Page 1 of Repentance and Absolution
Chapter One
Shadows
But go and learn what this means:
‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’
For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.~ Matthew, 9:13
Oscar was gone, and I couldn’t find him.
The brush surrounding the new homestead—if that’s what you could even call it—grew dense and completely impenetrable in some spots. A fella could easily get lost, especially a city fella who couldn’t tell an oak from a birch and fell o’er his own outsized feet on occasion. There were wolves in these parts that could kill a man Oscar’s size in an instant—not to mention the bears, coyotes and panthers.
I’d told him time and again not to go wandering around without me, to stay near the ramshackle rooms we were fixing up and not to go looking for whatever he thought he wanted to see.
The kid was trouble. Had been since I’d first laid eyes on him, back in Dawson City, and there wasn’t any way of taming him, much as I’d tried. I supposed, when it came down to it, I didn’t want to tame him any more than I’d wanted to smother the fire that kept us both warm at night and reared up inside me when he looked at me the way he did. He’d nigh burned me with a primal passion that I was still trying to control—or at least understand. It still didn’t make no sense how the two of us came together like we did. But there was no turning back now.
“Oscar!” I shouted into the trees, trying to see my way and take heed of any movement ahead of me. I’d searched all around the sorry excuse for a house that he’d inherited from his dead uncle, and he was nowhere to be found. So now, I headed into the brush toward the creek. I’d already checked the well and he wasn’t there, neither fallen into it nor trying to get water up for a drink. I didn’t know where he was, and I was beginning to panic.
“Oscar! D’you hear me? Get back here right now or I’m gonna tan your pretty hide so bad you won’t be going anywhere for a week!”
As I stepped past a big boulder, something caught my eye. T’was the peacock-blue frayed edge of a shawl, and I stopped in my tracks when I saw a familiar person standing there, looking off into the distance.
“Cal? Is that you?” I said.
But it couldn’t be Cal. Cal was back in Telegraph Creek, whispering scandalous things into the ears of men who paid for her time and attention. The person wearing the shawl turned with a languorous ease and smiled at me. T’was Cal sure enough, even though it couldn’t possibly be.
“Jimmy! My, I’d almost forgotten how handsome you were.”
I blushed, taking off my hat and giving her a puzzled look. “What’re you doing here? How did you get here?”
Cal simply smiled, the dimple in her cheek on the opposite side to Oscar’s. “Has that naughty boy wandered off again?”
She’d rouged and painted her face till there was no sign of the handsome boy underneath, the boy who was a girl for all intents and purposes, except for the tackle between her legs.
“Yes, he has,” I said. “And I’m gonna haul him o’er my knee when I find him.”
Cal laughed and pursed her lips. “Oh, I don’t think he minds that, do you?”
“He’ll mind it this time,” I promised. “And he’ll mind me.”
No matter what games we liked to play involving my hand on his behind, giving him a pretend walloping for being a brat, I’d give it to him this time—like I had once before when he’d wandered off and scared me half to death.
“You know which way he went?” I asked Cal, since I had nothing else to go by.
“There,” Cal said, pointing through the brush. “I heard a gunshot by the river.”
My blood went cold.Fuck.God only knew what he’d wandered into, and for a goddamn second, I almost fell to my knees.
In a moment I’d moved past Cal and I was running, tearing through the brush toward the river, terrified of what I’d find. The crack of a rifle pierced the silence, and it echoed for long minutes as my breaths ripped through my chest.
When I found him, if he hadn’t been shot or eaten by wolves, I was gonna kill him.
Just as I reached the edge of the brush, where it opened up onto the river, another shot echoed through the trees and I opened my eyes, gasping huge gulps of air and blinking at the darkness.
“Hey, hey, shhhh, it’s okay. It’s a nightmare. You’re dreamin’.”
Oscar’s shadow loomed above me in the darkness of the room that was barely a room—just a space with four walls and a fireplace, the fire banked now but the coals glowing red.
