“You don’t? Well, that’s too bad because I was about to start on it.”
“I got it right?”
“Yes, you did. If that fire actually is spreading, which is how it looks right now, it’s going to be spreading pretty close to our escape route.”
13
The horses woke her.
A whinny in the night, answered by another, and Allison was awake quickly. She was a deep sleeper usually, but not since Ethan had gone into the mountains. She had no fear of being left alone on the property; most of her life, she’d been alone on the property. Some days she wanted to send him into the mountains just to be alone again.
This summer, though, the ill winds had blown through her mind daily. She tried to adopt Ethan’s amused disregard for such things, but she couldn’t. You could offer the heart all the instruction you wanted. The heart was often hard of hearing.
She was a different woman this summer, and not one she cared to be. She was a fearful woman. In the corner of the room, leaning against the wall near her side of the bed, was a loaded shotgun. On the nightstand where usually a glass of water and a book sat, she had her GPS, the one Ethan would text her on if something went wrong. Only a single message received today: they were alone in the woods. That was all he would say, and she knew that, but still, she’d taken to looking at the GPS far too often, and though she knew well that the horses had woken her and not the GPS, she checked it anyhow. Blank and silent.
Bastard, she thought, and hated herself for it. How could she think that? Her own husband, the love of her life, and that was no joke, better believe he was the only love she’d encounter in this life, at least the only one that would run so deep. Deeper than she’d believed was possible.
And still she cursed him now. Because he’d made a choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. The resentment had plagued her ever since Jamie Bennett left Montana, the deal made. How could you resent a man who’d agreed to protect a child?
Jamie was reckless, and he knew it. She appealed to his ego, and he let her. I warned him, and he laughed…
Stop it. Stop those thoughts.
She rose, considered picking up the shotgun for a moment, then dismissed the idea. There was no need for a weapon, or for her resentments. Ethan had made the right choice; the only danger was with him, and she should be thinking of him instead of herself. She would go as far as the porch and see what there was to see. If there appeared to be real trouble in the stable, then she’d return for the shotgun. Occasionally you heard of problems with mountain lions and livestock, the sort of thing that happened when you offered up perfectly good prey in the homeland of a perfectly good predator, but in all her years there, the horses had never been bothered by one.
They also rarely woke her in the night.
She crossed the living room in the dark. A dull orange glow came from behind the glass door of the woodstove, remnants of a nearly extinguished fire. She hadn’t been asleep long. Just past midnight now. Between the living room and the porch was a narrow storage room, the washer and dryer crammed inside, rows of shelves surrounding them. She found a battery-powered spotlight by touch and then pulled a heavy jacket off the hook beside the door. Summer, sure, but the night air wouldn’t admit to such a thing, not yet. In the pocket of the jacket she put a can of bear spray. You never knew. One year they’d had a grizzly on the bunkhouse porch; another time one had inspected the bed of Ethan’s pickup after a garbage run. If a grizz was out there now, the pepper spray would be far more useful than the shotgun.
She went out into the night, and the breeze found her immediately and pushed its chill down the collar of her jacket. She walked to the far edge of the porch, leaving the door open behind her. Fifty yards away, in the stable, the horses were silent again.
She knew the shadows that lay between the cabin and the barn from years of night checks. In what should have been a stretch of open ground, every tree cleared from it long ago, something stood, black on black.
Allison lifted the spotlight and hit the switch.
A man appeared, halfway between her and the stable, and though he blinked against the harshness of the light, he seemed otherwise untroubled by it. He was young and lean and had bristle-short hair and eyes that looked black in the spotlight. The glare had to be blinding, but he did not so much as lift a hand to block it.
“Good evening, Mrs. Serbin.”
This was why she had the shotgun. This was why it was kept loaded and propped near the bed and now she had walked away from it because for too long she had lived in a world where a shotgun was unnecessary.
You knew, she thought, even as she stared at him in silence. You knew, Allison, somehow you knew he was coming, and you ignored it and now you will pay.
The man was advancing toward her through the narrow beam of light, and his motion induced her own, a slow backward shuffle on the porch. He did not change his pace.
“I’d like you to stop there,” she said. Her voice was strong and clear and she was grateful for that. “Stop there and identify yourself. You know my name; I should know yours.”
Still he came on with that carefree stride, his face a white glow and his eyes squinted nearly shut. Something was wrong with that. His willingness to accept the glare, to walk directly into it without taking so much as a side step, that wasn’t right. She’d caught him in the beam and for some reason he was embracing it. Why?
“Stop there,” she said again, but now she knew that he would not. Her options rolled through her mind fast because they were few. She could wait here and he’d come on until he’d joined her on the porch and whatever had brought him here in the night would be revealed. Or she could turn and run for the door, close and lock it, and get the shotgun in her hands. She knew that she could make it before he caught her.
He knows I can too. He can see that.
But still he walked without hurry, squinting against the spotlight.
She knew then. Understood in an instant. He was not alone. That was why he was not hurried and it was why he did not wish her to move the light away from him.
She pivoted and headed for the door only to stop immediately. The second man was already almost to the porch. Far closer to the door than she was. He’d come from around the other side of the cabin. Long blond hair that glowed near white in the beam. Boots and jeans and a black shirt unbuttoned almost to midchest. Pistol in his hand.
“Be still,” he said. He had a doctor’s bedside tone. A professional soother.
She stood where she was as he walked toward her from the front and the other one reached the porch at her back. No way to face them both. At once, she was relieved that she had not taken the shotgun. She could shoot only one of them at a time, the way they were positioned, but that was still more shooting than they likely wanted, and if they’d thought she was a threat, they might have fired first. Right now, they did not think that, and in their perception of her as harmless, she was being given one last valuable tooclass="underline" time. How much of it, she did not know. But there was some, and she needed to use it now, and use it right.
She thought of the bear spray, and then she lifted her hands into the air. To reach for it was to admit it was there. The bear spray was of little comfort in the face of a gun but it was what she had and she intended to keep it. Keep it and earn more of what these men could grant: time. Whether it was hours or minutes, whether it was seconds, her hope lay in buying more.
“What do you want?” she said. Voice no longer so strong. “There’s no need for a gun. You can tell me what you’d like.”