Page 75 of Protective Pucking Orc

“I’m gonna tell her you said that.” She rolled onto her hands and knees, stuck her rump in the air, and pushed herself upright the way I’d taught her, arms out, wobbling like a newborn bkarn. Her helmet—teal, of course, with a cobra sticker Jord had provided without asking me—sat slightly crooked over her flushed face. She beamed up at me, and my chest did that thing I was becoming used to; the squeeze of mine, mine, look at what’s mine.

“Better,” I told her. “You got up without grabbing me.”

“‘Cause I got my helmet.” She rapped a mittened fist on it. “No hands. That’s the rule. C’mon, do the train!”

The train: I skated slow backward loops around the safe rim of the pond while she chugged along in my wake, matching my strides, shouting chugga-chugga until she inevitably fell again.

We did the train. We did “red light, green light,” which she cheated at. We did the thing where she attempted to check me into an imaginary board and bounced off my thigh, sat down hard, and cackled at the sky.

Snow kept sifting down through the gold light. Her laughter rang off the trees, bright as struck glass, and I caught myself memorizing all of it—the crooked helmet, the mittens, the wet gleam of the ice, the warm window with my female behind it.

The vernal equinox was coming.

The ice would soften and the season would turn and it would be time for outdoor barbecues and playing in the sprinklers. But then…there would be a hundred more nights like this one, a thousand, a lifetime of them. My Kteer hummed, fat and content as a hearth cat.

Rosa attempted a turn, tipped, caught herself on one hand, and shot upright in triumph. “Did you see?”

“I saw.”

“I almost died, and I lived!”

A laugh cracked out of me before I knew it was coming, rough and loud in the quiet yard.

Rosa gasped like she’d witnessed a miracle. She pointed one mitten at me, delighted, merciless. “I made you laugh! I did that! Mama! Mama!” She swiveled toward the house, bellowing at the window. “I made Dak laugh! I did it!”

The wind shifted.

That’s all it was. A soft turn of air off the tree line, carrying woodsmoke and pine and snow and⁠—

Gunpowder. Sweat. Expensive cologne over old cruelty.

Him.

My body moved before I’d even processed what I was smelling. I crossed the ice in two strides and had Rosa scooped against my chest, her skates swinging, my head up, nostrils flared, pulling the night apart scent by scent.

Woodsmoke. Pine. Snow. There—the tree line at the pond’s south edge, where the porch light died.

“Dak?” Rosa’s voice had gone very small. “Are we playing⁠—”

“Hush, little one.” I turned, trying to put my body between her and the trees.

Anthony stepped out of the dark onto the edge of my pond, and he was smiling, and he had a gun.

The weeks had not been kind to him. The expensive coat hung wrong on his frame; gray stubbled his jaw below the sickly yellowish bruises he still carried from my fist; his eyes had a bright, wet shine that no sane man’s carried. But his hand was steady, and the black eye of the pistol looked at me across thirty feet of ice, and every drop of blood in my body went cold and slow.

“There he is,” Anthony said, warm as a talk-show host. His shoes—city shoes, leather soles—slid as he stepped onto the ice, and he adjusted with a little chuckle, arms out, like this was all a marvelous game. “The big television star. You know, I almost didn’t watch that night. Hockey.” He spat the word. “Animals chasing a puck.”

Rosa whimpered into my neck. I cupped one hand over the back of her helmet and began, slowly, to skate backward. Away from the house. Away from the porch. Toward the far side of the pond—drawing his line of travel out across the middle.

The middle, where I’d told my kitling the ice was thin.

“You should put that away,” I said. My voice came out level. Miles beneath it, my Kteer was not humming anymore. It was a wall of low, black sound. “Before you hurt yourself.”

“Before I—” He laughed, delighted, and took another sliding step out. Twenty-five feet. “It talks! It gives advice!” The laugh shut off like a tap. “Did you put your hands on my wife, beast?”

I said nothing. Skated back another slow stride. He followed.

“I’ve thought about it, you know. Ever since I saw that broadcast. My wife. My daughter.” His lip curled off his teeth. “Sitting in the stands wearing an animal’s name. Tell me—” another step, twenty feet now, his soles skidding, the gun never wavering, “—did that whore spread her legs for your monster cock? Does she let it near my⁠—”