“He’ll be all right. You were brave. You could have run when I fought them. You stayed, and fought back.”
“When they came, Johnny told me to run, to hide, but I wouldn’t leave him. He wouldn’t leave me. He could have left me when they came. He can run so fast, but he stayed, he tried to fight. He’s of the Uncanny, like you.”
“An elf, yes.”
“We ran away. My grandmother, she lived through the Doom. I was only a baby, and she protected me when everyone died. She’s very strict, and doesn’t believe magick can be good, like Johnny. She isn’t bad, she wouldn’t hurt anyone, but—”
“I understand.”
“‘You have to stick with your own kind, Lucia,’ she’d say. Even though once she helped hide a family from the PWs, and the little boy had wings. She says they’re evil, the PWs, but the Uncannys aren’t like us, and we have to stick with our own kind.”
“One day she might see differently.”
“That’s what Johnny says.”
She landed outside the clinic in New Hope. “Wait here. I’ll get a doctor.”
Fallon ran inside, spotted Hannah.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Not me. Maybe a little,” she realized. “I have a man outside. Gunshot wound, severe beating. I need help getting him in.”
“I’ll get a gurney. Jonah!” she shouted as she dashed for the gurney. “Fallon has wounded outside. GSW.”
He came on the run, headed straight out with Fallon.
“He had a fractured skull, and I did what I could. I hesitated to do more. The GSW’s not fatal, but he lost a lot of blood.” She rattled off the other injuries she’d found.
Hannah maneuvered the gurney while Jonah and Fallon lifted him down and onto it.
“Please, don’t let him die.”
Jonah secured Johnny on the gurney, searched for life or death, then looked up at Lucy. “He’s not going to die. Let’s get him inside, Hannah.”
“They’re doctors?” With the awkwardness of someone unused to riding, Lucy struggled to dismount.
“They’re medicals, and really good ones. Believe me, if Jonah looked you in the eye and said Johnny wasn’t going to die, he’s not going to die. Go on in.”
“You’re not coming?”
“You’re okay now. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”
“Thank you. I need to— Thank you,” she said again as she ran inside.
Because Laoch wanted a run, Fallon rode home at a steady gallop. Fields, she thought, as she had when she’d flown, but while some rested for winter, horses, cattle, goats, sheep roamed. And mists curled out from the Tropics, where summer never ended.
The maintenance committee plowed the roads, and would again, she knew, as she smelled snow in the air. And smoke from chimneys, growing things in greenhouses. She could feel the pulse of life here, not just in the trees and grasses that slept, in the spruce and pine, but inside the scatter of houses where people cooked or crafted, tended children, read books. Where they argued or laughed.
So different, she thought, from the emptiness she’d flown over, so different from the mindless violence that roamed that emptiness looking for prey—not like the hawk for food and survival, but for sport.
It lifted her mood, that pulse, and lifted it higher when Taibhse swooped overhead and Faol Ban streaked out of the trees to run alongside her.
She pulled up outside the stables, slid off the alicorn to give the wolf a rub. “We’ll hunt tomorrow.” She looked over at the owl when he perched on a branch. “In the morning, we’ll go on a hunt together, for fun. But tonight, we’ll go on a different sort of hunt.”
And thinking of it, she took Laoch into the stable so he could rest and feed. She found her father inside, grooming Grace.
“I took her out for a while.” He continued to brush, his back to Fallon, as he spoke. “We both needed a ride.”
“Me, too. Well, a flight. Head-clearing time. So much talk. Fighting’s a hell of a lot easier than talking about it.”
“Maybe, but there’s still some talking to do. You and me,” he said as he stepped over to the stall where she rubbed down Laoch with a cloth. “I need to— Whose blood is that? What happened?”
She looked down, saw the blood on her jacket, her pants. “Crap. Raiders. Five of them about two hundred miles west of here. I spotted them after they’d burned out a couple—young male elf and his NM mate. They’re at the clinic. She’s not seriously injured, but he’d been shot and beaten.”