Since taking possession, he’s made repairs. Cox had been the kind of guy who builds a half-assed structure and stays until it rots. Cypher has filled cracks between the logs, fixed the roof, and added a sturdy food-storage compartment around back. When we get inside, we find as cozy a cabin as you could want. It’s only about ten by fifteen feet, but out here, extra room means extra heating. The interior has a fireplace, an underfloor icebox, a low bed, and a table with one chair.
Before we split from Cypher, he’d asked us to check his snares. Trapping is his preferred hunting method—he doesn’t use guns and has never mastered a bow. We leave Storm inside with some dried meat and head out in the dark, flashlights in hand. The snares haven’t been checked in two days, and we find two snowshoe hares, a marten, and a mink. Dalton skins the marten and mink for Cypher. The meat is only eaten late in a cold, hard winter, and we presume Cypher won’t want it, so we cook it up for Storm. What she doesn’t eat, I’ll dry in strips overnight in the fireplace and we’ll take it with us for her.
I cook one of the hares for our dinner. We don’t eat anything else with it. Cypher isn’t a gardener, and 90 percent of his food stores are meat, so we won’t raid his meager supply of dried greens, berries, nuts, and roots. We have a half dozen chocolate-peanut-butter protein bars in our packs and split one for dessert.
We’re in bed by eight. That’s what can happen when night falls by late afternoon, and you haven’t slept more than a few hours in days. We don’t sleep, though. No sex either. It’s been a long and unsettling day, and even after we crawl into bed, we don’t talk about it right away. We’ve let Storm stay in the cabin—there’s plenty of room.
I curl up with Dalton, my cheek resting on his bare chest, listening to his slow breathing. Feeling the tension, too, strumming through him, and waiting for him to speak.
“What happened today…” he says finally. “With Owen and Cherise…”
“Trying to sell me?” I say, my voice light. He’s on his back, and I roll on top of him, my arms crossed on his chest. “Owen came out first, and I had that situation under control, so I tried to defuse it rather than fight. I didn’t expect Cherise.”
I purse my lips. “Pretty sure no one expects Cherise. She is a piece of work. But I still wasn’t in danger of being carted off like a side of venison. I was trying to keep things cool until…”
I remember, and I shiver. I don’t mean to. I can’t help it. Under me, Dalton goes rigid.
“What happened?” he says.
“Cherise happened,” I say, again keeping my voice light. “I got a bit of a scare, but…”
I want to fluff it off. But after a moment, I say, “We’ll need to keep an eye on her. She’s smart as hell, and twice as vicious.”
He nods. Says nothing, his nod tight as he holds in whatever he’s thinking, whatever he wants to say.
“Eric?” I say.
“I’m concerned about Owen,” he says. “That’s not underestimating Cherise. She’s a fucking cobra. She’s smart, though, like you said, so I get the sense she can be managed. Very, very carefully managed. With any luck, she’ll decide she doesn’t want to lose Rockton as a prospective trade partner. But Owen…”
He exhales, breath hissing through his teeth. “The way he was looking at you…” Dalton makes a face. “I don’t mean I’m jealous. None of that territorial bullshit. Men notice you. They pay attention. You don’t pay attention back. If anyone tries anything, you take care of it—you don’t need me to protect you. But Owen … Fuck.”
“You know him.”
“Yeah.”
“What was he in Rockton for?”
Another exhale. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. If I’m hesitating, it’s just…” He waves his hands, gesturing, and I start to roll off, but he holds my hips. “It’s the usual bullshit, this part of me that wants to smooth it over, pretend it’s not that bad, so I don’t scare you off. I wouldn’t do that. You need to know. I just…”
Another helpless wave. “You were in the forest, playing with our dog, and a couple of psychos threatened to kidnap and sell you. That’s fucking nuts, and it’s just another day out here, and it shouldn’t be. Biggest thing you should need to worry about is the wildlife. But no, it’s the crazy people who want to kill you or, now apparently, sell you.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It starts as a snicker, and then I’m sputtering, choking on laughter.
“It’s not funny, Casey,” he says.
“Oh, but it has to be, doesn’t it? Otherwise, we’ll become the crazy people.” I settle in and look down at him. “We’re in the Yukon wilderness. There are people here for this lifestyle, like you and me and most settlers. But there are also people with a certain level of eccentricity and, yes, crazy, who come here because of that. They’re here to escape the norms and rules of life down south. That can be a positive thing—they want something less rigid and more natural. Or their disregard for the rules of law is the reason they’re happier here, where they can do whatever they want. That’s going to mean, overall, a high quotient of…”
“Batshit crazy, as Ty said?”
“In every possible way, the good and the bad. It’s a world of extremes. It’s like walking down a city street and winnowing out all the average people, the people who are happy enough going about their lives. The people who don’t yearn for more, yearn for change, yearn for different. That’s who we have here, long-term. The dissatisfied and the dreamers and the doers and, unfortunately, the dangerous—those who want to box up their superego and let their id run free. You get that down south, too. It’s not as if people like Petra and Sebastian and Cherise and Mathias are some new species I never knew existed. I’ve met variations on all of them before. There’s just a significantly higher concentration here.”
“Yeah.”
“As for Owen…” I prompt.
Dalton sighs and reaches for his canteen, taking a slug and then offering me some, which I accept.
“Owen came to Rockton five years ago. I was deputy, and it was a little more than a year before Gene retired. Owen and I are about the same age, and that caused problems. He saw me as competition.”