The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

  “You’re not leaving Marcus! They took him away! The Gills took him away! So you are fucking coming home and getting him back!” That was all I could think of: if she went to prison, the Gills would get to keep Marcus. It made me feel like my heart was on fire. “You don’t just get to abandon your family.”

  As soon as I let go of her hair, she went back to looking at Tague and saying, “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

  I took ahold of the waist of her jeans with both hands to move her, but she fought so hard I had to squat down and dig my heels in to keep ahold of her. Gentry was pacing, waiting for us, scratching his neck and holding his sword. I really, really wished that he would finish Tague off, because I felt like maybe Tague being good and dead would clarify a few things.

  “This is not Beauty and the Beast! He’s not going to magically change from a fucking Nazi into a prince, just because you love him,” I said.

  “He’s not a Nazi. He’s made mistakes, but he’s a good man. I love him. He’s going to take care of me the way Loudon never—”

  “Loudon? Fuck you! I took care of you. I took care of you and Marcus.”

  “You smothered me. You don’t even have your own life. You were there all the time! I never got to be alone.”

  “Because you needed me! Because you and Marcus are my life,” I yelled. “When did I get to be alone?”

  “Well, you can be alone now!” LaReigne said.

  “My lady.” Gentry raised his voice enough to cut through our shouting.

  Hearing how freaked out he was killed my anger. LaReigne dug her fingers into the grass, still trying to get away from me. I let her go. Then all I had left was fear.

  “Please, LaReigne. If you stay here, you’re going to prison. Even if you didn’t help them escape, it’s going to look that way. When the cops show up and you’re here crying over this piece of shit, it won’t matter whether you’re innocent. I don’t even care if you are, but you can’t stay here. Please.”

  Maybe I would have gone on begging her until the cops showed up, but we heard more gunshots from the woods. They were close together, rapid-fire, and they echoed back across the valley.

  “Lady Zhorzha, by the oath I made, I beg thee come with me,” Gentry said.

  Thee. That meant just me. Whether he meant it that way or not, I knew he was right. If I stayed, I was going to end up in prison, too. Nobody would believe I’d come there to rescue LaReigne. They would think I was in on it. And if I went to prison, Mom would be alone in the world, Marcus would grow up in the Gills’ house, and I would never get to see him again.

  Gentry gave me his hand and pulled me to my feet. We left LaReigne there with her head down next to Tague’s, crying and whispering to him.

  Where we went into the woods, I could see there’d been a fight. There were broken branches, scuff marks in the pine needles, and blood. More blood. Twenty or thirty feet further, Conrad Ligett was lying facedown in a puddle of blood. It wasn’t Dirk or Edrard, so we kept going.

  Even with a bullet in his leg, Gentry was faster and stronger than me. I’d wrecked my hip fighting with LaReigne, and my foot was numb, so every step of the way, Gentry was pulling me and holding me up, and all the time blood was running down his leg.

  I’d told him I could walk from the truck to the cabin, but for some stupid reason I’d never thought about the fact that I would have to walk both ways. Thinking I should tell Edrard we were coming, I pulled the phone out of my pocket. Somewhere along the way it had gotten disconnected, so I redialed the other burner number. There was no voicemail, so it kept ringing as we got closer to the trucks. Finally, he picked up.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dirk said. “Where are you? You gotta get up here. They shot Edrard.”

  “Go. I’m coming as fast as I can.” I let go of Gentry’s hand and he ran ahead of me.

  I was still dragging myself up the hill when I heard Gentry’s voice over the phone.

  “Edrard, my brother,” he said. Like a coward, I hung up before I could hear anything else. A couple minutes later, I got there anyway and saw what had happened.

  Edrard was lying next to the open door of his truck, with Gentry and Dirk kneeling on either side of him. Gentry had pulled his blouse off and was pressing it against Edrard’s stomach, but there was so much blood. We’d left Tague and Scanlon at the cabin, and Dirk must have killed Ligett down the hill. The fourth one—Gentry had said there were four—had followed Edrard to the trucks. Edrard had put two arrows in him, one in his leg and one in his shoulder. Not to kill. The guy had an AR-15 kind of rifle, and even with two arrows in him, he’d managed to shoot Edrard. Dirk must have finished the guy off with a bullet to the head.

  Out of the cab of Edrard’s truck, I grabbed anything that looked like it could be used as a bandage—an old beach towel, a T-shirt—and tossed it out to Gentry, who was doing the only thing he could, applying pressure to the wound. I did the only thing I knew to do. I unlocked Gentry’s truck and got a tampon out of my backpack. It wouldn’t do anything for Edrard, but it would work for Gentry. I’d read it in some survivalist book that said as the tampon swelled up, it would put pressure on the bleeding arteries. I knelt down next to Gentry and ripped open the edges of the hole in his pants. I didn’t ask him. I just unwrapped the tampon and jammed it into the hole in his leg. Based on the sound he made, it hurt a lot, but he didn’t stop me, so I pushed it in until the string was hanging out.

  I thought it might bother me, but I’d been practicing for that ever since I got my period for the first time. I just didn’t know it.

  “We have to get him in the truck and get him to the hospital,” I said. Without even talking about why, the hospital in Ashdown was one of the things Gentry had marked on the map. “Dirk, you go with Gentry. You’ll go west into Oklahoma, then head back to Missouri. I’ll take Edrard to the hospital.”

  “Nay. He is my brother. I shall take him,” Gentry said.

  “No. Whoever takes him is going to have to answer a lot of questions.”

  “Yeah, she’s right,” Dirk said. “Gunshot wound, they’ll have to call the cops.”

  “The cops are going to be coming soon enough. Maybe LaReigne already called them,” I said.

  “Where is LaReigne?” Dirk said.

  “She’s not coming. She’s staying here with that asshole.”

  “Holy shit. I wondered, you know.”

  “Oh, shut up. You didn’t wonder shit,” I said. “Now, come on, we need to get Edrard in the truck.”

  We tried. Even though Edrard screamed, even though the edge of the bath towel shifted and I could see his insides, we tried to move him. Gentry was strong enough, he could have done a fireman’s carry, but not without killing Edrard. After we gave up, Gentry went back to pressing the soggy bath towel over the place where the blood seemed to be coming out fastest. Dirk and I watched. The sun had set and the only light was from the cab of the truck.

  “Call 911.” I took the phone out of my pocket and handed it to Dirk.

  If we hadn’t done so much planning and talking, it might have been a problem when the emergency dispatcher answered, but Dirk didn’t have any trouble giving directions. The highway, the county road, how many miles, the fire road.

  “There’s two gunshot wounds. Two people hurt. One of them real bad,” he said, and then, “I ain’t nobody. Just send an ambulance.”

  He disconnected before the dispatcher could ask him anything else. When he handed the phone back to me, I saw he had a big gash on his arm. A bullet graze?

  “Now what do we do?” Dirk said.

  I looked down at Gentry, who had his head bowed like he was praying. He was bloody up to his elbows.

  “We have to go. We’re all going to get arrested otherwise.” I hated myself for how crass I sounded, but if we stayed, we were going to prison. I would be abandoning Mom and Marcus as much as LaReigne wa
s.

  I put my hand on Gentry’s shoulder.

  “We have to go, Gentry. Do you hear me? We have to leave. I know that’s really shitty, leaving Edrard, but you need to come with us.”

  He didn’t look at me, so I tightened my grip on his shoulder, trying to will him to come back from wherever he was.

  “We have to go,” I said. “Come on.”

  He raised his head, and I thought he was finally hearing me, but he looked up. Toward the Witch.

  “I know what I swore. Yea, I ken it well, but I will not leave him. He is my brother.”

  “Please, Gentry. Remember about Melusine? How she told Raymondin to ride out of the woods and tell no one what he had done? This is like that.”

  “I would it were, my lady. For tho my oath be but ash and salt, I cannot go with thee for I cannot leave my brother,” Gentry said.

  I should have been crying and begging him to go, but I was thinking of what I needed to do to protect myself. I found the other burner phone where Dirk had dropped it while we tried to move Edrard. I looked around to be sure there was nothing else that could place me there. The gloves I was wearing were bloody, but I hadn’t left any fingerprints behind.

  “I have to go, Gentry.” I put my hand on his shoulder, hoping he knew I was there. “I have to go, because of Marcus and my mom.”

  “Heap on me curses, if thou wilt. Always have I done what thou bid me. Ever I trusted thee and here I am!” He shook my hand off his shoulder. “Here lieth my brother. With him lieth my trust in thee, hag!”

  Right up until he said hag, I kinda thought the next words out of his mouth might be odious serpent. He was talking to the Witch, but I deserved it. He had trusted me. I was the one who’d brought him there. It was my fault Edrard was lying there, maybe bleeding to death.

  I had the keys to Gentry’s truck, so Dirk and I got in, and I backed it down the fire road, wishing I could go faster, but knowing it was more important to get out of there without running into anything. After I backed through the gate, I put the truck in park and slid out of the cab.

  “What are you doing? We gotta go,” Dirk said.

  “One thing.”

  I pushed the seat up and popped the lid off Gentry’s roadside kit. Like I figured, the medieval Boy Scout had a pair of road flares. I tossed one to Dirk, and we cracked them and laid them at the edge of the county road to mark the turnoff for the fire road. When the ambulance came, it might make the difference in whether they got to Edrard in time. Back in the truck, I buckled my seat belt, turned on the headlights, and pulled out on the road like a law-abiding citizen.

  The ambulance, and the cops with it, would come from Ashdown, to the south, so I drove west toward Oklahoma.

  CHAPTER 44

  Zee

  We took the long way back to Missouri, on a bunch of little two-lane roads through Oklahoma, leaving a trail of trash behind us on the way north. In the dark, we took the scenic route past Broken Bow Lake, where Dirk tossed the guns out into the water, piece by piece. After that, it was a bloody T-shirt in one trash can, bloody gloves somewhere else. A broken burner phone here. The other there.

  Throwing things out should have felt like I was lightening the load, but nothing could do that. I was pretty sure I would be carrying the feeling of leaving Gentry and Edrard behind for the rest of fucking forever.

  We didn’t stop until the big truck stop north of Smithville. I cleaned up there, and bought new clothes to replace Dirk’s bloody ones. Cheap sweatpants and a truck-stop GOD BLESS AMERICA JESUS T-shirt.

  “What happened?” I said, while he changed in the parking lot. I didn’t want to know, but I had to. It was my doing.

  “I was down by the road, keeping watch like Gentry said, and that guy came at me.”

  “Did you shoot first or did he?”

  “It happened so damn fast, I don’t know,” Dirk said. “He was shooting at me, I was shooting at him, and then he didn’t shoot back. That’s how I knew I’d killed him. I never killed nobody before.”

  “Did you shoot the other guy? At the trucks?”

  “Yeah, but it was too late. He’d already shot Edrard before I got there.”

  I didn’t ask anything else, because Dirk sniffled like he was trying not to cry.

  We cut across the northwest corner of Arkansas, through a town called Siloam Springs, heading back toward Missouri. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, and Dirk was asleep beside me, when I saw the sign: GENTRY 9 MILES.

  I would have driven a hundred miles out of my way to avoid passing through a town called Gentry, if I’d known it was there, but I was driving without a map. I didn’t know where to turn off, and I didn’t dare turn back.

  Nine miles later: GENTRY CITY LIMITS.

  I felt so shaky I pulled off into the parking lot of a grocery store on the main street of Gentry, Arkansas. I rested my forehead on the steering wheel, trying to convince myself that raw feeling behind my eyes was just tiredness. Only sleep couldn’t undo the horrible, stupid thing I’d talked Gentry into doing. That was all I could think of: Gentry surrounded by cops, with a bullet in his leg, and covered in Edrard’s blood.

  After ten minutes, I got back on the road. Half an hour further, I stopped for gas and bought a tub of disinfectant wipes. While the tank filled, I wiped down the inside of the truck, trying to get rid of any physical evidence of the horrible, stupid thing.

  By the time we pulled up to the motel, I knew what to do. Dirk would get in his truck and go home. I would go into the room, pack up anything we’d left, and wipe everything down. Part of that was paranoia, but the cops were going to come around, and the less there was for them to find, the better.

  In the daylight, Dirk’s wound looked a lot worse, scabbed in black and deeper than I’d thought.

  “Fucked if I’m going to the hospital,” he said. “That’s how you get arrested.”

  “Why don’t you go home, and after I pack up, I’ll bring some bandages and stuff out to the house?”

  Dirk nodded and opened the truck door, but didn’t get out. After a minute, he said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out how we figured.”

  “Me, too.”

  As he walked across to his truck, he held his left arm close to his body, so I knew it must hurt.

  I braced myself for how I’d feel when I saw Gentry and Edrard’s stuff, but I’d forgotten one big thing. I didn’t brace myself at all for the possibility that when I opened the motel room door, I would hear the shower running. Rhys was still there, because we’d left him there. Because Edrard was his ride home. If I’d had anything in my stomach, I would have puked it up right there. Not that it would have been a new experience for that motel carpet. I’d thought I would have ten or fifteen minutes to be alone and lose my shit, but now I was going to have to deal with Rhys.

  He’d slept in the bed closest to the bathroom, the one I’d slept in the night before. Gentry had pulled the bedspread up over the pillows on the other bed. His big rucksack was propped against the headboard, with all of our phones zipped into the side pocket. I needed to start making phone calls, but first, I peeled back the bedspread and leaned down to sniff the pillow. Of course, it didn’t smell woodsy like Gentry, because he’d barely slept there the night before. It didn’t even smell like sex, even though we’d used that bed. Like all motel sheets, it smelled like bleach.

  I unzipped the pocket and took out our phones. Dirk’s I stuck in my back pocket, still powered off. I turned mine on and waited for it to catch up. A few texts: Julia at the restaurant, a few people I sold to, Toby, who said, You didn’t go and do something stupid did you, Red? There were voicemails from Emma and Mom’s doctor, but I didn’t listen to them.

  When I looked at Gentry’s phone, I almost cried. His home screen picture was of him and Trang and Edrard in armor. He was so trusting he didn’t even have a passcode to keep anyone out.
There were two missed calls, both from his parents’ house the night before, and texts from Trang and Carlees, checking on him.

  I left those, but I deleted his text threads with Rhys and Edrard. I knew the cops could find out when texts were sent, but maybe not what was in them, and the texts with Rhys and Edrard had just a little too much information. Even in Gentry’s phone I was Lady Zhorzha Trego, and I didn’t only delete the text thread between us, I deleted myself.

  I knew I ought to call Charlene—I owed her that—but when I scrolled through RECENT CALLS, it was Carlees’ number that I hit. Carlees, who had smoked pot with Gentry when they were teenagers. Carlees, whose last text to Gentry was Bruh how mad is Mom?

  The shower was still running when Carlees answered, and even knowing that Rhys could interrupt me at any time, I did what I had to do.

  “Hey, Gee, you—”

  “Carlees?” I cut him off before he could say anything else. “My name is Zhorzha Trego. I don’t know if Gentry told you about me.”

  “Oh yeah! Lady Zhorzha, it’s good to talk to you. Is everything okay with my baby brother?”

  “I don’t think so.” Then I told the lie I would have to tell to anyone who was willing to hear it. I said, “I think Gentry’s done something dangerous, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re for real? Did he get himself hurt in a joust again?”

  “No, it’s a lot worse than that. He was supposed to be back by now, but he isn’t. He’s been gone all night.”

  “Well, sometimes he goes out in the woods to be alone,” Carlees said. He sounded less worried than when he thought it was a joust.

  “I think he went to try to make a deal with some very dangerous people down in Arkansas, and I don’t know what happened.”

  “Oh, shit. That’s was what he was talking about.” For a second I thought the lie was already dead in the water. Maybe I’d been stupid to think it would ever work. “He said he was maybe going to get your sister back. I thought he was just talking, you know. I thought he meant he wanted to, not that he was going to.”