REMMEN
A week went by without anything in it worse than a fence dispute, and I should have known better than to enjoy it.
Kazan had a glint in his eye that I didn’t like.
“What did Maisie—”
“Finish that sentence, mayor, and our town won’t have a government much longer.” It was a threat delivered with a smile.
“Do you promise?” I sounded a little too eager. But I’d been grasping the horns of this place to keep it under control for six years and would gladly allow almost anyone to step into my place.
Kazan shook his head. “Maisie’s making friends with your little counselor.”
I didn’t pretend that I didn’t know who he was talking about. The town had seen me give her a tour. It was good for morale if she clearly had a place here. As my friend.
And nothing more.
Then Kazan let it sit. He was the size of a barn and twice as patient, and he’d cornered me outside the cider house for his quarterly complaint about the road and stayed on because needling me cost him nothing.
“Maisie loaned her the little buggy,” he said. “You want to know where it keeps going?”
“I’m sure the counselor has errands.”
“The ranch.” He watched me, steady, reading my face. “Out past the ridge. Three times this week, Maisie says. Alone. Your Agency woman, in my wife’s buggy, driving out to the Butchers to change their bandages.”
The noise of the cider house went a long way off.
I kept my face flat. Six years of telling this town everything was fine had made me good at it.
“She’s got medical training,” I said. “Otho’s stretched thin. It’s sensible.”
“Mm.” Kazan had watched me not want things before. He knew the look. He didn’t push. He set his cup down, clapped my shoulder hard enough to rock me, and left me standing in the road with the whole afternoon going sour.
There were men on that ranch I wouldn’t trust behind a locked door, never mind loose in a yard with a small woman and an open kit. Mestyn’s lot came off the transports the worst of any of us. One of them was fresh off a wound that hadn’t come from any fistfight, and pain made a bad animal meaner.
Every part of me that learned its trade in the sand was up and shouting that she should not be out there.
And none of it was mine to say.
She wasn’t mine. She was under contract. She was forbidden, and I was the mayor who stood behind the rule that made her that way and would have held any other male to it without blinking. I couldn’t forbid her a thing.
It was worse than that. If I rode out and set myself between the Agency’s counselor and the Butchers, I’d hand every man on that ranch the exact story they were itching to tell. That she was the town’s eyes. The office wearing a small woman’s face, sent to watch them.
She was trying to build something out there with her own two hands and her own nerve. My shadow on it would wreck it in an afternoon.
I knew all of that. I got in the truck anyway.
The whole way up the ridge road I told myself I wasn’t going to the ranch.
I’d get eyes on the yard from the track, watch her load the buggy and point it home, and turn around and be the mayor again before she ever knew I’d come.
I told myself that with my foot flat to the floor.
I knew it for a lie, and I kept driving.
I had no plan and no right to be out there, and I went anyway.
There was never a chance of doing it quiet. The last mile of that road ran open, and a bull on the fence line clocked my truck before I’d even made the turn and lit out for the buildings to raise the word. So much for keeping my distance. I was made before I’d stopped moving.
I came into the yard, and it was already wrong.
Skarn had her kit off her shoulder, thrown in the dirt.
Hesk had a fist in the front of her jacket, up in her face, saying something I couldn’t hear.
She had both hands up, flat, still talking, still trying.
And I watched the second she stopped believing talk would work.
I didn’t remember getting out of the truck. I tore Hesk off her and drove him face-down into the dirt with a knee between his shoulders. I went for the next before he’d finished shouting.
Skarn rushed me low from the left, fast, sure I’d be slow. I wasn’t. I caught the arm, turned it, and threw him into the side of the buggy with the weight of his own rush, hard enough to fold him over it. He slid down and stayed.
A third swung a length of pipe at my head.
Every man in that yard had killed in the sand, same as me, and he knew what he was doing with it.
But his blood was up, and he swung like he wanted it to feel good more than he wanted it to land.
I stepped inside the swing, took it across my shoulder, and drove the heel of my hand up under his jaw.
His knees buckled. I let him drop instead of following him down.
The rest kept coming, and for one bad stretch it was the pits again, bodies and angles, who was closing from where, my hands doing work they could never forget. And some of it felt good. For six years I’d kept the peace with words and my hands to myself. It had never fit me right. This did.
I’d missed it. I hated that I had.
I didn’t want it to stop. I put down every man who reached me and left him breathing, and my hands kept reaching for the last inch, the one that would have finished it, and I kept hauling them back off it.
Then Rauf drove into the middle of it, arms wide, roaring his own men off me, throwing himself into the gap. The ones still on their feet looked at him, and looked at me, and decided it wasn’t worth the price. They fell back, breathing hard, one dragging a leg, blood black in the dirt.
I stood in the settling dust with my chest heaving, and I made myself go still. Whatever I was right then had teeth, and I didn’t want it turning around and finding her small and soft behind me while it was still hot.
Then the barn at the back of the yard came apart.
Not the door. The side of it, boards bursting out into the yard, and under the crack of the wood came a sound I’d have known anywhere and never once let myself imagine living a mile from my own town. Low. Chesty. A purr with the weight of a truck behind it.
It came out into the light, and the cold went down through me from the crown of my head.
An animal. That was the first thing I understood, and I never lost it. Not a monster. A big cat-shaped thing gone wrong, ribs staring through a mangy hide, one ear worn to a nub, the fur at its throat rubbed raw by a chain. Somebody had starved it and scarred it and made it mean, on purpose.
And it was loose, and it was terrified, and it came for the nearest thing that moved, which was Anne.
I don’t know how I got there. I put myself in front of her, and it hit me instead, one raking swipe, claws through my sleeve and into the meat of my forearm, three lines of fire. I got my shoulder into its chest and shoved with everything the sand had ever put in me.
It screamed. Not a killing sound. A hurt, frightened, animal one. Then it wheeled off me and broke and ran, out past the pens and into the scrub, and it was gone.
The yard went dead quiet. Just my breathing, and the blood coming warm down my wrist, and every Butcher in it standing exactly where he’d stood while a starved animal went at a woman.
Then Anne was at my side.
She should have been backing toward the buggy. She’d just watched me put men down and get between her and a beast. She’d seen the man she’d been calling a friend turn into a killer, up close, no looking away. I didn’t want her of all people to have seen it. I braced for what came now.
For her to look at me and see a Butcher.
She didn’t. She came at me instead, fast and shaking, and got her fist in the front of my shirt and held on. She looked up into whatever was on my face, the sand and the killing still right there on top, and she wasn’t afraid of it. She held on.
The tension went out of me. Then I looked past her at the yard full of grown males who had watched a beast go at her and not moved a boot.
“You’re bleeding,” she said. Her sharp eyes had already dropped to my arm.
“It’ll keep.” It came out in a voice I never used on her. I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Rauf.
“Rauf.” The whole yard heard it. “What is that?”
He didn’t insult me by pretending not to understand. “It got loose. It’s never—”
“It went for her.” I heard how quiet I’d gone. Quiet was worse than the shouting; the shouting burned off. “You keep an animal that’s already opened up one of your own, chained in a barn, and today it got out with a woman standing in the yard.”
“Nobody loosed it, Remmen—”
“I don’t care whether you loosed it or it chewed through the wall.
” And I didn’t. It came to the same place either way.
They had it, they’d kept it, it had gone through Mestyn and who knew how many more, and I’d just felt it come three feet from taking Anne away from me.
“It’s done. Put it down, or I bring the town up that ridge and we do it for you, and then you and I have a much longer talk about what a chained animal and that dug pit you think I don’t know about are for out here. Are we clear?”
Rauf looked at me a long moment. Then he dipped his head. “Clear.”
I let myself believe him, standing there bleeding, because I wanted her off that ranch more than I wanted the truth.
“Get in the truck,” I told Anne. “You’re coming with me. Now.”
She didn’t move. “I’ve got Maisie’s buggy—”
“Leave it. Korfas can fetch it tomorrow, in daylight, with men.” I was already steering her toward the truck with a hand flat on her back, doing the exact thing the mayor of this town had no business doing to this woman in front of witnesses, and I couldn’t stop.
There was a hurt, starved, killing animal loose in the scrub between this ranch and my town, and she was not driving through it alone in a tin box built for one.
She dug in, and I heard my voice drop. “Please. Anne.”
She picked up her kit. She wrapped my forearm where I stood, fast and furious about it, and then she got in my truck.
Whatever trust she’d earned with those men, I’d torn it down in one afternoon. And right that moment, I couldn’t give a single damn.