“How could this still be happening, and no one knows?” He asked.
Sinead frowned. “This is five hundred miles north of the middle of nowhere, Theron. No one stumbles upon a place like this unless they mean to.”
“Because we’re shifters?” He said, then his eyes went wide. He hadn’t meant to say it, but she’d known. If they let him onto the property – if they considered him one of the Holdens, then he was like the rest of them.
And by the temperature of his hand alone, she’d known with utter certainty - Theron was like Eddie.
“No one would speak up for us. The tribes don’t speak of us. We don’t share our stories with just anyone,” Theron said, and suddenly let go of her hand. He was up now, pacing. “Has anyone tried to dig under it? The fence? Have they done a perimeter check?”
She gave him a half laugh and displayed her forearm to him. She took hold of his hand, drawing up his index finger, then ran it over her skin.
The sensation unnerved her in a way she hadn’t expected. Still, she fought to hide it from him. A moment later, they both exhaled at the same time.
They’d both been holding their breath.
“What is that?” He asked.
She touched her own fingertips to her skin. There was something hard there, just under her skin. She gave a sad smile. “It’s a tracker. We all have them.”
His eyebrows shot up. “What do you mean? They put this in you?”
He touched her arm again, this time with more purpose.
She nodded, fighting to stifle a whimper of surprise and excitement.
Where the hell did that come from?
“If we congregate in one place for too long, they come. If any one person spends too much time along the perimeter, they come. If a tracker stops working, they come. Darrell cut his out after they injected them. Baird hunted him down for it. Shot him in the back with a new tracker.”
Sinead went quiet a moment, remembering the sound of Darrell’s cries as he went down. Everyone had thought he was dead.
Theron was agitated now, his feet falling heavier with each step. “No one knows? I know we’re not like other people, but a fucking internment camp? And they’re starving you, aren’t they? That fence doesn’t just keep you in – there’s no game. There’s no hunting, is there?”
Sinead looked up at him, suddenly feeling an endless rush of patience. She knew all the things he was just now realizing – just now railing against.
“There are no trees in sight – how do you keep warm in the winters?”
Sinead gave a sad smile. “I have space heaters. On the really cold stretches, I stay with Pearl or Pauloosie and Cara.
There looked to be a fire rising in his chest. She’d seen this before – just before Darrell got himself shot. “How big is The Extension? Acreage?”
“We’re about five miles, squared as far as we know,” she said. She watched him for a long moment before she spoke again. “Don’t do it.”
The wind howled outside the window, betraying a turn in the weather.
Theron turned back to her, startled. “Do what?”
She softened her eyes, taking a moment to let the silence speak for her. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking of fighting back. It’s no use.”
“How can you say that?”
“They watch us. They watch us all the time. If we do anything they don’t like they punish us.”
“How? How do they punish you?”
Theron lunged down to his knees in front of her, taking her hands in his. She stiffened, but fought not to let the touch draw a sound again.
Good grief, why did he affect her this way?
“They take food away. Sometimes, they give us less gas for the generators. Sometimes, none at all. If we do something they don’t like, they make sure we don’t do it again.”
Theron stared at her face, and she let him this time.
Finally, when she spoke, her voice wavered. “They know our movements. Please, don’t try anything. They’ll hurt you, and then they’ll punish the rest of us, too.”
He squeezed her hand, then stood up, marching toward the door. “I don’t have a tracker.”
Sinead’s brow furrowed. “You don’t?”
Theron was at the door now. She rose from her seat, wanting to stop him half to keep them all safe, and half to simply keep his company.
How had such an abrasive, intolerable man become so gentle so quickly?
Well, somebody did try to kill him, she thought.
“What are you going to do?”
Theron stood at the door a long moment. “I don’t know. But I can’t -” He stopped, touching his hand to the wall of the school house. “I have to do something.”
With that, he stepped out into the open air. The school house grew cold in his absence – in more ways than one.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERON
He turned for the door. “I don’t know, but I can’t – I have to do something.”
He stopped, turning back to inspect her pale face. Her cheeks were growing pink from the cold that filtered into the schoolhouse.
He imagined her curled up by some warm fire, wrapped in a handmade quilt with a cup of hot cocoa in her hands.
He’d listened to her story, imagined the kind of courage it must’ve taken a woman from the south to choose internment over freedom, all because she’d grown loyal to the children in her class. It had softened him to everything about her.
Despite his best efforts. Despite recalling her letting him be dragged toward the electric fence and certain death – he’d softened.
He’d more than softened, but he didn’t dare admit that, even to himself.
He thought of her scratching math equations with pebbles on a worn down old chalkboard, a tracking device lodged under the skin of her forearm.
I’ll come back to see you? He thought.
It was a question, but he didn’t say it out loud.
The wind was kicking up something fierce by the time Theron reached the water. He was going to do a perimeter check – inspect the fence for holes, weaknesses, anything that might give him a clue of escape.
He soon realized what a difficult job that was.
The fence was easily fifteen feet high in some parts, the metal wires running parallel to the ground, each about a foot and a half distance from the one below it. Theron walked down to where the grass gave way to the first few stones of the shoreline, aching to just take a few more steps and feel the frigid touch of the water.
Theron walked over to one of the tall fence posts – a metal rod drilled into the earth, anchoring the wires every ten or so yards. Theron got as close as he safely could. There was no sign of rust or frayed wires. As he reluctantly had to admit to himself, this fence had been built to last.
And to top it all off, every third fence post had a camera atop it.
Theron turned northward, listening to the constant hum of the wires, like some foreboding war cry that taunted anyone who might come near. Theron walked for a long while, listening to the sound of waves, the rising wind, and the hum of electricity meld into one strange, hypnotic song.
He wasn’t thinking of mom or of the awful things he’d said before he left Blackrock. He wasn’t thinking of home and how the rez was fairing with the rise of police detail. He wasn’t thinking of his friend John and his wife, or his sister Maggie – he was thinking of Sinead and of the winter that was coming.
He was thinking of Sinead and what the hell he would even do once he found a way off this encampment.
He couldn’t run to the police, they were the ones who’d put her and his family there, injecting a god damn tracker into their arms. He couldn’t very well hitchhike or saunter back into Kilikut to catch a nonexistent ferry. He knew nothing of Labrador, nothing of even Canada.
He could find Sinead’s parents. They’d have power with the law – they were white.
A shift in the constant hum stole his focus away from the red hair
ed teacher, and Theron glanced down toward his feet. The fence was still towering to his right, curving away from the water as it made its way inland, but the hum was in stereo there, somehow. Theron kicked a stretch of grass beneath his feet, then turned to inspect the fence more closely.
There against the fencepost clamped to the lowest wires were jumper cables.
Theron turned back toward the first of the nearby houses, listening closely to the ground beneath his feet. It was haphazard, probably dangerous as hell, but someone had managed to pull a charge from the fence.
Theron followed the hum, catching glimpses of black wire hidden just beneath the grass, until he reached the green door of a small white prefab home, its wooden steps lopsided from wear and time.
The wind whipped up then and the first few flakes of snow whirled around him in the cold air. Theron stepped up the front steps of the home and knocked. There was no sound within.
Theron knocked again before heading around the corner of the house. Along the side wall, Theron found six or seven boulders of various sizes, all settled on the rocky ground, still covered in dirt. They looked to be recently dug up. Theron rounded the back side of the house and stopped dead.
There behind the small house was a large garage, its windows covered from within in black fabric. Despite that effort, each window cast a pyramid of light out into the cold air. Theron startled at the sight, hearing voices from within the small building. He moved closer to the shape, the darkening sky making the brightness from the cracks in the windows hard to look at.
The door to the garage sounded to be lined with plastic inside, and it roared and hissed with the rising wind. Theron made his way around the building, finding the door on the far side.
“Hello?” He called, rapping his knuckles on the door.
The male voice within grew agitated and low, cursing under his breath as the snow began to fall with purpose.
The two voices conferred, then Theron saw movement blocking light through the cracks in the nearest window. The door opened.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Darrell Holden said, glaring up into Theron’s face. “What do you want?”
Theron felt his chest grow tight. For an instant, he wanted to reach out and grab his cousin by the throat, yet he stopped as another familiar face smiled up at him from beneath Darrell’s arm.
Buniq pushed her older brother’s arm aside. “Let him in, Dar. Let him see!”
“You can’t be here! They’ll see you’re here and they’ll come! Fuck! Bunny, we have to go.”
“What? No! Why?”
Darrell continued to swear, heading up the stairs. “Bunny, come on!”
“Wait,” Theron said, trying to block Darrell’s escape. The man glared up at him. “I don’t have a tracker.”
Darrell’s eyes went wide. “They brought you here and didn’t give you a -”
Buniq tugged at Darrell’s shirt sleeve, then disappeared back into the space.
Theron had unfinished business with Darrell Holden, but that took an instant back seat to the curiosity of what was going on within those walls.
There was light. There was electricity. However thrown together their connections may have been, Theron wanted nothing more than to know what it was being used for – and who’d managed it.
Darrell glared up at Theron for a long moment, then without another word, stepped aside, letting Theron climb down a slapdash wooden staircase into the space below. Darrell pulled the door shut behind him, latching it as the plastic that lined the inner walls clapped overhead.
It was a winter greenhouse. The dirt floor was dug into the earth at least ten feet to avoid the freeze, and the wooden shed overhead was lined with lights. Buniq was beaming up at them both as she moved around the space. Buniq squatted down beside a framed wooden box and pried the bottom board loose.
A moment later she pulled three massive potatoes from within the box. “It worked! Dar, look at them. They’re huge.”
Darrell gave Theron the side eye as he moved across the dirt floor. The space was half lined with these wooden frame potato boxes. The other portion of the dirt floor consisted of different breeds of lettuce and other manner of cold crops.
Theron stared at the small farm with sincere awe. “This is amazing. How did you set this up? Where’d you find the wiring?”
Darrell squatted down with Buniq, prying a good dozen potatoes from the lowest layer of the potato box. He shot Theron a sarcastic glare. “I know right? Me with no college degree and all.”
Theron’s brow furrowed as he tried to find words to respond to this. Instead of reacting, he ignored them, pressing onward.
“Is that all the wire you have out there? Haven't they noticed the power drain? How long have you had this setup going?” He said. Whatever bad blood Darrell and he harbored toward one another, Theron didn’t have time for it. Darrell had managed to engineer something amazing in the middle of nothing, and Theron wanted to know everything.
Darrell tossed a handful of potatoes into a nearby bin and glanced back toward the ground above just as the plastic clapped again in the winds.
“That and what I used to connect the houses.”
Theron remembered walking through the small collection of houses that afternoon. There were six in this part of the Extension, another seven down toward the school house.
“So these houses aren’t run on generator?” Theron asked, cringing when Darrell gave him a hard look.
“No. They left us with two generators, one for each section. Wasn’t enough to keep the houses warm through the winter so – I made due.”
“And they haven’t noticed?”
Bunny ran up to Theron with a massive yellow potato in her hand. “Grandma Pearl is going to be so happy.”
“Ah, Bun. I think you underestimate Aanak’s need to be disappointed in me.”
Buniq turned, her long black braids swinging around her and slapping Theron’s hand. Buniq didn’t speak, but watched Darrell sort through the potatoes and return the smallest ones back into the box to seed the next crop.
Theron remembered the word ‘Aanak.’ It meant grandmother. He’d heard his mother use it to refer to Grandma Pearl many times.
The wind picked up outside with such purpose, Theron braced for the plastic to be torn right off the walls. Even Buniq seemed to cower a little closer to Theron as she stood with him by the stairs.
“You just gonna stand their stealing oxygen? What do you want?” Darrell asked, barely looking up from his work.
Theron stepped toward Darrell, making sure his boots didn’t crush the new leaves of lettuce underfoot. “I was hoping you might be willing to show me your wiring set up. How you got this running, how far it goes? How are you monitoring the drain on their grid?”
Darrell stood up, smacking his hands against his jeans in frustration as much to clear the dust. “Look -”
The world went black. The plastic clapped and thundered overhead, and Buniq shrieked as the lights went out. Darrell and Theron stood there a long moment, glaring at each other in the dark. Then, as though they’d read one another’s minds they both turned for the stairs and took off out into the storm.
“Dar, where are you going?” Buniq cried, chasing after them. Theron headed back around the house, ducking his head low into his jacket collar.
Darrell led her up the stairs and toward the nearby house. “Go inside. I gotta go down by the water. It will only take a minute. Go settle in with Aanak, alright?”
“But why do you have -”
“What the hell is going on out here?” A new voice called.
Theron turned just in time to see another five faces appear near the greenhouse. Pearl was among them.
“I told you it wasn’t going to hold,” she said, glaring at Darrell with disdain etched on her face.
Theron turned back as Darrell opened his mouth to defend himself.
Theron stepped forward. “We think they’ve lost power, Grandma Pearl. The fence is down.”
“Are you sure?” Pearl asked, pushing Buniq into the kitchen door behind her.
There was only one other notion, and that was their captors had found the connection and severed it. He was praying that wasn’t the case. They were in the middle of nowhere and the winds were picking up with such force, the walls of the houses were rattling. Despite the slapdash connection Darrell created on the fence, the clamp was jammed tight between two rocks – if it came loose, it came loose by human interference.
And Theron was sure no man who wasn’t a shifter would be out in this weather, voluntarily.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Darrell said.
Darrell and Theron were around the house in an instant, their heads down against the whipping snow. The winds were too loud to hear the tell-tale hum of the wire buried just underfoot, but Darrell knew the way and trudged forward, confidant even in the dark. They reached the fence and Theron moved closer to listen.
The hum was gone.
The clamp was still right where he’d found it.
Their captors had lost power.
“Ah, Jesus,” Darrell said under his breath. Voices were carrying over the wind. Their audience was following suit.
Theron couldn’t blame them.
Darrell marched closer to the fence, then he turned back toward Theron, meeting his gaze with nervous tension. “Let’s hope we’re right, eh?”
With that, Darrell grabbed ahold of one of the wires. Nothing happened. Darrell grabbed it in both hands and yanked with all his strength. The wire groaned in response. Darrell gave it another quick yank and the wire broke loose of its anchor, the metallic song of it echoing down the shoreline.
Everyone seemed to take the same excited breath.
“They’re gonna know we’re here! They’ll see that we’re all together. Darrell Holden, stop this!”
Pearl was hollering against the wind, trying her best to seethe, but her words came in shaky bursts. She wasn’t angry with Darrell, she was afraid.
True North (The Bears of Blackrock Book 4) Page 6
