for—they don’t follow orders forever. They sign a contract, an agreement like yours, and then when the contract is up, they choose their paths for themselves. They can go away if they like. Or…”
Or they can stay?
“Or they can stay. They can do whatever they want. What do you want to do?”
He met my eyes, and again I felt the weight of his stare. It pressed down into me, pushing on my face as if to warn me away from something more dangerous than I had ever touched before.
I want…, he began, though the assertion sounded strange. He seemed to find it strange too. He was not accustomed to the freedom to want.
I want orders to follow.
Dana was most surprised, I think. “What?” she said, or almost demanded. “What? He wants what? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Who cares?” I argued. “I want a car that flies, and that doesn’t make sense either. He wants what he wants.”
“He wants a purpose.” Benny called it. I was suddenly proud of him, almost beyond speaking. He nailed it, with four words—what I’d been thinking my way around with hundreds.
I was summoned. Now those who gave the tasks are gone. And I do not know where I came from. I cannot return.
It was the longest he’d ever spoken, as if the need to explain himself called for more sentences than merely answering questions.
“You don’t know where you came from, but do you know who summoned you first?” I asked.
He thought about it hard, turning and walking a pace or two, then returning his attention to me. His legs folded beneath him, sitting his immense bulk squarely in front of me, and putting us nearly on eye level. I still looked up at the underside of his chin.
I sat down too, crossing my legs.
A holy woman. I helped her people win a great war.
“When?” Dana asked. “It must have been a long time ago.”
He didn’t seem to know, but after considering the query he tried to answer it.
There were more trees then. And no people with yellow hair. As he said this, he gave Dana a glimpse. This was before they came. A long time before. Many, many seasons.
With a swiftness that surprised me, I felt very, very sorry for him. I wondered if he wasn’t projecting his sorrow to me, augmenting his attempts to communicate.
“But those people are gone now. They’ve been gone for hundreds of years. And after they were gone, there was another great war.”
The light-haired men fought there. Many of them died. But they were not honored. The dead were left for the animals, and the black birds came to feed on their eyes.
The dead did not understand. They had no wings, and they stayed behind. They did not fly, and they did not sleep. Then the old men came, and they asked me to watch. I told them I would watch, until their last heir had passed. I would harm not the living, and I would tend the dead.
“And you did. For over a hundred years, you watched them well. I know your bargain is over,” I said, “but there’s no reason for you to leave if you don’t want to. You are welcome there. You have a home there.”
“You’re missed there,” Benny added. “They need you.” I thought maybe he wanted to say more, but he bit it back, whatever it was.
Dana put her camcorder and her tape recorder down on the ground, and came to stand behind me. She was a small woman, even when she stood above me. I was acutely aware of her size, and her vulnerability, and…her grief. Even though I couldn’t see her, she was larger than life, and unnaturally complete.
I saw her from all sides.
And I saw Benny too, my old acquaintance and newer friend who once rolled on a battered skateboard through parts of town that have since been paved and refurbished into blandness. I was proud of him for holding his ground and not running, when other, saner people might have made for the hills. I was deeply glad that I had a friend like this, one who did not know, but who believed enough to trust.
I couldn’t explain the experience, the peculiar opening of my mind or tapping of my senses. But all three of them there with me—I felt like I knew them all and knew them thoroughly.
It overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, or to ask. I didn’t think I could remember how to stand.
Dana leaned down to murmur in my ear. “Stay with me, kid. You’re opening too far. You’re not used to this. Get a grip on it. Hold it down, or it’ll sweep you away.”
Then she returned her attention to the beast seated before us. “Come home. You are tied to that land, not to this place. This is a place that was lost years ago. It will drive you mad if you stay here. It will break your heart. Go back to those who need you. They are lost without you. They are being dishonored without you.”
The man with the spade. The man who killed the last heir.
“Yes.” I gathered my wits enough to spit out the answer. I felt Dana’s hand on my shoulder, and it was strong. “He’s looking for something on the fields. He won’t quit until he finds it. He’ll tear up the hills and run his shovel through the remains of the dead until he’s stopped. Will you let him do this?”
I should not.
“Will you stop him?”
Can I?
“You can,” I assured him. “You can. Please—please go help them.”
“We tried,” Benny said.
“We failed,” Dana added. “We’ve added another dead to your number. This is what it’s come to without you.”
The last heir is dead. There is no more contract.
He said it slowly, turning the words over in his head or in his mouth.
A light went on in my own head, and the words that rattled there came tumbling out. “Then there are no rules anymore. You don’t have to stay, and you don’t have to abide by anyone’s terms but your own. Don’t you want to hurt the man who treated your”—I used his word, then—“your children with such disrespect?”
“Eden,” Dana said, and this time it was definitely a warning.
I did want to hurt him. But I could not.
“Because of the pact. But now there’s no pact. And there’s nothing to stop you from going after him.”
“Eden!”
I could hurt him if I wanted.
“You sure could. And maybe you should. He’s hurting people, Sentry. He’s killing people because he wants something and he’ll do anything to get it. We tried to stop him, but we couldn’t. We weren’t strong enough.”
I could hurt him.
He sounded far away now. I liked it. He was thinking.
“Nothing’s stopping you. You can protect them. You can help them. You can stop the man who’s doing this. Please—they need you. We need you. Will you go back to Chickamauga? Will you go and take care of them?”
I…I do not know. Do you command me?
“No.”
But you are like the holy woman who first called me. You see with the same eyes. You could command me. There is no one else to do so.
“No. You’re missing the point. Command your own damn self for once.”
He rose to his feet then, in a movement that was shockingly fast for a monster so large. His hair sprawled and waved like a hula skirt, settling over his shoulders and grazing his belly.
And without a word, he vanished.
17
Invited
“I think that went pretty well,” I said. I was lying on my back where I’d dropped to the ground in the dark, in the woods, at the Bend. Dana and Benny were standing over me, shining flashlights down on me in such a fashion that there was no way I could see either of them.
“You’re an idiot,” Dana told me, and it made me smile.
“Thanks.”
“You really don’t get it, do you? You turned him loose, Eden. You told him to do his own thing, and his own thing may well involve killing people. How do you feel about that?”
I winced against the light she now directed straight into my eyes. “If by ‘people’ you mean ‘that guy who shot your husband’ what, forty-eight hours ago now? Then I’ve got to say I feel pretty good about it. Why don’t you?”
“Because there’s a bigger picture at stake here, dumbass. Say he decides—and we still don’t know what he’s decided, by the way—that he’s going to go back to the battlefield and keep watch. But now he’s not bound by any of his prior restrictions. Now he’s a homicidal maniac the size of an oak tree, and it’s not like he’s a vampire and we can just chuck a vial of holy water at him.”
“I bet that wouldn’t work,” Benny said.
“I’m going to write this off to hyperbole,” I grumbled, pulling myself back up to a sitting position.
“You’re crazy. You are fucking crazy!”
“He’s not an animal!” I yelled back at her. “He’s not an animal, and he’s not a homicidal maniac! He’s…he’s lost. And he’s looking for meaning. People in a philosophical crisis do not go on killing sprees, Dana.”
“He’s not people, honey. You were sitting pretty close to him; I would’ve thought you’d figured that out. He isn’t ‘people,’ and he’s operating right now with no moral compass. He’s angry, he’s scared, and he wants revenge.”
“What about you?” Benny asked her before I could. “Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you scared? Don’t you want—”
“I want justice! It’s not the same thing.”
“Since when?”
“I am not having this conversation.” She cut us both off. She threw her hands to her face and squeezed, massaging her temples and rubbing her eyes. “Fine. I’m angry. Is that what you want to hear?”
“It’s a start,” I said, prying my flashlight out of my back pocket and turning it on.
“Okay, I’m angry, and I’m scared. I’m so angry, and I’m so scared, that I can hardly stand to stand here right now without killing the pair of you with my bare hands from pure rage and horror and grief and a thousand other things that neither of you can relate to!”