Black Feathers

44

The rain fell steady and hard, and soon the comfort and dryness of the previous few days was a distant memory.

Gordon tried not to think about the events which brought those dry, safe days to an end. But from time to time a flash of the strangest or most painful of those moments would enter his mind and blot everything out: the mutilation of Brooke’s hands, the sound her father made when he found her, the blood caked to her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, the smell of the earth as they dug her grave.

When he was angry, and he was angry for much of the time, he remembered how the attackers had died. Death had been almost comical: a man trying to pick a tiny pellet from the artery in his neck, a raging man speaking of love. And the one Gordon had killed. What he remembered of that was only the sensation of punching his knife blade hard and high and the disbelief at its effectiveness. He was fairly sure the tip of the knife had stopped against the man’s spine. So deep. So very, very deep. He could recall the intimate warmth of the man’s blood coating his right hand, but he didn’t even know his victim’s name.

He expected the rain to chill him, but it did not. Wherever his new power came from, it made him warm as well as strong. His pace never faltered, though he climbed both gentle and steep slopes. And though the rain slickened the rocks and turned the earth to mud, his footsteps were sure and solid. His waterproof jacket had a peaked hood, which he tightened to his head with hidden straps, and it kept most of the rain out of his face.

He chewed smoked game as he walked. Around him the world was cloaked in swirling cloud, low and grey and heavy with moisture. Sometimes the landscape emerged, to reveal moments of deep-green vegetation or glistening black rock, perhaps a distant grove of trees or glimpse into a valley, but mostly the world was shrouded and wet, and Gordon was glad not to see too far into it. He put as much distance between himself and his past as possible. Somewhere, the Ward were searching for him; on the path behind him right now, perhaps. He would walk and he would search until he found the Crowman. Only that could save his family. It was the one thing worth doing in the world.

Either that or lie down and give up.