by Lena North
“Is the man dead?”
“No.”
I exhaled and answered Olly’s unasked question.
“Jamie was alive.”
“Come,” he said and pulled me along toward the door where the others already had entered.
There was a loud voice talking in a sing-song voice inside the house, and I frowned.
“Baby-girl, baby-girl, baby-girl,” the voice repeated happily, and a baby giggled.
Something about the voice felt odd. It sounded like a grown man, but at the same time as a child.
“Hey, Boon,” Mary said.
“Mary!” the voice called out, and I frowned.
Without taking off my jacket, I walked into their living room, not sure why a sense of urgency had come over me. An older woman was sitting on the couch with one of Mary’s twin daughters on her lap. An old man who I assumed was the man Mary had grown up with in Thend sat next to them, and he was smiling broadly. The others were moving around in the room, and I looked toward the other couch which was partially behind a corner.
Then I screamed.
The man on the couch lowered the child he’d been bouncing in his lap, and I screamed again.
“Byron!”
He turned his head slowly toward me, and I saw that half his head was disfigured, and full of scars.
“Bree?” he said and almost lost the grip of the child in his hands
Miller was there in a flash and took his daughter out of Mary’s adopted brother’s arms.
“Byron,” I said again, not ready to believe what my eyes told me.
Olly was behind me and put his strong arms around my waist to hold me up as I started crying.
“Byron,” I whispered through my tears.
He got up, and I moved Olly's arms so I could walk toward him.
“I thought you died,” I whimpered.
“Bree?” he asked again. “He said you were dead?”
“Annie?” I heard Olly say, but it sounded as if it came from far away.
I tried to collect myself, but all I could see was the boy I'd adored when I grew up. My best friend.
“Byron Strachlan,” I said, to the young man in front of me, to myself and to everyone in the room.
Then I walked straight into his chest and put my arms around his waist. He didn’t move at first but slowly, he put his arms around my back and leaned his head down on my shoulder like he'd done so many times in the past.
“Not dead,” he murmured.
“Not dead,” I confirmed, about me but about him too.
We held on to each other, and I cried into his strong embrace. His shoulders shook, and I let go of the tight grip I’d had on his loose tee to let my hands slide over his back and sides, but stepped back when I felt ridges and bumps on his arms.
There were scars all over as if someone had cut him repeatedly. It looked like some of them had been taken care of, and I could see marks from stitches, but some were wide and puckered in a way I knew meant they'd been left untreated.
“What have they done to you?” I gasped and let my fingertips slide over him again.
“I did. Hurt to think of you, better to hurt on the outside than on the inside.”
“Oh, By,” I whispered and raised my head to look into his eyes.
They were still the same warm brown I remembered, but they were different. Where there had been sharpness and piercing wit when we grew up were now two pools of dim nothingness. He was right there in front of me, but he somehow… wasn’t.
“Can the hurt stop now?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, By,” I said, tried to smile and failed at it. “The hurt will stop now.”
I heard Mary crying behind me and moved closer to Byron at the same time as I turned a little to look at the others. They looked as shocked as I felt.
“Ronnie,” Miller murmured.
I was immediately pushed behind Byron, and he spread his arms out.
“No. No. No. Can’t come. He will hurt Bree. Can’t hurt Bree,” he shouted angrily.
“No one will hurt her, buddy,” Olly rumbled.
His deep, calm voice seemed to snap Byron out of his anger just as quickly as he’d snapped into it.
“Who are you?”
“Olly.”
Their eyes met and held. Then Byron suddenly smiled.
“You love Bree,” he said softly.
“I do.”
“Good. More love is good. Bree is good. I am good.”
He moved a little, and I stepped up next to him. He took hold of my hand and tears started running down my cheeks again when I gripped a hand that felt so different from the soft one I’d held so many times before.
“Vera, can you please take the girls to their room for a little while?” Miller said calmly.
She didn’t hesitate and promptly picked up the girls, nodded toward Mary, and walked away without a word.
“Reuben, where is Ronnie?” Miller asked
“Ronnie?” I asked although I suspected I knew who he was talking about.
“The brothers spent the past years with Reuben,” Miller said calmly, although there was a hardness in his face that scared me a little. “Where Mary grew up.”
I pressed my lips together and thought through what I'd found out about Mary's past. She had moved away from Prosper as a young teenager, but there had been issues with her papers, so she had never been officially taken care of by anyone. Reuben and Joelle Douglas had ignored the rules and given her a home, but I'd never thought to investigate who else was in that household. They had apparently taken two brothers in roughly at the same time, and also without paperwork.
“Cameron,” I said, needing to hear his name.
Byron reacted immediately, and frighteningly.
“No!” he shouted and crouched down, clutching his head. “No. No. No. No say, Cameron. No.”
He was rocking back and forth, and his voice had a high-pitched quality that broke my heart. I went down on my knees and felt Mary next to me.
“Boony,” she said. “Stop. We’ll call him Ronnie. Just stop.”
Her calm words seemed to soothe him, and he let go of his head.
“I love Bree,” he said suddenly. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said quietly.
“More love is good,” he said and sat down on the floor.
“By,” I whispered. “Where is Ronnie?”
My voice shivered and everything that was happening bounced around in my head in a jumbled mess. Before he could answer us, a loud, happy voice came from the door.
“Hey everyone!”
A young girl walked in with a young child in her arms, and I heard Mary whimper.
“Jenny,” Mill said. “Where’s Ronnie?”
“He had to go back. Someone called while we were on our way here, and Ronnie wasn't happy because he really wanted to come, but he had to. Screamed so loud he woke Marcus up,” she said with a shrug. “Someone was taking something somewhere, and he wasn't doing it right. Ronnie kept yelling about the boats, dropped me off and left again.”
She shrugged out of her jacket, peeled the overall off the boy who was watching us curiously, and walked into the room, but stopped when she saw Byron on the floor.
“What’s wrong with Boon?” she asked.
No one answered her, and then I heard Olly ask Mill quietly who she was.
“This is Ronnie’s wife and son,” Miller said.
I stared at the girl and tried to process what I'd just heard. Cameron had a wife and a child? This pretty girl with her curly hair and shabby clothes was his wife?
“What’s going on exactly?” the dark, white-haired man asked. “What kind of trouble is Ronnie in?”
Everyone ignored him.
Olly and Miller stared at Byron and Olly asked quietly, “Hawk knows?”
“Yeah,” Miller said.
“They’re turning?”
&nbs
p; “Yeah. They’re half an hour out, know the make of the car, might meet him.”
“Right.”
There was another silence, and Mary got to her feet.
“Reuben, Jenny, I have some bad news,” she said calmly.
In the middle of all of this, she'd found the strength to share that their adopted son and husband was a criminally insane man who had killed several people.
“Baby,” Miller murmured.
“They deserve to know,” Mary said.
“Know what?” the girl asked.
“I'll tell them,” Jinx said. “Give me a moment, and I'll do it.”
She looked pale but determined, and when our eyes met, she nodded decisively. Then she crouched down next to Byron and me on the floor.
“Hey there,” she said softly. “I’m Jinx.”
He just looked at her and didn’t respond.
“Jiminella Sweetwater,” she said, still in that soft voice.
His face went slack, and he murmured, “The angel.”
“What?”
“I used to tell him you were our angel,” I murmured, a little embarrassed about my choice of word.
“Pretty,” he said.
“You are pretty too,” she said, stretched her hand out and put it on his scarred cheek, caressing it slowly. “So beautiful.”
He was. He’d been magnificent before the injury; tall and strong with thick, dark brown, curly hair and big brown eyes. The scars transformed him, and his eyes had a dim look to them, but he was still beautiful.
“Where would your brother go if he could go anywhere he wanted?” Jinx asked quietly.
“To Bree,” he said, holding her gaze as if mesmerized. “He wants to find Bree.”
When his words sank in, I jerked around to look at Olly. He raised his brows, but then he got why I was frightened.
“Da,” he whispered hoarsely, and I watched his eyes grow dark and angry.
His father was alone at the farm. If Cam knew where I was staying, that’s where he’d go.
“Go,” I said.
He glanced over at Byron, and then back at me, clearly unhappy about leaving.
“I’ll be fine, Olly. It’s all good. Go see to your father.”
He nodded and left without a word.
“Big,” By said.
“Yeah,” I said, with a grin.
“Safe.”
“Oh, yeah.”
He put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer to him. I closed my eyes and tried to think of what to do. Loud sobs came from the kitchen, so Jinx had brought Cam's wife and adopted father there and shared some details about him. Mary was also gone, so she must have joined them. I wouldn't add anything to that discussion, and Byron had to be told in a different way, I thought. The injury to his head had changed him, and I filtered through my memories to find off-hand remarks Mary had made about him. He had the mind of a young child, she'd said. In a way, he seemed to have regressed, but it wasn't right to compare him to a child, though. He used simple sentences and slurred his words, which I figured was a result of the injury to his frontal lobe. He’d drawn logical conclusions in a way a child wouldn’t have been able to, though, and reasonably easy. He'd remembered me, and things we talked about and had seen who Olly was to me almost immediately.
I couldn't believe I was sitting there, on the floor, in Byron's strong arms. He was silent and breathed slowly into my hair. I turned my head a little, and our eyes met.
“Bree,” he said.
“Byron,” I replied.
“Yeah,” he agreed with a satisfied smile. “I’m Byron.”
Olly’s black vulture suddenly shouted in my mind.
“Someone’s here! Danger!”
I straightened and turned toward Miller. He had moved his gaze back and forth between me and the kitchen door, but when I heard the bird shriek, his gaze locked with mine.
“He’s at the farm,” I whispered.
Miller nodded and pulled out his phone as he walked into the kitchen.
“Ronnie is here?” Byron asked.
“He’s in Olly’s home,” I said as we got up from the floor. “Olly’s father is there.”
Byron straightened, and his eyes narrowed.
“Go,” he said quietly.
“By –”
“I’ll be fine, Bree. It’s all good. Go see to your father.”
He echoed my words to Olly from before, and I looked toward the kitchen but turned back when Byron shook me gently. I held his sweet brown gaze, and suddenly something flickered in it. For just a split second, he was there. Then he was gone again, and the softer, glazed look was back.
“We’ll come to help,” he said in that slightly slurry voice that was his, but still somehow wasn’t. “Go.”
I nodded and knew I had to go. I could draw out Cam. Make him shift his focus from Olly and Sven. I could make him hone in on me long enough to give the others time to get there. He wouldn't kill me, I thought. At least not immediately.
Miller was shouting something from the door as I made a swift turn with my bike, but I didn't stop and roared down the empty street toward Olly's home. Toward my home.
“I’m on my way. Get word to eagle-eyes that they need to go to the farm. They should come quietly. I’ll look around and tell them where to go,” I said to the bird.
“Careful,” the bird said. “Old man is gone, and my man is searching.”
Shit. That meant something had happened to Sven.
“Dog?”
“Shot.”
What!?
“Is he dead?”
“Breathing. Bleeding.”
“Tell everyone.”
“They know. Coming up the mountain, but still far away. Salt and pepper is shouting that he can go, but he's told to stay with the genius.”
“Okay.”
“Everyone is yelling at me to tell you to turn around.”
“I won’t.”
And I wouldn't. I'd run away from Cameron Strachlan once. Afraid, and grieving. In shock. I'd jumped on my bike and raced away from him. If I'd stayed, I might have been shot, but I might have managed to salvage the situation. Cam hadn't wanted to kill me back then, and I might have talked to him. Made a deal that got both Byron and me away from him in the end. Maybe. Maybe not.
This time, I wasn’t going to run, though.
“Bad!” a dragonfly chirped. “Black man!”
I was too far away to speak to them, and I couldn’t shift my vision to theirs while I was racing down the gravel lane on my bike.
“No!”
The shot came as I drove up to the farm, and there was another one immediately after. I turned, went around the house toward the barn, and jumped off the bike before it even stopped and let it fall to the side. I hadn’t bothered with a helmet and pushed my hair out of my eyes before entering the barn.
Sven was in the far corner, on his side with his back toward me. Dark patches colored his jeans and shirt. He wasn’t moving.
Olly was in the middle of the barn, on his belly. He wasn’t moving either. A man was standing with his back toward me, aiming a gun downward.
There he was.
The devil.
“Cameron,” I said softly.
He turned slowly and moved the gun he’d been aiming at Olly’s head to point it straight at me instead.
“Bree,” he breathed.
Chapter Twenty-two
Why?
“Why?”
The word vibrated in the stale air inside the barn. Cameron sneered but didn’t reply.
“Keep him talking, they’re almost in Norton,” the bird murmured.
“Can’t you answer me, Cam?” I asked softly. “I know you’ll kill me, but I’d like some answers before you do.”
A bee buzzed into the barn, headed for the angry man in front of me. My grandfather must know what was going on and they’d be on their way too, but it would
take too long for them to get to the farm.
“Please,” I added, trying to sound young, and afraid.
“Why, what?” he said.
The bee circled his head, and he waved his free hand to make it leave him alone. It didn't, and he slapped his hand on his neck, wincing a little but not turning his gaze from me. The gun was still aimed at me too.
“Byron,” I said quietly.
He tensed, and I knew immediately that it had been the wrong thing to ask.
“I know you didn’t mean it,” I said quickly. “It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It was an accident, and if you'd stayed, I would have told you.”
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I should have stayed.” He relaxed visibly, and the gun stopped shaking. “It was scary, Cam, and I was too young to understand.”
“It was a warning shot, but he moved,” he whined.
It hadn't been. Cam was a lousy shot, but he knew a warning shot should go straight up or to the side. He had deliberately shot at his brother, but the fact that he hit him in the head could have been a mistake.
“I took care of him,” he said.
“Yes, you did,” I assured him.
He hadn’t taken care of his brother out of love, though. Cameron didn’t feel love. He’d taken care of Byron to make sure he couldn’t tell anyone about what had happened.
“Can you get him out of the barn? They're surrounding the farm. If you get him out of there, they can come in from the back and take care of the men.”
I turned immediately and walked out of the barn.
“I’ll shoot you!” Cam roared.
“Then do it. I want to die outside, with the mountains around me and the wind in my face. I want the whole universe to see what you do, and who you are.”
My voice was calm and a little bit angry, and I didn’t turn around to see if he followed me. I knew that he would.
“Heather Brianna,” he sneered but didn't pull the trigger, and I heard his steps behind me. “So condescending when in reality, I’m above you, and above everyone else too.”
I kept walking until we were in the middle of the lawn behind the house, right where Olly and I had sat down on a blanket to talk. Cameron stopped a few steps away and aimed the gun at me again.
What did he mean, above me? I searched his face for clues, and found one, right at the side of his neck where the bee had stung him.
