Page 9 of The Widow and the Wanted

Flashes of light in the night and fast-falling snow. Men shout and scream. A woman runs for the trees and is yanked back by her skirts. Another tries to shield the notebooks with her body, like they’re worth protecting. A shot takes the professor in the chest. He goes down clutching the front of his coat, eyes wide with shock.

“Burn ’em,” a man from the posse shouts. “Everett wants it all gone.”

Before I can wrap my head around it, glass shatters and one of the covered wagons ignites. Women scream, running from the flames and into gunfire.

I fire at the men we rode with fast as I can work the lever. One man goes down, then another. Boone tackles a thug off a woman, pistol-whips him. The storm slams down, snow coming sideways now, turning everything into a white blur lit by muzzle flashes.

One man screams, “Burn the notebooks!”

Christ.

I spin around slowly, counting three wagons consumed by flames, burned to skeletons.

To my left, a scream cuts off sharply. I look over just in time to see one of the women crumple in the snow, hands pressed to her stomach, red seeping between her fingers before the white swallows it. Another lies still by the fire, shawl blown back, eyes staring at nothing.

I keep firing.

At last, the shots thin out. My rifle clicks on an empty chamber. Boone’s gun does the same. We’re both breathing hard, hands shaking.

Two men are still on their feet—Jessup, bleeding from the arm, and that bastard guard from the hire line. They take one look at the coming storm, another at us.

Our horses linger nearby, out of reach.

“To hell with this,” the guard spits. In an instant, two cracks and flashes of light scatter through the rain of ice as they fire at our horses.

Our way out.

The sound of their cries as they fall against frozen ground shatters me, all the air forced from my lungs. My mouth opens as if to scream. It burns my throat and yet the sound is swallowed by the brittle air.

The men ride off and Boone tries a final, hopeless shot with his pistol but the bullet goes wild into the storm in vain.

Hoofbeats pound away into the white, then they’re gone. Silence drops in behind them, as if muffled by a wall of goose feathers.

Women lie scattered around the camp. Blackened red on white. None of them moving.

All but one of the wagons stand charred and hollow, their ribs burned black against the storm. Canvas hangs in smoking tatters. A wheel turns slow in the wind, creaking once, then stopping.

For a long second, all I can hear is the howl of weather through what’s left.

Boone swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Mercy,” he says, voice cracked clean through. “What the hell happened?”

Then—a sound. Not wind.

Something else.

Someone.

A small, strangled sob.

We both turn toward the wagon where the sounds escape the worn waxed canvas.

Lula

Eli. If this is your way of calling me home, I swear you will not be happy to see me. The screams and gunfire outside are deafening, close enough to make the wagon boards tremble under me. Every shot punches through the canvas like a fist.

It all happened so fast. One moment we were looking up at the sky, and the next men were shouting, guns were firing and I was dragged from the campfire, thrown down into the snow.