Page 21 of Remmen

I came into the yard, and it was already wrong. Skarn had her kit off her shoulder, thrown in the dirt. Hesk had a fist in the front of her jacket, up in her face, saying something I couldn’t hear. She had both hands up, flat, still talking, still trying. And I watched the second she stopped believing talk would work.

I didn’t remember getting out of the truck. I tore Hesk off her and drove him face-down into the dirt with a knee between his shoulders. I went for the next before he’d finished shouting.

Skarn rushed me low from the left, fast, sure I’d be slow. I wasn’t. I caught the arm, turned it, and threw him into the side of the buggy with the weight of his own rush, hard enough to fold him over it. He slid down and stayed.

A third swung a length of pipe at my head. Every man in that yard had killed in the sand, same as me, and he knew what he was doing with it. But his blood was up, and he swung like he wanted it to feel good more than he wanted it to land. I stepped inside the swing, took it across my shoulder, and drove the heel of my hand up under his jaw. His knees buckled. I let him drop instead of following him down.

The rest kept coming, and for one bad stretch it was the pits again, bodies and angles, who was closing from where, my hands doing work they could never forget. And some of it felt good. For six years I’d kept the peace with words and my hands to myself. It had never fit me right. This did.

I’d missed it. I hated that I had.

I didn’t want it to stop. I put down every man who reached me and left him breathing, and my hands kept reaching for the last inch, the one that would have finished it, and I kept hauling them back off it.

Then Rauf drove into the middle of it, arms wide, roaring his own men off me, throwing himself into the gap. The ones still on their feet looked at him, and looked at me, and decided it wasn’t worth the price. They fell back, breathing hard, one dragging a leg, blood black in the dirt.

I stood in the settling dust with my chest heaving, and I made myself go still. Whatever I was right then had teeth, and I didn’t want it turning around and finding her small and soft behind me while it was still hot.

Then the barn at the back of the yard came apart.

Not the door. The side of it, boards bursting out into the yard, and under the crack of the wood came a sound I’d have known anywhere and never once let myself imagine living a mile from my own town. Low. Chesty. A purr with the weight of a truck behind it.

It came out into the light, and the cold went down through me from the crown of my head.

An animal. That was the first thing I understood, and I never lost it. Not a monster. A big cat-shaped thing gone wrong, ribs staring through a mangy hide, one ear worn to a nub, the fur at its throat rubbed raw by a chain. Somebody had starved it and scarred it and made it mean, on purpose.

And it was loose, and it was terrified, and it came for the nearest thing that moved, which was Anne.

I don’t know how I got there. I put myself in front of her, and it hit me instead, one raking swipe, claws through my sleeve and into the meat of my forearm, three lines of fire. I got my shoulder into its chest and shoved with everything the sand had ever put in me.

It screamed. Not a killing sound. A hurt, frightened, animal one. Then it wheeled off me and broke and ran, out past the pens and into the scrub, and it was gone.

The yard went dead quiet. Just my breathing, and the blood coming warm down my wrist, and every Butcher in it standing exactly where he’d stood while a starved animal went at a woman.

Then Anne was at my side.

She should have been backing toward the buggy. She’d just watched me put men down and get between her and a beast. She’d seen the man she’d been calling a friend turn into a killer, up close, no looking away. I didn’t want her of all people to have seen it. I braced for what came now.

For her to look at me and see a Butcher.

She didn’t. She came at me instead, fast and shaking, and got her fist in the front of my shirt and held on. She looked up into whatever was on my face, the sand and the killing still right there on top, and she wasn’t afraid of it. She held on.

The tension went out of me. Then I looked past her at the yard full of grown males who had watched a beast go at her and not moved a boot.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. Her sharp eyes had already dropped to my arm.

“It’ll keep.” It came out in a voice I never used on her. I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Rauf.

“Rauf.” The whole yard heard it. “What is that?”

He didn’t insult me by pretending not to understand. “It got loose. It’s never⁠—”

“It went for her.” I heard how quiet I’d gone. Quiet was worse than the shouting; the shouting burned off. “You keep an animal that’s already opened up one of your own, chained in a barn, and today it got out with a woman standing in the yard.”

“Nobody loosed it, Remmen⁠—”

“I don’t care whether you loosed it or it chewed through the wall.” And I didn’t. It came to the same place either way. They had it, they’d kept it, it had gone through Mestyn and who knew how many more, and I’d just felt it come three feet from taking Anne away from me. “It’s done. Put it down, or I bring the town up that ridge and we do it for you, and then you and I have a much longer talk about what a chained animal and that dug pit you think I don’t know about are for out here. Are we clear?”

Rauf looked at me a long moment. Then he dipped his head. “Clear.”