Page 27 of From the Noblest Motives
"You holding up okay?" Blaze had waited a full two hours to ask, but Damien had been completely silent. Not even a loud breath.
"I'm… It's stabilized. I should be all right."
"You say something if you need to stop. Don't just go until you fall over or throw up on my shirt."
"I won't." A beat later, Damien added, "I like that shirt."
Blaze snorted a surprised laugh, but he wasn't willing to read too much into a statement about a plain black T-shirt that was maybe a size too tight.Boundaries. Right.
Neither one of them wanted to admit they were tired, apparently. Shudder was alive, and the knowledge that he was running and hurt set a fire in Blaze's heart, one of adrenaline-soaked fury that his body could barely contain.
It was close to midnight when Damien called a halt by an ancient cottonwood. "He stopped here."
"The trail ends here?"
"No." Damien cocked his head to the side. "No, but he stopped for a while."
Blaze let out a slow breath, taking in the moonlit clearing. "How bad an idea is it to ask how you know that?"
"There's…" Damien waved a hand in a helpless gesture. "More of him here."
"Some lights over there." Blaze handed Damien off the platform, climbed down himself, and collapsed it into its neat carrying square. "Question is whether it's safe to ask, or do we move on?"
"Ask."
"Feeling?"
"Yes." Damien was already making his way toward the lights of a homestead, possibly, or maybe a small village.
Trying hard not to sigh, Blaze hurried after him. Something had caught all of Damien's attention, which explained the reversion to single-syllable answers, but explanations would've been nice.
The cluster of buildings, what they could see from the pair of lamps hung from trees, was a village of sorts, with the houses clustered around a central clearing and a fountain. Damien stopped by the fountain and turned in a circle as if deciding on an appropriate house to disturb in the middle of the night. Two houses still had lights on. Someone was still up.
Blaze was about to suggest this when the familiar click of a gun safety being switched to off caught his ear. Right behind his ear. He held both hands wide and otherwise kept carefully still. "We're not here to hurt anyone."
"Tell me another one, hunter," a deep voice rasped. "You walk into my family's home, armed, fixing to start a war, and you got the nerve to say you don't mean harm?"
Damien turned, his eyes wide in horror. "Blaze…"
"It's all right, Twitch. Don't… Just stay there. It'll be okay."
Instead of Damien answering, another voice spoke from Blaze's right, this one probably an older woman, though Blaze wasn't going to turn his head to look.
"Laurent! You put that cannon away now!" A tiny woman with a cane and a crown of silver braids walked into Blaze's line of sight. She pointed her cane toward Damien. "Don't you see who that is, boy? Clear as day, just like Shudder said."
"But, Meemaw—"
"Don't youMeemawme. Put that thing down." She turned back to Damien. "What's your name, young man?"
"Damien Hazelwood. You talked to Shudder?" Damien blurted out in a hoarse whisper.
The gun moved away from Blaze's ear, and he let his hands down, though he knew relaxing would be premature. Dark windows equaled possible multiple weapons trained on them.
"You're as pretty as he said you were." She clumped up to Damien and looked him up and down. "Shudder's not here."
"Yes, ma'am. I…"
"You know. He said you track people. Track them by the life inside them." She tapped his chest with the head of her cane. "So why stop here? Busting into my family's home when decent people sleep?"
