Jace was aware of all the eyes fixed on his failure and he was starting to hate Ethan for it, was looking for something Connor Reynolds could come up with to stop it, a bit of bad attitude, maybe even some real anger…
He jerked his hand back in surprise as the tinder caught and a wisp of smoke began to curl.
“Okay,” Ethan said. “Now, when you give it air, be real gentle. Real light.”
Jace lowered his face to the tinder and blew gently and the flame grew and spread, and now the larger pieces were burning, and Ethan told him to add his sticks. He had a brace piece at one end and a series of pencil-lead-size pieces to be added first, leaning against the brace at a forty-five-degree angle. Once those caught, on to the pencil-size, and then the finger-size. He jumped to the second stage too fast, and the smoke began to come thicker and darker, the sign of a fire fighting death, and Ethan said, “This is where you use your brace.”
Jace took a free end of the brace piece and lifted it gently. Ethan’s design wasn’t the tepee style Jace had seen before but more of a ramp, everything angled over the flame and toward the brace. When Jace lifted the brace, the fire that he’d been threatening to smother from above received immediate oxygen from below and the flame caught and grew and crackled.
The sound of it got attention. Everyone in the group murmured a little, impressed.
“We all get to try it?” Drew said.
“Yes. Nice work, Connor. It’s a fine fire. May I have that knife back?”
Jace took it by the bottom of the blade, offered Ethan the handle, and said, “Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
The Nighthawk was gone from him then, and Ethan was moving on, but Jace didn’t care. He was staring at the flames. He lifted the brace piece again, gave it another gust of air, and couldn’t keep from smiling.
I can make fire, he thought.
When Claude woke, the sun was hot on his face and his arm ached worse than his head, though that pain was powerful too. He blinked and saw nothing but a harsh golden sun and a cobalt sky and for a moment the pain was forgotten, because he believed they were gone, that they’d moved on and left him there.
He tried to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound back over his head, and then he was concerned but still not scared because at least the two strangers were gone. This situation he could deal with somehow; with the two of them, he’d have had no chance.
“Seems to be among the living again,” a gentle voice said from behind him, and that was when the fear returned, icy prickles bubbling along his flesh.
“The waking dead,” a second voice said, and then they rose and again Claude saw only shadows as they returned to him. He was aware for the first time of the smell of wood smoke and the soft poppings of a small campfire.
They circled around in front of him. The one called Jack had the gun back in its holster, but the one called Patrick was still holding on to the chain-saw blade. Steam rose from the oil and grease trapped in the links, wisps of black smoke. It had been in the fire.
“We’ll take that location now,” Jack said. “Where Serbin has the boys. We’ll take it from you.”
Claude tried to move, scrabbling his boots in the dirt. They’d bound his hands back against one of the trees he had felled, and there was no chance of moving its weight.
“I’ll give it to you,” he said. His voice was a high fast rasp. “I’ll tell you.”
The man looked down at him and shook his head.
“No, Claude,” he said. “You misunderstood me. I said that we were going to take the name from you now. Your chance to just give it away is gone.”
The one with the smoking chain-saw blade approached from the right and Claude tried to kick him but missed, and then the long-haired one grabbed his boots and held his feet down as the other wrapped the hot string of saw teeth around Claude’s arm. His skin sizzled on the metal and the smell of burned hair and flesh rose to him as he screamed. The one holding his feet had steady, unblinking blue eyes. They never changed expression. Not even when his brother began to tug the blade ends back and forth, back and forth.
They’d gone through all of the muscle and arteries and half the bone in his left forearm before Claude screamed Allison Serbin’s name loud enough to satisfy them.
The blackness came again and this time it would not leave, he could not clear himself from it, he just faded in and out, and the fade-out was better, because the pain was numbed some then. Not enough, but some. He knew that he was going to die here on the hill above his own home, on a sunlit, blue-sky day, and he was less troubled by that than by what he’d just done, how he had given them what they wanted. He could feel his own blood warm and wet on his back, pooling beneath his arm and then running down the slope, and he hoped that it would pump faster, empty his body swifter.
Bring it to an end.
Their voices came and went in the blackness.
“I’m in favor of it. Would take a fine crime-scene team to determine he died anything but a fool’s death, and I suspect they do not have such a team in this area.”
“Does it matter how he died?”
“Time might matter. What this man Serbin hears and when he hears it might matter.”
“True enough. Of course, if you do that, the whole hillside goes up. Awfully dry. Good breeze blowing and taking it up the mountain, into all that timber.”
“Might provide quite a distraction, then.”
“Another fine point. You’ve won me over, brother. But you’re assuming we’ll have no need for him again.”
“I’ve seen lying men and I’ve seen honest men. In that last moment, when he said the wife was the only one who knew? He had the characteristics of an honest man. In my assessment.”
“I concluded similarly.”
What they were discussing, Claude had no idea. He was distracted by wondering what had happened to his arm. The pain suggested it was still part of him, but he had trouble believing that it was. If he was strong enough, he could move it, and that might tell him whether the arm remained, but moving seemed a terrible idea; he wanted to hold on to the blackness longer, where the pain was less. He tried to find it again and could not, because the sun was too hot. The sun was keeping him conscious, and he hated it, oh, how he hated it. What he’d give for a single cloud, something to block out that heat.
But the sun came on stronger, relentless, and with it came the smell of smoke, and he realized then that the sun had somehow set the mountain on fire, and he thought that was one hell of a thing, because in all of his years in this country, he’d never encountered a day so hot as to set the earth to smoking. Someone should do something about that. Someone should make a cloud.
The mountain crackled around him as the sun strengthened, and Claude Kitna squeezed his eyes shut tight and moaned low and long and prayed for a cloud as the world turned to fire.
11
Hannah didn’t trust her eyes. She’d sighted the smoke late in the afternoon and promptly went to the binoculars, certain it was a trick of the light or maybe some backpacker’s campfire, nothing more. She’d already sighted one campfire and found the same boys who had been in various spots around the mountains for nearly a week. Scouts or something. When she saw the second fire, all she was expecting to find with the binoculars was the same group, but when she glassed the hillside above the tree line, she saw a steady column of smoke, growing and thickening, too much for a campfire.
Still, she didn’t call it in immediately. She lowered the binoculars and blinked and shook her head. For days she had watched the empty mountains for fresh smoke and had seen none, and there had been no storms and no lightning, nothing to give her cause for suspicion.
But there it was.