Page 60 of The Winter Husband
He reloaded as warm blood ran down his cheek.
He yelled, “Who’s next?”
A flaming torch sailed through the window. A rifle barrel soon followed. Lucas shoved the barrel away as it discharged. Seizing the hot bore, Lucas drove the gun hard through the window to knock down the owner. Leaping to his feet, he swept up the torch and flung it toward the hearth before he charged out the front door.
The man he’d knocked still struggled to his feet. Lucas hurled himself across the porch to slam his body into him. The enemy cursed in perfect French as they tumbled into the mud. Twilight flashed on steel. Lucas grabbed the wrist that held the glinting knife and saw, on his attacker’s face, an eye of milky blue.
Realization struck him.
Fortin.
The murdering Frenchman had come for vengeance—with his cousin, Lucas realized, as the sound of a scraping ramrod came from behind. Lucas rolled over to see Landry tipping powder into the pan of a rifle now aimed at his face.
Time slowed to a stop as he stared down the black bore of a newly-loaded weapon. Eternity stretched between the seconds. He’d been in this still, ringing place before. Dozens of times, two continents apart. Life hung by a thread when a gun was pointed so close. He could fight, if he still had it in him. But death was the effortless choice, as easy as surrender, and just as seductive. The thought teased him, winked familiarly before him, an old friend beckoning. Then he realized: he’d been waiting for death to come. He’d been preparing for a very long time.
No.
That was before Marie.
His wife, helpless in the cabin.
Now, he never wanted to live so badly.
With a slap of a hand, he deflected the bore as Landry’s gun fired. Jerking up, he stomped Fortin in the ribs and turned on the other Frenchman with bloody intent. A fighting madness took over.
He became all motion, no thought but survival.
Much later, the blood-haze of the fight thinned behind his eyes. A chill painted the back of his throat. He heaved heavy, hard breaths. One leg tingled with pin-sharp cold. The other flowed with warm blood. He could see only narrowly out of one eye, but well enough to make out the shapes sprawled motionless on the ground around him. He nudged them. None moved.
He raised his gaze, surveying the twilight darkening to the gloaming for more enemies. Flashes of the fight played across his mind. The crack of knuckles against bone. Flintlock-blasts. A rolling torch.
Marie.
He twisted toward the cabin. Ice-sharp spears shot through him, radiating down his back, but he ignored it for now. No flames leaped beyond the windows, no sparks rose from the roof. His toss of the torch toward the hearth must have tumbled true. On the porch, he glimpsed a woman’s shape. She grasped a weapon, the bore pointed down. Relief, iced with fear, showered over him.She’s safe.He lurched toward her, staring at her through his one good eye, seeking any sign of injury. She stood in simple grace, as if she’d descended from the clouds.
His star maiden.
His wife.
The bore of her flintlock knocked the porch boards as he approached.
“Lucas.” Her eyes went wide. “There’s a knife in your shoulder.”
***
Marie held her breath as Lucas mumbled something through a split lip, some ridiculously common thing about going inside the cabin so she wouldn’t be cold. As if her shivering was the worst of what had just happened. It astounded her he was standing upright after the blows she’d seen him take, the wrestling she’d witnessed, the knife she’d watched flashing in the dying light. Now he winced as he reached over his shoulder in search of the hilt. When he knocked it with clumsy fingers, his body stiffened.
“Stop,” she said. “You’re making it worse.”
He dropped his hand. “You’ll have to pull it out.”
Impossible. She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t a surgeon. And yet, only moments ago, she’d smothered a torch fire with bed linens and her own skirts. Moments ago, she’d loaded a flintlock and aimed to kill.
Her stomach lurched, splashing the back of her throat with bile. She swallowed it down and pointed Lucas inside. “Go sit by the hearth.”
“Not there.” He swayed like a pine in a blizzard. “In the bedroom.”
Lucas limped inside. She followed, leaning the still-smoking rifle against the wall with shaky hands. Lucas shuffled to the hearth to grab a wooden spoon from a canister on the mantel. A mad sort of laugh bubbled up in her—are you going to help me cook?—but the laugh died fast as he tested the wooden handle between his teeth.
