And if it's a trap, she said, "If this is exactly what it looks like, what happens to me once you're 2 miles away and out of earshot?" He didn't have an answer for that because she was right. plainly, undeniably right. And because both things were true at once, and there wasn't a version of the next 10 minutes that let him protect everyone he needed to protect. Take the rifle, he said finally.
Bar the doors. Use the trip wires exactly like we set them. I'll ride fast. I'll be back. Before what?
Before it matters, he said though, though even he could hear how hollow that sounded spilling out of his own mouth. He kissed her forehead, fast, instinctive, something neither of them had planned for, and something neither of them pulled away from either. Then he was gone, riding hard towards smoke that hadn't even started rising yet, chasing a warning that some cold, honest part of him already suspected was a lie dressed up as an emergency. He crested the rise above the Hargrove place 20 minutes later, lungs burning, his horse lthered white with sweat and effort, and pulled up hard because the ranch below him sat completely empty. No screaming, no gunfire, none of the chaos that scrap of paper had promised him.
Just an eerie, staged, quiet smoke curling up thin and lazy from three small fires set at careful, deliberate intervals along the property line. Too neat, too controlled, nothing at all like the wild, hungry spread of a real accidental blaze. And there, propped upright on the porch rail in plain sight, sat a photograph, playing on a loop, a scratchy recording of gunshots and screaming over and over. Same 4 seconds repeating. Jed's blood went to ice.
No, he whispered just the one word breaking apart in his own mouth. No. No. Because he understood all at once exactly what he'd done. exactly what he'd fallen for.
Like a fool, like a man who should have known better after everything Reeve had already warned him about. He wheeled his horse around so fast it nearly stumbled beneath him and drove it into a dead run back toward home. Two miles. The two miles that had never once in his whole life felt longer. Every single second stretching out like Taffy pulled thin, his own heartbeat pounding louder in his ears than the hoofbeats hammering underneath him.
But please, he thought, not even sure anymore who exactly he was praying to. Please. Not again. I can't bury another one. I I can't do it a second time.
He crested the final ridge, and the whole world seemed to catch fire at once. Smoke. Real smoke this time. Thick and black and boiling up from his own barn in a column visible for miles in every direction. And down in the yard below, three horses tied loose at the rail.
Three men. He didn't slow down, didn't think. just drove the horse straight down the slope at a dead gallop, rifle already coming up into his shoulder. Cyrus spotted him first, shouted something, already sprinting for cover, a torch still burning bright in his other hand. " Callaway!"
Cyrus screamed, voice cracking wide open with something that might have been fear. " Come watch your savage burn." Jed fired from horseback. The shot went wide, but close enough to send Cyrus diving flat behind the water trough, the torch skittering out of his grip and into the dirt. Movement at the corner of the cabin.
Reeve stepped out, revolver already drawn, already leveled straight at Jed's chest. Time did something strange then. Slowed down and sped up all at once, the way it always does in the worst seconds of a person's life. Jed saw Reeve finger start to tighten. saw the muzzle flash bloom orange against the black smoke rolling behind him.
Felt the bullet burn past his shoulder, a hot line of fire that missed everything vital by less than an inch. Except it hadn't missed by accident. Jed rolled off his horse came up firing and the shot caught Reeve square in the chest, spinning him hard before he dropped silent into the churned up dirt of the yard. Later, much later, once there was time to think again, Jed would replay that single second a thousand different times over. Reeve aim, the angle of it, too high for a man with his reputation.
Too clean a shot for someone who'd truly been trying to kill him at close range. Almost like Reeve had aimed to make it look real. And nothing more than that. But there wasn't time to think the thought all the way through. Not yet.
Because the third man, Amos, had already frozen solid, both hands thrown high, nerve completely broken, soing something incoherent into the drifting smoke. Jed let him go. didn't even look back to watch him run because his eyes were locked hard on the barn. On the flames climbing the walls in hungry orange sheets on the door barred shut from the outside with a heavy beam that had never once in three long years been used that particular way. They trapped her inside.
Desa. His voice tore out of him raw and cracking. Barely his own voice anymore. Desa. No answer.
Just the roar of fire and the groan of old timber giving way somewhere overhead. He hit the bar door at a dead run, shoulder, shoulder first, and it barely budged. Hit it again harder. Felt something given his own shoulder that he'd deal with later, if there was a later, and threw his whole weight against the beam until it finally cracked loose, and the door swung wide into a wall of black smoke and heat that hit him like a physical blow to the chest. He pulled his bandana up over his nose and mouth and plunged inside.
Anyway, Desa, where are you? a cough, weak, barely audible over the roar. But there followed the sound, stumbling blind through smoke, so thick he could barely see. His own hands stretched out in front of him and found her collapsed near the back wall. The Winchester, still gripped white, knuckled in one hand, the blood soaking dark through her shirt from a wound low in her side.