A PAIN IN GABRIELLA’S TEMPLES FIRED AGONY IN HEARTBEAT bursts into her head. Her neck hurt with every movement.
Ty! Where’s Ty?
She understood on some level that she was staggering around in the rain too disoriented to form an intent and then act on it. But another part of her had gone on autopilot. Like the “danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson” robot, it kept repeating, find Ty, find Ty.
“Ty!” The cry savaged her from her collarbone to her sinuses. But she shouted out anyway, ignored the pain. “Ty. Where are you? Answer me. Ty!”
Wherever he was, she knew he must be terrified. Obviously, he’d seen Yesheb and run from him. If he’d been there, Yesheb would have hurt him, too, like he did—
Theo!
Gabriella began to cry. Each sob dragged steel wool across the inside of her throat. How could she tell Ty about his grandfather. And Pedro! What had happened to—?
She heard something approaching behind her, turned in terror to see … P.D.! He must have heard her calling Ty. The dog raced up to her, tail wagging. His wet coat was splotched with blood that his run through the rain hadn’t washed away. His muzzle was bright red, as were his teeth. Yesheb’s blood. Good!
She wanted to bellow some yell of triumph, wanted to stand over the homicidal lunatic’s dead body and … Instead, she collapsed to one knee and hugged the dog that had saved her life and killed the madman who had terrorized the whole family.
“Good dog, good dog, P.D. Good boy!” The dog licked her face, smeared some of Yesheb’s blood on it, but she didn’t care. “Oh, Puppy Dog, I can’t find Ty.”
The dog barked and wagged his tail furiously.
Duh! Of course. P.D.! She got painfully to her feet.
“Find Ty!” she commanded and the dog instantly took off at a run toward the back right corner of the valley. That was crazy. Why would Ty …? She started after the dog, then realized she was dragging her nylon jacket on the ground behind her. She picked it up and shoved her arms into the sleeves as she followed along behind P.D..
THEO SWAM BACK up to the surface of the water from some deep, dark, cold place. He had dangled beneath the bridge, fallen into the depths and now he was struggling to—
His eyes opened and he saw an expanse of bloody kitchen floor. And brand new black hiking boots. Yesheb stood a few feet away with his back to Theo.
Somehow the madman had survived P.D.’s attack!
Always said that mutt was useless as a rubber beak on a woodpecker.
As the black boots turned and started out of the kitchen, Theo realized Yesheb thought he was dead. All he had to do was lie still and ...
Instead, he reached out and grabbed Yesheb’s ankle. The slick blood did the rest and Yesheb fell forward, slammed hard into the oak floor, groaned in pain. P.D. must have messed him up pretty bad; Theo forgave him.
Yesheb managed to roll as he hit so the fall didn’t cause any real damage, but when he lifted his head and looked at Theo, the old man wanted to cheer. Yep, P.D. messed him up real bad! Good dog.
“Here’s one more nut for your trail mix,” Theo said, his words garbled by blood and broken teeth. “A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”
The bloodied figure got to his feet and wordlessly placed the barrel of his pistol to Theo’s forehead—he could feel it; the metal seemed particularly cold.
Cornelius, you about to get evicted!
“What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back to you?”
“A STICK,” YESHEB replies, and pulls the trigger.
He pauses for a moment above the old man’s lifeless body, sorry he’d administered such a painless death. He would have liked … but there is no time.
He turns and staggers out of the kitchen through the mudroom and pauses at the back door of the cabin before stepping out into what is now a light drizzle. He has a decision to make. He can activate the signal from the paging device in his pocket and summon the helicopter to come for him. The brunt of the storm has passed over the peak and is now assaulting the other side of the mountain. The chopper can land, rescue him and get him medical attention before he bleeds to death. But he hardly even toys with the idea. His own survival matters nothing to him. What is of paramount importance is that they die tonight! All of them. At his hand. He will not suffer them to see another sunrise.
He struggles out into the meadow, trying to keep the woman and dog in sight ahead of him. They are not moving fast, don’t appear to realize they are being pursued. Soon he will have her in his sights. He will merely wound her, bring her down. Gabriella. Not Zara. She isn’t his beloved bride, just an imposter, a fake. He will make her pay for deluding him, tricking him. He will make them all pay for what they have done to Yesheb Al Tobbanoft.
He is profoundly grateful that he did not choke her to death. Now he can kill her slowly, make her suffer delicious torment. He will inflict on her an agony like no other human being has ever felt. He knows how. He has studied the art of torture, practiced it, honed and refined it the way other men fine-tune their golf swing. Many from the worthless dregs of humanity have died agonizing deaths as he perfected his skill. The torture and death of Gabriella Carmichael will be a work of art, his virtuoso performance.
First, he will dispatch the dog with a bullet in the skull. Then in a magnificent two-act play, he will ravage her mind, force her to watch the long, agonizing torture of her son. By the time the child gasps out his final breath, she’ll be begging for her own death. And he will have only just begun!
His rage is the white hot fuel that propels him forward. It is wrath alone that keeps him going. He no longer notices pain. The bandages he crafted from hand towels won’t hold long. Soon, he will begin to pour out his life blood again and he has none to spare. His recently healed foot had been reinjured in his fight with the dog—perhaps even re-broken. The best pace he can set is a shambling limp. And then there is the air. He gasps and has to stop often to catch his breath. The others are accustomed to the altitude. He is not.
But none of that matters. Pain and injury are totally irrelevant. He will do what he has to do no matter how much it hurts, no matter what the cost. Nothing, absolutely nothing short of death can stop him now.
WHEN P.D. BEGAN to scramble up the slope on the barely visible trail leading to the chalet, Gabriella finally had to admit to herself that’s where he was going. How could Ty possibly have known about the place?
How often had he gone there? Did he sneak away every day to play in the bristlecone pine forest like she and Garrett did that summer thirty years ago? The flood of memories, happy and painful, temporarily blinded her as she climbed and she lost her footing, went down on one knee.
Something whizzed past her arm and slapped into the dirt beside her.
What in the worl—?”
She turned and saw death itself on the slope behind them.
Like a black, hairy-legged spider, Yesheb was crawling up the trail below, lurching forward, limping and holding his left arm against his body with his right.
But he was alive!
She’d have screamed if she’d had the voice and the air. Instead she stood stunned, stupefied, rooted to the ground in terror. He lifted his hand and pointed at her and she realized what he was doing just in time to dive aside as a bullet went pinging off a rock at her feet. She heard no gunshot; the wind carried the sound away back down the mountain.
P.D. emitted a vicious growl and with hackles raised, started toward Yesheb.
“No,” she said and P.D. stopped in his tracks. Yesheb would shoot the dog if it got anywhere near him. “Find Ty.”
P.D. turned and continued up the rock trail toward the forest of bristlecone pine trees. Jesus trees. She followed close behind, zigzagged and hopped abruptly from rock to rock to present a moving target. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she cringed away from the agony she would feel any second from a bullet ripping into her back. He fired twice more; the bullets dug up dirt beside and behind her. At first, she thought he was a lousy shot. Then she realized he wasn’t aiming at her back at all but at her legs. He wanted to wound her, not kill her outright. She knew why, knew what he would do to her if he caught her.
But she wasn’t helpless anymore. She had the advantage this time. Once she made it to the trees, she could lose him. She knew this forest; he didn’t. It’d been here 4,000 years so it hadn’t likely changed a whole lot in the past 30. And though she stood up taller now than the trees, the labyrinth of passageways between them would provide excellent cover. She’d go to the chalet for Ty and then the two of them and P.D. would vanish into the trees. She could find her way through the forest by moonlight. Yesheb would quickly become hopelessly lost. She doubted he’d thought to bring a flashlight.
She stumbled in the gravel and slid backward a few steps, then staggered forward the final few feet up the trail to the crest. The slope had shielded her from the worst of the whistling wind, but it hit her full force now, a cold, wet fist that almost knocked her off balance. It pummeled and battered her, whipped her jacket around her, lashed her face with her hair and took her breath away.
P.D. had already disappeared into the trees and she had to hurry. Once Yesheb made the crest, he could follow along behind her down the trail. It was indistinct from lack of use, but if you looked closely, you could see it. She had to get to Ty and get him out of the chalet and into the forest where there was no trail to lead Yesheb to them.
As she plunged into the trees, she looked back over her shoulder. The black spider was still there—his shadow actually looked like a spider, humped over, using his hands as well as his feet to climb. He was farther back; they’d gained on him. And now that she could run standing up, she’d put even more distance between them. She knew where they were going and he didn’t. That was another edge.
She’d outwit him. Outlast him.
Lightning flashed. Though the storm was on the other side of the mountain, the lightning near the crest lit the mountainside like a neon sign. She didn’t have time to be frightened of it, though. She had only so much currency in her terror account and right now she was spending every dime of it on Yesheb.
Once she was among the trees, they protected her from the brunt of the wind. But she found it more difficult to follow the trail than she’d thought. It was hard to see in the odd half-light. P.D. was in front of her, waiting patiently at the first bend in the trail. Then he turned and headed deeper into the woods, but this time he stayed close, only a few feet ahead. As they wound deeper into the forest, she heard a sound she hadn’t heard in decades, the mournful wailing of the wind around the crags of the peak two thousand feet above their heads. For the first time, Gabriella realized how cold she was, chilled to the bone, she had her jaws clamped together to keep her teeth from chattering and could not feel her fingers at all.
Did Ty bring a coat?
The absurdity of that thought forced a semi-hysterical giggle from her raw throat. The boy was on a mountainside in an electrical storm running for his life from a madman who wanted to cut out his heart and she was worried that he’d catch a cold!
She noticed that her breath frosted, made little white puffs in the air in front of her as she ran. Then they rounded a corner past a rock outcrop and there it was—the chalet. It was much more like she remembered it than the cabin had been. The chalet’s changes had come from disuse, not renovation. As she drew closer, she saw the hole in the roof, the missing porch pillar and the crooked front door. The sight made her unexpectedly sad.
P.D. raced up to the spot where the trail connected with the rock porch of the chalet—and kept on running! What was that dog doing? She stopped in front of the chalet, gasping and called out, “P.D., come.” Softly—she knew the wind would bear the sound instantly away down the mountain toward Yesheb. For a moment, she feared P.D. didn’t even hear. But then he appeared from behind a Jesus tree. He stopped, looked at her, then turned and ran back the way he’d come.
Gabriella yanked open the chalet door and called out, “Ty!” though it was clear he wasn’t there. The single room with no furniture offered no place to hide. But if he wasn’t in the chalet, then where …?
Gabriella’s heart took up a staccato rhythm and she couldn’t seem to draw a breath, like the wind had been knocked out of her. Neither had anything to do with exertion or thin air.
She turned from the door and raced after P.D., but she no longer needed him to lead her. She knew where they were going.
RATHER THAN FOLLOWING the winding trail through the aspen grove, Pedro cut through the trees in a straight line toward the cabin. He had done the same thing coming up the trail. Wherever he could, he climbed the space between the lower and upper trails, rather than going all the way down and back the long traverses. He’d fallen twice scrambling up the wet rocks. Lost his rifle the last time and had to climb back down to retrieve it.
As he clambered up the last switchback before the trail to the cabin, he heard gunfire. He’d heard what he thought was a lone gunshot earlier but the wind carried sound a long way in the mountains and it could have been distant thunder. This time he was sure and the adrenaline boost gave him the renewed energy he needed to run the rest of the way.
He could see the cabin through the trees in the fading light. A black jeep sat next to Gabriella’s in the gravel beside it, lights shone out every window and the back door was standing open.
Pedro instantly became again the Marine he had been years ago. He slowed, approached the cabin at a crouch, rifle ready. Keeping the jeeps between him and the cabin, he dodged from one to the other, then to the back corner of the house. He stood listening. Not a sound.
Slowly, he peeked around the doorframe and could see through the mudroom into the kitchen. Even with only a small swath of the kitchen visible, what he saw there momentarily took his breath away. Blood was all over the floor, dripped, in puddles and smeared. An overturned chair lay next to a lampshade, broken cups and bowls were scattered on the floor. And it looked like … there was a piece of bloody … was that a human ear lying in a puddle of blood?
Pedro had been in combat in Somalia and had seen enough battle scenes to know this was a place where a life-and-death struggle had been staged. But who had fought? Who had won? And where were they?
He eased slowly through the door, crossed the mudroom silently. Theo lay in a puddle of blood on the floor by the sink with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. It had been a gunshot he’d heard. Pedro groaned without making a sound, but stayed focused. He stepped quickly into the room and swept the perimeters of it and the family room with his rifle. No one.
He crossed to the stairs and eased up them, urban warfare in Mogadishu, street by street, house by house.
As soon as he was certain the cabin was empty, he raced back downstairs and tried to puzzle out what had happened here. Theo had been shot at close range. Executed. Pedro felt rage meld with the fear that had been building in his chest as he raced up the jeep trail to the cabin. Paw prints in the blood. And human footprints—large and small. Gabriella and the stalker. Where was Ty and where—?
Another gunshot! The sound came from the mountain. Pedro remembered Gabriella’s description of the chalet in the bristlecone pine forest and he took off at a dead run across the meadow.
GABRIELLA STOOD STOCK still at the edge of the clearing, staring in awe and wonder. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed on the other side of the peak. P.D. had run ahead, leapt up the steps and stood on the top stone, flashing his golden retriever smile. But Gabriella couldn’t move, merely gawked at the apparition from her dream come to life before her.
The igloo-shaped rock formation. The stair-step stones leading at an angle around and up the side of it like a spiral staircase. All of it resting squarely beneath the ominous overhang—the diving-board rock with boulders piled on the other end of it.
The sight detonated a bomb in her head and the concussion blew open all the locked doors that held her memories captive, imprisoned for so long they’d sneaked out as dreams and fantasies. Now they were a stampeding herd, thundering past her so fast she hardly had time to examine them.
She and Garrett had found this place, came here often.
This is where they’d sat on the day before their birthday almost thirty years ago, where they’d dangled their feet as they tossed in pebbles.
And … this is where the piece of granite hit the dirt and rolled out through an opening at the bottom, the rock that didn’t look like a geode, the one that contained an inner treasure of impossible quartz.
All of those thoughts fired through her mind with the speed of a comet, lit up her brain inside with light.
Just like the light shining up from the pile of boulders.
No, not just like it. The light in her head was the fierce white of the halogen bulbs in a stadium that illuminated a football field so bright you could perform surgery on the fifty-yard line. The light coming from the boulders was golden. Not shining, really. A golden glow.
This couldn’t be real. She had to be imagining it. It must be like the ghost images you see after the ophthalmologist dilates your eyes.
P.D. barked, a single yap, and suddenly Gabriella was running, couldn’t cross the clearing fast enough, couldn’t scramble up the stone steps quickly enough. She peered down through the opening at the top of the boulders at a single, perfect Jesus tree below.
Ty was sitting on the ground next to it, a golden glow sparkling in his round glasses.
But for the space of a single heartbeat, the boy wasn’t Ty. He was Garrett.
“I’ve got a secret. I’ve got a secret,” Gabriella chants in a sing-song voice.
“I don’t care,” Garrett says. He’s grumpy today; his stomach hurts. He didn’t want to leave the chalet, didn’t want to come with her to The Cleft after Grant and their parents left to search for aquamarine near the mountain peak.
Oh, how she wants to show him the rock! She has his half of it in her pocket and it is like an itch she can hardly stand not to scratch. She has to wait until their birthday party later today, though. She has to.
But the rock is a hard secret to keep. Because of it, she can’t tell him the real reason she is so determined they go to The Cleft today—so she can search for more rocks like it!
Instead, she tells him she needs his help with the pole. After Grant told them about St. Elmo’s fire—they call it firesies—they found a broken fishing pole and decided to stick it in the ground above The Cleft to get firesies to land there—like the sugar water Mom sets out in those little glass things on the porch attracts hummingbirds.
Once they’ve made their way through the forest to the special pile of boulders, Garrett helps her find a spot and then jam the fire stick down into a crack between two big rocks. But then he sits on the edge dangling his feet, won’t help her look for thunder eggs. She has to do it all by herself. All the rocks she finds are granite. But the special rock was like that, too, didn’t look like a geode at all. She’d been certain it was just another hunk of granite when she tossed it in yesterday, but now she remembers that when she picked it up after it had rolled out the opening in the bottom of The Cleft, it felt warm, like it’d been lying out in the blazing sun. Only it hadn’t. She’d found it in the shade up next to the boulders along with all the pebbles she’d chucked into the opening—and they’d all felt cold.
And the rock with the amazing crystals had felt … heavier, too, but that’s crazy. Well, she’ll just have to gather up a whole sack full of them and take them back to the cabin and hit them with a hammer and see—
There is a sudden crack and boom of thunder so close to them both children jump and cry out.
Gabriella had been focused on finding rocks; Garrett on his stomachache. Neither of them noticed the storm. They do now. It’s not noon, probably not even eleven o’clock yet, but dark, bubbling clouds are gathered around the peak of Mount Antero and are spreading out toward them, reaching out monster fingers in the sky.
Cold wind that smells of rain lifts Gabriella’s long curls and tosses them into her face; Garrett’s Pirates baseball cap flies off and disappears on the other side of The Cleft.
“Come on!” Garrett says, leaps up and runs down the stair-step rocks with Gabriella right behind him. Before the two of them hit the bottom rock, lightning rips out of the sky and snakes down in a blurred white flash and incinerates a pine tree in the forest—between them and the chalet.
The boom of thunder that follows in its wake is deafening. Like an invisible breaker hitting a beach, a wave of air knocks the children backward a step.
Both of them squeal in terror and then start to cry. Since the day they arrived at the cabin, they have never been outside during a storm. Certainly not way up on the mountainside in the boulder field! They have seen one, though. From the window of the cabin, they watched in awe as lightning danced around the mountaintop, so many bolts of it at once it looked like the mountain had grown white fuzzy hair that was attached to the clouds the way their hair stuck to a balloon that time Grant rubbed one back and forth on the carpet and then held it above their heads.
They can’t go through the trees back to the chalet! It’s too far. But they can’t stand here out in the open, either.
That’s when Gabriella remembers the opening in the base of The Cleft that the rock rolled out of yesterday.
“This way!” she says, turns and dashes around the bottom of the boulders to the far side, gets down on her hands and knees and starts to crawl into the opening.
“What are you doing?”
“This goes all the way through. Come on!”
Gabriella drops down on her belly and squeezes through the tunnel formed by the rocks. It is a tight fit. If she’d been much bigger, she couldn’t have made it, but within seconds she is through, in the empty space formed by the overhanging boulders. Empty except for the lone bristlecone pine tree in the center, where the sun would be shining if there’d been a sun to shine.
She turns and urges Garrett on. He is taller than she is, but only a little bit larger. Even so, he has to grunt and strain to make it through. When he crawls out into the opening with her, he has a large scratch on his cheek.
But he doesn’t mention it. Neither does she. They’d been so terrified; it had been so noisy, windy and dangerous out there. But in here, it is quiet. No, more than quiet. Hushed.
Gray storm light streams in a pallid beam through the opening above them, and it has begun to rain. Hard. The drops fall through the opening and pummel the tree. But the rocks overhang—they hadn’t realized how much, looking at it from above. From down here, it looks like the picture Grant showed them in a National Geographic of a house made out of ice where Eskimos live. It was called an igloo. Smoke went out the hole in the igloo; rain falls in the hole of their boulder igloo. But only what is directly beneath the hole gets wet and that’s the pine tree.
Maybe it is just her eyes adjusting to the darkness here. Because it doesn’t seem nearly as dark as it had looked from above. In fact …
She turns to Garrett and he’s grinning, the first time he’s smiled all day. She can see the gap between his teeth where he has already pulled out the two top ones in the front. Hers are loose, but she’s afraid to pull them.
And it seems like … no, it is. Garrett’s face is glowing.
He says nothing, just points behind her at the tree. She turns to look and realizes Garrett’s face isn’t really glowing. It’s reflecting the glow from the tree. The glow shifts through amber, caramel and yellow and turns her brother’s pale face the color of a brown-toast suntan.
Is this real?
They can hear the rumble of thunder out there in the world. It sounds a little like being in a bowling alley. But the sound doesn’t really come in here. Nothing from the outside does. The air is different, the light is different, the sound is different.
Gabriella lets out a shaky breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. It’s okay now. They’re safe. The lightning won’t get to them here. In fact, she’s pretty sure that nothing bad can get to them here.
She turns and looks at Garrett. She knows he’s thinking the same things she is. He reaches out and squeezes her hand.
“Drumma du, Gabriella,” he says. Or maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe she hears them without him having to say them.
“Drumma du, too, Garrett.”
“Mom!” Ty leapt to his feet. “How did you fi—?” He saw P.D. and didn’t finish the question. “You can’t stay here, you have to run. That man is looking for me and—”
“How did you get down there?” She knew he hadn’t crawled through the opening she and Garrett had used. They’d barely fit and they’d been younger and much smaller than Ty.
“I jumped. Sort of. See over there, on the back side, where that rock juts out over The Cleft like a little shelf?”
The Cleft? How did Ty know …?
Gabriella looked where he pointed. A piece of the back boulder extended out past the other boulders on the top portion of the igloo. It was about the thickness of a shelf in a closet.
“I scooted down off that on my belly, let my legs dangle below, scooted farther and farther until I was just holding on with my hands. Then I let go.”
That was still a long drop. He could have broken … She realized she was about to scold him for doing something dangerous!
Without another word, Gabriella got down on her hands and knees on the shelf with her back to the hollow space between the boulders—nose to nose with P.D. What about Puppy Dog? There was no way to get him down into The Cleft with them and Yesheb would shoot him on sight.
Then Ty called out, “P.D.—Hide!”
The dog turned instantly, raced down the rock steps and disappeared into the trees. She turned and looked a question over her shoulder. “It’s a new game I taught him,” he said. “He won’t come out until I find him or call him. We play it here all the time.”
Play it here all the time?
Gabriella flattened out on her belly on the shelf overhang with her legs dangling into the hole and slowly eased herself backward until she’d slid all the way off the shelf and was hanging from it into the hole. She didn’t have much strength in her hands and arms.
“Out of the way,” she cried, let go and fell down through the years into the shelter of The Cleft, the only place she had ever felt perfectly safe.
She understood now what she’d really known all along. The Cleft was the reason she had come to Colorado.
Gabriella landed without much dignity on her backside in the dirt and Ty leapt into her arms, held on so tight it shot bolts of pain through her injured neck. But she didn’t care, squeezed him just as tight, realized she was rocking him back and forth in her arms, crooning the universal mother song,
“Shhhh. It’s okay. Mama’s here. Mama’s gotcha. Shhhh.”
He wasn’t crying, but he was trembling violently. It seemed to take a long time for him to stop shaking, but she knew it was actually only a minute or two.
“He’s coming, isn’t he?” he finally whispered into her shoulder.
“He won’t find us here.”
“He’s not looking for us. He’s looking for me.”
Children always thought everything was about them.
“I ran away because I didn’t want him to hurt you and Grandpa Slappy.”
Theo! How could she possibly tell Ty that his grandfather was dead? And … no, she couldn’t think about Pedro now. If she did … With a great effort of will, Gabriella banished the images from her mind.
She eased the boy gently back out of her arms and looked into his face.
“You don’t understand, Ty, Honey. He’s stalking me because he’s crazy. He thinks he’s—”
“No, Mom. You don’t understand. He’s come to punish me for …” Then he did start to cry. Softly though, not great gulping sobs. More the worn-out tears of a child who has been crying for hours.
“Do you know Grandpa Slappy saw his best friend drown?”
Where did that come from?
“No. When?”
“But they didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. And one of them, the fat kid. He’s felt guilty about it for sixty years.”
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t want to do that.” He looked up into her eyes. “I don’t want to carry it around for sixty years. I think … it’d kill me if I did.”
“Carry what around?”
He grew quiet then, turned and looked at the tree. There was no denying it now. It was no trick of the light, no optical illusion. The tree really was glowing. Like a firefly, light from within. And tiny golden sparkles floated in the air all around it. There had to be a reasonable explanation, of course. Maybe it was … pollen, and up here so high the altitude made it … glow. Or … well, something.
Okay, she couldn’t explain it. Or the fact that it was warm in here, had to be twenty degrees warmer than the windswept mountainside on the other side of the rocks.
And she certainly couldn’t understand why the instant she dropped into The Cleft, all fear had left her. Yesheb was still out there, as dangerous as a wounded lion. He was still intent on murdering them both. The storm was dropping lightning bolts on the other side of the mountain like Santa tossing candy to the children along a parade route. She should have been terrified, but she wasn’t. No reason, she just wasn’t.
Ty didn’t seem to be frightened, either. But terribly burdened. She didn’t push him, just waited. He’d tell her in his own time. Finally, he let out a long sigh and scooted away from her, looked at the tree, warmed himself on it the way you warm yourself on a campfire.
Still not looking at her, he said. “The bad man is after me because I have to be punished for what I did.” He turned slowly, resolutely from the tree to look at her. His voice was steady, but so terribly, terribly sad. “I did it, Mom. Not Daddy. I burned your face with acid.”