Page 8 of Forbidden Protector

My blood does the wrong thing about it, and it does it in the dark where he can't see.

"Which one?" I ask.

"You know which one."

"Then why ask?"

"I didn't ask," he says.

There is a smile trying to happen. I give it to the window instead of to him.

Outside, the fence line runs black against the last of the light. Sullivan ground is giving way to Blackwater ground with nothing between them but four strands of wire and a century and a half of graves.

I'm still deciding what to say next when his phone lights the cab.

He answers on the first ring. Doesn't say hello.

A voice comes through, too loud, too fast, frayed at the edges. A man named Wyatt. Grown, and not handling it.

I catch three words and none of them are the ones that matter. What matters is the truck. What matters is that Holt Blackwater's hands do not tighten on the wheel, do not move at all, and that the speedometer climbs eleven miles an hour without a single change in his face.

That is how I learn what this man looks like when something is actually wrong.

He hangs up.

"What?" I ask.

He takes the turn onto the timber road so hard my shoulder hits the door.

"Jacob's horse came down off the mountain," he says. "Without him."

FOUR

HOLT

The sirens come up the timber road twenty minutes after they stop mattering.

Four seconds. That's all it takes to know a man put him here.

Snow is a ledger. It writes down every weight that crosses it and holds the entry until wind or sun closes the book. Out here in February, with the light going flat and blue at four in the afternoon, nothing has closed anything.

Jacob lies on his right side eighty feet off the road, coat open, hat gone, arms drawn in. That part is true. That part is what cold does at the end. It curls a man back toward the shape he started in, and whoever arranged him knew it well enough to build it.

The rest is wrong.

No horse. Bear came down riderless. Wyatt found her at the home place, reins broke short, mud to the hocks, so the snow here should have carried her panic in a churn of hoof marks and a torn line running downhill. Not a track within forty feet.

No stagger. A man dying of exposure doesn't walk a clean line. He wanders, falls, gets up in the wrong direction. This snow should look like a drunk crossed it. It shows two boot lines coming in and one going out, and the pair coming in are set too deep and too close together.

A man walking under load. I've carried enough weight in enough snow to know what load.

The drift on his lee side hasn't built. He was laid down after the wind quit. Somebody waited for the weather to lie flat so it couldn't testify about timing, and never thought hard enough about what stillness would say instead.

Behind me, the truck door opens, which it is not supposed to do.

"Stay in the cab."

"You said that nine miles ago." Her boots hit the snow. City soles, no tread, and she comes down the shoulder anyway. "You also said nothing else, so I've been working with what I had."