I stand up slowly, eyes darting from the man to the door behind him, but I stay behind the table, a barrier between myself and him. Yet it’s hardly anything at all.
His boots against the wood floor echo up the walls of the room as he strides toward me, metal spursclanking. But before he even reaches me, I know who he is: the scar running lengthwise across his throat—a slit I now know was made by Noah. A wound that surely once ran red with blood.
Holt.
My pulse is electric in my veins, and he stops at the other side of the table, eyes blinking strangely at me as he smooths a hand across his dark, slick hair. Everything in its place. Tidy. Unsoiled: his face clean-shaven, white shirt pressed, each button neatly stitched one above the next. At his waist, the notched belt with two holsters—but no guns. Maybe it’s meant as a sign that he doesn’t intend to hurt me.
Yet.
He blinks, the odd angle of light through the windows streaming over his eyes: one bright blue, the other an insipid gray, as if a storm cloud has blown over it, muting all color, all vision. I’m certain he’s blind in that eye.
Sick with consumption.
“Do you know where you are?” he asks through bared teeth, a flatness in his eyes now that almost looks like disinterest. As if I have summonedhimhere, a prisoner who has interrupted his day.
I don’t reply.
Slowly, leisurely, he walks to one of the smaller tables, tappinga hand against the wood surface as if he’s bored. As if he’s playing a game he already knows he’ll win. And for a half second I think he might turn and walk back for the door, deciding I’m not worth his time, and slip out into the pale light without another word. But then, like one of the Horaces’ cats, whose fickle minds dart from one thing to the next, his gaze snaps back to me. Eyes fluttering, watchful. It wasn’t disinterest I saw in his stare; it was patience. A careful tiptoe, a fortitude—he’s a man who will take his time, until he gets exactly what he needs. “This is a schoolhouse,” he says, cool and calm, answering his own question, as if he were giving me a lesson. “Before this town was abandoned, teachers would stand at that desk where you are now and instruct their students on literature and mathematics, science, and even art.” He leans a hip against the small table, the soft leather of his belt giving way. “My own father was a teacher, for a time,” he says, a flatness to his voice, without emotion, without anything at all, and I don’t know where he’s going with this. Why he’s telling me any of it. “He stood in rooms just like this one, lecturing about our history.” His good eye shivers, an unconscious clicking in his jaw.
“You see…,” he says slowly, to be sure I’m listening, that I hear the next words that leave his tensed lips. “The past is remembered by those who were there in the beginning, who saw what happened—” His dead eye widens like a raven, intent, refusing to blink.
He waits a moment—like he thinks I might know what he’s about to say next, like I’m going to speak—but then he rolls his thin, pale mouth to the side, growing impatient with my silence, teeth sawing at the back—a sound I remember from the miners’ camp when he stared down the barrel of Pa’s gun, his teeth gratingtogether. He exhales through his nose, quick and blunt. “Andyourancestors were there, weren’t they?”
I feel my jaw go slack, a ticking in my chest. But I don’t say a word.
The scar at his throat seems to stretch wide, pale and dully pink, and I can see the impatience growing in his eyes, a twitch at the edge of his mouth. It sends chills down my flesh, being in the same room with him, feeling his eyes on me with nowhere to run. Without a rifle between us. He knows he has the upper hand, yet he’s taking his time making his point.
He doesn’t like to lose control.Always in control. Even of himself.
“I know more than you realize,” he says now, tapping a finger to his temple, eyes unblinking as the next words slide between his teeth like spit and tobacco. “I have spent most of my life hunting you, living out here, in the filth of these out-of-the-way towns, trying to find any rumor, any witness or old tale about the last Astronomer who vanished years ago.” He pushes out his lower jaw, the sickening sound of grinding teeth echoing in my ears. “Dead or hiding, no one had seen her,” he says as if it were a puzzle, pieces scattered across the landscape. “And I always thought she would be old and ragged and barely alive when I found her, a woman I could easily break, easily get what I wanted from. And yet…” He raises a pointed eyebrow, a ruthless, bitter-edged smile taking shape on his lips. “Hereyouare.”
His eyes grate down the length of my body, from my chin to my toes, as if he were cutting me open with a blade, and I feel my skin shiver, hating the calculating sharpness of his stare. My heart starts beating too fast.
I should have killed him,I think, remembering the feel of myfinger against the trigger, how close I was. How easily I could have squeezed it back and let the rifle explode in my hands. A simple thing. And he would have bled out on the ground at my feet, in front of the miners’ cabin. But I also know, I might have found myself dead shortly after—shot by one of his loyal, branded men.
“You are what I’ve been waiting for,” he adds, voice slicked and awful, words drowned out by the thudding fear in my veins, growing louder.
I sway a little, my throat closing up, the bruise at the back of my skull pounding, and I want to close my eyes, want to sink to the floor, but I grip the edge of the desk to keep myself upright and conscious.
Holt tilts his head, like he can see that I’m struggling to keep from collapsing, and he straightens himself up, walking slowly toward me—as if he’s in no great hurry—then presses both palms against the table separating us, his gray eye shuttering.
Every muscle in my body tightens—being this close to him, only a couple of feet away, hearing the tapping of his finger on the table, the scent of horses and sweat on his skin, makes the nerves beneath my flesh writhe and twist. I am trapped, with nowhere to run.
“Now…,” he says, releasing his hands from the table, scraping his eyes down to my throat—the soft skin, the place where the air quivers inside me. “I’m told there’s something on your neck.”
On reflex, I take a quick step back, my heels hitting the wall behind me.
He smiles, liking that I’m afraid, and he touches his hair again, smoothing it back around his ears, making sure not a strand has slipped out of place.Always in control.“I won’t hurt you,” he says,but there is an oiliness to his words. An ease to his lies—something he’s well practiced at. Skilled, deft. “I just need tosee.” His gray eye shivers, winks, as if it’s reminding him that he won’t see anything through its clouded center—worthless now—an eye merely taking up space within his skull.
He moves around the desk, slowly at first, but when he’s close enough, he snaps forward and grabs the back of my head with his hand, pinching my temples until I buckle over. I let out a pathetic cry, then swallow it down. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of my pain.
He brushes the hair away from my neck, gentle, careful—and it makes me shudder in disgust—before he peers down at the marks. I can hear the heaviness of his breath, the deep rasp of air—dust in the lungs, dust on everything. He makes a sound, a pleased growl. And finally, satisfied, he releases his hand from me and I jerk back, pressing myself into the corner of the room.
He brushes his palms together, as if I’m covered in dirt and have soiled his clean skin. “I suspect—” he begins, grinding his jaw again. A habit he can’t control. “—that the mark doesn’t end on your neck, but is much larger, traveling the length of your body.”
I wince. Hating that he’s guessed the truth, that he’s imagining the marks weaving down my spine—something only Noah has seen.
Still, I don’t reply. I refuse.
