Chapter 14 #2
“Mr. Freedman.” I inwardly cringed at the surprise that escaped.
I hadn’t seen the man since I’d left for Cibola, and the five or six years since then had been hard on him.
His coiled hair was a mix of gray and white, and he shuffled out the door with the help of a cane.
Though he had that ever-present smile on his face, there wasn’t any recognition for me.
“I’m Fallon Hunter.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of my home.
“Ohhh, Fallon. Fallon?” He rubbed his face in astonishment and giggled.
“You sure have grown. Haven’t seen you in years.
I hope you didn’t come to lift me over your shoulders and carry me around like you girls used to.
My back won’t take it anymore.” He fell back into his rocking chair with a groan.
I grinned from relief. “No, I won’t put you through that. Miss Cora sent me to deliver this to you. She said you’d know what it was.”
He took the jar and the note with a generous thank you. I leaned against the railing around the front porch and waited for him to put on his reading glasses and look over the message. He put the jar atop the folded paper on the round metal table beside him.
“For my leg. Got this…sciatic nerve pain. Like fire up and down my leg and back. Needs surgery to fix, according to the doctors, but I’m old, Fallon.
Figure I’ll just go ahead and die with it.
” His laugh was so rough it could have been mistaken for a cough.
“This stuff helps, though. Miss Cora, she’s a good one.
Y’all have been good to me.” He looked off into the peaceful surroundings and grew thoughtful.
I enjoyed the quiet with him for a while.
I had a few hours to kill anyway, and it was nice to have a distraction.
“Is there anything you need me to do while I’m here?” I offered.
He waved the offer away with a shake of his head and his hand.
“I get plenty of help from the girls. Got one here ‘bout every day now. Taking care of poor ol’ Sandy out back or clearing out the yard. Bringing me food, cleaning up cobwebs, chopping wood when it’s cold.
It’s not a bad place to grow old and die.
” Mr. Freedman hooked his cane over the table beside him and leaned back to rock in his rocking chair.
The pity I’d felt was gone. This was a man who was totally at peace.
“You know, I was a young man, younger than yourself, when I moved here. I just wanted out of Louisiana. Hurricane wiped me out and sent me packing, and I didn’t stop until New Mexico.
Got a job at the racetrack, and that’s where I met Mr. Ramirez.
He was a bracero, he called it, and they looked down on him just as much as they did me back then.
In that world. Horse racing. But Ramirez knew his horses.
He got this land up here, and he got to work, and in his time, he owned some of the fastest horses that ever graced the track down there.
He hired me, but I always felt more like a son to him than anything else. He was family.”
Some of the mothers still called this piece of land the Ramirez property, but in all my time living here, it had always been Mr. Freedman’s land.
After a thoughtful pause, he continued, “When I came to live here, Mr. Ramirez warned me about the women who lived up the way. Brujas. ‘Brujas,’ he’d called you.
He’d point to owls who came in the night, called them the same thing.
” Mr. Freedman stopped for a fit of laughter.
“I didn’t know what the word meant, not until Mr. Ramirez was long gone.
He thought y’all were witches. And maybe he was right.
They used to say my great-grandmother was a witch, but where I was from, maybe it meant something different. ”
I smiled. There was no fear or accusation in his eyes.
He wasn’t even looking for confirmation for whether we were witches or not.
I’d never thought about it from Mr. Freedman’s perspective — what it was like to live next to the Hunters.
We were certainly an odd bunch of women, but he’d been so much a part of my childhood that it was strange to think of him as an outsider now.
“What I mean to say is…” He was quiet for so long, looking out into the forest at nothing in particular, that I wasn’t sure he would finish his thought. I was startled when he picked it up again. “Y’all have been good to me. I thank you for that.”
“Thank you, too, Mr. Freedman.” I felt like a shy little girl again, going up against something bigger than I could manage. This felt like a goodbye.
“You get back home now. You’re here to visit your family, right?” He shooed me off.
“Thank you,” I said again. “Need anything before I go?”
“Just need you to deliver my gratitude to Miss Cora.” He told me with a look from the corner of his eye before his attention went out to the forest again.
* * *
I’d been ordered to sit in an old wooden chair far enough away from the house to be private, and with several Hunter mothers looming over me — Josephine, Cora, Sarah Jane, along with my sister Imogen Hunter — the point was clear.
I was on trial. I folded my hands together in my lap and squared my shoulders, trying to portray an image of calm confidence totally at odds with the shrieking anxiety inside.
The forest behind me was coming to life in the setting sun, and the occasional shuffles and calls set me on edge.
I wasn’t sure if that was the reason goosebumps raised on my arms, or if it was the chill of evening setting in.
Four sets of judging eyes probing me probably had something to do with the feeling, too.
“When was the last time you were here, Fallon?” Sarah Jane asked.
“It’s been two years, at least. I didn’t visit last year.
Not for the Day of the Mother,” I admitted.
Last year, I’d been convinced I’d never be a real Hunter, though.
I understood her line of questioning and got in front of it.
“You know the story. I lost Derrick Hope, the person I loved. Killed by vampires. I didn’t know how to go on being a Hunter after that. ”
“And why should someone who gave up be Blessed?” Imogen asked. With her head held high and haughty and her arms locked in front of her, she was the harshest of all of them, despite being decades younger.
“I’m fighting again now. I want to fight. More than just wild newborns, even.” I wanted to be strong enough to fight Lazaro Reyes and his kind, but I sensed that wasn’t the right answer. We’d never learned to go after more than just the freshly reanimated beasts that caused mindless destruction.
“Jerica told us about the old vampire hunting you,” Jo said. “A Knight of the First?”
I shook my head, unfamiliar with the term.
It figured that Lazaro would think of himself as a knight, a romantic protector of his own kind.
“He was from a family of vampires who use the name Reyes. It was a ritual killing of a Hunter. Some old tradition. He attacked me, and I was just able to hold him off. It was luck, really.”
“He still lives?”
I nodded. “For now.” Some cockiness seeped into that promise. My fight against Lazaro was a point of pride, as long as I left out a few details. Of course, my critical sister wouldn’t let me linger on that shining example of my will to fight.
“And what about your friend who was turned?” Imogen asked. “Jerica told us about him.”
I flinched as a sultry image of Fenton’s mostly naked body rocking with mine that morning sprang into my mind and zipped through my body.
Oh, Mother. I panicked and cursed Jerica for mentioning him.
“Right. He’s… still around. Not enough of a nuisance or a danger to kill.
” That was the wrong fucking answer, and it was his own voice in my head telling me so.
“It’s a vampire,” Imogen spat.
“Do you still feel empathy towards him?” Jo asked, narrowing in on the weak spot.
“Could you kill the vampire wearing a friend’s face?” Sarah Jane added before I could answer.
“If he were killing humans,” I answered with confidence, despite the wrongness of it. “Which he’s not. He drinks bottled blood that’s donated, and he’s protected by the Reyes family. Those knights?”
“There’s the issue with Lily, too,” Imogen said to Jo, jumping subjects before we were even past Fenton. This was getting away from me real fast, and it was starting to piss me off that Imogen was the conductor setting the pace. I had no option but to keep up.
“Lily is choosing the life she wants for herself. Hasn’t that always been an option for us?” I said, unable to straighten the wobbling edge to my voice.