Page 31 of Scythe & Sparrow
“My point exactly. He deserves to lose for the name alone.”
“Hate it all you want, Doc. He’s still going to win.”
Fionn gives me a piercing glare and I grin. God, I love that expression on him, when his eyes go lethal, their blue darkening to a deeper hue. There’s a hunter in there somewhere. I just know it. I can imagine him letting that beast out to play. Chasing me. Catching me. Holding me down and tearing my clothes and—
A notification comes through on Fionn’s phone, a sound I don’t recognize. He whips it from the side table and frowns at the screen. A look of shock passes over his face and he darts to his feet, scattering his dried veggies across the floor.
“FuckingBarbara,” he hisses.
I grab a crutch and hop up onto my good foot. “Yeah,fucking Barbara. Let’s fuck her up,” I say, whipping my knife from the sheath at my back. “Who’s Barbara?”
“The raccoon.”
I blink at him as Fionn pockets his phone and strides to the table to grab his truck keys. “Aww, I don’t want to fuck her up. She sounds cute.”
“Trust me, she’s not so cute when she’s gotten into the medication cabinet. Or the break room. Or basically anywhere.” Fionn marchesto the door and throws it open, then turns to give me a questioning look over his shoulder. “Well? Are you coming or what?”
He smiles, and it’s so bright, so beautiful, maybe even just a little bit unhinged, that I feel like I’m lit from the inside. I sheathe my knife and grab my other crutch and hobble toward him. His grin grows even more magnetic, a feat that doesn’t seem possible. I pass him to step onto the landing, and before I can attempt the stairs, he sweeps me up with a strong arm across my waist and doesn’t set me down until we’re next to the truck.
“She might look cute,” he says as he helps me up into the vehicle, “but don’t let her deceive you. She’ll tear your face off to get what she wants.”
I force a mischievous grin as he settles my injured leg into the footwell, trying not to think about what it might be like for him to toss me around when he lifts me so effortlessly, or what his hands might feel like gripped so tightly to my hips that he leaves fingerprints on my skin. “Are you talking about me, or the raccoon?”
Fionn huffs. “Both, probably. So I guess you’ll be evenly matched.”
He tosses my crutches onto the back seat and jogs around to the driver’s side, throwing the truck into reverse the moment it’s started so he can peel out of the driveway with a squeal of tires.
“So, how did you come to name a raccoon Barbara, anyway?” I ask as we turn onto Main Street.
“Kind of randomly, to be honest. It just seemed to suit her.”
“Any idea how the hell she’s getting into the clinic?”
“Witchcraft is my guess,” Fionn says as we watch a pair of state troopers drive in the opposite direction. We turn off Main Streetand onto Stanley Drive, the side street where the clinic is located. I twist in my seat and watch as the troopers continue on their path. “They must be opening the search for Eric at Humboldt Lake. From what I heard, that’s his favorite fishing spot.”
I swallow. “Where’d you hear that, exactly?”
“One of the search volunteers. He came to my clinic yesterday.” Though I’m not looking at him, I can feel Fionn’s eyes bore into the side of my face. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“The shopkeeper at Shireton. He saw me and Eric talking when Eric bought bullets and I bought my knife. He knew Eric wasn’t about to go fishing.”
“Gerald. Yeah, I know him.” Fionn’s hand is a sudden warmth over mine, and I search his face when he breaks his gaze from the road to glance at me. “If Gerald was going to say something, he would have done it by now. Of anyone who could have drawn a connection between you and Eric, he’s probably the least likely to bring that to the cops. He plays by the rules, but it doesn’t mean he has any fondness at all for law enforcement. It’ll be okay.”
I sit back in my seat. I know enough about the area now to know that Humboldt Lake is about twenty miles out of Hartford, in the opposite direction of Weyburn. That puts it at least a good forty or fifty miles from Eric’s watery tomb at the bottom of the Platte River.
By the time we park at Fionn’s clinic, the burst of adrenaline from seeing the police vehicles has subsided. Maybe it’s a false sense of security, but knowing the authorities are focusing their attention so far off course, I feel a measure of relief. I can’t say Fionn feels the same. Not with the way his brows knit together, or the momentary pause he takes when he exits the vehicle tolook back toward Main Street as though the cruisers might appear. When he comes to my side to help me down, the smile he gives me is a faint echo of the one from his doorstep only a few minutes ago.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “As long as no one else realizes he was intending to hunt and not fish, he’s going to be hard to find. And even if they do, who knows where he might have gone.”
“I’m not worried.” I probably should be. I’m sure that’s what Fionn is thinking too. But something about it feelsright, no matter what happens next or what consequences I might have to face. Sometimes, I thinkrightmight not begood. Andwrongmight not bebad. Even before I joined Silveria Circus, I’d started to question what kind of people drew those lines around our lives, and whose benefit those boundaries are really for. Because the more women I meet like me, the more I believe the rules were never made with us in mind.
With a single, decisive nod, Fionn passes me my crutches before grabbing a backpack from the rear seat. When we get to the entrance of the clinic, he brings up the app on his phone, disarming the security system before he checks each of the internal cameras. “I don’t see her,” he says as he pulls the keys from his pocket and unlocks the door.
“Is there a back entrance?” I ask, and he nods. “I’ll take the keys and go in that way. We can corner her. Or, if we’re lucky, she’s already gone.”
Fionn levels me with a flat look as he drops the keys onto my waiting palm and then slides the backpack from his shoulder to rummage through its interior. He passes me a pair of gardening gloves. “Trust me. She’s not gone. She’s lying in wait to ambush us.”
“Okay,” I say as I shift my shoulders back. “Where’s the comms device?”
