I kept all those questions to myself. I sealed them inside me and put them into a chest that I would open later. Maybe. When we had time. When we were safe. When I thought he might actually answer one or two of them.
Until then, there was no point asking any of them. No military man would give up his position. No intelligence officer would let go of his cover. I still wasn’t sure which of those Marlon was. But I knew enough to know that he wasn’t going to give me the information I wanted until he was sure he could trust me—and until we were out of danger, at least for a moment.
Marlon grunted and smirked at the question I had asked. “Like kids?”
“Yeah. I know it’s none of my business, but you have to admit that these were a strange find.”
The comment was waved off. “My niece and nephew. They used to come with my sister when she lived in town. I didn’t put them away after the last time they were here.”
“Did something happen to them?” Angie asked, sounding worried. “To keep them from… coming back?”
Marlon looked haunted—and also angry. “She moved to Detroit last year after a run-in with Randall and his boys. We didn’t talk about what happened to her, but I didn’t need to ask many questions. With that man, there are only a certain number of possibilities, if you get my drift.”
So the hairy menace had spread his insane anger beyond his realm. And though I couldn’t have done anything to keep him from attacking Marlon’s sister, I couldn’t help feeling responsible for the man still being alive at all. I should have finished him off. I should have taken more care with that bullet.
I should have stuck around to make sure the job was done. My training had told me to do just that, and I’d ignored it in my hurry to get Angie out of there as quickly as possible.
The problem was, in doing that, I might have cursed us all. Because now, instead of dealing with him in a cabin that, while it belonged to him, had at least been a stable situation, we were now going to have to deal with him out here in the wilds.
In his territory. By his rules.
Marlon woke me when it was my turn to keep watch, and I sat up from where I’d been laying next to Angie in the bed we’d built of several sleeping bags on the bottom and several more quilts on the top, shivering as the cold air reached me. The fire was still burning brightly in the middle of the cave, and I could feel the heat coming off of it, but it couldn’t match the warmth Angie and I had achieved in our own bed.
A part of me felt guilty, for a moment, that Marlon would be going to his set of blankets on his own, without the benefit of another person helping him to heat the space—or having already been under the blankets, acting as a natural heater. Then I put that thought quickly away from me. I wasn’t going to volunteer Angie for the job, and there was no one else.
Besides, if my suspicions were correct, Marlon had plenty of experience figuring out how to see himself warm alone in the depth of winter, in the wilderness.
“Nothing out there that I can see,” he whispered, backing up a bit to give me room to leave my bed. “Just your typical cold, bright winter’s night in Michigan. Lucky it’s a full moon tonight. Gives us a ton of visibility.”
I nodded, steadied myself against the cold I was about to feel, and dragged myself fully out from under the blankets, then turned and made sure Angie was completely covered up again. I might have to deal with the cold. She didn’t. And I wanted her body putting all its energy into healing. We were already going to put her under enough pressure asking her to stand on her own while we dealt with the river. She needed her rest.
Marlon followed my eyes down to my wife and, it seemed, my thoughts as well. “I’ll keep an eye on her for as long as I’m awake,” he said softly. “But I don’t think she’s going to be waking up any time soon. She might not have worked as hard as us today, but her body is going through resources quickly as it tries to heal itself. The more rest she gets tonight, the more successful we’ll be tomorrow. And I suspect she knows it.”
“I suspect she does,” I echoed, staring down at Angie.
I knew she’d come through for us tomorrow. Even if it killed her. And that was what worried me.
I turned toward the front of the cave and bent over to strap on my boots. A moment later, I reached for the hunting knife I always kept strapped to my calf—which I hadn’t taken off, even when we went to bed. Once the knife was in my hand, I felt more secure. More prepared. Like I would be able to take on whatever came for me.
Yes, it was an exaggeration. But we all have our security blankets, and that knife was mine.
“Don’t suppose I’ll be needing a gun, then,” I told Marlon quickly. “Long as it stays quiet out there, I don’t want to be making too much noise.”
“Right you are, my boy,” he answered. “Besides, I left something up there for you. If you need to protect us, it’ll give you the best possible chance.”
He turned and made his way to his blankets, then, and I noticed that he’d placed them closer to the fire than I would have—but had also put his feet toward the fire, with his head facing away. Smart man. If the fire got too high or the heat became too much, he’d experience it with his feet first. No danger of his face blistering or his hair catching on fire.
It was a natural alarm clock, and it increased my respect for him by quite a bit.
I glanced down at my watch and marked the time—just past eleven—and then set an alarm for one. We’d agreed on two-hour shifts for standing guard, since it would give us each enough time for quality sleep in between and would keep the one standing guard from being so tired that he might fall asleep. Then I turned toward the mouth of the cave and made my way to the boulder that lay about three feet into the cave. We’d seen the boulder when we first started talking about guard duty and had agreed that it was the best spot. Whoever was standing guard could shelter behind the boulder and still see most of the area in front of the cave—without being seen by anyone or anything that was looking in. I was hoping that we would have a quiet night and wouldn’t have to deal with any incursions, but if we did, it was far better to catch the intruder by surprise.
The boulder gave us a way to do that.
When I arrived at the flattened spot behind the rock, where Marlon had obviously been spending his time, I huffed out a laugh. There, sitting up against the wall, was a sturdy, compact crossbow. I couldn’t see well in the darkness, but I thought it might be a Ravin of some sort. It had that narrow aspect that usually marked that brand.
That made it a top-end crossbow. One of the most sought-after labels. Here in our cave.
“No noise, indeed,” I whispered to myself.
The crossbow would be virtually silent and just as deadly as a gun against both predators and people. Next to the weapon, he’d left a quiver full of arrows, and I wondered for a moment how the hell he’d hidden that from me up to this point. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was too large to have fit in his pack—which I’d helped to pack, in any case.
Then I realized that it didn’t matter how he’d gotten it out here. I didn’t care whether he’d shoved it into his pants to carry it that way or if he’d already had it in this cave, just in case he ever needed it. The only important thing was that we had it—and we had it because we’d happened to find this man in the middle of nowhere, and he happened to have not only training but an almost paranormal sense for what we’d need and when.
Yes, I was glad to have him on our side. I knew for a fact that without him, we would have died in the snow outside of Randall’s house. Even if we hadn’t, Randall would have caught up to us at some point, and I would have been too weak to fight him alone.