More than you could possibly know and understand . . .
“You claim to know him.” I don’t even try to hide the defeated whisper. The kind all rustlers should be ashamed of. I should be demanding, strong right now. I should be the rustler commanding the situation.
It’s not like that and I feel like I’ve failed on more levels than one as I watch my family argue in the street.
“I do,” he says.
“Then you’re going to tell me exactly where he is, what he’s planning, and how he’s going to do it. How do I save Rondo?”
I sense him staring and he’s quiet.
“Not that I don’t think you can put up one hell of a fight or anything, Frost Flea, but if you see just what he’s doing out in those mountains, you won’t be half as confident as you seem to be.”
“That’s not your problem now, is it?”
“No, but it’s yours.” He looks over his shoulder. “The fence is just for show. To handle the ‘minor’ details if anyone manages to get out when everyone hears Rondo’s final cries for mercy.”
Tracker and Sadie stop arguing, the latter of the pair seeming older than he really is. Neither looks at each other as they part ways, Sadie bending down to pick up her wooden spoon and glaring away the dark-skinned man when he tries to help.
She storms past as if Colton and I don’t even exist.
Tracker, equally flustered, motions for us to follow. Colton looks uneasy; his feet shuffle against the snow several steps before picking up into a slower walk.
That dreadful feeling invades again, reminding me of what comes next.
A burning desire deep within wants me to just tell Tracker that Colton knows about Henny, that I wasn’t in Rondo all day. That I made a mistake in second-guessing myself to create this mess. About the fence and the warning Henny issued.
I don’t say anything. There’s no telling what Tracker will do right now. He’s already lost his temper once today and his bad mood hasn’t ebbed. It’ll wait until he’s calmed down.
We walk past the little white church. No sign of Jericho. No sign of anyone. Only the cold, lifeless snowfield.
Chapter Twenty-Two
No witnesses. My hands tremble.
Tracker places a foot in our front yard and motions to the farmhouse.
I hesitate. He wants to kill him in our yard? First Matthew’s house to remind me, and now I’m going to have to look at our yard and know I took a life here? Right there. Under the willow.
Colton looks at the willow. He burrows both hands into his pockets, his back to me.
A gloved hand falls over my rifle. Tracker’s brown eyes aren’t forgiving, but they’re also not harboring rage. He lifts the rifle from my hands.
“Show him to the guest room. I want to talk to you alone.”
My legs quiver under the look. Confusion reigns in my mind. First, he wants to kill him, now he’s letting this man stay with us?
He continues to point at the broken door.
“Go, Rags,” he says, a bit more forceful this time.
I take a quivering step into the yard. Hand trembling, I wave Colton to follow me. Everything warns against turning my back on Tracker, especially with the rifle in his hands. He could easily drop the young man where he stands in an instant.
Colton follows, shoulders erect, anticipating the gunshot.
It never comes. Only heavy footsteps.
I retreat into the ruined house, trying to ignore the mess. The cabinets are hanging wide open, the contents scattered over the ground. It’s cold, the woodstove fire out, leaving the puddles half frozen around warping floorboards.
Tracker leans the rifle against the wall and bends down to pick up the door. He studies it for several seconds and wedges it back into its frame, taking stock of the damage.
I move through the carnage and up the stairs.
Colton hesitates, eyes wide at the state of our home, but he doesn’t stare long.
I step across the spongy carpet in the T-shaped hallway and choose the door tucked on the right, across from my own room.
The old wooden door swings open into to a small room with robin’s egg wallpaper and a shaggy gray carpet. The lone window sports a layer of frost, rendering it impossible to see outside. The K. C. tore the white curtains, the curtain rod hanging down at an angle. A small bed with a disheveled pink quilt is wedged in the corner alongside a nightstand that’s seen better days, while a vase full of fake sunflowers, petals drooping unevenly over a ring of dust that shook free, sits on the stand.
The K. C. didn’t completely destroy our home at least, but they looked.
“It definitely has a woman’s touch.” Colton offers a warm smile despite his unease at being in Tracker’s house. “I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t decorate it. It looked better before they searched it too.” Sadie helped make this room look nice. Or at least she stood at the center of the room and pointed out where everything should go. All I did was follow her orders and pretend to show some interest in what Tracker refers to as the Great Domestic Upheaval of 2041.
“Looks cozy and warm. Been a while since I’ve slept in an actual bed.”
“Don’t get too comfortable. This isn’t a permanent place for you, stranger.”
He stretches his arms over his head and looks at the flowers. “Probably not, but one night out of the cold is better than none. Good enough time to get to know each other better too.”
The way he says it makes me uneasy.
“Bathroom’s the door facing the stairs. Stay out of the other rooms on this floor.” I turn back to the stairs. Especially mine. “We’ll talk later, maybe.”
If Tracker’s temper ever subsides. Something about Colton’s presence changes him into angry—crazy person. He lied to Jericho; he nearly beat this young man to death right in front of me.
“Yes, ma’am.” He feigns a salute.
I close the door behind me and make my way down the stairs to face my own judgment. Every step feels heavy. My legs quiver and the kitchen’s lantern flickers.
A scuffling sound, followed by the loud clack of wood settling against snow and linoleum makes me jump.
I wrap my thin fingers around the doorframe and peek into the kitchen.
Tracker continues the process of setting the chairs upright against the table. From this angle, he’s threatening. Like a big black wolf waiting to pounce.
The lingering feel of cold cement makes me shy back, hiding in the living room’s protective darkness.
“Rags,” he says without looking at me. “Come here.”
It’s the same tone our masters used when one of us screwed things up—a tone that promised a beating or worse. Tracker has never beaten me before. Then again, up until today, he never laid a hand on me either.
I don’t want to go into that kitchen right now. Not while he’s still angry.
“Rags?” He abandons the chair.
I back away, glass cracking under a soft deer-hide boot heel.
He stops at the doorway, a lantern’s light highlighting the wrinkles on his dark face. After several seconds, his brown eyes soften. “It’s okay, Rags. I’m not angry with you.”
The words aren’t as reassuring as I’d like them to be.
“I lost my temper today,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry for breaking my word.”
He seems sincere but I’m not so sure after what I saw today.
“I shouldn’t have let my anger get the best of me. I had no right to grab you like that or hurt you.”
You’re damn right you had no right to. We’re supposed to be a family. Not enemies.
He continues looking at me. “I’ll understand if you’re not comfortable living here and would rather go live with Sadie and Frank.”
I weigh his words. He’s never offered to let me go live with Sadie. If anything, he spent the past three years keeping me from living with that woman. He wouldn’t tell me why, only that it was best that I didn’t live at the Wil
liams’s house.
Matthew and Jericho always taught me that forgiving someone is the best course of action on anything. People make mistakes, they’d say. Accidents happen. Only this wasn’t an accident. Tracker deliberately picked me up and threw me on the ground. How can I be sure that it won’t happen again?
“Rags. Look at me.”
I instinctively back away.
“I won’t make excuses for my actions.” He looks me in the eyes. “I made a promise to keep you safe and never lay a hand on you like the people who mistreated you did, and I broke it. I overreacted, and I don’t expect you to forgive me for that. It will take a while to earn your trust back, if it even can be done, but only if you’re willing to let me try.”
Long gone is the angry monster from earlier, replaced with a frail old man. He doesn’t move any closer than the door; he merely watches and waits.
“Why?” The word is far more timid, like I was three years ago when I didn’t know anything but the pens. “What made you so angry?”
His gaze drifts to the broken picture frames scattered over the floor. He makes his way across the lingering ice, kneels, and slips a soggy photograph back into its broken frame.
For a moment he stares at the people in it.
One is a beautiful, dark-skinned woman in a yellow sundress. Another is a young, dark-skinned child, her black hair braided and wearing a red T-shirt with a teddy bear on it and beige shorts. The third person in the picture is a much younger Tracker dressed in one of those old United States Air Force uniforms that’s been modified to sport the Kingdom’s bronze hare across the left breast pocket.
They stand on a lakeshore. The water isn’t frozen and there’s no snow in the picture. There are green leaves on the oak trees. Vibrant green grass reaches up past their ankles. A big yellow retriever dog lounges at their feet.
They look so happy in that picture.
He told me it was taken down south in Edmonda close to eighteen years ago, during an unusually warm summer day. He never told me who the people with him are by name, but every time he looks at the picture, he gets this sad look in his eyes. One time, late at night, I heard him crying in the living room and telling someone he was sorry.
“It’s complicated.” He puts the frame up on a shelf. “Just like your life in the pens.”
The words stop short of pleading me not pursue this any further. Whatever Colton did must have been bad. Really bad.
“All you need to know is that the young man upstairs is not to be trusted. Do not listen to him. Do not fall for his lies. He’s very good at what he does, just like that blond young man I warned you about.” He continues to stare at the picture. “Hyperion’s greatest weapons are the lies that become truth.”
He moves to the bookcase.
“You mean Henny?” I help collect our few remaining books.
Tracker tenses. “Yes, Rags. Like Henrick.”
He sighs as if he was hoping I’d never encounter him face to face.
“I saw what you did this morning.” He shelves a book. “He could have killed you.”
I focus on a coverless book in my hands. It’s the one with the castles, I think.
“I deliberately told you not to go after him on your own. He’s a very dangerous young man.”
“He was going to hurt Sadie and her baby.”
His gaze softens and he takes the book from my hands, looking at the rip in my jacket sleeve. “That does not mean you should have done what you did. We would have kept her safe.”
“Like Matthew?”
Tracker sighs.
“He would have killed her, just like Matthew.”
“Matthew was an accident.” He’s searching for the right words. “It was a horrible, unfortunate accident.”
“What if it wasn’t though?” Henny’s words jag at my mind.
Tracker places the castle book on the shelf. “Matthew was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
If I tell him that Henny knew his name, both names. That there was something apparently Matthew didn’t tell me, he’ll raise his voice again.
“It could have happened to anyone,” he says. “It happened to Matthew. Why don’t you go get cleaned up.” He looks back to the bookshelf. “He’s being buried tonight.”
“Tracker,” I eye the castle book on the shelf, “Henny said something to me—something about Rondo being publically destroyed in four days. There’s a fence in the gully.” I flinch and stare at the book, too scared to move for fear he’ll raise his voice.
Tracker sets another book about “sky people” beside the castle one, pausing for several long seconds. “A fence. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And he said four days?”
I nod.
“And here I thought this would be easy.” Tracker shakes his head and mutters the words. “I will speak to Jericho. For now, you get cleaned up and do not leave Rondo again until I say you can. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes sir.” I step back.
Tracker nods. “I am not angry with you, but Rags, this is a very dangerous situation and I need you here. Henny is dangerous enough as he is. I can only imagine what Hyperion has given him to use against us.”
“What about Colton?” I test the waters; half afraid he’ll snap at me but not remotely brave enough to tell him I know what he once was to the Kingdom.
His lip curls into a snarl that eases when he looks at me. “I’ll figure something out for him. For now, the rules stand.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I sit at the small desk in my room, bone roses perched on its lopsided surface. My toes tap against the books holding the right hind desk leg up. I nudge the roses back and forth with my fingers. Peeling wood bits collect around the newly forming groove. I don’t stop, continuing to stare at the cracked, pale-green wall.
The pewter stag charm drags across the desk as the stone petals grind deeper into the wood. Every bone aches, my body sinking against a wooden chair. I don’t want to go. Tracker thinks I should. That it will be “good for me.”
He doesn’t understand. This isn’t some stranger. Watching Matthew being thrown into that hole Jericho and Frank have been digging behind his cottage is going to hurt worse than Henny’s bullets ever could.
I should be thankful. He could have been heaved by uncaring hands into a mass grave like the others will be and forgotten.
Jericho would never let that happen. No one’s going to argue with a preacher and it’s really none of their business what’s done with the body. It’s not like they cared about Matthew anyway. He was just the boy who worked on the farmstead, sat in the first pew; occasionally lead the prayer. The boy who “traded” his soul to the devil by sympathizing with the blue-eyed witch-child.
No one even knew he was an artist capable of painting beautiful pictures like the one in Sadie’s kitchen as well as a capable horseman. No one cared.
The bone roses grind to a halt. My fingers tremble around the sharp petals as the first tears burn. The back of my hand wipes them away before they fall.
Why is this so hard? Why does it hurt so badly?
I can’t even figure out where it hurts. It’s like every emotion trips over each other, creating one big, confusing knot that I can’t find any ends to even begin unraveling.
I should be angry. Angry at Henny. Angry at Colton. Angry at Hyperion and his damn Kingdom for taking him away. They murdered him, and I don’t even know why.
You know why, the rustler part of me remarks. You know exactly why.
A brother. A father. Someone’s son. Rival rustlers who encountered me once and never returned to their families. I took away their futures—made their families grieve like I am now.
“If you knew the truth about our Matthew, you wouldn’t think so highly of him.” Henny’s words linger by my ear; the phantom lavender and hickory scents the air.
My fingers tangle in my freshly washed hair.
“Shut up,” I plead. “Just go awa
y, please.”
Henny’s words continue to taunt, torture, cement their way into an obsession I can’t break free from. He seemed so certain that their Matthew was my Matthew. He would never be anything to the Kingdom though. He wouldn’t lie to me.
A light tapping on the door interrupts Henny’s invisible taunts.
“Rags—” Tracker’s voice stays gentle. “It’s time to go.”
When I don’t move from the desk, he opens the door and peers in.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.” My hand cups the bone roses. None of it matters right now. Not Henny. Not the fence. Nothing but the young man I’m about to bury. My friend. My brother.
Tracker closes the door.
A shaky breath rattles my lungs. I close my eyes and try to compose myself.
Grabbing the bone roses, I pull the bloodstained buckskin jacket over a clean, scratchy, brown, goat-hair sweater and brush the damp hair out of my eyes.
Tracker’s comforting hand guides me away from my room. Colton’s door remains shut, only a small sliver of flickering candlelight creeping under it to show he’s in there. I’m glad he won’t be at the funeral. He doesn’t even know one is happening tonight, even though he likely knew Matthew too.
The kitchen is in somewhat better shape than it was. The door is secured back in its frame. We mopped up the melted snow and swept the broken dishes into several small piles. They can wait until morning.
The sleet continues to fall, painting the yard with a thick, slushy crust. The willow is encased in ice, its branches straining and threatening to snap as the wind stirs them. Beside the cottage, light from a lantern flickers, casting a shimmering hue over our yard.
Tracker lightly encourages me to continue walking.
The lantern’s warm, inviting light seeps across the cottage’s siding casting shadows across the woodpile.
Sadie greets us with a comforting hand on my other shoulder and offers her best attempt at a smile.
Numbness overtakes the dull ache deep within my soul. Any moment now I’ll wake up in my bed like nothing happened. No more Kingdom. No Henny. Not even an Irish bastard, and definitely no Hunter either. Matthew will be on the doorstep, eager to get out for the day, and Rondo won’t be in danger.
The Bone Roses Page 14
