18. Seventeen
The fucking screw went in crooked.
I backed it out, lined it up, and the point skated off again.
"Fuck this."
"Language," John said, not even looking up from his work.
Sierra had handed me the screwdriver at breakfast like he was doing me a favor. The hasp had torn clean off Nimue's crate, taking half the wood with it, and now I was sitting on the dirt floor of the equipment shed with the crate wedged between my knees, blood boiling.
Two days of work, and I had a pile of dry pine and a box of crooked screws to show for it. Linc was on the sofa in the main house with his leg mapped out in surgical marker, and Zaroff was in town somewhere with the air conditioning running, drinking cold water.
"You're not my mother." I dug the screw back out.
"No." John kept counting suture packs, dropping them one by one into the lid of Sierra's kit. "Your mother would've taken the screwdriver away from you by now."
He didn't lift his head, but the corner of his mouth twitched under his beard, and my chest pulled tight.
I reached up to shift Nimue. I'd draped her over my collarbone when I started because she'd been sluggish and cold to the touch, and I'd figured she needed the heat of my neck. I’d been thinking too hard about Miguel to look any closer.
The second my fingers brushed her scales, she snapped.
She missed my jaw by a foot, closing on empty air next to my ear, then pulled back, coiling tight, her tongue whipping. She was hanging onto my throat with the rest of her body, drawn up tense, trying to work out where the threat had gone.
I froze, hands flat on the crate, breathing shallow. "Easy," I said. "It's me."
She struck at the sound of my voice and missed again.
Her eyes were blue, milky, and clouded. Blind.
She stayed coiled there for a second, her head weaving, tasting the air. Then she finally slid back down my shoulder, tucking her head under my jaw.
Nine years. I'd dug her out of a frozen culvert with a broken tail and hauled her through every bad night of my life, and she'd never once snapped at me. My hands were shaking against the wood of the crate.
"Good girl," I told her.
John started to push himself up from his bucket, one hand braced hard against his busted ribs.
"Don't. She'll go for you, too."
"She's blind, not rabid." He didn't listen. He crouched as low as his side would let him and just watched. "How long?"
"She quit eating on Tuesday. The eyes are new."
"You didn't say anything."
"I've been busy."
He didn't argue. He just stood up and went back to rearranging the shed. He'd been doing it all week. Moving the ammo boxes off the high shelf, dragging crates out into the yard, changing the lightbulbs. The room had shifted a foot to the left since breakfast.
"What are you even doing?" I asked.
"Counting." He pulled down a fresh box and set it on the bench. "You've got saline in a barn fridge, gauze spread across four different buildings, and the nearest doctor is an hour's drive away."
"So?"
"So I'm organizing."
With nothing else to fix, John had turned the shed into his personal mission.
"Bring her into the house," John said.
"No."
"Put her in Sierra's back room. It has a window. I can check her eyes twice a day, make sure she isn't getting an infection."
"You can't fix a shed."
"A what?"
"Shed." I lifted Nimue off my neck, careful to keep my fingers away from her mouth.
She let me do it this time, her body cold and heavy as she slid over my knuckles.
I lowered her into the crate. "That's what she's doing.
The eyes go milky, they clear up, and then the whole skin comes off in one piece. She'll be fine in a few days."
"And until then, she's blind and trying to bite your face off."
"Exactly. She can't see, so anything that gets close is a threat."
John braced his hand on the workbench and lowered himself back onto his bucket with a groan. "So what does she need?"
"Dark. Cool. Something damp to rub against when the skin starts to give." I looked at the broken lid. "And for everyone to leave her the fuck alone."
He huffed.
"What?" I asked.
"I know the feeling."
I sat there, hand resting on the crooked lid. The cave ran cooler than anywhere else on the ranch. Pitch black, silent, and nothing came in unless I carried it in.
"I'm taking her to the cave," I said.
John stopped. His hand stayed flat on the lid of the suture kit, and his eyes came up to meet mine. "You aren't crossing the perimeter alone," he said.
"It's forty minutes up."
"I don't care if it's forty seconds. Rafe put the rule on the board for a reason, Coyote. Nobody goes past the fence alone."
"Rafe won't even know."
“You want to go up there? Fine. Take Cruz. Take his rifle."
My throat tightened. Cruz had been looking at me a certain way since we buried Miguel. Quiet. Sorry for me. Forty minutes of that look riding at my back made me want to claw my own skin off. I couldn't do it. I couldn't stand being watched for another second.
"Fine." I picked at the split wood on the crate lid. "I'll grab Cruz."
"I'm not tying you to the ranch," he said. He set the kit lid down instead of dropping it. "Make sure Cruz carries the long gun."
"Yeah."
I stood up and the empty sheath knocked against my hip. The knife was still on the floor by my bedroll where I'd dropped it after we buried Miguel. I picked it up.
Then I picked up the crate. A blind snake loose on a horseback ride would bite me before the second barn. I grabbed a roll of heavy black friction tape from the bench and bound the lid down tight, wrapping it until the wood didn't budge.
I saddled the mare and didn’t bother Cruz, heading straight for the arroyo trail.
The arroyo wasn't mine anymore. Somebody had walked it right past me and put his hands over a kid's face.
But the ranch was too loud. I wanted to be somewhere nobody looked at me like I was the one who'd let a kid die.
So I told myself what I'd have laughed at coming out of anybody else's mouth. He wouldn't use the same door twice.
I rode past the second barn.
The mare knew the way. I gave her the reins and let her pick through the loose rock herself. The tape-bound crate bumped rhythmically against my thigh. Nimue stayed quiet inside. My collar was bare, and my shoulders kept hunching up around nothing.
The trail climbed until I couldn't hear the ranch behind me anymore.
No radio crackling on my hip. No heavy boots behind me. No one asked me to play doctor, fix a fence, or make a goddamn decision. Up here nothing wanted anything from me except a blind snake, and all she wanted was the dark.
I'd found this cave when I was seventeen. Nothing could come at me from behind in there. Back then, I couldn't have explained why that mattered so much, but it did. It still did. I'd slept up here whenever the noise at the ranch got too loud to stomach.
The mare broke through the rocks beneath the overhang and stopped. I tied her in the shade, loosened her cinch, and carried the crate the rest of the way on foot.
The bones hung across the cave mouth on their wires. I'd rigged them to rattle if anything came through. Nothing moved them today.
Inside, the air ran cool off the stone. I set the crate on the flat stone bench at the back.
I sliced through the friction tape with my pocketknife, worked the lid off, and set her up.
Nimue lay coiled in three tight loops, her head tucked.
I filled her shallow water pan from my canteen, folded a rag over the edge, and pushed it down until it was soaked. Something wet to rub her snout against.
"Two days," I told her. "Then I'm coming back."
I rested my hand on the stone next to her, not touching her, just letting her know I was there. She didn't budge.
I sat with her until the light went off the high peaks, because the second I got back somebody down there would want something from me.
I checked the water pan one last time, then turned and headed back out.
Forty feet down the trail, I stopped. A stone sat in the middle of the path with the dust wiped clean off one side. I crouched down, hands on my knees, my breath hitching. A mountain cat could've done that chasing rabbits down the ridge.
But then I looked up.
The tall grass above the trail lay flat and hadn't stood back up. A wild juniper branch hung twisted, the pale underside of its needles showing.
My skin pulled tight from my wrists to my shoulders.
They had come back.
No. Worse than that. Something had put that grass down more than once.
It lay in layers, the kind that came from a body lying in the same hollow day after day.
Somebody had bent that juniper and let it go and bent it again until the wood quit springing back.
Boots had scuffed the dirt under the cut to powder in a patch the size of a man.
I held my breath, listening so hard that my ears rang.
No birds. Nothing in the scrub. The whole ridge sat silent.
Shit.
If I ran and it was a cat, it would have me from behind before I cleared the rocks. If I stood still and it was a man, he'd have me either way. I had three inches of folding blade on my belt and forty feet of bare rock under me, and the mare was tied below with her cinch hanging.
I stood up.
They came out of the flat grass above and the cut below, both at once.
And for about a second and a half, I was actually glad.
A split second of pure, venomous relief. Finally. Let them try to put me in the dirt next to Miguel. Let them try to take me. I wanted the fight. I wanted to bleed for it.
But then I saw the short, heavy clubs in their hands. And not one of them was reaching for a holster. They wanted a captive.
I drew my knife anyway. It was a three-inch folding blade. It was laughable against five grown men on open ground, but I didn't have anything else.
The first one lunged, swinging a thick wooden bat at my temple.
I ducked inside the arc of his arm, stepped in close, and drove the three-inch blade straight into the meat of his thigh.
I twisted it hard pulling out. He let out a wet, strangled shriek, and his knee buckled under him.
His blood came up hot over my knuckles, but it didn't matter.
Before I could clear the blade, a heavy blow caught me square across the shoulder blades.
The impact rattled my teeth and sent me crashing to my knees.
The gravel tore through my jeans, biting into my skin.
I swung blindly behind me, catching another man's forearm and leaving a long, ragged gash, but then three of them hit me at once, burying me under a wall of suffocating weight.
I kept my eyes on the dirt. A heavy boot came down hard on my right wrist, pinning my hand flat against the jagged stone. Someone kicked the knife away.
Then the heel ground down and the bones snapped under it with a sound I felt in my teeth. The pain caught up and took my sight for a second, and when it came back I was looking at my own fingers lying wrong against the rock. I screamed, but I didn't stop fighting.
I couldn't use my hands, so I lunged forward with my jaw open and sank my teeth into the nearest ankle.
I bit down through the heavy canvas of the boot, tearing until I tasted salt, dirt, and sweat, grinding my jaw shut until the man shrieked and kicked me squarely in the ribs.
Another blow cracked against the side of my skull, and everything grayed out.
They dragged my arms behind my back. My broken hand throbbed with a rhythmic, agonizing heat, every beat of my heart sending a fresh wave of nausea through me as they zip tied my wrists and ankles. They left me face-down in the dirt, chest heaving, spitting gravel and blood onto the trail.
Face down on the trail with my hands behind me, I could have turned my head and looked. She was forty feet up in the dark with the lid off. If I looked, they'd follow it. They'd find her weaving at their voices, and one of them would put a boot on her head and never think about it again.
So I looked at gravel. I looked at their boots. I did not look up that hill.
Somebody walked up the trail without hurrying and stopped a foot from my face.
Zaroff crouched. He looked at the man holding his thigh together, and at the one with his forearm open. "He almost killed two of you with a pocketknife," he said to nobody in particular.
Then he took my jaw in his hand, turned my head into the light, and looked at my teeth long enough to count them. He let go and wiped his fingers on his jeans.
I spat on his boots.
"Load him."
They took me down past the mare. She threw her head at the blood smell and pulled against the tie, and one of them swung wide of her, cursing, and then I couldn't see her anymore.