He set the rake head aside and fell to his hands and knees, his fingers sifting through the fine dust. He concentrated on the area near the walls, as a good farrier would never leave a shoeing nail lying in the center of the barn, where it might injure the tender part of a horse’s hoof. But if one went flying, it might land in the shadows, lost. He felt his way along one wall before his fingers found something hard and slender in the dust. His heart gave a single hard thump. A nail.
But it was larger than might be used for shoeing a horse—a tenpenny nail, too thick to fit into the keyhole. I could kill the girl. Tears gathered in his eyes, burning. His nose ran. He laid his head against the wood and closed his eyes as tears leaked slowly from his eyes and trickled through the dust on his face. I could kill the girl. Hail Mary, full of grace, he thought. I could kill the girl. Hail Mary, full of grace . . .
A measure of peace fell into the air with the words to rest across his shoulders and settle into his heart. The words of the Apostles’ Creed came to him, as clear as if Sister Mary Thomas were standing over him in the barn, ruler in hand, tapping his skull each time he forgot a word. She had never hurt him, but that ruler was a constant threat. Eyes closed against the falling light, he whispered, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. . . .” Murmuring the creed and starting the rest of the rosary, he searched the barn to the reaches of his bindings.
By the time he was done, he had found three more tenpenny nails and discovered the boards of a stall wall that had been replaced. The carpenter had dropped the nails during his repair job. Rick placed the nails with the rake head, a metal button, a buckle, part of a leather bridle with two rusted rings, a broken plastic spoon, and a dog collar. Nothing that would kill a vampire.
He was filthy, his sheet so full of dust that he looked as if he had been rolling around on the ground. Which he had. Sister Mary Thomas would have smacked him with her ruler if he’d come back in from recess looking like this. Nuns, especially the older ones, still believed in corporal punishment, although not to the black-and-blue state. And back when he was in school, he had figured they practiced punishment searching for perfection—though whether they hunted for the perfection of the method of chastisement or perfection of the souls of their charges, he had never decided. When he was a lot older and a little wiser, he figured he had been a pain in the nuns’ collective butts and had brought the punishment on himself.
It was late afternoon when he thought to use the rake tines to pry and chop a stake from the old wood. And felt so stupid that he started laughing. “I’m an idiot,” he said. “A damn fool idiot.”
He chose a board low down on the wall that could be hidden in piled dust, and felt along it with his fingers, searching out a weak spot. He found one in the corner, damp from long contact with the ground. Rick pried into the grain with the tines and started to chop.
? ? ?
Rick stopped chopping before dark and hid his tools, tucking the rake head into the shadows of the stall wall across from his work site and covering it with a natural-looking pile of stall dust. He stepped back and, seeing his footprints, knelt and brushed them away. When it still didn’t look totally natural, he picked up handfuls of dirt and tossed them into the air. They made a convincingly haphazard pattern when they fell, and he repeated the dirt-tossing everywhere. It left him sneezing but feeling safer.
He had decided during the slow course of his labor that he couldn’t kill the little witch. She might deserve it, but she was as trapped as he was. And maybe he didn’t have premeditated murder in him. When it came to humans. But if push came to shove, he’d find a way to kill himself before he’d let Isleen bind him with black magic. And he had the weapon, nicely hidden, that would do the deed easily. If he couldn’t get away in twenty-four hours, then . . . then he’d find the pulse point on the inside of his elbow and puncture his artery with a sharp tine. Or he’d fall on the tines. Something. He’d be dead meat when Isleen came for him, which brought grim satisfaction.
Just having a plan was enough to raise his spirits and help him to face another night bound to the stone. Well, a plan and the first of his weapons. If he’d had half a brain, he would have been ready to put the plan into action tonight, but he’d moped away half the day and had only part of the tools he needed.