Page 48 of Remmen

None of the words he was saying made sense. It was barely morning. What was Anne doing out at the Butchers’ ranch so early, especially after she had left my place so late? Foreboding bled through my veins.

“Keep a lookout,” I told him. “And get Korfas.”

I was already moving. I went up the middle of the street at a dead run, and the half-waking town blurred past me. A bull hauling water called my name and I gave him nothing. Two brides on a stoop stepped wide and stared. My hooves tore the mud and I didn’t slow for any of it, because the same short thought kept going around in my head and wouldn’t stop. She’d left my bed after midnight. She’d have gone straight home. She was always careful. There was no good reason for Anne to be out at that farm at dawn, and I could only think of bad ones.

The counselors’ units sat at the north end of the row. I took Anne’s stairs three at a time and hit her door with the flat of my fist hard enough to jump it in the frame. Nothing. I hit it again, and again, until the wood split under my hand and something rattled loose inside. “Anne.” I put my mouth to the seam of the door and said it lower, like she might answer that when she wouldn’t answer the pounding. “Anne.” Nothing came back. No light under the door. No sound of her at all. I set my shoulder to the wood and meant to take it off its hinges.

“I don’t think she came home last night.” Chelsea had opened her own door, and in my panic and fury I hadn’t heard.

“What?” I demanded. I was being too harsh, too emotional, and I didn’t give a damn.

“Usually I hear when she gets in late.” Chelsea’s eyes flicked up and down. “The walls are thin. I just assumed she was with you.”

She knew.

A month of creeping and covering had bought us nothing. It should have frightened me. It didn’t. Anne had not come home, and nothing smaller than that could reach me.

I didn’t have time to deal with Chelsea, not with Anne gone. I rushed back down the street to find chaos.

The street had come apart in the few minutes I’d been gone. Doors stood open all down the row and half the town had spilled out in whatever they’d slept in, none of them sure whether to close on the trouble or back away from it. A cart sat abandoned across the ruts with its animal still in the traces, stamping and blowing. Someone’s washing was down in the mud. The truck sat crossways with one door hanging open and the engine still coughing smoke into the cold, and six feet off its bumper the buggy had slewed to a stop where it had cut the road. For one bad moment I couldn’t find her in any of it.

Anne stumbled out of the truck and even from across the street I could see the dark bruises around her dainty wrists. She was wearing last night’s clothes and they were covered in dirt.

Mestyn came down out of the buggy slow, one hand braced at his belly. The skinning knife they kept in the buggy for the stock was on the seat behind him where he’d left it. Hesk swung down after him. His shirt was torn half off one shoulder and one eye was already swelling shut, purple, the mark of a fight he’d been in before he ever reached town.

My hands had curled into fists without my telling them to. I didn’t know what had happened out at that ranch, and I didn’t need to. She was bruised and filthy and shaking against the truck, and these two had run her down the road to get to her. Everything else could wait.

Mestyn and Hesk stalked toward my mate, but Hesk was faster. Seemingly with no care for the crowd, he backed Anne up until she was pressed against the truck, her whole body cowering against the rusted paint.

I roared and everything stopped.

Hesk went still, his hand half raised, his one good eye going wide. He came off Anne and turned to face me, and she got herself out from between him and the truck and ran for the nearest open door. Someone’s arm came out and pulled her in among the watching bulls, and she was behind a wall of them, and I could stop thinking about where she was.

Mestyn didn’t go still. He turned and found me across the street and held my eye, and whatever he saw in my face, it made him smile.

Then I was across the street. One moment the width of the road stood between us, the next I had a fist twisted in the front of his shirt and my shoulder driving up under his jaw. We had trained in the same pits under the same lash. He knew how to fight and so did I. We both knew how this ended. The beast had opened his belly weeks ago, and he’d torn the stitches holding him shut only days before.

He fought like it didn’t matter. He got an elbow into the side of my head hard enough to gray the edges of the street, then his knuckles across my cheekbone. I tasted blood and kept coming. He was quick even hurt, quicker than his fresh stitches should have let him be, and he spent it all at once. He ducked under my reach and drove a short fist up into my ribs, then hooked a leg behind mine to spill me into the mud where his size would count for less. I didn’t go down. I got a hand around the back of his neck and bent him back over the hood of the truck, one arm crushed up behind him, close enough to done that I had already started to ease off.

Hesk hit me from the side and took us both off the truck and down into the mud. My grip tore loose and Mestyn came off the hood with us, and for a breath it was all knees and elbows and the stink of the ranch coming off their clothes.

So that was how they wanted to play.

Mestyn landed inside my reach and I got a boot into him where he lay, low on his stitched belly, right where the beast had already opened him, and felt something give under my heel. He folded and stayed folded. One down.

Then it was Hesk. He was younger and stronger than he had any right to be, and he came at me quick. But Hesk had been little more than a boy when we broke out of the pits. He had never had to learn what the rest of us learned down there. He didn’t know how to fight a male who had nothing left of him to lose. He swung wide and open, still sure he would walk out of this.

And I let it up. Six years I had kept it folded down small, the male the pits had made of me, and now I opened my hands and let him out into the cold morning street. It felt good, and I was not proud of how good. My body knew this work better than it knew anything gentle, and it went to it glad. No crowd screamed for me. The whole town stood dead silent down both sides of the road and watched their mayor come apart into what he had been under the sand, and I found I did not need the noise. I never had. I needed Hesk down and I needed Anne behind me. Past that there was nothing.

Hesk came in swinging and I let him. I took a blow on my shoulder that would have staved in a smaller male, and gave him my forearm across the throat for it. He reeled back gagging. I stepped in after him and hit him once in the body, low, and felt a rib go under my fist. I hit him again in the same place. After that he quit trying to reach my head and only tried to keep me off him.

I had him giving ground now, his charge gone ragged. Then I noticed what I’d missed. No one had come in at my side. Korfas should have been on me by now, and Kazan, and Lorkin behind them. I risked one glance down the street. They had their hands full. Three of my males had Rauf and two other Butchers down in the mud by the well, pinning what they had caught coming off the road, and not one of them could see that Rauf had stopped fighting them. There was no help coming. It was only me and the two who had hurt her, and one of the two was no longer where I had left him.

The blade came in from behind and laid my side open below the ribs, a hot line dragged across me, and I heard Anne scream my name from somewhere behind the crowd. I had let Mestyn crawl back to the buggy and the skinning knife on its seat. Fool. The pain went white and total for a breath, and I took it and used it. It had run along the bone and not under it. That was luck, and I did not waste time being grateful for it. Warmth spread down my side and soaked the waist of my trousers, and I let it come. I had bled worse than this on the sand and lived. I would sooner die on this road with my boots under me than go down in front of her and let them have her. So I turned into the knife instead of away from it, and it opened my forearm from the elbow down, and I did not care.

Hesk lunged one more time, still certain of himself, and it was the last thing he had. I let him commit, then put everything left in me through my fist and into the hinge of his jaw. The blow lifted him half off his feet. He dropped where he landed and did not get up. Then I turned on Mestyn. He’d hauled himself up onto his knees with the little knife red in his fist, and I took it off him, bent the wrist back until the blade dropped, and put him down into the dirt on his face and set my boot in the middle of his back.

Mestyn struggled against me and I pressed further with my heel. “Stay. Down.”