Chapter 25
twenty-five
Fuck. He couldn’t deny Rainey Beckett when she looked at him like that, with her heart in her eyes.
So here he was, trudging across the fields at last light next to Boone. The sky behind them had gone the color of bruised fruit, and the timber ahead was a jagged black seam.
The first mile passed in silence, save for the steady crunch of their boots and the dry thrum of his pulse.
Sable’s tracks were easy enough to read. She’d come in fast, then slowed, then started dragging her left hind — evading something, or someone, or just done in from the run. He didn’t need to crouch to see the blood. The hoof prints staggered, the drag mark clean and sharp.
“She’s hurting,” Boone said.
Evander nodded.
They found her at the edge of a small clearing, standing three-legged in the last of the light, head low, favoring the hind leg so badly she’d worn a circle in the dirt trying to ease it. A lead rope ran from her halter to a stake driven into the ground.
Evander stopped.
“Someone staked her here,” Boone said quietly. He knelt, pressed two fingers to the disturbed earth. “Recent.”
She hadn’t wandered down off the mountain on a bad leg and found her way to the one fence that meant safety. Someone had walked her here, hurt or found her hurt, and tied her in the open where anyone glassing the ridge from the ranch would see her.
Bait. And he’d read it as his horse coming home.
Sable lifted her head and saw him and made a low sound, and every instinct in him pulled toward her.
He crossed the clearing anyway, because leaving her staked and lame in the dark was not a thing he was capable of doing, and he knew — the way he knew terrain, the way he’d known the second Boone stepped into his path at the gate — that walking into the open was exactly what he’d been brought here to do.
He got a hand on her neck. She leaned into it. He reached for the lead and worked the knot at the halter, and that was when the world snapped to full awareness.
Movement at the top of the ridge. Not a flicker, not a sliver of metal caught wrong. A man, standing.
Creed stepped out of the tree line onto the bald rise where the sightlines converged, rifle held loose across his body, and made no move to raise it.
He wanted to be seen. He stood there against the last of the light and let Evander get a long clean look at him, at the fact of him, at who had walked the horse down and staked her out and waited.
Then he brought the rifle up.
Evander shoved Sable’s head away and dropped, and the shot arrived a half-beat behind the motion — the crack rolling flat across the clearing, no suppressor now, Creed past caring who heard. Sable screamed and yanked back against the stake.
Boone hit the dirt beside him. “That’s Calder.”
“I know.”
“He’s not hiding.”
“No.” Evander came up on one knee behind the deadfall and put two rounds on the rise to move him. “He wants us to know it’s him.”
Creed didn’t scramble. He dropped to a prone line behind a shelf of rock, and his next shot punched bark off the ponderosa four inches from Evander’s ear. Close. Deliberate close. A man that good who missed by four inches hadn’t missed.
He was toying with them. Or he was making a point.
“Move,” Evander said.
Boone rolled up and drove for the next fallen log in a hard lunge. Halfway there his jacket snapped back, his left arm jerked, and blood sheeted across the dark fabric. He didn’t stop. He hit the ground behind the log and called it out flat. “Shoulder. Not through.”
Evander’s world went cold.
He tracked the muzzle flash back to the rock shelf and put three rounds on it fast, walking them across the position, driving Creed’s head down while Boone got what cover he could.
From the rise came a shift — Creed pulling off the shelf, repositioning, not running.
Buying the angle he wanted. He hadn’t come for a firefight.
He’d come to make Evander watch what happened to men who stood next to him, and then he’d come to leave.
Sable tore at the stake, wild, hauling her full weight against the lame leg every time a shot cracked, and she was going to stand in the open and take the next one if he didn’t get to her.
He couldn’t get to her.
Evander crawled to Boone instead.
Blood ran down Boone’s arm to the dirt in a fast, steady line. He had a hand clamped over it and he grinned up through it, wolfish, teeth white in the low light. “Told you he’d come for you.”
Evander tore open the med kit. “This is bad.”
“I’ve had worse.”
He found the entry, high and medial, pressed a wadded bandage into it and wrapped tight, heel of his palm bearing down hard enough to count — and behind him the stake pulled free of the earth and Sable bolted.
Lame, lurching, three good legs and one bad one, crashing into the black timber and gone before he could have reached her if both his hands hadn’t been full of Boone.
He didn’t go after her.
He kept the pressure on and let her run, and the thing in his chest that had spent all afternoon daring to want her back went quiet and dark.
Up on the ridge, the fire stopped.
Evander held still, rifle in one hand and the other on the wound, and waited for the shift, the last round, the thing Creed had climbed up there to do.
It didn’t come. When he risked the rise, the skyline was empty.
Creed had gotten what he came for and walked off the mountain, in no more hurry leaving than he’d been coming.
He’d wanted Evander to see him. He’d wanted him to know. Then he’d shot the man standing next to him and left, because that was the whole message and he’d delivered it.
“Bear.” Evander keyed the radio, voice gone flat. “Boone’s hit. East ridge, above the timber break. Shooter’s Calder — he’s off the mountain, but assume he circles. Extraction now.”
Bear came back even and controlled. “Jonah and River are en route. Hold position. Coming to you.”
Evander stripped off his jacket and wadded it under Boone’s head. He kept pressure on the wound. He counted Boone’s breaths and the seconds between them.
“You know he only got me because I stepped into it,” Boone said.
Evander grunted. He didn’t have words.
“Can’t control everything, Cole. Sometimes a man just chooses to bleed.”
Evander looked down at him. “Why.”
Boone smiled again, softer. “You’re the best shot we got. Wasn’t going to let you go down before I did.”
Something in Evander cracked, then set harder than before. He kept the pressure, kept the count, kept the world narrowed to what his two hands could hold and nothing past it.
The blood slowed. Not enough. He checked the pulse. There. Not strong. There.
Bear reached them first, King baying down the slope, Bear’s boots heavy and certain on the grade. He dropped beside Boone and took the wound. “You good?”
“Peachy,” Boone said, lips gone gray.
“Get him out of here.” Bear jerked his chin at Evander. “You’re point.”
They carried him down in a fireman’s carry, Evander at the legs, Bear at the arms. Jonah met them at the break with River a step behind, and by the time they crossed the yard both men wore more of Boone’s blood than Boone had left to give.
Twelve minutes to the ranch. Bear’s hands never came off the wound, not across the yard, not through the infirmary door.
Evander backed away and let him work.
He stepped out onto the porch into the cold.
Behind him the infirmary was all motion and light and noise — Bear’s voice pitched low and hard, Jonah running for supplies, someone calling for the good clotting gauze, Boone answering something dry enough that a strained laugh went around the room.
The sounds of people pulling together around a man who was hurt.
The sounds of a family closing over a wound.
He stayed on the porch with the door between him and all of it.
He looked at his hands. The blood had gone tacky, filling the lines of his knuckles and drying dark under his nails.
Boone’s blood. He turned them over and looked at the backs and then the palms, and they did not know the difference between this blood and any other he’d carried out of any other bad ground.
He’d flagged the blind spot on Ghost’s map that morning.
He’d named the exact ground Creed used. He’d let himself want the horse badly enough to walk out into it, and Boone had followed him into the dark the way men kept following him into the dark, and now Boone was on a table and Sable was gone up the mountain on a ruined leg and Creed had stood on that ridge and made sure Evander saw his face while he did it.
There was a version of the last week he’d let himself half-believe. Coffee at a table that wasn’t his. A song about a name. A door somebody kept holding open, and the idea, quiet and unfamiliar, that he might walk through it and stay.
This was the other version. The true one. He stayed, someone trusted him, someone bled. It had been true in a country on the far side of the world, and it was true on a ridge above Solace, and it would go on being true wherever he let himself stand still long enough for people to gather.
Inside, Boone’s voice again, faint through the glass, telling somebody to quit crowding him.
Evander stood on the porch with the man’s blood drying on his hands and did not go in.