Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Eli
One man. Half a mile down, at the saddle, where the road dies and the open slope begins.
I watch him through the glass for a long minute before I move, the way I'd watch anything I might have to put down.
He's on foot now, left the sled below, smart, the slope's too steep for a machine, and he's working up through the last of the trees toward the open ground with the particular care of a man who's done this before and a rifle slung across his back.
Not a lost hiker. Not a rescuer. A scout, sent up to confirm there's a hurt girl alone at the top of this hill and to find out exactly where, so the rest can come and finish it clean.
He has no idea I'm up here. I can tell by the way he moves, careless of the high ground, eyes down on his footing, treating the cabin above him as a problem of terrain and not a problem of a man.
He thinks he's hunting. I let him keep thinking it.
That misunderstanding is the only weapon I've got that's worth more than the rifle, and I'm not going to spend it cheap.
"Stay down, stay back from the windows, and whatever you hear, you don't come out." I'm pulling on the shell, the whites, the gear that lets a man become weather. "Pistol's on the bench. Same as I taught you. But you won't need it, because he is never going to get to this door."
"Eli." Wren's face is white but her voice is level. "What are you going to do."
I look at her. I think about lying, the way I told her I never would. I don't.
"I'm going to go down there and stop him."
"Stop him how?—"
"Whatever way he makes necessary." I check the rifle, sling it, and take the knife too, because a scout this close to a cabin you don't always get to do at distance.
"He came up this mountain to help murder you.
I want you to hold onto that, in here, while you're listening, in case what you hear scares you.
He came to murder you. Everything that happens to him on that slope, he brought up the hill himself. "
She doesn't argue. That's the thing about Wren. She's never once flinched from the real number. She nods, once, and the trust in it is a weight and a fuel both.
"Come back," she says. Just that.
"That's the plan."
I go out the back, into the cold and the blinding white, and I become the mountain.
I won't lay out all of what happens on that slope. Some of it is mine to carry. But here is the shape of it, because she's going to ask, and because I won't have her thinking I'm something I'm not, or thinking I'm not the thing I am.
I take the high line, the one no man hunting up a hill ever watches, and I let him come up into the open where there's no cover and no luck and no road back.
I let him get close enough that I can see the cheap factory pattern on his rifle sling and the way he hasn't checked his six in twenty minutes because nothing in his life has ever taught him to fear the high ground.
I step out of the snow ten feet behind him like the slope grew a man, and I say one word, "Don't," and he is a man who reaches anyway.
After that it's fast. It's always fast, when it's real; the long part is the waiting and the short part is the doing.
He's strong and he's done violence before and for about four seconds it's a real fight in the deep snow, his hand on his rifle and mine on his wrist, the cold and the steel and the grunting animal arithmetic of it.
But he was trained to hunt the helpless and I was trained by men who hunted men, and there's no contest in that, there never was, the second he reached.
When it's done I stand over him in the snow with my breath sawing and my hands not quite steady, they never are, after, no matter what the movies say, and the old thing comes up, the thing I climbed this mountain to get away from.
The terrible clarity. The knowledge that I'm good at this, the one thing I most wish I weren't. I take his rifle and his phone and his sidearm and I find, in his coat, a folded square of paper, and on the paper, in a careless hand, is a hand-drawn map of the upper grade with a single word written at the top of the slope where my cabin sits.
WITNESS.
So now I know. They've got the witness located. This one came to confirm it and call it down, and he didn't get the chance, and that buys us a day, maybe, before they realize their scout's gone dark and come up in force to find out why.
I drag what's left where the spring melt will take it in May and the bears won't find it before then, and I cover my work, and I go back up the hill, and the closer I get to the cabin the more I dread the door.
Because she heard. Maybe not the details.
But she heard the shape of it, a man went out into the snow and only one came back, and now she's going to look at me and see it.
The thing I am. The thing I tried to bury up here.
Nine years of careful quiet and the truth was always just this: I am a man who is very, very good at killing the men who deserve it, and I have never once been able to make that the same thing as being good.
I come in the back, stamping snow, the dead man's rifle in my hand and the dead man's map in my pocket and the dead man's blood, surely, somewhere on my whites where I can't see it. And I make myself look at her, because she's earned the truth of my face.
Wren is standing. Standing, on the bad leg, her hand on the bench by the pistol I told her she wouldn't need.
She's white as the slope. Her eyes go over me, all of me, taking the brutal inventory she's so good at, reading exactly what happened out there in the set of my shoulders and the thing in my face I can't hide from her.
She knows. She sees it. She sees what I am.
And she crosses the room, limping, fast, before I can warn her off, before I can tell her to be afraid of me like a sensible woman would, and she puts both her cold hands flat against my chest over my hammering heart, and she looks up into the face of the thing I am, and she says:
"You came back."