Page 13 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

"Since when does a rail stop you?"

"Since you put your hand up yesterday."

Her scoop stopped. A strand of auburn had worked loose again and lay against her neck, right where I'd put my mouth on Friday night, and I looked at the goat instead. He looked back at me with total contempt.

"Somebody's moved the water trough back," she said.

"I can see that."

"It's eighty pounds. Do you want to haul it, or do you want to stand there admiring the safety inspection?" She nudged the gate open with her boot, and her mouth twitched. "It's a trough, Grayson. It's not a proposal."

"Understood." I came through the gate.

It was a good thing the trough was heavy, because it gave my hands something to do. I hauled it to the back rail, slopping water over my boots, while she held the gate against the goat with her hip. The pig grunted at me from the corner. When I straightened up, she was standing close enough that I could smell her soap and the hay on her skin, and I had to curl my fingers against the rail to keep from reaching for her.

"Thank you for the light," she said, to the sheep.

"It was a sixty-dollar fixture."

"It was my front porch. Lyle says you were either robbing me or courting me." The color climbed from her ears to her cheeks.

"Lyle's a menace."

That got me a real smile, small and quick, and it went through me harder than anything had in two days. She looked up then. Her eyes were gray-green and bright at the edges, and she was gripping the empty feed bucket with both hands. I wanted to say a hundred things. Instead I said, "You're welcome," and it came out rough.

"About Thursday," she said, taking her time with it. "When I told that man—" Her voice stuck, and she swallowed and tried again. "I wasn't⁠—"

Then my pager went off.

It shrieked on my belt in two long bursts, and the radio at my shoulder crackled with the dispatcher's flat voice: structure fire, the old storage barn behind the north lot. Caller reports a man inside.

All the color left Molly's face.

"Go," she said. "Grayson. Go."

I was already running.

* * *

The engine sat on the green where it had sat for all four days, with a brush truck beside it and a crew of four on standby, because I'd made that a condition of the festival permit. Silas, my second in command, had the engine rolling before I got my boot on the step.

It should have taken two minutes to reach the barn. It took nine, because the access road behind the north lot had grown over with brush that nobody had cut in years, and I sat in the cab with my jaw locked while the engine shoved through it. Black smoke poured off the roof in a column, orange showed in the loft windows, and the heat hit my face from fifty feet away. A woman in a Halloween sweater was clawing at the door, screaming, and I knew her. Mrs. Hollis.

"He went back for the cider press!" she shrieked. "Back left, by the tractor!"

I set it up the way I had a hundred times. Silas took the engine and a line on the loft. The brush truck crew wet down the corn at the north edge, where the maze stood eight feet high and dry as paper, three hundred yards downwind in a west breeze I didn't like. I yanked my mask into place, and the world shrank to the sound of my own breathing.

"Hold the door," I told Silas.

"Chief—"

"A man's in there. Hold the door."

Inside, the smoke was a wall. I went in low with one hand on the stall boards, the heat pressing through my gear, and found him at the back wall on his hands and knees, hugging a hulking iron cider press like a drunk with a lamp post. Walt Hollis, over eighty years old, hauling at it with both arms and coughing hard enough to bend double.

"Sir, we're leaving."

"The press," he wheezed. "It was my father's⁠—"