Page 88 of Justice

She was standing in the mouth of the stable. She wasn’t moving. She had both hands clapped over her mouth. Her little body was trembling from the shoulders down. She was staring at something inside that I couldn’t see yet from where I was running.

I hit the ground in front of her on my knees, grabbed her, and turned her face hard into my stomach so she’d stop looking at whatever it was. “I’m here. I got you. I got you, baby. Don’t look. Keep your eyes on me.”

Then I looked past her, into the stable.

Midnite was down on her side in the straw.

She was not sleeping. I knew it in one look. A horse doesn’t lie down like that, all wrong, legs stiff and shoved out straight, the neck twisted at an angle no living thing would ever hold on purpose. There was a mess of sick pooled up by her mouth, foam gone strange colors in it, some of it dried at the edges already. Her one open eye was catching the last of the light coming through the stable door, and that light wasn’t doing a thing in it. Just glass. She was gone. From the look of her, she had been gone a little while. She had died alone in her stall.

Something about it was wrong. I couldn’t name it standing there, but I felt it settle in my gut like a stone. A healthy young horse does not drop dead.

Animals that die like that, foaming, cramped up, twisted, sudden, they got into something. Something that didn’t belong anywhere near a stable. I pushed the thought down into the back of my mind, because the child shaking against me needed all of me right then.

“Okay.” I got my voice as flat and calm as I could make it. ”We’re not gonna stand here, baby. We’re going in the house. Come on. Up.”

I scooped Dream up off the ground. She was too big to be carried and I did not care one bit. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and buried her wet face in my neck. That was when she really started to cry, the deep kind that comes up from somewhere underneath, the sobs shaking through both of our bodies at once.

“She’s dead, Miss Skye.” She could barely get it out. “Midnite’s dead. I came to feed her and she wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t get up⁠—”

“I know, baby. I know. I’ve got you now. Don’t look back there, you hear me? Just hold onto me and don’t look.”

I carried her out of that stable and back across the dark yard, and I did not let her turn her head to look behind us one single time.

I brought her in through the kitchen and lowered myself onto the floor with her still wrapped around me, my back against the cabinets. Then I just held her there and rocked. There was nothing to say that would fix it. Sometimes the only thing you can do for a hurting child is be something solid for them to fall apart against. So that’s what I made myself. A wall for her to break on.

Storie came in from the hallway.

“What happened?” She looked down at Dream shaking apart in my lap. “Why is she screaming like that?”

“Something happened to Midnite.” I kept my eyes on the back of Dream’s head and kept smoothing her hair down, over and over. “Don’t go out there, Storie. Please. Stay out of there. Let me get your daddy on the phone.”

She was already moving toward the back door.

“Storie. I’m serious. Don’t go out there.”

She went anyway. She always did the opposite of whatever I said, but this time I didn’t have a hand free to stop her, and honestly I don’t know that I would have.

She was gone about a minute. I sat on that kitchen floor holding Dream and listening to the silence past the back door, waiting. When Storie came back in, she had one hand pressed flat over her mouth and tears were coming down her face.

“Oh my God,” she said. “She’s dead. Midnite’s really dead.”

I held my own baby close and told Storie I was so sorry. I meant it. I would have gotten up off that floor and put my arms around that girl too, dry-eyed and difficult as she was, if my hands weren’t already full of a six-year-old who couldn’t stop crying.

But I was watching her. I couldn’t help it. It’s a thing I do, a thing that kept me breathing for a lot of years, reading a person while they think you’re only listening. And how Storie was crying sat wrong with me. I could feel it in my bones.

I couldn’t put a name to it. And I would never in a hundred years have said the thing out loud that my body was trying to tell me on that kitchen floor. It was too ugly to think about a child that way. I had no proof of a single thing. I was a woman living under a name that wasn’t even mine, and I had no right to look at anybody’s tears and call them fake.

But the tears were running down her face while her eyes stayed flat somehow underneath them. She was watching me. Watching Dream. Checking the room, taking the temperature of it. Measuring us. Grieving people don’t take inventory. They fall apart, or they go numb, or they go quiet. They don’t stand in a doorway with wet cheeks quietly counting the reactions in the room. Storie was counting.

A cold sensation went straight down my spine.

I pulled Dream in tighter against my chest and reached up onto the counter for my phone to call Justice.

And God forgive me for the thought, because I already knew how it sounded even inside my own head. I thought that I needed to be gone from this house even sooner than I had planned.

For the first time, it wasn’t Roman I was running from.

The front door opened down the hall.