THE PELLET SMELLED of lead, and left a circular dent on Daniels’s thumb as he pressed it into the barrel, holding his balance against the whip of the forest wind.
Anger curled like a snake in his stomach as he pushed through the trees, cutting his skin on briars and thorns, thinking about Sep and the look on his face as he’d burned him in front of the gang, then hidden behind the fat Greek.
You’re still mine, Hope, Daniels thought, grinding his teeth. You’ll get what’s coming to you—and so will your toothy friend.
He squeezed under a decayed warning sign at the entrance to the Windercross estate, its message rotted to a paint-flaking mess—and as he stood, a coil of rusting wire tore a chunk from his ear.
Daniels fell to his knees, gripping his ear tight as though he could squeeze away the pain, and howled into the darkness.
The blood was shiny with moonlight as he lifted his hand away, and he wiped it across his chest, tensing his muscles as the night air hit the wound and it began to throb. Then he smashed the sign to bits with the butt of his air rifle.
When he reached the meadow, he lay flat and still, his ear throbbing, feeling himself vanish into the trees. He watched an oblivious rabbit bump along, its tail flashing white in the gloom.
He let it go.
They all thought he was angry, that he lashed out. They thought he couldn’t control himself. But he could be patient.
They didn’t know how patient he could be.
A fox passed on the far edge of the paddock. A squirrel twirled up a tree trunk. More rabbits passed, their twitching noses empty of his scent. Minutes fell away, measured only by the pulse in his wound.
Still he waited for the target his anger craved—the hardest shot, the biggest prize.
A bird in flight.
And then he saw it: a crow dropping from the trees, its wings spreading as it banked to turn. He dropped his head to the sights, pictured Sep—and fired.
The crow carried on, silent and untroubled, wings fluttering as it landed on a distant treetop.
He climbed to his knees.
“Daniels doesn’t miss,” he spat, looking again along the rifle’s sights.
Just to prove it, he lined up a branch that hung from a nearby tree and squeezed the trigger. The pellet left a perfect, circular hole in the center of a dangling leaf.
Daniels looked at the crow. It had turned to face him.
“Bullshit,” he whispered.
A swallow dove from the treetop above him, swooping low over the meadow and banking sharply in a bow-winged arc.
Daniels raised the rifle, followed the little bird until it lined up with the horizon—and fired.
The swallow fell in an exclamation of feathers.
Daniels looked at the crow again. Its eyes were fixed on the swallow’s twisted body.
“Daniels doesn’t miss,” he said again, and loaded another pellet into his rifle.