The Trap

I stood in the street, feet spread apart, sandalwoods heavy on my hips. I felt like I was in a western, which I suppose I was. The fact that the showdown was at midnight and the enemy were vampires didn’t shake the feeling. Call it low noon, maybe. But there was a lot to worry about.

Carrie and Penny weren’t part of it, though. I’d long known that they could take care of themselves. Carrie was almost an entirely different person than the heroin addicted prophet I’d first met. The first time we faced danger together, she could barely stand up on her own, let alone walk straight. Now she could keep up with the rest of us, and her new powers were flowering into something wonderful and deadly. Penny was still a child, but like Jake Chambers she was a Gunslinger. Last night they’d stood their ground against the vampires, and had killed them all. I was proud of both of them.

I wished I could stand with them, but my guns were needed guarding the store. Eden would need my backup again, though Alistair was covering both groups from the rooftop. Ashleigh was with us, but…Ashleigh….

Walter had laid one hell of a trap for us here. I had no idea how he got a Type One vampire here. Or if it had been here all along and the Man in Black just woke it up. Our search through the caves turned up half of the townspeople that had been turned, and even their master. But he was impossible to get to, sleeping beneath the stone where only air could reach. If Walter hadn’t protected Zepath from Carrie’s sight, she could have searched him out and just burned him in his tomb. He laid his trap well.

It was not a good time for the ka-tet to be weakened, but we were. Ashleigh hadn’t spoken any more about whatever issue was weighing on him. He acted normal for the most part, but signs of stress still showed around the edges. Like when he snapped at the priest. Minutes before sundown, when we needed the priests blessing, the southern boy gets into an argument with him. I snapped at him and said that I was beginning to think that it wasn’t such a good idea for him and Penny to be around each other. Every time I trusted him with her it seemed like something bad happened.

Maybe it was too harsh, I was stressed out and worrying about the attacks. I’ll apologize to him later, if we’re alive. And if he gets his head together. If he worked for me, I’d force him to take all his vacation time and relax. Of course, that’s what it might come down to. When we got back to New York, he had to decide if he could handle the knowledge of his own powers, the Dark Tower, and the Todash beneath it, or if he wanted Eden to make it all go away and go on as a desk jockey for the Tet Corporation.

What it basically came down to, was that I no longer trusted Ashleigh. That was a wound in our ka-tet, and it was dangerous. Not ka-shume, but one thing can lead to the other.

But there was nothing I could do about it but wait for Ashleigh to tell us what he needed, or do it himself. I rolled the cylinders on my guns and checked the rounds for the hundredth time and waited for the red haze to fall.