The yellow light from the early afternoon sun flared through the opening doors, and Tryp squinted as he walked down the front steps with his fingers still laced on the back of his head.
He didn’t completely close his eyes, though. He wanted to see the sunshine. He had always liked the feel of the desert sun on his arms. Elfie’s last shrieks still rang in his ears, but he wanted to remember her smile, and her laugh, and the way she felt warm and fragile in his arms.
Right outside the front doors, Teancum told Tryp to cross his hands behind his back and bound them together with a cable tie. The tie hissed that distinctive zip sound as the hard plastic cut into Tryp’s wrists. Teancum told Tryp to walk in front of him as they went down the front steps to the car.
Tryp stumbled when they reached the car, trying to see if Teancum would help him up and thus aim the rifle away from him for a second, but Teancum was too smart for such an obvious trick. He just stood back and let Tryp get up out of the dirt, glaring at him.
Teancum opened the door and said, “Get in the car.”
Tryp slid in because he thought there was a serious chance Teancum would shoot him right there in the yard outside the front doors. His fingers felt empty without drumsticks, maybe because the old cigarette smoke that clung to the sun-rotted upholstery stank like clubs they had played in the early days of Killer Valentine.
Teancum put the rifle in the trunk and got in the car to drive. Tryp had a moment of hope that he could overpower Teancum if he didn’t have a gun, but as the other man twisted and eased himself into the car, a handgun on his far hip rotated into view.
Tryp leaned his head back against the headrest even though his arms behind his back bowed him forward. Fuck. He had known they might shoot him from the moment he’d gotten on a plane, but he had had delusions that he could somehow get Elfie to safety, that he could hold them off while Elfie sprinted back to the rental car, or something.
At least he had made sure the Elfie was as safe as she could be. He hated himself for letting her come with him. He should have walked away from her in Augusta, just left her standing by the bus and pissed off at him, but she would be safe. Kumen was going to marry her and rape her,—helpless fury built in Tryp and threatened to shake him apart,—but at least she wouldn’t be assigned as a handmaiden. That was worse. So much worse.
Tryp was going to fight, though. He was going to fight to get back to Elfie, to take her out of New Empyrean. He would fight until his last breath, until Teancum put a bullet between his eyes.
Teancum answered his cell phone, sighed, and hung up. He said to Tryp, “We’re going to set you on the road again, Tryfon, but I need your word as a man that you won’t come back and you won’t be talking about us anymore. We have two of your women now, Sariah and Elfie, and your behavior will determine their treatment.”
Cold relief gusted on Tryp’s face, and he sucked in a deep breath of sweet air and planned Elfie’s rescue for an instant until he figured out that Teancum might be fucking with him so he wouldn’t fight back on their drive out to some lonely spot in the desert. “Bullshit.”
“No, it’s not.” Teancum said, starting the car and driving down the driveway. His dry tone made Tryp think that someone else had made the decision not to shoot him. “The elders think that Twitter would go nuts—” his sarcastic tone broadened, “—if the big rock star dropped off the map, and we don’t want to draw that kind of attention to ourselves. Nobody in small, conservative, faith-based communities wants to see the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’s black helicopters sweeping into town, chockfull of flashbang grenades and flamethrowers.”
When they reached the end of Kumen’s driveway, Teancum spun the steering wheel and aimed the car toward the highway.
Enough cars frequented the highway that Tryp could jump for it, and there would be too many witnesses for Teancum to shoot him. He was relatively sure that he would survive jumping out of the car at highway speeds. Maybe.
If he survived that, he could make it back and rescue Elfie before Kumen married and raped her. Maybe Sariah would leave, too.
But Elfie. His heart lurched at the thought of that old man asshole even looking at her, let alone—
Images of blood rose in his mind, and Tryp gagged but swallowed hard.
“So I’ll need your word,” Teancum said.
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I was just hoping we could be civilized about this. We’ll send pictures of what happens to them over Snapchat if you do or say anything.” He turned onto the highway. Cars whizzed around them until he got up to speed.
Tryp didn’t remember how to pray, but he sure as fuck remembered rage.
The first time he had been set out on the road, on a Tuesday morning about ten o’clock, his mother had told him never to come back or else Kumen would shoot him on sight. He had been a scared fourteen-year-old kid, grieving his lost home and family, and all he could see in both directions was mile upon mile of sun-steaming asphalt.
Tryp leaned back against his overbuilt arms in the car’s bucket seat and took deep breaths, just like the ones Cadell sucked in before going on stage every night. “You don’t have to do this,” Tryp said. “You can help me get her out.”
“Which ‘her’ are we talking about?” Teancum asked. He stared straight ahead, driving and squinting into the setting sun that blazed over the horizon.
“Elfie.”
“Not Sariah? The woman you keep coming back for?”
“Sariah has never wanted out. I wanted her to leave, but she won’t.” Tryp stared at the road that painted a straight, black line crawling with cars to the fiery horizon. He’d been keeping an eye on the odometer, judging how far they’d come.
Picking at the zip tie binding his hands behind his back didn’t help. He used a knife to cut those damn ties off his mic cord when he needed some extra slack. His fingernails didn’t even dent the tough plastic.
Tryp said, “I thought I could convince her this time because Kumen and the elders would beat her to blackmail me, but it’s useless. She’s told me, herself, so many times.”
Teancum’s stare hardened. His jaw clenched. “I don’t know what she really thinks,” he ground out through his teeth, “but Elder Kumen forced her to write that letter a few years ago. She is sealed for time and all eternity to Elder Kumen. You should stay away, regardless.”
Even a few years ago, Tryp’s soul would have soared to hear that Sariah had been forced to write that devastating letter that Tryp kept in his copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence. Now, it just felt like a hole in chest had widened. She was a missing branch of his life, a future that never was and never could be. Even if it was a teenage thing—and, looking back, Tryp was sure that it was an adolescent crush,—he should have found a way to convince her to go with him to safety. He had been fourteen, but he had left her behind.
He had lived in the outside world for as long as he had lived in New Empyrean, a world of kind people and choices, and the guilt of leaving her behind weighed heavier on him every year.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tryp said. “She told me no to my face twice. She could have walked away with me, but she didn’t.”
“So you do just want the girl.”
“Her name is Elfie.”
“Elfie? And I thought Utah names were weird.”
“Her real name is Elsa.” Tryp blinked, and he wondered if that was her real name. Elsa Hernandez? She must have used a fake I.D. to get hired when she was seventeen. No traveling tour would have hired a minor. Tryp had used the name Gunther Haas for four years in order to work at the music store for Gloria until he had turned eighteen, even though she had known his name and story within the first month.
“Elsa. Okay.” Teancum stared at the road and chewed on his lip. “You can’t come back, Tryfon. They will force us to shoot you next time. This desert is wide, and Sheriff Smith’s cadaver dogs won’t look in the right spot to find your body, not if Elder Kumen tells them to look elsewhere.”
“I know.”
“You were friends with my brother Coriantum.”
“Yeah.” Cory had gapped teeth and dark hair, and he was the only other black-haired kid Tryp knew. They had learned to throw baseballs together out in the tall grass, and Tryp had taught him to read. “Where is he?”
“He was set out on the road about a year after you were.”
A chill gripped Tryp’s back at the thought of Lost Boys out there and teenaged girls still in New Empyrean. Bitterness hacked up in his throat. “Did you ever hear from Cory?”
“No.”
Fuck. Cory was out there somewhere, too. How many other Lost Boys were out there?
Hundreds.
Maybe thousands, over the years.
Fuck.
Teancum pulled the car over on a dusty part of the highway. Tryp glanced at the odometer. They had driven seven and half miles in this car that already had two hundred thousand miles on it. “Get out.”
“You could help me save Elfie. She wasn’t born here. She must be terrified.” A cramp shot through Tryp’s heart at the thought of Elfie crying in a room somewhere. “You know that it’s the right thing to do.”
Teancum turned and pure venom filled his pale brown eyes. “I have two wives and five children. I may not be a perfect man, but I’m a damn sight better than anyone else they would be assigned to. Those are my kids. Little kids die if they get reassigned. I won’t endanger my kids because you brought a woman here when you shouldn’t have come here at all. Get out of my car.”
Tryp studied his terror disguised as hatred. “If you ever leave, if you ever put them in a car and drive away,” Tryp said, “find me, and I’ll help you.”
“Turn around.” Teancum flipped his pen knife open and popped the zip tie that bound Tryp’s hands. “Just get out.”
Tryp opened the car door and stepped out into the hot wind that blasted his skin.
Teancum drove away, skidding on the loose gravel, as soon as the door clanked shut.
Last time, when he was fourteen, the road had been blurred by Tryp’s tears and he hadn’t known where to go or what twenty dollars might buy him.
Seven and a half miles.
Tryp ran eight minute miles at that hardcore gym in Salt Lake City that Xan had forced them into before the Rolling Stone cover shoot, only a few months ago.
Tryp would be back in New Empyrean in about an hour, and the keys to his rental car still jangled in his pocket. He glanced down at his shoes, grating on the stony dirt. The hot afternoon sun reflected white stripes on the shiny black leather. The fashion guy had insisted that Tryp needed to wear proper dress shoes with the suit.
Damn. His running shoes were still in his suitcase.
Fuck it.
Tryp wasn’t leaving the woman he loved behind this time. He was going back for Elfie.