CHAPTER 2
The Calloway north fence line caught the early sun in barbed wire. June saw it first as a glint, then as a line, then as something to drive past on her way to the barn. She wasn’t looking for Deacon Pruitt’s truck. She found it anyway.
She told herself it wasn’t her business. Pulled over anyway.
The gravel crunched under her boots. County road quiet at six-fifteen, nothing moving but the occasional red-winged blackbird lifting from the ditch grass.
June approached the truck from the passenger side, hands in her jacket pockets, hands loose, unhurried.
She wasn’t in a hurry now. The thing about finding something broken on the side of the road was that it was already broken.
The timetable belonged to whoever had done the breaking, not to her.
The cab smelled like coffee, work gloves and a musk that lived in Deacon’s clothes no matter how often Harper washed them.
A thermos wedged in the cup holder, lid screwed tight.
A single leather work glove on the driver’s seat, palm up, fingers curled, dropped there mid-task. Keys in the ignition. Radio off.
June stood at the open door and looked at the glove. Then she turned and scanned the fence line.
The ditch on the far side was shallow. Maybe three feet deep, grassed over, the kind of erosion gully that ran alongside county roads all through these hills.
Deacon lay at the bottom of it, face up, boots pointed at the sky.
Canvas work shirt, the kind with the button-flap pockets.
Rubber-soled boots, clean at the heels. His hat was gone.
His eyes were open, looking at nothing. Morning dew had settled on his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves, beading the fabric where it hadn’t soaked in yet.
He’d clearly been headed out to check on something before the sun got high. That was the worst part: the ordinary-ness of him. She hadn’t even seen the blood yet. His body had arranged itself in death the same way it had in life: practical, unadorned, taking up no more space than it needed.
June stepped over the fence. The barbs caught at her sleeve, and she unhooked herself without looking down. The grass was wet. Her boots sank into the soft earth at the bottom of the ditch; she crouched beside him, knees in the mud, and pressed two fingers to his neck.
She held them there. Carotid pulse. Absent.
She knew it was absent after the first three seconds.
She held for fifteen anyway, because fifteen was what the protocol called for, and June had been following protocol since she was nineteen years old and her mother’s hospice nurse had shown her how to check for a pulse she already knew wasn’t there.
She released his neck. Sat back on her heels.
The ditch smelled of wet earth, cut grass and something underneathdelete, copper-sharp, that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
She looked at his face. The lines around his eyes had relaxed.
His beard caught the light where the dew hadn’t dried yet.
His mouth was slightly open, the small parting dead mouths often fell into, and June had the sudden, useless thought that she should close it. She didn’t.
Two nights ago. The clinic. The fluorescents buzzing, the phone call from Mrs. Hadley,delete then Deacon at the back door with his hat in his hand and a prescription for Harper along with a piece of advice, delivered flat, final, without ornament, the register he reserved for anything that mattered.
Take Third Street home tonight.
She had. She’d taken Third Street home, slept in her bed, woken up to her alarm and driven to the Calloway place to look at a goat with a prolapsed eye, and now Deacon Pruitt was lying in a ditch with dew on his collar and no pulse under her fingers.
The sun moved. A shadow crossed the fence line. Cloud, maybe, or just the angle changing as the morning climbed. June reached for her radio. Stopped. Reached for her phone instead.
County dispatch picked up on the second ring. Female voice. Young, or young-sounding. Professional, with the clipped efficiency of someone who’d answered a lot of six-a.m. calls.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“This is June Callahan. I’m on County Road 12, approximately half a mile north of the Calloway property fence line.
I’ve found a deceased male, approximately mid-fifties, lying in the ditch on the east side of the road.
No visible trauma from my position. No signs of vehicular accident.
The deceased’s truck is parked on the shoulder with the engine off and the driver’s door open. ”
A pause. Keys clicking.
“Can you confirm the identity of the deceased, ma’am?”
“Deacon Pruitt. Local resident. Married. One granddaughter.”
More keys. The sound of a database being queried, or a form being filled out, or both.
“Emergency services are en route, Ms. Callahan. Please remain at the location.”
“I will.”
The line clicked dead. June lowered the phone and looked at the screen.
The time read 6:22. The battery was at sixty-eight percent.
The signal bars showed three out of four.
None of this mattered. She scrolled to her contacts and found the number she’d saved five years ago and never used, not once, not for anything.
The pack channel rang twice. Someone picked up. She didn’t wait to hear who.
“Deacon’s dead. County Road 12, north of Calloway’s fence line. I’ve called dispatch already. They’re on their way.”
Silence on the line. Then a voice (male, low, not one she recognized immediately) said, “Copy.”
She ended the call. The phone went back into her pocket. The ditch was quiet. The blackbirds had moved on. Deacon lay where she’d found him, boots to the sky, and the dew on his collar was starting to dry at the edges where the sun hit it.
June stayed crouched. She knew the order was right.
Dispatch first, pack second. That was how the world of licenses, paperwork and official records worked.
How it worked when the body in the ditch belonged to a man with a human wife, a human granddaughter and a life that existed on paper in ways the pack’s did not.
She also knew it would cost her. Not with dispatch.
With the pack. With the men who would pull up in trucks with cracked mirrors, work gloves still on their hands and find her standing over Deacon’s body having called the county before she called them.
There was a hierarchy in moments like this, and she had just stepped outside it. Deliberately. With both eyes open.
The gravel on the road stayed empty. The fence line held its silence. June waited.
Ramsey’s truck came up the road with its suspension complaining on every rut.
Black Chevy. Cracked side mirror on the passenger side, the kind of damage that happened when you parked too close to a fence post and didn’t bother to fix it because it still worked.
He pulled in behind her clinic truck and killed the engine.
Four minutes before anyone else. The pack’s parallel channel had fumbled the relay, or Ramsey had been close enough that he’d heard it on instinct and had come without waiting for confirmation.
June heard his boots hit the gravel. Heavy. Deliberate. The unmistakable cadence of a man walking toward something he already knew and didn’t want to see.
She stood up.
It was a choice. She could have stayed crouched by the body, could have let him find her there with her fingers still warm from Deacon’s neck, could have given him the image of her as witness first and messenger second.
She didn’t. She stood before he reached the fence line, because Ramsey Tucker needed to see her face when she said it, and she needed to say it standing.
He stopped three feet short. Looked at her. Not at the ditch. Not at the body. At her face, her eyes, the set of her mouth. Reading her with the same directness, unhurried, giving the moment exactly the attention it deserved.
“Deacon’s dead,” June said. No lead-in. No softening. The words came out flat, the same flatness Deacon’s had carried when he’d stood in her clinic doorway and told her about vampires. “I found him here twenty minutes ago. I’ve already called dispatch. They’re on their way.”
Ramsey’s jaw set. Not a clench. A settling, the give of a shelf taking new strain without breaking. His eyes held hers for one beat. Two. Then he looked past her, at the ditch, at the body lying in the grass with its boots pointed at the sky.
He looked for a long time. June stopped counting after thirty seconds.
The silence between them was dense. Not the empty kind, the kind that was full of things neither of them was saying.
Deacon’s chest didn’t move. The dew had dried off most of his collar now, leaving a dark ring where the fabric had soaked through.
His beard caught the light differently dead than it had alive. Less warmth in it. More shadow.
Ramsey studied his friend as if he were a closed door. Assessing. Measuring the distance. Then he looked back at June, and his voice came out level. Not raised. Not cracked. Level in a way that was worse than either.
“Was it the vampires.”
Not a question. Not quite. The way he said it. Flat, declarative, the cadence of a man stating a fact he’d already arrived at. Left no room for the upward inflection that would have made it a question. It sat between them, solid, physical. An accusation wrapped in three words.
June held his gaze. She could have said yes. She could have said no. She could have offered the comfort of certainty one way or the other, could have given him a target for his grief. She didn’t.
“I don’t know.”
The words hung between them. Honest. Unadorned. The kind of honesty that cost more than comfort would have.