She studied me a moment longer, then put one arm around me in a swift, fierce embrace. It was a gesture I did not expect and it stunned me anew.
She stood, brushed off her jeans and jacket and looked down at me. “You look like hell, Viktor. Get some sleep.”
I sat and listened to the rhythmic tread of her feet, solid and sure on the earth. Then I rose to do as she commanded.
“It’s amazing how fast those soft tissue injuries can heal up, isn’t it?”
Cal’s voice caught me in mid-stride, freezing me. He stepped from the shadows beneath the boughs of a tall cedar, blocking my path up the hill, his eyes pointedly on my left knee.
“Well, Doc, aren’t you happy? You just got up out of a crouch without using your hands. And you didn’t even wince. That’s got to be a miracle, right?” He took a step toward me. “Or not.”
“And how long were you standing there?” I asked.
“Let’s assume I was standing there a long time. You have something you want to tell me about your leg?”
I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew I had no further room for evasion. “My leg is fine. It barely even aches. My leg… is not the issue.”
“I didn’t think so. You know, I never would’ve taken you for a superstitious man.”
“I am not-” I protested.
“An albatross? What is that, if not rank superstition? Colleen’s right, we’ve all needed help. We’ve all done things that put others in danger. That’s not likely to change. She’s also right that we’re weaker without you, no matter what condition you’re in.” He held his hand out to me, his eyes holding mine. “Come with us, Doc. Please.”
When I hesitated, he said it again: “Please.”
I gave in, clasping the hand he offered, feeling a strange mixture of dread, gratitude, and relief. “I do this against my better judgment.”
“So noted.”
He turned and started up the hill. I fell into step with him. We had gone only a few strides when he said, “She called you ‘Viktor.’ ”
“That is my name.”
“You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
He was silent for a few strides, then said, “Sorry. I should have.”
FOURTEEN
CAL
“Hey,” I said.
Colleen looked up from her fletcher’s task, a half-finished crossbow bolt in one hand, a roll of thin leather binding in the other.
Terminally different. That was where I’d come in last night. Were we really? I hoped not.
Between her and her able assistant, Matt, the resident weapon-maker, a pile of bolts and longer arrows grew on the table in the leather shop’s large, tourist-friendly workroom. We would not lack for armaments on the next leg of our journey.
“Hey, yourself,” she said. “Give us a hand?”
I hesitated. A request from Colleen for help was extraordinary in itself; the idea that she’d let me handle the ordnance was doubly so. I was a good swordsman (with high school and college fencing trophies to prove it), but she openly despaired of the way I handled the complexities of archery.
“You’re sure?”
She glanced at Matt (usually called Young Matt, to distinguish him from his father, Old Matt), and pointed at the bundles of stripped and smoothed wooden shafts that needed to be turned into deadly projectiles. “You wanna get out of here any time soon?”
I sat down at the table. “What do I do?”
She pulled a longish shaft out of a bundle and held it out to me. “You take that very, very sharp knife and you cut a notch yay deep in one end of the shaft.” She ticked a mark across the shaft with her thumbnail. “Then you cut three slits yay long…” She scored the other end of the shaft vertically. “… around this end. Equally spaced. Use the razor blade gadget there for that. And if you cut yourself, please don’t bleed on the binding. Liquid makes it stretchy, and we don’t want it to get stretchy just yet.”
Young Matt stifled a chuckle and squinted at the arrowhead he was attaching.
“I won’t cut myself,” I promised.
I don’t know what Cal thinks, she’d said. What I thought was that even with shorn hair, she was beautiful, the way a wild mountainside is beautiful. More than that, she was vital. Strong. Capable.
Colleen smiled and went back to slipping sharp, nasty-looking bits of metal into the notches she’d cut in her crossbow bolts. “Talk to Doc since last night?” she asked, eyes on her work.
“You mean since he dropped his little bombshell?”
She peered intently at her wrapping job. Apparently satisfied, she set the barb aside. “Yeah, that. Did you…?” “We talked.”
She gave me a sudden, sharp glance. “Well, is he coming with us or not? Because I can’t believe you’d let him get away with faking that bum knee and that crappy attitude. And I told him that… more or less.” She fell silent for a beat. “Well? What did you say to him?”
I blinked at her, wanting to laugh, forcing my face to remain solemn. “I told him… he wasn’t an albatross.”
She stared at me for a moment, then lowered her eyes. “Oh, you heard all that. So you understood what he was doing.”
“Yeah, faking a limp.”
Colleen swatted at me with a length of leather thong.
“That wasn’t what I meant. I meant the reason he was faking the limp.” She leaned across the table toward me and lowered her voice as if it might keep Matt from overhearing. “God, Cal, I swear he actually thinks he’s going to get us killed. Like he’s a-a jinx, or something. Like what happened with-” She broke off, flushed, and shook her head.
“Like what happened with what?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing. Um … just, you know what happened at the mill with the dam. All that. He has a clumsy moment and turns it into a disaster.”
Colleen is a terrible liar. I reached over and stopped the movement of her hands. “That’s not what you meant. What were you about to say?”
She looked down at our entwined fingers. “Nothing I should’ve.” After a moment she glanced at Matt, then back to me. “Has Doc ever talked to you about Chernobyl? Or his family?”
“I know he lost his family. And yes, he told me he was at Chernobyl. It must have been horrific. Are the two things connected?”
She gazed at me unfocused for a moment, then said, “He felt like he didn’t make a difference then. Like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here, in the Preserve, he can make a difference.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s really what he’s all about. Making a difference. Making … choices.” Her voice seemed to die in her throat.
“What?”
She shook herself visibly, looked down at her work and said, “Just a little lightbulb going on in Colleen’s head. So, what did you say to him?”
I tapped the fist she’d knotted around one of the pencil-
thin dowels. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break that?” “Don’t be a shit, Griffin. What did you say to him?” “Sorry. I told him you were right.”
She sat back and looked at me wryly. “Really. Oh, well, I’m sure that changed his mind.” She wet a binding and began wrapping it around the notched joint between barb and shaft.
“Actually, it did.” I glanced at the contents of the table. “What are you planning on using for feathers?” I asked Matt, aware that Colleen’s eyes were making holes in the side of my head.
“Whatever’s lying around.” He pulled a basket of junk out from under the table. It contained a motley collection of actual feathers, plastic playing cards, business cards, and other junk. “Feathers,” he said.
“Very eclectic.”
He shrugged, smiling. “Works.”
Colleen’s hand clamped firmly over mine. “Back up! Doc isn’t staying? You talked him out of it?”
I looked up and met her eyes, and the breath stopped in my throat. I was suddenly aware of every sensation in my body- the quickening pulse, the tingle of subtle electricity on my skin, heat warming my face, other, more intimate responses.