Page 122 of The Outsider
I stayed by Danny’s side while the others went to round up his family.
“John,” Danny croaked as Kimmy prepared anesthetic to put him under. “Gloves.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Gloves,” he repeated, like it was super important. “The answer was gloves.”
I stared at him. “To your stupid joke?”
He grinned like he was the funniest guy in the world, then immediately passed out again. I sighed.Trust Danny to give me the punchline even on death’s fucking door.
The days after Danny was attacked were grim.
Kimmy managed to set his leg—a minor miracle—but she predicted permanent nerve damage. He may also walk with a limp. His ankle was broken in several places, and she’d done her best to set it and put it back together, but it’d likely never be the same. She kept him there overnight, and his poor grandparents looked like they’d keel over with worry. They depended on him more than ever, and he’d struggle to support them with the coming harvest.
Jenna was beside herself when she arrived at the Lodge. She’d always thought of her big brother as invincible. With Danny’s sense of bravado, maybe we all had. Isla joined her in the grand hall, where they sat and cried together.
I was exhausted, and the only relief came when Claire arrived. Seeing her beautiful face, even when she looked so worried, instantly made things a little better. She didn’t speak, just pulled me into her arms and held me close. I buried my face in her hair and inhaled the comforting scent of her.
An attack on the Chief Outrider had never happened before, and that scared the shit out of everybody at the council meeting the next day. Worse, it’d been totally unprovoked. The investigation of the scene turned up nothing, other than that whoever had done this had been careful to cover their tracks…and that Danny’s radio was missing. They combed the area searching for it, but it was gone.
I tried, over and over, to remember if I’d seen it when I found him, but I hadn’t. That suggested his attacker took it. They’d also killed the horse but left Danny alive. How had they found their way into the Valley? And what were the odds that some random outsider had just happened to cross paths with Danny?
Nothing made sense, and at the council meeting, everyone seemed to feel either anxious or suspicious. I was in the second category.
I watched Jameson carefully as he led the meeting, Abby by his side. To his credit, he seemed as shocked as the rest of us. Unlike his father, though, Zach seemed agitated. After his threats toward Claire, he seemed like the obvious suspect. The problem was that he had no clear motive for hurting Danny or stealing from him. He saw outsiders—and me, I guessed—as a threat to his family’s power, but Danny wasn’t. That said, having access to the radio would give him insight into where all the outriders were at any given time, including me.
I clenched my jaw, watching Zach fidget in his seat.
The meeting ended with no real resolution other than we’d keep investigating. None of us knew what to do, or who to trust. Violence was rare in our small community. In my few months as an outrider, the most I’d ever had to do was break up a drunken brawl or mediate a heated argument between neighbours. This was way beyond anything we normally dealt with.
The morning after that, I drove Claire to school, along with a hefty pile of books she wanted to bring into the classroom. Books stacked in my arms, I pushed open the schoolroom door…and stopped dead.
Claire’s mural, painted on the back wall of the room, had been defaced. Long, dried streaks of what looked like blood spelled outGO HOME, WHORE.
My blood ran cold as Claire followed behind me.
“You can just leave the books on the desk, darling,” she was saying as I turned to block the door.
It was too late. Her eyes got huge. “What the hell is that?”
Her voice came out high-pitched and terrified, and I rushed to do damage control.
“Turn around and walk out to the lounge,” I ordered. “This is a crime scene.”
She did as I said, but I couldn’t erase the heartbroken look she gave me. I closed the door to the schoolroom and made my way across the building to the command center.
All we could be sure about was that this wasn’t over.
Chapter 34
Claire
If John had been wary after Zach Jameson’s threat at the dance, he was downright paranoid in the week after Danny’s attack and the vandalism in the schoolroom. He stuck to me like glue at any moment that I wasn’t teaching. Now that planting season had started in earnest, he had Kimmy run the tractor so that he could be at my side every morning for chores. He drove me to and from school on teaching days. When he had to work on the farm or in the distillery, he took me with him, and when he had to patrol, he left me with Kimmy, the only person besides himself that he trusted to protect me. No matter where we were, he was alert, on guard, watching our surroundings like a hawk.
The only time I was ever alone was in the house, though even there, he tended to hover over me, as though worried I might spontaneously burst into flames. Even still, I felt his fear, because every single night since the vandalism, he’d made love to me—sometimes tender and sweet, other times rough and urgent and anxious, like he couldn’t get enough of me before I disappeared forever.
“I’m alright, love,” I murmured after one such session, stroking his hair. He’d laid his head against my naked chest, every part of his body touching mine, his arms firmly around my middle.
