Chapter 21
The smoke reached me before we made the ridge. I cursed under my breath as we crested it.
The ranch was on fire below us.
Fat, black smoke rose off the hay barn first, the kind hay throws when there's been gas on it.
The horse barn behind it was paler, slower, going up through the roof.
The yard had taken light too. Two of Rex's trucks sat at angles past the corral with their doors open.
A gate I'd hung myself eight years ago lay knocked off its post in the dirt.
The bunkhouse roof was intact, but somebody had punched holes through three of its windows. Gunfire cracked across the yard.
My hands closed up on the reins, and Galahad felt it, and I made myself ease them. Sorry, buddy. This was my ranch, and these were my boys, and my horses were inside that barn. Ten years on this land and I'd ridden home to it burning.
Winston tensed against me.
"Easy," I said into his hair. He smelled of hospital tape gone sour and sage, and wet leather.
We dropped into the mouth of the arroyo and Coyote was already there, breathing slow like he hadn't just run a mile down a hillside.
I slid off Galahad and reached up to lift Winston down, my hand sliding under his ribs.
He got his feet under him and held. Behind us, the horses inside the barn screamed.
The screaming went up under the smoke, but there was no getting to them. The fire was too big already.
Galahad shied hard. I put my forehead against his neck. "I know, buddy. Easy. Stay with me." I held him a moment longer than I had time for, then walked him back into the cut and tied him off where the scrub would hide him. He stood with his head down and let me do it.
I turned back to Winston. He had his pistol in his good hand and his eyes on the yard, blood drying on his upper lip from where some of the packing had come out.
Stay with me, I almost said. Don't ask me to do this without you twenty feet behind me.
"Stay tight on me," I said instead.
"No." He shook his head once. "We split. You go right under the corral rail; I go left along the wash to the bunkhouse. They've got the tree line and the south fence both. One of us flanks, or those boys don't last."
Goddamn him. He was right.
"Winston—"
"Go."
I looked at him too long.
"Go," he said again, with a pronounced drawl this time.
I turned away from him and climbed.
I came up over the arroyo lip and ran the wash line toward the corral.
Coyote ghosted past me into the scrub, knife already in his teeth.
I flattened against the rail and listened.
There were two voices on the other side, the shotgun pumping, one of them saying something low and the other laughing shortly.
Rex's boys were having a good time on Rafe's land. I pulled the knife out of my boot.
The first stood at the rail with his back to me, rifle up.
I put my hand over his mouth and jammed the knife between his ribs into the heart.
He went rigid against me and dropped quietly.
I lowered him so he wouldn't make a sound on the way down, his blood running up over my hand into the cuff of my shirt before I'd let him go all the way.
The second turned, and I shot him in the face from four feet off, the round through the cheekbone and out the back of his head, the spray hitting the corral rail behind him in a dark line.
That was two. Welcome to Pae Saco, motherfuckers.
I came around the corner with the pistol up, and the yard opened in front of me.
Mateo was behind the water trough working the bolt of a .
30-06, blood drying brown down the side of his face from his hairline.
The Cruz kid was at the bunkhouse corner with a bandana tied tight around his upper left arm, blood coming through the cloth in a steady seep and running down to drip off his elbow.
He had a pistol in his right hand, and he was leaning his shoulder into the wall to keep his feet under him.
His face was the color of dry chalk. He saw me, nodded once, and pivoted back to the tree line.
That's a lot of blood, I thought, and didn't have time to think anything else.
I cut along the corral and took a man at the hay barn corner from fifteen yards.
The shot caught him in the chest as he turned.
He fell across the threshold, and the fire took him.
A round came past my ear from the tree line, and I dropped behind the corral.
The hay barn had gone over and was throwing chunks of itself across the yard in burning lengths, and the horse barn was past anything anybody could do for it.
The screaming from inside it had stopped.
Across the yard, Winston came up beside Mateo at the trough and started firing at the tree line.
Two shooters dropped fire on them. The Cruz kid pivoted and put rounds into the trees with his good arm, leaning hard into the bunkhouse wall.
Coyote came out of the scrub on the south end at a dead run, and one of Rex's men broke from the trees trying for a truck I hadn't seen.
Coyote took him down between the second and third strides: clean tackle, one short knife motion.
Nimue stayed across his shoulders the whole time, head up.
I came around the corral corner to get a sightline on the wash, and the man came out of nowhere on Winston's blind side.
Winston, no!
He was tracking the tree line through his sights with Mateo working beside him, and he didn't see the man. The rifle butt came down across the back of his head, and Winston dropped sideways off the trough into the dirt like somebody had pulled the bones out of him.
Son of a bitch, I thought, and broke into a run. I'll fucking rip your throat out with my teeth for that.
Forty yards stretched between us. Forty fucking yards and a corral rail and two of Rex's men. I knew before three steps I wasn't going to make it, but I ran anyway. Get up, I told him in my head. Get up, get up, you stupid, stubborn Ranger, get up.
Rex's man got him by the collar and started dragging. Winston's bad arm trailed behind him in the dirt. Another one came up to help the first, and I shot him through the back at thirty yards. Old habit. The round took him cleanly, and he dropped on top of Winston.
The second man was already moving faster. He'd seen me coming. I shot again and missed. When I drew up to shoot a third round, the revolver clicked. Empty. Dammit.
A round went past my head near enough to move the air. A third man came up out of the wash to cover the drag. I ducked behind the rail and shouted, "Winston!"
He didn't answer.
I tried to peek around the fence post, but bullets flew too close to my head, and I didn't have any spare ammo for my revolver. God dammit, Ransom. The one time you weren't prepared…
The truck started.
I came over the fence with the pistol up. The truck was already rolling, the second man swinging up into the bed, getting an arm under Winston's head, and for one stupid second I thought, Thank God, somebody's holding his head, and then I remembered who they were.
Some animal part of me wanted to chase the truck down, run after him. I wanted to get on Galahad and ride them down, jump into the bed. Maybe I could take a few of them before they shot me dead. Maybe not, but wasn't Winston worth trying for?
Wasn't he worth dying for?
By the time the thought came and went, the truck was a mile down the road, throwing up a long tail of dust behind it.
They were gone, and so was Winston.
Fuck. God dammit.
Rex was going to die slowly.
I turned back toward the yard.
The horse barn was still standing. Most of it.
The roof was gone in a hole at the east end and the south wall had fallen in, the smoke thinning, the fire eating what was inside it.
Two of Rex's men's bodies lay in the dirt by the threshold, and the one I'd shot at fifteen yards had burned where he fell. The smell was bad and getting worse.
The Cruz kid was on the bunkhouse porch and Mateo had got him there.
Sierra was kneeling in front of him with his sleeves shoved past the elbow and both hands working: pad, pressure, the second bandana already tied tight above the wound.
The blood was still coming down off the kid's elbow and onto Sierra's wrists in a slow, steady line.
Cruz was holding the bad arm against his ribs and not moving it.
His face had gone past chalk into something gray.
Mateo was at his shoulder. Coyote was at the south end of the porch with Nimue across his shoulders and his hands on his hips. He hadn't sheathed the knife.
"Bonney Ranch," I said. "They were taking him to Bonney."
Mateo nodded once.
"Rex'll want him alive long enough to put on a show. That's my window. It's closing every minute Galahad's not under me."
I started walking toward the cut.
Rafe stepped into my path.
He must've come off the porch when I turned. Sierra was at his shoulder, blood on his hands and forearms up to the elbow, the kid's blood. Pearl was at Sierra's side with her head down and her ears pinned. Coyote pulled up a few feet off, watching.
"Move," I said.
"No."
"Rafe. Move."
"You're not going."
"The fuck I'm not."
"My barn is gone. My horses are dead. The Cruz kid took a round through the arm. Sierra's hands are still wet from packing it. Rex Rawlins came onto my land for your Ranger and he came through my barn to do it."
"I know all of that, Rafe. Move."
I tried to sidestep him, but he put a hand on my chest.
Ten years, and Rafe had never put a hand on me.
I looked down at it. Then at him.
"Take your hand off me."
"You're not going."
"Take it off, Rafe."
His hand stayed where it was. That was worse than if he'd shoved me.
"You ride out that gate, the rest of these boys are on their own.
Cruz is half dead on the porch. Mateo's eighteen and just shot a man for the first time.
Coyote's running on fumes. I've got a barn that's still burning and one I can't put out and a fence line Rex can come back through any minute he wants. I need my right hand."
His right hand. That's what he called me. He'd called me his right hand since the first year, when I'd asked him what he wanted me for and he'd said what a man's right hand's for.
"I can't, Rafe."
"You can. You will. You always have."
"Not today."
His grip tightened on the front of my shirt.
"You walked onto this ranch ten years ago with a mountain of rage and nowhere to put it.
I gave you a name, a roof, a horse, and a brother to look after.
I gave you work that made sense of what you were.
And now you're telling me one man with a badge has come through here and you're done? Is that what you're telling me?"
"I'm telling you I'm going."
"For what?"
"For him."
Rafe's eyes searched my face for something he didn't find.
"He's a Ranger, Ransom. He's not even ours."
The anger came up so fast I tasted it. I let it come this time. I wasn't going to swallow another goddamn thing today.
"Maybe he ain't yours. But he's mine. And I love him, Rafe."
The yard went still.
I said it again because I needed to hear it again.
"I love him. I'll be damned if I'm going to stand here and let Rex torture and execute the man I love."
His hand was still in my shirt. The yard had gone quiet around us. Cruz's breathing came across the porch. Pearl panted low at Sierra's leg. Coyote, off to my right, had not moved. I didn't look at any of them. I kept my eyes on Rafe.
"Get the hell out of my way, Rafe," I said. "Or I'll make you."
He finally let me go. "You go after him, Ransom, you don't come back. You hear me? You ride out that gate, you ain't my right hand anymore. You're his. And I don't know who that man is who's standing in front of me, but it ain't the boy I took in ten years ago."
The words went into me like he'd put a knife between my ribs.
I didn't have anything to give him back. The thing he wanted me to take back was the only true thing I'd said in ten years on his land, and I wasn't going to take it back to keep my place at his table.
Sierra put a hand on Rafe's shoulder. "Rafi, let him go."
"Sierra—"
"Querido. He just told you. In front of all of us. You heard him."
"I heard him."
"Then hear him. You're standing in front of a man who just said the word out loud, Rafi, and you're asking him to act like he didn't. He can't. He won't. You're asking him to be less than what he's become."
Rafe's jaw worked. "I need him here."
"You need him whole more than you need him here," Sierra said.
Rafe took a deep breath and removed his hat. In all the years I'd known him, I'd only ever seen him outside without his hat a handful of times. It felt wrong looking at the man without it, his dark braided hair bare. There was more silver there than there used to be, and that felt wrong too.
"Go on then," Rafe said eventually. "Do what you've got to do."
He turned and walked toward the porch and didn't look back.
Sierra walked up to me and took my face in his bloody hands. "Go, aguijón," he said. "Bring him home."
"Sierra—"
"Bring him home, and we'll figure out the rest when you get back. Go save him."
I nodded, turned, and sprinted for Galahad. I untied him, swung up, and turned him toward the gate. Galahad went without me asking.
A horse came behind me before I made the gate.
"Hold up, lover boy," Coyote said, riding up on a paint mare.
"You don't have to come," I said.
Coyote snorted. "I know. But if I let you die, Nimue will be sad, so I'm going."
Past the gate, Mateo rode up to join us.
"You should go back," I told him.
He rode up closer and slapped a satchel full of ammunition against my belly. "And miss all the fun? Hell naw."
A quarter mile out, Linc came up from somewhere with Fenix on a horse beside him. Linc had his rifle across his back. Fenix was armed with a pair of binoculars and a few extra canteens. Fenix looked up at the sky and said, "It's a good day to die."
"Amen," said Linc.
Coyote gave a loud whoop and dug his heels into the mare. The rest of us rode faster to catch him.