In the meantime, things were supposed to run as normally as possible.
There were shoppers strolling around, but it was quiet for a summer Saturday. Most of that was the town itself—everyone was watchful. Even those who weren’t directly affiliated with the club knew that there was something up, and people were lying low. That atmosphere seemed contagious, and people who came from away to shop didn’t stay long. The vibe was off.
Geoff turned to her and sighed yet again. He’d been huffing and puffing for days about the state of the town, and of her face. “Okay. Well, I hope it passes and we get back to normal soon. You want to help me rearrange the curiosities again?”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
For her part, Iris had been a bundle of nerves since the riders had left. Now it had been two days since they’d checked in with anyone, and she didn’t know whether she’d forced her father, and more of her family, to join Nolan in death.
She brushed her finger down the length of her nose, something she’d been doing over and over since the day before, when she’d been able to take the splint off. Her face was still bruised—even uglier now in its healing—and makeup didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Iris didn’t know what had happened to those guys, but everybody kept telling her they were ‘handled’ and no longer a threat. Did she hope they were dead? She didn’t have an opinion on that either way. She just never wanted to see them again. As long as that were true, they could breathe, or not. Whatever.
Gia had been put to work at the town library and at the B&B, filling her days with chores and supervision. Iris had only seen her once since that night. They’d been at the market: Gia and Bo with Lilli, and Iris with Joey, following a shopping list Shannon had sent with them.
Gia had been blushingly silent, staring at her boots. Lilli had had a lot to say—so much so that Iris was going to the Lunden’s after work. To start self-defense training.
She hadn’t been given much of a choice. When Lilli wanted something, she got it.
~oOo~
“Did you bring your splint?”
Answering Lilli’s question, Iris nodded and pulled a fresh self-adhesive splint from the pocket of her denim shorts. They were in the Lunden’s barn—Iris, Lilli, and Gia. The horses were out loose in the pasture, and Lilli had all the doors open.
The afternoon was hot and humid, but the big ceiling fans moved the air above them, and the barn felt almost cool. A couple of barn cats prowled around, curious about the new activity, and their old dog Kodi stretched out in the front doorway, panting. While Iris put the splint on her nose, feeling its placement without need of a mirror, she considered the Lundens’ hound.
Several Horde families had old dogs, all of them littermates, from a litter Badger and Adrienne had found abandoned on the road ten years earlier. They were big beasts, with a pedigree they’d only been able to guess at. Most of them looked like some kind of cross between a Rottweiler and a pit bull, but two of them looked a lot different and still managed to look related. The biggest, the Lundens’ Kodi, was something like a hundred and fifty pounds and looked more like a hulking German Shepherd than anything else. Adrienne and Badger’s Hector, pushing a hundred pounds, looked like a huge Australian Shepherd. The littlest, Uncle Len and Tasha’s Penny, was nearly eighty pounds. Cory and Loki had Thor, also about a hundred pounds.
Iris’s family had had Max, but he’d died a couple of years earlier. He’d never really been her dog, since she hadn’t lived in Signal Bend, but Joey and Millie still got sad about missing him sometimes. Max had come into their lives when they were just tiny babies. They’d grown up with him those first years. Iris felt their grief—and she felt a little envious, too. Even before Ray and what he’d done to little Falkor, Iris had never had a pet.
Watching Kodi stretch his arthritic legs out onto the shaded dirt, maximizing his contact with its cool, Iris realized that all the families would know Joey and Millie’s grief soon enough. The littermates had gotten elderly.
“We ready?”
Iris turned and smiled at Lilli. “Yep.”
Gia was leaning against an empty stall, withdrawn and unhappy. Iris and she had yet to talk about their shared misadventure, and Iris intended to rectify that before she left this evening.
Lilli had brought out a punching dummy or whatever it was called, and she was filling its base with water. While she worked at that task, she explained her plan for their first training.
“We’re not going to do any contact stuff tonight, except on Bob here. We’ll wait until your nose is fully healed, and then we’ll bring in one of the Horde, and you can punch on him.” She smirked as she stood up, dropping the running hose into a steel bucket. “I’ll let you choose which one. Turn off the water for me, G.”
Gia did as she was told. She seemed smaller than before the Moe’s incident.
Iris poked at the dummy. It was rubbery but solid. “You named him Bob?”
“He came that way. B.O.B. It stands for Body Opponent Bag. He’s better than the heavy bag for this, because you can place your hits according to their location on a man’s body. On a regular bag, you have to estimate. I want you to build some good memory in your head and your muscles.” She closed the spout in the base. “We’re gonna start with the basics, though.”
“I know all that stuff,” Gia muttered.
Lilli spun on her boot heel and stood akimbo, facing her daughter down. “You, cara mia, don’t have shit to say about this. Iris’s nose was broken and her ribs bruised because you thought you knew better than everybody else, and you were wrong. Did you use any of your great knowledge deciding to sneak out to a bar dressed like a club girl? No. Did you use any of it when you were getting attention you didn’t want? No. Did you almost get raped by some son of a bitch who’d put GHB in your beer? Yes. So stand up straight and get over here. We’re starting from scratch.”
“It was your sweater,” she protested as she slumped closer. “How come when I wear it, I’m a club slut, but you’re not when you wear it?”
Iris felt extremely uncomfortable standing in the middle of this mother-daughter smackdown, but she’d draw more attention to herself if she said anything or tried to sidle out, so she just stood there, waiting.
Lilli’s expression had become calculating. “I wear it for my man. Because it turns him on. Who were you wearing it for?”
Gia blushed, but she faced her mother straight on. “I made a mistake. Like you’ve never made any mistakes.”
“I’ve made plenty. But no, G, that was not a mistake. A mistake is doing something you didn’t intend to do—it’s buying whole milk when you wanted skim. Everything about that night was your intention—you didn’t accidentally steal my sweater and smear makeup all over your face, you didn’t accidentally sneak out of the house, you didn’t accidentally go out with Hilary and those girls.”
“I didn’t want to go to Moe’s, though. That was Hilary’s idea. And I didn’t deserve to get roofied because of what I was wearing. God, Mom.”
“Of course you didn’t, and that’s why those guys were…handled. But you have to protect yourself, and you have to think about risks. You dove into a shark tank.” Lilli sighed and shook her head. “We’ve been through this, G. I’m done fighting about it. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a bad choice, and bad choices snowball. I’ve made plenty of those, too. Those are the consequences that carry important lessons. So straighten your spine now and learn something.”
Gia came and stood near Iris. Iris smiled at her, but Gia wouldn’t make eye contact. Sheesh. Was she angry at her? If she was, maybe there would be some contact during this training after all, because Iris would not stand for that nonsense.
“First thing.” Lilli grabbed Iris’s wrist. “This is easy. You’ve probably had a guy grab you like this—just catch your wrist to keep you from turning away. Try to break my hold.”
Iris did, pulling as hard as she could, but Lilli’s grip only got tighter.
; “Now watch what Gia does.” Lilli went to her daughter and grabbed her wrist. Gia broke it immediately, with such force that she nearly punched herself in the chest. “Good. Let’s do it again, slow, so Iris can see.” When she had Gia’s wrist, she narrated her daughter’s movements. “She turns her arm first, lining up the strongest part of her wrist with the weakest part of my hold. Think thumb to thumb—line the base of your thumb up with the tip of your attacker’s. Then yank hard, bending at the elbow. You get strong torque that way.” They demonstrated again, and Lilli came back to Iris. “Okay, you try it.”
This time, she got herself free at once.
“Good! It’s almost foolproof, unless the guy is an absolute beast. And in situations like at Moe’s, these guys are just assholes. They’re not trained assassins. They just grab, thinking that you’re little and helpless and they can do what they want. People think that weapons are the answer to self-defense—guns or knives or mace…or batons, but usually, for normal people without extensive training, they just make things worse. Too much chance for error. If you turn your body into a weapon, though—nobody knows your body like you do. It’s always armed, always ready.” Lilli grabbed Iris’s wrist again. “Okay, do it again.”
Again, Iris was able to break the hold, even though it didn’t feel like Lilli was going easy on her.
“Excellent! Okay, let’s play with BOB and deal him some palm strikes—nose and solar plexus.”
~oOo~
They worked for an hour, and by the time Lilli called the session off, all three of them were soaked in sweat. But Iris felt good. She felt powerful. Her hands ached from pounding the heels of her palms into BOB’s nose and chest, but she kept curling her fists closed, making them ache more—because in that calm pain, she felt strength.
She thought she understood why the past had been tormenting her so much all of a sudden, when for so many years she’d kept it safely tucked away, only getting loose during occasional nightmares. She had felt hopeless and helpless, lying on the floor of Moe’s. She’d tried to do the right thing, and she’d had her little baton and used it, but it hadn’t saved her, or Gia. They’d been, until the Horde had arrived, lost to the whims of bad men. And that had been much, much too close to the place that memory called home.
She’d felt hopeless and helpless before that night, too—a different kind, and one she’d been denying, but real nonetheless. Since Nolan had gone away, and she’d been left without any understanding of why or who or what or when. No word from him, no information from the Horde—she’d tried to carry on, to wait and understand and hope for the best, believe in the best, but it had been a veneer she’d brushed on over her loss.
He’d made her a promise. For a future. Iris had never before in her life seen a future for herself, but she’d seen one with him, and then he’d ridden away with that future in his hands and left her standing alone.
Moe’s shook all that loose and left her feeling broken and weak. But beating on BOB brought her strength back. When the Horde brought Nolan home—if the Horde brought Nolan home—then they would talk, and they would decide.
But she wouldn’t be left again. Not like this.
Lilli opened the spout on BOB’s base, and water rushed onto the barn’s dirt floor. “Gia, when BOB’s empty, put him away, then drop shavings over the mud before you bring the horses in. Iris, you want to come in for a drink? Got tea, lemonade, beer.”
“Thanks—I’ll be in in a minute. I’ll help Gia out here first.”
Looking unsatisfied with that idea, Lilli stood for a moment, clearly thinking. “Gia is doing some restitution with her chores, but okay. She can have help tonight. Kodi! Come on, old man. Let’s get into the air conditioning.”
Kodi creaked his way to his feet, then went to her side, tail wagging, and Gia and Iris watched Lilli and the dog walk toward the house.
“You don’t have to help.” Gia had waited until her mother was well out of earshot before she spoke. “I’m good on my own.”
Iris turned on her young friend. “What is going on? Are you angry at me? Because—”
“No! I’m not angry. I’m…I don’t know. Not angry.” She turned away, and Iris grabbed her arm.
Gia broke her grip, just as they’d been practicing, and they both grinned at that.
“What’s wrong, Gia?”
With a sigh nearly theatrically expressive, Gia sat down on the mounting block. “I’m really sorry about your face. I shouldn’t have called you. If you hate me, I get it.”
“I don’t hate you. You’re supposed to do stupid shit when you’re a teenager. You’re supposed to sneak and break rules. But that was a big barrel of stupid. You could have been really hurt. Why are you hanging out with Hilary?”
Hilary and her shitty friends had gotten through that night like Gia, unscathed except for the dosing, and the Horde had returned the girls to the Jasper house. Iris still thought she wouldn’t have minded too much if Hilary had experienced some harsher consequences for being even more of a stupid twat than her sister.
Gia’s answer to Iris’s question was a lackadaisical shrug.
“Gia, come on. What’s up?”
BOB’s base was no longer running water. Gia got up and closed the spout. She pulled the dummy back into a small room.
Apparently, they weren’t going to talk. Iris went to the stall where they kept the shavings and dumped a shovelful onto the mud, then returned the shovel to the shaving pile.
Gia stood just outside the stall when she was done. “I’m never going to have a boyfriend. Not as long as I live in this town.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guys at school will barely talk to me. They all stare, until I look back. Every guy I know is terrified of my dad and my mom. My mom might be the worst. I mean—the stuff we did today, the palm strikes and the hold breaks? That’s nothing. I know how to destroy a man’s knee and cripple him for life. That’s a big one with her. I know where to hit their head so I’ll probably kill them. I didn’t use the stuff she taught me because it scares me. It was too late before those guys scared me as much as the thought I might accidentally, like, kill one. I can shoot five different kinds of guns, and I’m an expert archer. Every guy I know thinks of me as the girl with the parents who’ll kill them if they touch me, and they don’t even know that I can kill them my own self. I’m a total freak.”
“So the other night was what?”
“I don’t know. Trying to be somebody who’s not a freak, I guess?”
“You’re not a freak, Gia. And you don’t want a guy who’s so weak he’s afraid of you or your parents. Trust me—that’s a blessing, being known as strong. Being strong.”
“I always thought I’d be with one of the Horde someday, but…there’s no one now.” She blushed and looked away, and Iris remembered that Gia had a crush on Nolan.
“Not all strong men are Horde.”
“All the strong men I know are.” She huffed and stalked off a few steps. “I just feel so weird. I want somebody to touch me. Sometimes I want it so bad it hurts—like, literally.”
“That’s hormones, Gia. You’re fifteen. That’ll settle down, I promise.”
“Please don’t give me the ‘urges’ speech. This isn’t that.”
Iris thought it probably was exactly that. She remembered fifteen. It had been like waking up in somebody else’s body and not knowing how to operate it.
“Okay. Have you talked to your mom?”
“God, no! God! You saw how she is—completely unreasonable. She’ll just tell my dad, and then they’ll lock me up or send me to a convent or something.
Iris laughed, trying to bite it back when Gia blushed with embarrassment and offense. “I’m sorry, Gia. But you know who my dad is. He’s, like, famous for beating on his daughters’ boyfriends. Your parents aren’t gonna lock you up. When you find the right guy, he’ll face them and stand up for himself. And he’ll think what you can do is sexy. Your mom found your dad, after all. Pretty su
re your dad is into her.”
Gia rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Don’t even. They are so gross.”
“I hear ya,” Iris laughed. “My dad and Shannon, too. So, you know. It can happen. But it’s not going to happen by you acting like somebody you’re not. I one-hundred-percent promise that that is the wrong way to find a guy.”
Not looking convinced, Gia offered a nod. “Okay. Well, I hope you’re right.”
“I am. The good ones love you for who you are, and they add their strength to yours.”
~oOo~
That night, exhausted from the training session and just life in general, trying to carry on when her heart and mind and spirit were all trapped in limbo, Iris took a shower not long after supper, and she went to bed early.
Nolan: Return to Signal Bend Page 30