Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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“Wait till hecomes out,” Randy suggested. “And bash him.”

“Fair,” he said. “You ever hear the word?”

“Fair, with him? He doesn’t fight fair. Why should we?”

“Little brother, you want snow down your pants?”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Randy swept a handful off the porch rail and started a snowball.

Carlo dived off the porch and ducked. And scooped up snow and had a big one ready when Randy threw at him.

Randy ran, stopped, and flung one that caught Carlo. His caught Randy. They stopped all strategy in the matter, stood and made snowballs and pelted each other until they were both powdered from head to foot and out of breath from laughing and swearing.

“I’ve got a handful of snow,” Carlo said, and Randy, knowing its potential destination, ran for the forge, past the evergreen.

Carlo stalked him.

“No fair, no fair,” Randy said, at bay beside the doors. “I haven’t got the key.”

“Oh, nowfair counts!” Carlo bent, made a good snowball and stood up.

Randy’s caught him fair in the face. His caught Randy on the side of the head.

Then they’d run out of snowballs and breath, and he gained sense enough to realize how late it was. The village was quiet. It was a deserted, lightless street, no light from the Mackeys’ house, either.

“Everybody’s gone to bed,” he said. “Way late.”

“Spooky,” Randy said, and waited, bouncing a little with anxiety as Carlo opened the door with the key.

Randy went across the darkened forge and threw a log on the banked fire, huddled down by it and started brushing snow off as he undid his coat.

Carlo had a last bit from his pocket. And delivered it to the back of Randy’s neck.

Squeal of indignation.

“No fair!”

“That’s twice you’ve called fair. You give?”

“Bully,” Randy said.

“Yeah.” He figured the kid would learn a little finesse. At least in snow fights. “But that’s enough. If we wake the Mackeys up, we’ll be in the street. No kidding.”

“Yeah, just you wait,” Randy said.

He gave Randy a hug. With no snow involved. They hauled the cots they used out of the storage area.

He could hardly last long enough to hit the mattress.

Tired, tonight, real tired. His mind was quiet, finally. He thought he could sleep, now, and felt it coming on thicker by the minute.

Something had made a sound. Darcy levered herself out of bed, thinking she’d might have heard Brionne call out. She searched for her slippers and her robe without clearly thinking, in her concern for Brionne and those stairs.

“Are you all right?” she called out. “Honey, are you all right?”

“Mama?” the thin voice came to her, likewise alarmed.

Something crashed at the front door. Someone yelled.

Someone was trying to break in, rattling the door handle—she could hear it. She knewas if she could see it.

She ran to Faye’s room, and the child was out of bed, on her way downstairs, crying out something, she couldn’t tell what.

“Stay here!” Darcy cried. “Stay here!”

She ran to the stairs and took them clinging to the bannister, put out her hands in the dark and felt her way along the wall to Mark’s office door—walked blind then to his desk, pulled open the topmost drawer and took out the gun—the gun that she never touched, never wanted to touch again; but it comforted her hands right now.

She listened. But the rattling and banging had stopped. She sat and listened in that stillness. The dark seemed alive it was so heavy and so dreadful.

The commotion had been on the public entrance porch. If it was drunken miners, the disturbance wouldn’t necessarily cut her off from the passages—she could take Faye, she could go that way, and reach the marshal, or a neighbor—but it was too risky. It was quiet out there, maybe because they’d given up, maybe because the intruders were thinking of trying another way in. But she had strong doors, and if a whole crowd of miners had gotten to warring with the loggers or some such foolery, there might be riot in the passageway as well. There was a passageway entry off the street, not far from her door—as well as the direct access by the kitchen door. She was scared to try to go for help, and hoped that Constance and Emil, next door, might have heard. Emil was a big man. If Emil flung open the shutters and shouted in his deep voice to get the hell away—if there was anybody conniving in the shadows out there, they’d move.

“Mama?”

Faye was on the stairs, coming down in the dark.

Not knowing her way. Giving out a high, female voice that might only incite drunken fools. She kept her finger off the trigger for fear of tripping in the dark, and recrossed the cold floor to the office doorway.

“Here I am,” she said in a calm, easy voice. “It’s all right, honey. I’m right down a short hall. Just some drunks. Put your hand on the wall and just walk along it. I’m right here.”

“I know.” It was a quavery, scared voice. But closer. In the dark she could see the pallor of the nightgown as the girl inched her way toward her. She knew when the girl reached her, and reached out her hand and found chill fingers.

“Somebody wants in,” Brionne said. “He wants in because I’mhere. Do you hear it? It’s scary.”

“They’re not going to get in,” Darcy said firmly. “I have a gun, sweet. Don’t grab it. Just stay close by me. If anybody breaks in, they’ll be sorry.”

Desperate hands clutched her. A frightened, shivering body pressed against her.

Silence followed. Then a dreadful sound above them, a sliding and scrabbling as if something had gone along the roof. The girl cried out, and Dairy’s heart jumped.

Then she laughed. “It’s snow, honey. It’s just snow sliding off the roof. It’s all right. Sometimes it does that, around the stove-pipe.”

The girl wasn’t so sure. But Darcy put an arm around her for reassurance.

“Tell you what. Let’s go to the kitchen where it’s warm. I’ll make some tea and we’ll have some of that cake. How’s that?”

The girl didn’t say anything, but she let herself be drawn along at Darcy’s left side.

They reached the kitchen and Darcy carefully laid the gun down on the counter while she lit the oil lamp and got out the tea canister. The house stayed quiet. The child pulling back a chair at the kitchen table made a loud screech on the boards, and she stopped and looked apprehensively at the roof.

“I heard something,” she said.

“I think you’re imagining, honey. Go ahead. Sit down. I’ll put on tea. Do you want a big piece or a little piece?”

“Either’s fine.” The girl’s eyes were still toward the ceiling. “I hear it, don’t you?”

“No, honey. I don’t.”

“It wanted in.”

“Don’t think about it.” She dipped up water from the kitchen barrel and set the kettle on.

There was no more snow sliding. The house stayed quiet. The wind blew, and snow would be coming down. It was the buildup on the steep roof that had slid.

She was worried about the kitchen door, the one that led to the passages. She listened for footsteps out there, but everything was quiet. She thought still about going after the marshal and taking Faye with her.

Brionne—with her.

But they were all right here. It was quiet.

And there were five rounds in the gun. She knew. Mark had only needed one.

Chapter 18

There’d been something wrong in the night—they’d waked, at least Danny and Ridley had, armed and gone half-dressed out to the den, but they’d found nothing amiss. Ridley said he wasn’t entirely sure it was Spook bothering them: small alarms during the winter weren’t uncommon, and they’d taken their frozen selves back to the barracks and headed back to their beds.

The horses were still jumpy this morning, arguing that something had bothered them in a way that had put them in a lasting mood. Slip kicked at Rain, and Shimmer snapped. Danny took Cloud out into the yard to curry and comb him—and file a chipped center-hoof that Cloud had gotten from somewhere about the yard, possibly last night.

There were abundant horse-tracks in the snow of the yard, the overlain traces of the horses’ paths to the walls and back, to the den and to the porch of the house last night, and a lot going back and forth over the passageways that made the only hill of vantage in the camp, a ridge in the snow, not much projecting above the ground, but a hump that made a nighthorse feel he’d reached high ground, silly creature.

And now he was combing manes and tails, and Callie, with a hammer and chisel, was doing some carpentry involving the den-side passageway door, which was new wood, and which had stuck last night when they’d been investigating the trouble.

Remarkable system, those passages. Ridley said when they built the village they’d blasted down a lot of gravel and rubble, and the builders had dug in with timber shelters buried in gravel where the wildlife couldn’t get at them, and thatwas the start of the passages at this and other villages, except one that was totally passageways and no houses at all.

A lot of effort, Danny thought. They’d laid in dirt atop the rubble, probably hauled up from the lower slopes, and compost of evergreen needles, just anything the village could put down for the brief growing season, so he heard from Ridley, for gardens—for the greens and vegetables they couldn’t afford trucked up. In summer, so Ridley said, all of Evergreen broke out in vegetable gardens and flowers.

No gardens on this side of the wall, however, where there were hungry horses to raid the plots.

Above this place on the mountain, with one exception around Mornay, was snow. Above here was uncompromising rock. It took a lot of effort just for humans to survive on what little soil clung here, and when a lad from the bustling crowds of Shamesey thought about it he marveled that humans not only survived, they built fairly fancy houses, and churches, and such, on the hard rock and thin soil of a mountain.

Pretty damn stubborn people, he said to himself, and took up a length of Cloud’s tail to get a knot out.

Cloud of course switched the tail, being ticklish.

“Cut it out!”

A lot better if he could take Cloud outside the walls regularly and at whim. Village camp walls weren’t as wide as Shamesey town’s, and playing chase around a small yard just wasn’t enough for Cloud. Ridley said they could go hunting whenever they liked, and often, once they could get the horse business settled—

But that wasn’t amusement. And it wasn’t settled. His personal guess that it wouldn’t leave despite the turn in the weather seemed to have been right, and neither he nor Ridley was looking forward to that matter. He ought, he thought sometimes, to have gone on to Mornay—but what could he have told them? The suspicion of a suspicion of a horse no one could deal with? That two riders who ought to have been able to call it in had failed and now they were down to spooked hunters and short supply of game with a situation down the slope at Tarmin he didn’t think maybe anybody had managed to tell Mornay or any other village up here.

Worrisome thought: maybe there were reasons Ridley didn’t want Mornay involved, or people talking to Ridley didn’t want Mornay involved. Certainly Ridley had been talking to the marshal from time to time, and they still had the horse on their hands, which, no matter the reasons that they weren’t talking to the other village, he had some chance of dealing with. He could have dealt with it without harming it if it weren’t for the Goss kids; and now he had Brionne Goss on his mind more often than he liked to have anythought of her near the surface.

He wishedhe’d been able to get his hands on the horse. That would be the best thing. But he wasn’t sure it was possible—especially with the distraction and attraction the village posed; and with the Rain and Jennie business. Everything in the world had conspired to keep that horse a problem to them; and dammit, it wasn’t fair, shooting at it.

But, mope about it as he would, he’d made hisbest and probably only good try at catching it that night he’d gone out on foot—and scared hell out of Cloud, who thought about it at the moment and swatted him with the tail, which still had one good ice-lump in it.

“Cut it out! Dammit!”

Cloud backed into him. There was in Cloud’s mind. There was—

Danny looked up. He hadn’t seen Ridley when he’d come out to see to Cloud. He hadn’t known Ridley had gone to the village, but it was a good guess in a small camp when he’d not immediately seen him at the horse den. He supposed that Ridley had gone over to confer with the hunters.

hit the ambient. Callie left her door-adjusting and he followed Callie out into the yard.

“Is Jennie in the yard?” was Ridley’s first question.

‘“Was,” Callie said. Jennie had been out currying Rain till the horses got snappish. He’d mentioned it to Callie and Callie had sent young Jennie inside to play. “Horses are nervous this morning. Thought she’d be better off inside.”

Ridley let go a breath. “Never had horse trouble before,” Ridley said. “I’ve heard—it sets off people who aren’t riders. And something happened last night. A miner’s hanging around the doctor’s place. Or he was.”

was Danny’s first, leaden thought and it sailed through and around the ambient.

“Some disturbance there last night,” Ridley said. “Somebody tried to open Darcy Schaffer’s front door. And this morning when the doctor opened her door—there’s blood all over it.”

“God,” Callie said.

“Knifing’s what they think. Wasn’t any sound of a gunshot. But the way the snow was falling—guess maybe there was a reason besides the stray that the horses were acting up. Maybe it wasn’t even here last night.”

He caught the scene from Ridley’s mind, hazily, because Cloud didn’t know buildings real well. But there was

“Not impossible somebody was trying to get to the doctor to treat a stab wound, trying to get away from the guy who attacked him. And got hit again on the porch. They’ve been poking in all the snow drifts thinking somebody could have fallen there, but there’s nothing. If we can get the gates open, I’m going to bring Slip around—”

“Into the village?” He’d never heard of such a thing.

“To see if he can find whoever it was.”

It made good sense. But it wasn’t something you’d ever do in Shamesey streets—bring a horse past the barriers, let alone into a murder scene. “You want some help?”

“No need of it. What there is to find, Slip will find. And they know Slip over there.”

“Sure,” he said. “Want some help to clear the gate?”

“That,” Ridley agreed, “would be a good thing.”

Earnest Riggs wasn’tto be found. So the marshal said, holding the hat with the bushdevil tail in his hand—a hat Earnest Riggs had kept with great care, and now—now it, like everything about the porch, was spattered with blood; not that that appalled a doctor, but the memory of last night did. Darcy stood outside shivering in a light coat, while the marshal and his deputy stood officially at her front doorway and a snow-veiled crowd of neighbors, on whom the snow was gathering thicker by the moment, were standing and gaping and gossiping below her blood-spattered porch.

They were bringing one of the riders over—and the horse—to find the missing, or track the guilty, as the marshal or the judge sometimes requested. They’d shoveled the outer gates clear so the horse could get from the rider camp to the street—and she could see that distant figure coming through.

The crowd gave back in a hurry as the rider came at a brisk pace up the street. She wouldn’t budge from the porch. It was her house, her office, her daughter upstairs in her bedroom. She’d spent a bad and a sleepless night, sitting up with the gun she passionately hated, and she wasn’t giving ground to any threat—least of all one of their own riders, doing his distasteful job this time involving her porch, herproperty, which had seen all too much of notoriety in the last two years—the other two incidents with the law had had the sanctity at least of tragedy. This—this was an embarrassment in front of the neighbors.

Ridley Vincint was the rider’s name, and the horse, by that fact, would be Slip. That was all she knew about riders—except that this man had been the escort supposedly watching over Faye, and she considered him directly to blame, and she didn’tforgive him for that, or for speaking harshly to Faye, as others reported, on that day. She tried not to think about that as he rode close enough to let the horse sniff the air and sniff the blood around the porch rail. She watched it, thinking doggedly of snow, which was what she’d always been taught to do if she was around a horse or any creature of the world, just think of snow and it wouldn’t be interested in her, and it wouldn’t—horrible thought—spread her private thoughts and her private fears to the neighbors.

The door behind her opened. She knew who it was without turning around, but turn she did as, in her nightgown, Brionne came out, with a thunderously unhappy look. The child hadn’t even shoes on her feet, for God’s sake.

And suddenly the horse gave a snort and reared up, so the rider had to fight to stay on.

“Get the kid inside!” Ridley said harshly.

“Stop it!” Brionne cried. “I won’t! You can’t tell me what to do!”

The horse backed away, shaking its head, having just smelled something, evidently, about the porch. The crowd scattered from it in panic.

All but the marshal and Jeff Burani, who stood their ground, Jeff with his hand on his gun.

“It’s her,” Ridley said. “He doesn’t like the girl. Get her out of here. Get her back inside!”

“Honey,” Darcy said, in the grip of so much craziness she didn’t know whether to protest or do what the rider said. The bare feet decided the matter. She flung an arm around Brionne to restrain her and had to hold tight to prevent her going to the rail.

“It’s just like Tarmin!” Brionne cried. “You’re just like the riders there! Go away! I hate you! I hate you andyour horse! Get awayfrom me!”

Darcy pulled her away and argued her back through the blood-spattered door into the house. For a moment—for a moment she thought she was having an asthmatic seizure or a heart attack. There was a tightness in her chest, and Brionne broke away from her toward the interior of the house, crying that she was going to get dressed and go back out there and talk to the rider if she wanted to, that she was embarrassed in front of the whole village.

“They’re awful!” Brionne was crying. “I hate them! I hate them!”

Darcy didn’t know what to do. She went back outside, trying to recover her breath and her wits in the cold air. Ridley and his horse were still there, in a large circle of spectators, a very large vacant circle, that had formed again near her porch.

“I can’t get anything,” Ridley was saying. “It’s just dark. My horse is starting to get upset. The girl remembers Tarmin too clearly. I’ll have to take him back to some distance. I’ll see if I can pick up any trail on the perimeter.”

“This is the craziest damn thing,” marshal Peterson said; and about that time John Quarles arrived, and came up on the porch, blessing the place with holy water, a process Darcy would have skipped on most days, but right now it was her house that had been denied, her doorway where yet one more life had ended, and holy water and John’s willingness to face the devil both came welcome, with Ridley on his horse still in her sight, and Brionne inside swearing she was going to come out again, to what earthly good in this horrific business she had no idea.

But after riding all the way around the house, with much of the crowd both drifting after him and rapidly reforming their apprehensive circle when he came back, Ridley showed up again at the porch to talk to the marshal.

“I don’t get any scent of anybody with blood about them. Just here on the porch. And I’ve got to get my horse out of here. This isn’t good. I’d suggest you give the girl something to quiet her down. She’s loud in the ambient. Dangerously loud. I can’t hear anything.”

“Meaning you can’t findany thing,” Darcy said. “Don’t tell me the problem’s with the girl, Mr. Vincint, damn it, I won’t hear it!”

It was certainly the closest she’d ever stood to a horse, and she was afraid—terribly afraid, all of a sudden. She didn’t know whether it was a sending or what, but Ridley Vincint made his horse turn or it turned, or something pushed it back. It looked—if an animal could have such a look—crazed; and snapped at her, not to strike, because she was out of range, but to make clear its hostility.

“I’m going back to the camp,” Ridley Vincint said, and the horse gave a furious whip of its tail and headed back down the street toward the outer gates, quickly graying out into the snowy distance of the street.

In the same moment the Goss boys were coming up the street ahead of a flood of miners and loggers from down by the barracks, and they passed each other, Ridley and the horse fading out, the newcomers growing brighter and more solid in the haze, until the Goss boys, arriving out of breath, forced their way through what by now looked like the whole village gathering to know what had happened.

God, she hated scenes. She’d had her fill, in Faye’s death, and after that in Mark’s. She hated to be the object of gossip, and she knew now she was the winter’s topic for good and all, and maybe worse than that. She could only think in one term now—how it affected everything she hoped for, all she intended: her respectability to parent a daughter.

And the respectability of her dealings with Earnest Riggs.

The Goss brothers reached her porch and climbed the steps and that, too, was a scene bound to stick in neighbors’ minds. The Mackeyswere coming, too, with hateful Mary Hardesty marching in the lead, and there was no way to go inside and let them and the marshal talk out here in front of the whole village without her knowing what they were saying. She found herself trembling, fearing that the boys were intending publicly to fault her care of Brionne, fearing that someone, somehow, in investigating what might have become of Earnest Riggs, might uncover the financial dealings she’d had with him—God knew who he’d have talked to.

Someonehad gotten wind of money—she was sure of the motive and daren’t say anything to the marshal about it. If it got about that she was involved—

She didn’t know what to say.

“What’s happened?” the oldest boy wanted to know. “What’s going on here?”

“Drunken fools,” she said, that being the position she decided to take—total ignorance. But the marshal gave the long account.

“Earnest Riggs,” Eli Peterson said. “The rider didn’t find any trace of him. His bunk wasn’t slept in. Found only his hat, lying sheltered on the porch.”

“He was at the tavern last night,” somebody yelled from the crowd below the porch.

“Ernie was alwaysat the tavern,” another voice yelled. “He’s probably got in a fight and he’s sleepin’ one off!”

“Not with this,” Peterson said. He scratched his chin and looked back at the snowy street. “I’m not finding him, the rider didn’t find him. And there’s a hell of a lot of blood. I’m taking a survey of everybody, searching all the sheds and such.”

“Ask Carlo Goss!” somebody yelled. “He picked a fight with him yesterday. He threatened Riggs. Threatened to kill him! And he was up and about way late—I saw him!”

“That’s a lie,” the younger boy yelled back. “That’s a lie, Rick Pig! He wasn’t anywhere last night but with me. And you were passed out drunk!”

“Goss saidhe’d kill him!” That was assuredly Rick Mackey from near the fringes. “Riggs was talking loose about his sister and he said he’d kill Riggs. Now he’s done it. Naturallyhis brother’d give him an alibi.”

“Carlo Goss?” Peterson said, and all of a sudden the Goss boy just jumped off the porch and broke his way through the crowd and ran.

“Carlo!” the younger boy yelled after him.

But Carlo Goss was running breakneck down the street, disappearing into the snowfall.

“Get him!” Peterson yelled. “Bring him back here!” And thatwas a mistake. A number of miners took out running, chasing the boy, shouting encouragement to each other.

Then the younger brother ducked past people trying to stop him and ran after all of them, in the same moment Brionne, this time shod, came out onto the porch. Darcy put an arm around her as, in the distance, Carlo Goss failed her expectation he would go to the rider camp.

No, the boy was going farther than that, as she could see from her elevated vantage. The miners hadn’t overtaken him. RandyGoss had taken that side street and gone off toward the rider camp. But Carlo, almost faded out in the snow, came to the village gates, and as she strained to see clearly what was going on, or whether Serge, who kept the gate, would catch him—he vanished altogether.

He’d opened the lesser gate and gone outside the walls—maybe to reach the rider camp across to theiroutside gate. Maybe he’d hoped to draw the miners away from his brother, and then go where they wouldn’t—because from what she could see, nobody else passed that gate.

Gunfire echoed back. Someone had gotten up the steps and shot.

“Stop that,” Peterson said to his deputy, and Burani walked down off the porch, went out into the street and fired his pistol into the air, at which Darcy’s nerves jumped, and Brionne jumped, and the crowd got quiet.

Did they shoot him? she was wondering. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe Carlo Goss hadhad words with Riggs. Maybe Riggs had come to him trying to solicit more money, and the boy had gotten mad and killed him.

The marshal was shouting to Jeff Burani to go to the riders and get them to go out after the elder boy, and Burani lit out running on the course Randy Goss had taken.

Maybe Carlo hadgone toward the rider camp’s outside gate and some overzealous miner had shot him from the wall. Riders wouldn’t necessarily turn him in—not until the marshal had made a case that it was village business and none of theirs.

She hugged Brionne against her side, in the blood-spattered venue of her porch, in the wreckage of the winter’s peace. Brionne was what she kept. Brionne was hers.

“Sorry the girl had to see this,” marshal Peterson said. “Honey, if your brother didn’t do this, we’ll find out. I just want to ask him some questions.”

“He could do it,” Brionne said bitterly. “He shot our father. He shot papa, Mama died. He was in jaildown there. He deserved to be.”

“Honey,” Darcy began, hoping to stem the bitter flood, but Brionne wasn’t finished.

“I was scared of him,” Brionne cried. “He was hateful. He was always hateful. He never wanted me to have anything. And he shot papa, I know he did!”

The whole snow-blinded sky was screaming, a condition against which the gunshots were faint noise, and it didn’t stop. Ridley couldn’t get his bearings except by sight, and that was diminished to an insignificant sense in the noise and the fright that raged in Slip, in Shimmer and Rain and Cloud—Jennie was terrified and trying to protect Rain, and in the stubbornness and the skip-to-any-belief character of a youngster, might be the strongest of them. Jennie didn’t equivocate– Jenniedidn’t care about anything but what Jennie wanted, and that was including all the horses.

But her father knew she was no match for that thingin the village, not in age, not in angry tenacity. Ridley kept by Slip’s side, trying to keep himcalm, and tried to be the stable center of their camp– but he’d compromised himself. He’d persisted against better sense, he’d tried with all he had in him to do the job his village asked him, even with that darting, unhealthy there, and he knew he hadn’t made sense to the marshal or to the doctor when he’d suddenly known he couldn’t make headway either against the search or the girl who so doggedly possessed that place. He’d had to get Slip and himself away from there.

There was in that place, there was and and so much and so hard>that Slip imaged it as so quickly you couldn’t track it,

The rider camp gate had opened for them and now it was shut– Jennie and Callie and Dan had opened it for him, the horses all bunched and sending and so strongly that presence enfolded him, snatched him into harmony with one breath, one thought, and

Now, slowly, they became and

But something had come into reach, and it was and first and foremost.

“Randy Goss,” Dan Fisher/Cloud identified that presence, and they weren’t afraid of it, skittish and angry mess that they all were. Dan was steady and Ridley held fast as Dan wanted

Ridley didn’t want anything to do with the intruders in his village. He wanted But he was sane, now, and he had a partner and a daughter with him that he wasn’t going to let down. He separated Dan out of and let him go, even while he walked to the door of the den and Slip and the rest of trailed him.

He wanted no part of the boy who came toward them—the girl’s brother, it was. The young one. Who blurted out, spilling images right and left,

<“Carlo’s run. Miners chasing him.> You got to help him!”

Dan didn’t stop to question further. He wanted and he ran alone for the gate, and into the village.

Ridley didn’t know what they were supposed to do with a village boy. The boy was crying and trying not to show it. And Jennie was upset, and wanting near her, where her hands could feel him.

Shimmer was and hanging back behind the others, both more and less afraid. Shimmer would kill if the kid made the wrong move, and on the instant of the realization how fragile Shimmer’s truce with the situation was, Ridley moved, and Callie moved, him to take the boy under his protection and Callie to hold Shimmer’s temper under her calming hands.