“Please don’t throw away a chance to know your mother.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two weeks! She should just kick his butt and get on with her life. Shadow always believed she had a ton of patience but Talon’s stubborn refusal to even talk to her had pushed her to her limit.
He had stayed with her for three nights after she discovered where she came from and she was so grateful. It was one thing to wonder if you were all alone in the world; but to find proof that you’re all alone in the universe….
He was gone when she woke up on the fourth morning and didn’t return until after she went to bed. He always left cleaned, fresh game for the next day’s meals in a pot of cold water. That established the pattern of every day since then.
Well, today things were going to change. She stumbled on his hideout yesterday when she cut across the central square on her daily search for treasures. He chose a cluster of trees with low-hanging branches to conceal himself. When she sat in the hollow within the web of exposed roots she discovered his little secret. That knowledge was directly responsible for her current mood. She was pissed!
Talon wouldn’t join her in the house but he had a clear, direct visual path to the front of the house. He would see her every time she went outside to look for him. He knew she was worried about him and he just ignored her.
The way she had it worked out in her mind was simple. He was musically trained despite not being actively involved for twenty years. She envied him that ability. Her singing could crack eyeballs at a hundred yards. It takes a total lack of musical ability to be asked not to sing along with drunken soldiers. Shadow chuckled when she remembered their solution to her screeching. A simple piece of metal bent into a long ‘v’ shape and held between her lips made a so-so tune when the ends were plucked. It didn’t sound much better than her singing but it wouldn’t cause permanent hearing loss like her voice.
A boar roast baked at the back of the fire pit. It would take all day to fully cook and didn’t require much from her other than a little basting every couple of hours. Time to get to work.
Shadow settled on the top step of the porch so she could lean against the railing. She pulled the crude mouth harp from her pocket and fitted it in her mouth. After several minutes of plunking out random sounds, she removed it. Wiping the saliva from her chin, she leaned back and belted out the first song that popped into her head.
“Oohh, kava ain’t got no tail a-tol, tail a-tol, tail a-tol. Kava ain’t got no tail a-tol, jus’ got a powder puff.”
She only knew one verse of the silly child’s song but she sang it with all the gusto of high opera. After a dozen or so repeats of the verse, she switched back to the mouth harp. When her mouth got dry she’d stop for a drink and check on the boar. She didn’t know if Talon was within hearing range and didn’t want to strain her voice so she started taking a little extra time and brewed a cup of tea.
By nightfall, the rich aroma of roast boar floated into the yard on the breeze. Talon was there…watching…listening. She was hardily sick of the kava song but her knowledge of other lyrics was severely limited. There was the one about a young man from Nantucket that she learned on her first trip to Earth but it was pretty risqué and she didn’t think it would have the same effect on her stubborn bounty hunter. That left the other song she had learned on that trip. After thirty minutes of the mouth harp she launched into a new song.
“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”
She worked the song all the way down to zero before starting with the mouth harp again. After two hours, Shadow called it a night.
“Good night, Talon! You can come in now!” She yelled into the darkness. “I know you’re out there under the trees.”
* * * *
Thank all the gods in the universe! He didn’t know if he could listen to another minute of the horrific sounds coming from her mouth. How was it even possible for anyone to be so totally tone deaf? He fully expected to find blood dripping from his ears. With a shake of his head, he gathered the rifle and the bucket of mollusks and headed inside. Whether she actually knew where he was sitting or just making assumptions didn’t matter. Either way, he was caught. The nights were getting colder and his reasons for avoiding Shadow were not worth frostbite.
Frostbite? The trees are barely turning color. Why don’t you just admit you’re pouting and go home!
If he could find a way to shoot that annoying voice in his head he would. He wasn’t pouting. Young children pouted. Teenage girls pouted.
“And that house is not home!” He muttered to the trees around him. It was time to call this training finished and find Draagon. It shouldn’t be hard to pick up his trail—just follow the path of death and destruction he leaves in his wake. In a matter of days they would head back to the mainland and he’d see the last of her and her meddling. If that thought sent burning pain through his chest, so be it. He had learned to live with her; he could learn to live without her.
You keep repeating that thought and you might eventually believe it.
The light from the fire pit was enough for him to see the dinner Shadow left warming on the hearth. For all her claims to the contrary, she was right at home in the kitchen. She should have a husband to care for and a house full of little ones running her ragged. How long could she continue popping around the galaxy, jumping from one war to the next before her luck ran out?
She can’t have children—remember? And when did she ever say she wanted to settle down? She was stubborn, pig-headed, and opinionated but he’d be proud to have her at his back in any fight. Why did she have to meddle in his past? Everything was great until then.
He made sure the kitchen area was as spotless as Shadow liked it and covered the mollusks with fresh water. Since he already cleaned himself up at the well, there wasn’t anything keeping him from his bed. The sliver of light beneath Shadow’s door drew him like a magnet. He’d just stick his head in and tell her good night. He tapped softly on her door and waited for her to respond.
“Just wanted to say good night.” He stood at the open door, watching her slide the heavy volume back under the bed. She was more than a quarter of the way through the massive tome already.
“Did you find your dinner?”
“Yes. It was good, as usual.” They acted like polite strangers. He missed the hours they once spent discussing their day or reading. He especially missed sharing her bed. The sex was beyond good but he missed just holding her.
“Well, good night, Blue.” He backed away from the door so he could close it.
“Talon?”
Her soft voice stopped him but he remained silent. His rapidly beating heart pushed too much blood below his belt causing an immediate and uncomfortable reaction.
“I just wanted you to know that I put your mother’s albums back in the vault. In fact, I’ll need your help in getting some of the bigger items locked away before we leave.”
If she would once look him in the eye he’d know how to respond to her. “Whatever you need, babe. Do you have an estimated departure time for us?”
“You’re more than ready to go after Draagon. As soon as we can put everything away next door, you can signal the ship to pick us up. Maybe two days?”
“We won’t need them. We have the hover-boat and it’s faster than the ship. It should only take two or three days to reach the mainland.”
When she just nodded, he pulled the door closed behind him.
Shadow lay in the dark for hours, her mind struggling with how to break through Talon’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge his past. She didn’t know why it was so important for him to make this connection. Her gut churned every time she even thought about leaving here before that happened. That intuition…instinct…feeling…call it what you will, it saved her life more than once. Every atom in her body knew without a doubt it was necessary. She had two days.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shadow was up before the sun. While she heated up the leftovers from last night, she started singing the beer bottle song—at a considerably lower volume. Before she reached eighty bottles on the wall, Talon stomped into the room.
“Good morning!” She practically shouted at him. “It is a gorgeous day and not too cold. We should get quite a bit of this stuff moved.”
“You can’t tell what kind of day it’s going to be BECAUSE THE SUN ISN’T UP!” He bellowed, stumbling to the table where she placed a mug of tea.
“Someone didn’t get his nap out. Lighten up, grump butt.” She turned back to the fire pit so he wouldn’t see her grin and picked up where she stopped on the beer bottles.
“What is that noise?” He grumbled, sipping on the hot brew.
“Surely you’ve heard someone sing before?” Another chorus erupted into the room.
“Singing? Sounds more like the death throes of a giant jungle cat.”
“If you can do better, be my guest. If not, I’m entertaining myself.” She placed their plates on the table. “Eat up. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
“Thank the gods! You can’t abuse my ears with food in your mouth.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She mumbled, hiding a grin.
After their meal, they began the slow process of dismantling the cozy home she had created with the bits and pieces of salvaged refuse. She was surprised at how sad she was to be leaving. It didn’t make any sense, but she couldn’t think about it right now. If being around all of her treasures bothered Talon he hid it well. Not even his mother’s desk and lamp broke through his shell. She had to keep the pressure up. During their breaks, she plunked on the mouth harp. As soon as they got back to work, she started singing again.
Talon grunted and groaned during the ninety-nine bottles of beer verses but the kava song had him growling. He did have a valid point. She was completely and totally sick of the single sentence she repeated for over an hour at the time. Sometimes she even lowered her voice enough that he had to strain to hear it.
When the light started fading, she called a halt to the moving. They made dozens of trips between the two houses and had almost everything moved. When she picked up the usable items over the past two months, it didn’t seem like a lot. The secret room behind the burial urns was almost filled to capacity. All they had left were the dishes and kitchen essentials, the sealed food canisters, and the book. She would get one more night to read about the history of this place and the people who used to live here. Dawn the day after tomorrow would see them on the water again.
* * * *
Talon was saved from a second day of the constant barrage of discordant sounds coming from Shadow’s mouth when he declared he needed to stock the hover-boat with provisions for their voyage.
“That makes sense, but I can’t move the book by myself.” Shadow couldn’t think of a single reason to keep him close nor a reason to go with him.
“We’ll move it before it gets too dark to see. It shouldn’t take more than four or five hours to stock the hover-boat. Hardest part will be hauling the drinking water. Hover-boats are powered by the sea water so fuel isn’t an issue.”
As soon as he disappeared from view, Shadow started preparing the food for their return trip. She had to use the opened canisters of food so she baked a mountain of hard, flat, bread and wrapped each one in a clean cloth before stacking them in a wooden crate. With no way to keep food cold, she fried, baked, roasted, and boiled every scrap of meat on hand. It would have been better to smoke the meat but she couldn’t go near the smoke house without seeing the living blanket of carrion beetles. She hoped the colder temperatures of approaching winter would keep the spoilage to a minimum. A case of food poisoning was bad enough on land. Being sick on the open water was too scary to even think about.
It was mid-afternoon when everything was cooked, wrapped, and packed. When she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air she spotted the two-wheeled cart Talon used to haul the boar carcass from the Marina. He said he couldn’t use it for the water bags but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that it would take him a lot longer to haul two bags at a time instead of making one trip. More time on the job—less time with her.
With a huge grin, Shadow started pulling the crates, buckets, and bags of food out to the cart. He couldn’t complain about her being out there if she was loading supplies. They wouldn’t consume a fraction of this before reaching the mainland but a lot of it would travel with them while they tracked Draagon. Anything perishable that was still safe to eat they would donate to the homeless.
An hour later, she was struggling to keep the contraption moving. The bed was made from a sheet of metal from the roof of a collapsed building. It was nailed to the axel brace of the wheels from a small cart. She didn’t remember if he told her where he found them. Must not have been important enough for him to pass the information along or she didn’t think it was worth remembering. Two sturdy limbs about the thickness of her wrists made workable handles. Too bad they had to leave their horses on the mainland. This would be a perfect fit for such an animal.
Damn! This thing is heavy. She hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before the muscles in her arms and shoulders burned and sweat ran down her face.
“It would be a lot easier if I could push the damn thing instead of pulling it.” She muttered, sitting cross-legged beside the cart. “Shit…shoot, woman. There’s nothing to stop you from pushing it. This job has made you lazy. Quit bitchin’ and get on with it.”
Her whispered pep talk to herself worked. It took a little creative maneuvering but once the cart faced the opposite direction, she grabbed the handles. It was a struggle to get the cart in motion, but once it started moving, it rolled much better.
She was proud of her accomplishment and it only took her two hours to make the trip versus the thirty minutes it took the day Talon showed her the white clay. She didn’t have the energy to sing and struggle with the cart, too, so her approach was fairly quiet.
The cart suddenly started moving faster down the slight decline in the trail. Before she could figure out how to slow it down, the handles slipped through her sweaty hands and the cart raced toward the clay pit, the hover-boat and Talon.
“Look out!” She yelled, running as hard as she could.
Talon didn’t jump for cover like he should. He moved just enough for the cart to miss him and leapt on the handles, forcing them into the clay and turning the cart just enough to miss the hover-boat.
Shadow watched in horrified slow motion as the cart tipped and dumped a week’s worth of food all over Talon and the ground. The momentum snapped the handle Talon had pressed into the ground. With nothing anchoring him to the ground, the broken handle flipped him high enough that the remaining handle smacked him in the head. He dropped and the cart rolled against the boulders.
Shadow ran to Talon and gently rolled him to his back. Blood poured from the side of his head and he was unconscious.
“Talon! Come on, baby, open your eyes and yell at me.” She begged. “Please, please, please don’t die on me.” She ran to the boat and grabbed a water bag. Stripping out of her shirt, she doused it in the cold water and pressed it hard against the cut. She used the other end of the shirt to clean the blood and debris from his face, looking for other injuries.
“Fuck! Why are you in a panic?” She muttered, not caring if he demanded a kiss for cussing. As a mercenary she was familiar with battle wounds. She knew head wounds bled a lot. The sight of blood didn’t bother her. “So why the fuck are you freakin’ out?” Because I love him. Her heart admitted what she never could. She lost the right to have a man love her a long time ago.
“Shit. Shit. SHIT!” She yelled, ignoring the tears running down her face.
“That’s about a half-dozen kisses you owe me, Blue.” Talon whispered, struggling to sit up.
“Don’t move! You might have more injuries but I can’t check that out until I get this ble
eding under control.”
“I’m not hurt anywhere else. It’s controlled enough for you to see if I need stitches.” He pulled himself to a sitting position using her as an anchor.
“Anyone ever call you pig-headed?” She carefully lifted the bloody cloth and breathed a sigh of relief when only a small trickle still escaped. “You might need a couple of stitches. The cut is about an inch long in the middle of your eyebrow.”
“There’s a first aid kit in the hover-boat, under the driver’s seat.”
Shadow retrieved the kit and ran back to Talon. Inside the box she found needles, suture, antiseptic wipes, and bandages. Thirty minutes later, three small stitches closed the wound and a small adhesive strip protected it.
“That should hold until we get to the mainland and you can see a medic.” She gripped the first aid box with both hands to hide the tremors she couldn’t control. “I’m so sorry, Talon.” She whispered. “I didn’t….”
He covered her lips with his finger. “It was an accident, Blue.” He flashed a quick, small grin. “It’s been a while since I made you mad enough to want to hurt me.”
“You sit here while I get this mess cleaned up and loaded.” She turned her back to him and those green eyes. She could just drown in the warmth and caring she saw there. Would he still look at her the same way after tonight? With a mental shrug, she started the beer-on-the-wall song as she gathered and sorted the food for their voyage.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Talon swallowed hard, fighting the fear eating at his soul. He couldn’t let Shadow suspect his injuries were more serious than a small cut. Standing before the mirror he used for shaving, he repeated the same ‘test’ he’d been performing since they returned to the house. Results were the same. The uninjured eye still functioned like it did before he was hit by the runaway cart. The right eye, the one he needed to sight the rifle, only saw the heat images like before the new implants. How would the loss affect his aim? They were leaving for the mainland in little less than twelve hours. Not enough time to learn how to shoot left-handed.
The Men of Anderas III: Talon, the Assassin Page 16