Chapter 23
Chapter
When we got home, I made the fawn a bottle.
I wondered if she would even want it—perhaps she’d left the thicket to go hunt.
There was no such evidence, no scratches on her nose or blood on her face, and she sucked down the bottle as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
After that, she collapsed into her usual spot in the living room and immediately fell asleep.
I limped to the bathroom to assess the damage.
At some point in my search, or maybe when the buck had hit me, I’d twisted wrong, and now there was a deep ache radiating through my back from my left hip.
The blood that coursed down my arm had already dried to rusty flakes in the creases of my palm, its source a shallow scrape dragging across my shoulder.
I had another, shorter one across the top of my ribs, and a third that stretched from the left point of my collarbone to the right side of my neck. How close I had come to death.
I washed out the broken skin and applied an antiseptic ointment, my fingers clumsy with exhaustion.
All I wanted was to sleep, but I had to prepare for what was coming while I had time—there were no animals left to feed except the fawn, no cages to clean, no wounds to dress except my own.
Even my phone was silent for the first time in weeks, and I wondered if Broder could’ve possibly had me removed from my animal control post already.
I couldn’t afford to grieve my losses. I had to protect what I had left.
The first thing, I decided, was to rebuild the gate.
I didn’t know how I could do it or if it was even possible, but I would rebuild something. If these fools wanted to come for my land, they would find their way blocked every time. To do that, I needed materials, and there was nothing left in the barn.
But there was the barn.
I slipped out of the house. The old barn door creaked sharply as I shoved it open. Everything else was quiet, motes of dust drifting undisturbed through patches of sunlight. The makeshift barriers and walls I’d used to split up the stalls looked like a prison, and I hated the sight of them.
I ripped them down. The planks of sheet metal, and sections of chain link and straggles of chicken wire were torn from the walls and dragged into the back of the truck, and when they were gone I knocked down the original stalls too.
Walls that had stood for almost a hundred years crashed to the ground beneath my hammer, nails shrieking as they were wrenched free of their homes.
When I was done, I didn’t stop to take in the result of my work; I didn’t want to see the cavernous, silent space. The truck’s bed rode low under the immense weight, but I gunned it down the driveway anyway, right up to the remains of the gate.
The end of the drive looked like a war zone, hunks of metal strewn all the way up to the shoulder of the road. Someone tried to toss pieces into the ditch to get them out of the way, but rather than bow under the weight, the briars and thorns caught and held them like deranged Christmas trees.
The original gate itself was still hanging off a couple hinges, its corner having dragged a deep furrow through the grass.
The first thing I did was melt through the bolts that held it with my blowtorch, and for a moment it stood unmoored, its broken bars gleaming in the sunlight.
I backed away as it toppled, slowly, and the ground shook under my feet as it crashed to its resting place in the driveway.
Not even I would be able to drive over it now, but there was only one way I was leaving this place.
I hauled the leaning posts back into place with the truck, then dragged my looted materials out of the bed and began to cobble them together.
The boards were long and solid despite how I’d treated them, and they could take the weight of metal.
There was more than enough, and I lost myself in the work for a time, seeing only the wire and screws and staples.
When I was finished, a wall stood across my driveway. There was no lock or latch or hinge; it did not open.
Dawn broke red the next morning, and I was awake and waiting when the flashing lights came up the road. I set down my cup of coffee, and went to the fawn, who was just settling down to sleep off her breakfast. She reared her head back indignantly as I picked her up, almost clocking me in the chin.
“You’re not going to like this, but I’m not taking chances this time.”
I carried her down to the cellar, through the crates of apples and squash and past the silent shelves of canned peaches and green beans, all the way to the plain wooden door at the back.
I tossed down the flannel she’d been using as her bed, arranged it hastily with the toe of my boot, and set her down on it.
The flower chain I’d made the day before, a simple twist of valerian and chamomile, waited in my pocket, and I slipped it over her head before catching her little face in my hands and whispering a sleep spell.
She might’ve slept anyway, but as I’d told her, I wasn’t taking risks.
When she was fast asleep, I shut her in with the jars of hearts and vials of venom and boxes of bones. The ward on the door was my strongest one, enough that the wrong person wouldn’t see it even if they stared straight at it, but I pulled a shelf in front of it anyway.
Back upstairs, I saw the flashing lights had collected at the bottom of my driveway. I briefly pondered the shotgun in its place above the door, and went out.
There were six black-and-whites and an SUV, and a little clot of uniforms buzzed around like flies on a carcass.
They were clearly expecting a free run up the drive and were confounded by what I’d built yesterday.
One of the cruisers tried to drive over the original gate, and I heard the tires blow from where I stood.
They used the SUV to drag it back, and it left its undercarriage on the sheared-off edges of the bars.
There was some shouted consternation and arguing, and eventually they hauled the gate out of the way, sparks flicking up behind it. With the way cleared, the SUV came roaring through, bulling into the wall.
The welded wire collapsed under the blow, folding around the front of the SUV.
As the vehicle reversed, the barbed wire hooked around the fenders and front tires, and there was more arguing and gesturing, someone asking for wire snips, which no one could locate.
“Just gun it!” someone else finally shouted, and the SUV revved backward.
The fender creaked and bent and there was a loud pop from one of the tires, but the wall still held, anchored in place by the briar canes that had snarled through the wire.
One of the uniforms came through with an emergency axe and began to hack at the briars, and a howl and a curse drifted up the drive. I found myself smiling again, even though I knew it wouldn’t hold them for long.
It was another ten minutes of slashing and shouting before they got through the briars, and the SUV limped back, dragging the mass of wire, wood, and plant life with it.
The black-and-whites came screaming up the drive, but when Broder got out, I could see he was irritated to find me standing there, his element of surprise long gone.
“Tess, we have a warrant to search the premises,” he said without preamble and thrust a sheet of paper at me. I scanned it quickly; the object of the search read, Ezekiel Abdee’s person or property.
Satisfied I wouldn’t object, Broder made a few jerky motions, one toward the house and one toward the barn.
Four cops barged into my house, and another four slammed open the barn door.
Another couple cruised up the driveway on four-wheelers retrieved from the SUV’s trailer, and they immediately headed into the meadow.
Broder poked his head into the barn. “Looks a little empty in here. Where are all your critters?”
The mockery in his voice made me want to claw his eyes out, but I was actually grateful Shim had taken all my animals; the DEC officers were far gentler than Broder’s cretins would’ve been.
I shrugged and gestured to the officers currently ripping apart my feed room.
“I don’t know, I see plenty of pigs in here. ”
Broder grimaced. “You better watch your mouth, Tess.”
“Or what, Broder? You’ll arrest me for resisting arrest?”
“I’m sure you won’t make me do that.”
There was a loud crash from the storage section of the barn—my ceramic pots, a slow collection built from gifts, reduced to broken pottery.
I didn’t flinch at the sound, barely registered the loss.
What was one more? Each of these little injuries dropped like a stone into the black pool of hatred in my heart, and even though every one sank with barely a ripple in my consciousness, I knew the level was rising.
I left the barn. My front door was hanging open, and I heard the squeal and thud of furniture being moved, or perhaps tossed. The four-wheelers had disappeared, leaving winding trails through the meadow, but the buzz of their engines still reached me through the woods.
One of the cops exited the barn behind me and brushed past. I reacted before I thought better of it, shoving him in the back. He caught himself on the railing and whirled, hand instantly going to his gun.
“Fucking watch it!”
It was Mark Perry. Two days ago, he had been an annoyance, but today he was an enemy, and I would’ve torn his throat out.
I’d butchered enough roadkill to know what it would take. My hands knew the force required to rip muscle from bone, to snap tendon, to crush cartilage; I could almost feel the shape of his esophagus in my fingers, the slick slide of skin beneath my nails.