Blood Colony Read Online Free PDF Page B

great to have reliable Railroad in Seattle again.
    Caitlin had volunteered for the trip north, mostly to stop thinking about Maritza. The Railroad brought out the sane part of her ever since Maritza was murdered. The words still didn’t fit right in her head, so she must still be in denial. At least the rest of her head was still working.
    Driving to Seattle had taken more than a week. Now that her car’s engine had finally died, she was stuck. Flying with Glow was out of the question, of course, and buses and trains were almost as bad. At least her problems kept her head busy.
    Caitlin had only spoken to Father Arturo on the phone twice, never for more than two minutes. During her call from Portland yesterday, when she’d been hurting so much that she’d barely been able to pull a sentence together, Father Arturo had interrupted her with a long “Shhhhhhh.”
    “So often we blame God for the work of the Other,” he said.
    Damn right, Caitlin thought. Caitlin had seen Evil the night she’d identified Maritza’s butchered body at the morgue. Someone had stabbed Maritza fifty times.
    Caitlin retrieved her denim duffel bag from the shadows beside the storefront and hunched her shoulders into the wind on First Avenue. She walked fast, just in case the guy in the coffee shop really was a tail. She had to lose him.
    Is this how it started with you, Mari? Did you see someone who didn’t belong?
    At Pioneer Square, the city reverted to red brick and cobblestones. Caitlin vanished into an alleyway near the warren of underground buildings that lingered from the city’s nineteenth-century subterranean past. The alley was deserted, a tomb behind the plugged rush-hour streets. The few cars parked here looked abandoned. She circled three times, keeping an eye out for her tail, and she thought he was gone. She hoped he was.
    Caitlin never showed up for a meeting anywhere she hadn’t cased first, but this alley had looked safer three hours ago, in daylight. Caitlin stopped in front of the unpainted metal door at the end of the row of brick buildings. NEW DAYS , read small, faded letters stenciled on the door in white. She looked around once more to make sure she was alone. She heard the muffled sound of a baby crying from upstairs, behind one of the closed, cracked windowpanes.
    One second. Two. Three.
    She didn’t see anyone, so she tested the doorknob. Locked. From her back pocket, Caitlin fished out the key Father Arturo had mailed her. She slipped it in.
    Not much light inside, only a bare forty-watt bulb doing its best at the far end of the hall. The dimly lighted hallway was lined with cast-off furniture, mildewed boxes and dirty plastic crates piled with canned food and children’s toys cast from their homes. The hallway smelled mildewed.
    “Father Arturo?” she said, whispering into the quiet.
    No answer.
    Caitlin wished Father Arturo had been able to get away from his parish and meet her during daylight. With only twenty bucks left in her pocket, all she wanted was a greasy cheeseburger and a bed at the shelter. After all, wasn’t she homeless, too? You can’t call it home if you’re afraid to go back there.
    Caitlin couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Seattle, so close to Fana. Should she go down to Berkeley and see her friends on her way to Arizona? Johnny was trying to call her, and he kept leaving text messages, but she wasn’t sure it was safe to talk to him. I need some candy, he’d written, improvising a code for Glow, and she wanted to strangle him. Why had she ever shown him so much? Were her instincts failing her?
    Too many mistakes, and mistakes had cost Maritza her life. Maritza hadn’t died randomly—someone had been trying to get her . If Johnny didn’t watch out, he might be a target too.
    In the shelter’s kitchen, Caitlin found open food containers and double sinks filled with dirty dishes. The large fridge was disappointingly empty, except for rows of soda cans. Caitlin grabbed a Coke and