Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

call your little sister, earlier, trying to warn her not to get involved in this. She got a little angry at me, but I think she knows I’m right.”

      Kate looked doubtful at first. Then she looked worse than doubtful. “I don’t know, Joe. You say you made her angry? Were you issuing orders?”

      “Come on, give me credit for a little more sense than that.”

      “Still, I don’t know. She’s quite grown up now. Maybe even suggesting what she ought to do was a mistake.”

      “I figured she must have heard in the news about the bombing. I don’t know if she knows that now he’s calling himself Thorn. I don’t have any idea when they’ve seen each other last, to tell the truth.”

      “I don’t know either.” Kate sighed. “Maybe it’s all over. And her school is at least five hundred miles away from Phoenix.”

      “I don’t think it’s all over for her. She got angry. But as far as I could tell she wasn’t really planning to do anything, like go to Arizona. She’s anything but a wild kid, usually.” Then Joe paused, listening to his own words, what he was saying about a girl who had had an affair with a vampire, however brief.

      Husband and wife lay looking at each other, exchanging hopeful and supportive thoughts. At least Joe was trying to make the exchange hopeful, and he could see that Kate was doing the same.

      “Well,” Joe added at last, “we could call her again in the morning, and tell her that we know for sure now that he’s still alive.”

      “She must know that much at least,” Kate said positively. “There’s still at least that much contact between them, if there’s any relationship left at all.”

      “Yeah, I suppose. That’s spooky.” Joe knew that Kate knew more about the subject than he did. “Give me a hug, Joey.” Joe rolled away from Kate to turn the light off. Then he rolled back again. Kate hugged his face against her bare breasts.

      The telephone rang again.

      For a moment, as he floundered his way back over the quaking mattress to pick up the receiver, Joe’s imagination flickered with a truly horrible suggestion. Suppose, just suppose, that Thorn had been deranged somehow by the bomb’s concussion, and turned into a crank phone caller. To imagine him gone mad, driven out of the state that with him passed for normality…

      “Hello, who is this?”

      In the next moment, puzzlement and fear had a new tangent. It was a woman’s voice on the phone, one that Joe had never heard before. It sounded young, and, of all things, vaguely British. “Yes. Am I speaking to Mr. Joseph Keogh?”

      “Lieutenant Keogh. Yes. Who is this?” It didn’t sound like long distance this time.

      “Sorry, lieutenant, of course, of the police department. I don’t suppose you would recognize my name. I should like to communicate with Mr. Jonathan Thorn. Have you any idea at what number I could reach him quickly?”

Chapter Sixteen

      Pat O’Grandison was heading west again. From northern Indiana he thumbed his way through Chicago and right on, following Route 66, or Interstate 55 as they called it now. His intention was to find Annie, the girl he really liked.

      He had missed Annie, he had to admit it to himself, more than he could remember ever missing anyone before. They had met—well, never mind where they had first met, but they had spent days together in Chicago some months back. Then Annie had dropped out of sight and Pat had just assumed that she was gone for good, like everything else good that had ever happened to him. Then bang, gosh, one night in Calumet City, Indiana, she had shown up again out of nowhere. At least Pat was almost sure she had. Not really absolutely sure, because next morning he had been having a bad time with his mind again, and the morning after that he woke up in the looney bin again.

      He stayed in the mental hospital for a few weeks and was then discharged, with all the usual bullshit about commitment to a sheltered care program and a case worker and so on, and on that same day he sniffed the air and decided that the warm weather was far enough advanced to hit the road. And headed west.

      Damn, but he missed her. Annie was the only girl, the only female, practically the only person of any kind that Pat could remember feeling anything like this about. Almost the only person he could remember ever really liking. And what made it even stranger, was that as a rule he could get along okay with girls and women but he didn’t usually seek them out, or care for them as close associates. For a companion, a partner in bed or on the road, he generally felt better with another male. Preferably a bigger and stronger male whose presence could afford at least the illusion of protection; as almost any boy, by the time he was half grown, was bigger and stronger than Pat, that particular condition was not too hard to fulfill.

      But now he just kept on thinking about Annie, the girl he really liked. She had told him once, just before they took her off to the juvenile home in Chicago and got ready to put Pat on trial, that her last name was Chapman. A lot of the people that Pat met had changed or were changing their names for one reason or another, so he tended not to take names very seriously—he wasn’t always completely sure what his own real name ought to be, if it came to that. But he was sure that he liked Annie, whether Annie Chapman was her real name or not, and he needed her as much as he had ever needed anyone. She was all girl, nothing dyke about her, and yet she still had an air about her of being able to offer protection. Small as she was, no bigger than Pat himself, there was this hard core in