doorway is steady as a monument; the heavy rifle at her shoulder doesn’t even shake. If these men refuse her, or if they lie to her, or maybe even if they tell her the truth, she’ll blow them all to kingdom come.
“Kid,” he shouts. His voice comes out frayed by dust and blood. “Kid. Send them away.”
“Where’s Brendan?”
“Please, kid,” Cal shouts. His voice cracks open. “Please. Just send them away. I’m begging you.”
There are three breaths’ worth of pure, cold nighttime silence. Then the Henry goes off again. The rooks explode from their tree in a vast black firework of wings and panic. Cal’s head goes back and he roars like an animal up at the night sky.
When he gasps for air, paralyzed between lunging for the rifle and lurching around to see the damage, he hears Trey’s voice shout, “Now get ta fuck!”
“We’re going!” a man shouts back, behind him.
It takes another second for Cal’s jolted brain to catch up. Trey aimed high, into the treetops.
“Get ta fuck offa this land!”
“I’m bleeding, God almighty, look—”
“Come on, come on, come on—”
Rough panting, jumbled voices that Cal can’t make into sense, feet hurrying through grass. When he turns to get a look at the men, his knee gives out and he collapses, gradually and ungracefully, into a sitting position. The men are already vanishing into the dark, three swift black shapes huddled together with their heads ducked down low.
Cal sits where he is and presses his coat sleeve to his streaming nose. Trey stays in the doorway, with the rifle to her shoulder. The rooks whirl, screaming abuse, and then gradually calm down and settle back into their tree to bitch in comfort.
When the muffled voices have faded up the lane, Trey lowers the gun and comes loping down the beam of light to Cal. He takes his sleeve off his nose long enough to say, “The safety. Put the safety on.”
“I did,” Trey says. She hunkers down to peer at him in the darkness. “How bad are you?”
“I’ll live,” Cal says. He starts trying to reorganize his limbs into some arrangement that will let him stand up. “We need to get inside. Before they come back.”
“They won’t come back,” Trey says with satisfaction. “I got one fella goodo.”
“OK,” Cal says. He can’t articulate the fact that, if they do come back, they’ll come with guns of their own. He manages to get to his feet and stands there, wobbling gently and trying to work out whether his knee will carry him.
“Here,” Trey says. She loops her free arm across his back, taking his weight on one skinny shoulder. “Come on.”
“No,” Cal says. He’s thinking of her injuries, which at the moment he can’t picture exactly but which he recalls as horrifying. Trey ignores him and starts towards the house, and Cal finds himself moving with her. They shamble across the grass, weaving in and out of the light, propping each other up like a pair of drunks. Both of them are panting. Cal can feel every inch of the darkness spread out around them, and every inch of their bodies that would make a perfect target. He tries to limp faster.
By the time he slams the door behind them and double-locks it, every muscle in his body is juddering. The sudden brightness smashes him right in the eyes. “Get me a towel,” he says, dropping into a chair at the table. “And that mirror.”
Trey leaves the Henry on the counter and brings him both, and then a bowl of water and his first-aid kit, and stands there hovering while he presses the towel to his nose. “How bad are you?” she asks again.
The tautness in her voice reaches Cal. He takes a long breath and tries to steady himself. “ ’Bout the same as you were the other night,” he says, through the towel. “Pretty banged up, but I’ve taken worse.”
The kid hovers for another minute, watching him and fingering her lip. Then she heads abruptly to the freezer and starts rummaging. While Cal waits for the bleeding to stop, he pulls up his pants leg and checks out his knee. It’s purple and inflating, with a darker purple line scored right across it, but after some experimenting he’s pretty sure it’s not broken. His collarbone is at least cracked: it shoots out pain whenever he moves his shoulder. When he probes very carefully along it, though, the line is straight. It shouldn’t need setting, which is good. Cal would