Chapter 4 Reid
They'd started trickling in twenty minutes ago, wandering from the bunkhouse, some still buttoning their shirts, others already stripped down to shorts. No one spoke.
Midge Maddox, matriarch, queen of hard stares and stiffer whiskey, stood on the porch steps, smoking a cigarillo and watching.
Counting heads, even from this distance.
It was her turn to stay home with Noah. They’d worked out a rotation after last summer.
The first time we’d left Noah home alone, we’d come back to find a total stranger passed out in the barn.
She’d ended up staying and was now married to Calder and about to shift and run with us, but Noah didn’t get left at home alone anymore.
Period. Tonight it was Midge’s turn. She raised the cigarillo in salute when she caught me looking. I nodded back.
The others had made a loose line at the edge of the barn's shadow.
Ash was first, fidgety and wild, always closest to the exit.
Gray hung back, hands in his pockets, saying nothing but missing nothing.
Jace stood apart, eyes on the trees, shoulders tight.
Sloane fell in beside Jace without a word, the way she did everything, like she'd already accounted for every variable and found them acceptable.
Tess, our barn stranger turned Calder's mate, drifted in last, silent as a deer, her entire body radiating tension but not fear.
The change in her since her first day here was staggering, no more flinching, no more scanning for exits.
She looked ready, almost eager. And then there was Eli, standing right next to Calder.
Calder took a step forward and the rest of us followed.
We ran for the southern line, covering ground in a loose wedge.
Nothing to hunt tonight, just territory to map, scent marks to check, and a hundred invisible signals to read and reply to.
Gray ran the outer edge, watching the boundary for anything that didn't belong.
Buck and Jace kept the middle. Eli moved as if outrunning something only he could see.
At the highest point of the ridge, I paused and looked back.
The porch light was still on. Midge hadn't moved.
A hundred yards past the creek, a whitetail broke cover.
The rest of us clocked the deer, calculated, and dismissed it.
But not Eli. He shifted gears and shot after her.
No signal, he didn't look back, just poured every muscle into the chase.
Calder turned to me, the look in his eye as hard as a rifle stock.
This was my problem. I broke formation and gave chase.
Eli was fast. He was so fast it took everything I had to close the gap.
At the edge of the next clearing, he stopped dead.
The deer was gone, but Eli stood there, head up, chest heaving.
I paced toward him. There was no fear in him, but there was a flicker of something else, defiance, maybe, or embarrassment.
I didn't snarl. I didn't posture. I just gave him the stare that said, “Enough.” He looked away first, and that was all it took.
We loped back to the main group. Ash shot him a look as we passed, and Tess nipped his shoulder, not hard, just enough to say “dumbass” in the language we all understood.
Back at the barn, the others peeled off for the bunkhouse. Only Eli lingered once we’d shifted back. Thanks to an old spell, our clothes shifted back and forth with us.
“You good?” I asked.
He nodded, but it was a liar’s nod. “I just... when it runs, I want to run.”
I got it. God, I got it. “There’s nothing wrong with that, kid. But if you break the line, you put us all at risk.”
“I know,” he said. “Won’t happen again.”
It would. That was who he was. I clapped his shoulder and stood in the doorway for a while, thinking about Eli, the way he’d always been one small step from spinning off the rails. He’d grown up raised by Calder, Sloane, Midge, and me. Poor kid never stood a chance.
Then I thought about the woman from the Coleman side. Her measured calm. The way she’d handled everything without flinching.
I felt the wolf in me, restless but not for the usual reasons. Not threat. Not anticipation. Just unsettled.
***
Well, it certainly wasn’t chilly out here before the sun, it wasn’t blasting hot, either.
A rare treat the Hill Country doled out only after punishing everyone for a week straight.
The main yard was quiet but not empty. A couple of the horses nosed at the fence rails, hooves ticking impatiently against the limestone base, while the barn cats dragged the carcass of a field mouse to some dim recess in the tack room.
If I listened closely, I could hear a coyote chorus winding down to the west, two ridges over, where they thought we couldn't hear them.
Coyotes always thought that. They were always wrong.
I saddled Ghost and put the rifle in its scabbard.
The meeting point was just past the north tank, where the fence cut down a shale slope and into a strip of brush that looked rough to mend.
I saw them as I rounded the rise, Buck and Gray, already at work, stringing a fresh run of barbed wire and making short work of it.
I slowed Ghost to a walk and watched them.
Buck, cussing softly as he twisted the splice, Gray, hands moving with that unnerving, deliberate quiet he had, every movement planned six steps ahead.
No need for words this early. Just a nod, and a shared glance at the sky, and then each man back to his work.
I spotted Jennie fifty yards further. She wore a worn tee and jeans and a ball cap with no logo, sitting straight and still on her horse, hands loose on the reins, sunglasses hiding her eyes but not the way she watched every step I took.
Her sidearm was in plain sight, holstered high and tight.
“Morning,” I called.
She looked up, smiled in that way that was half apology, half challenge. “I thought you ranchers slept until ten and let the help do the hard work.”
“If that’s true, Buck’s been lying to me for years,” I said, and slid off Ghost to check the bottom rail of the nearest fence post. “You ready?”
She patted Jupiter’s shoulder. “She’s as ready as I’ll ever be.” There was a casualness to her that didn’t match her hands, which stayed loose but never far from her hips. I clocked the bulge at her waistband and how it rode above her belt.
The sun cracked the horizon and burned the mist off the low pastures, drawing shadows across the ground.
We started down the fence, a steady walk, the horses falling in beside each other with barely any guidance.
I pointed out the new wire as we went, the fresh ties, and where the old posts had been replaced.
Jennie took it all in but didn’t pretend to be impressed.
Instead, she asked, “You do all your own repairs?”
“Ninety-nine percent, yeah,” I said. “Saves money, and you get a better product. Hired hands tend to cut corners. Plus, between all the hands on the ranch, we pretty much know how to do it all.”
She grinned, a flash of white teeth. "Sounds like you're describing my last boyfriend with the hired hands."
I didn’t comment, but let myself laugh a little, quiet and tight. “You from a ranch background?”
“Not even close. Houston, then Austin. My mom’s idea of a farm was a backyard with grass. She was a city girl who thought boots were just for concerts.”
“She raise you alone?”
Jennie shrugged. “Mostly. Dad took off before I was born. She said she liked her freedom, but I think she just liked not answering to anyone.”
The horses moved in step, heads low, ears twitching at the breeze. Up ahead, the creek cut a lazy S through the pasture, the water brown with runoff from last night’s rain. “You want to see the ridge? I can show you the boundary.”
“Lead the way.”
We rode the next mile in silence. The land sloped up, a long steady climb, and the view at the top was everything the brochures promised, waves of trees and shimmers of grass all the way to the blurred edge of the horizon.
I took out a topo map from my saddle bag, unfolded it on my thigh, and pointed to the line that separated Maddox land from the rest. “Here,” I said.
“You see the dark cut? That’s the old riverbed.
It marks the legal boundary, but the fence follows the high ground instead, easier to defend, and less work in the long run. ”
She leaned over, close enough that I could smell her, soap, sweat, and a faint trace of mint.
Gum, maybe. Maybe her toothpaste. She studied the map, finger tracing a line, and said, She bit her lip, thinking.
“We’re too far east for Eagle Ford, though.
I checked the geological survey.” She pointed at a formation that was Glen Rose.
Not Eagle Ford. She should’ve known that.
That was it. She’d meant to say Glen Rose. A real geologist would never mix up the two. Different strata, different rock, different everything. I watched her face, saw the micro-twitch when she realized she’d tipped her hand, and let it go.
“Survey was out of date when they printed it,” I lied, folding the map back up. “We use what works.”
She smiled, the real one this time. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? I’ve spent three years mapping soil in the Panhandle, and every time, the land does something it’s not supposed to.”
“You ever work in the Hill Country before?”
“First time. They said it’d be easy. Turned out, nothing about this place is easy.”
She said it with a laugh, but I could see the truth behind it. There was a hardness to her, but not the brittleness that breaks a person. It was the smooth, layered resistance of something that had been tested too many times to fail.