Chapter 11 Jace #2
“Good coat you got there,” the Colonel remarked as they walked out to the barn, their breath steaming in the air. Daylight had dawned, but the sky was covered with a gray wall of clouds; there was no sign of the sun. “Got a lot of use out of it. It’ll treat you well.”
“Thank you for the loan, sir.”
A rooster crowed as they approached the barn through a fluffy layer of new snow, just about an inch or two, so light that his approaching footsteps displaced it.
Jace had no idea what to expect from the inside of an actual, working barn.
The reality was at least partly an equipment shed as much as a barn.
It was a big open space with high wooden rafters, lit up by a string of electric bulbs down the middle when the Colonel flipped the switch.
It smelled like motor oil, hay, and chickens.
There were some half-dismantled engines, including one thing he recognized as an outboard boat motor, an actual tractor with the big back tires and some kind of torture-implement looking thing hooked to the back, and an antique truck with a plow on the front.
A few other equipment-type things were also covered with tarps.
Further down the open space, there were some stalls with hay in them, apparently empty.
The space for the chickens was walled off from the rest of the barn with wire netting and wooden slats, creating a space-within-a-space, presumably so they wouldn’t run all over the barn.
Sleepy clucking greeted them. The Colonel stopped to dip a scoop into a feed bin, then showed Jace how to unlatch the man-sized door to the chicken area.
It was relatively clean, with hay on the floor.
Inside, the Colonel opened a hatch door to the outside, letting in daylight.
Some of the chickens seemed to consider it, saw the snow, and settled down to pecking at the feed he scattered inside.
After throwing a few handfuls out into the snow-covered yard area as well, he collected a dozen or so brown and pale blue eggs from the nest boxes into the scoop.
“Easy enough,” he remarked, handing the scoop to Jace. “Their water is here. Just fill it from the inside hose. Rinse and dump outside if it’s dirty. There’s a dish for crushed oyster shell, makes their eggshells strong, and you refill that from the bin there, but they don’t need it often.”
“Yes, sir.” Jace made mental notes. He didn’t think the Colonel seemed like someone who wanted to give instructions twice.
After they stepped out of the chicken coop, the Colonel regarded him for a moment. His eyes were a clear, striking golden hazel, a little too bright to be natural. Abruptly, he said, “Leave that scoop there. We’ll get it on the way back. I want you to take a walk with me, son.”
Jace swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
He set down the scoop, and they went out the back of the barn into a field adjoining the Christmas tree acreage. Rows of lightly snow-dusted pine trees marched off across the farm’s rolling hills, blocking Jace’s view of the shed and parking area he knew to be nearby.
The Colonel started walking in that direction. There was more snow away from the plowed area than Jace had realized. Although some bare patches had been cleared by melting and wind, in other places it was deep enough to be tiring to walk through.
The Colonel said nothing, and Jace struggled not to panic. He said WE’LL get it on the way back. That means he’s not going to kill me and dump my body out here. Probably.
The Colonel must know about Jace sleeping over. Had he known the whole time?
Jace wondered if it would be best to lead with the excuse which also happened to be the truth—I didn’t touch her, we were in separate rooms all night, I was just worried about her .
.. Of course then he would have to explain what he was worried about, which meant breaking Holly’s confidence, and he would rather die than do that.
Hopefully dying wasn’t on the table.
The Colonel said nothing until they reached the wooden rail fence that abutted the rows of Christmas trees. Then he turned to Jace. “Dave told me you’re a shifter,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Yes, sir.” Now that the Colonel had raised the point, Jace figured he could just ask openly about it. “I know you are. Are any of your daughters?”
“No,” the Colonel said. “None of ‘em got the trait. Girls usually don’t, you know.”
“I didn’t know that. One of the only shifters I ever met was a girl.”
The Colonel nodded a little, as if something had been confirmed for him. “You part of a pack or clan?”
Jace swallowed. “No, sir.”
“Were you ever?”
“No, sir.”
It was a little more complicated than that, but still basically true.
Back in the group home, the shifter children could recognize each other, and at one point he and two others, a boy and a girl, had played at having their own pack.
But they hadn’t had any idea what being a pack entailed, or how to make it real; they had fought over who would be the alpha, and finally went their separate ways when one of them was fostered.
Jace wondered what had happened to those other kids.
Once he was an adult, the occasional other shifters he’d met had already been part of something—a clan, a pack, a family.
They might be in the military now, or working somewhere away from home, but they always had a home to go back to.
Shifters were both territorial and highly family-oriented.
Jace had never really been able to make friends with other shifters at all.
Now he tried to meet the Colonel’s golden eyes without flinching. It was astonishingly hard.
“Now then, son,” the Colonel said quietly, his voice soft but deadly serious. “Let me see your hands.”