Blackwell Bounty

Chapter Twenty

Cal was frozen.

His mind, accustomed to bloody encounters, accepted the scene instantly, but there was still an underlying doubt whispering that this was impossible.  

Calvin had seen many dead bodies in his life. Some strangers. Some loved ones. He felt desensitized to death, which — he supposed — was a troublesome thought. Even when Amos' fresh corpse had fallen onto him with the grisly bullet hole gaping through his crimson soaked shirt, Cal had simply shoved the dead man away, eager to be rid of the devil that had hovered over his shoulder for years. 

Lifeless bodies were this: quiet, cold, and uncannily still. 

Skinny's lifeless body on the other hand was different because Cal's heart didn't want to believe what his mind knew; his foolish and troublesome nephew was gone. 

Where was the twitch of restless energy in Skinny's fingers? The lazy grin that belonged on his mouth? The perennial badgering directed at his uncle? The youthfully immature approach to any and all circumstances?

He looked at Skinny, and he thought nonanimated instead of dead.

Slowly, Cal's arms fell away from Edith. He took one step, and then another, and another, gaining speed with each one. The wounds he had received from Amos' sharp knife burned irritably, but the emotional pain tearing through him completely overshadowed his physical injuries. 

The crowd surrounding the body gravitated backwards as Cal approached. They gave him space. He might have been grateful if he'd had the time. 

He stooped down as Skinny's head lolled to the side. The splatter of freckles across his face were more noticeable against the cadaverous ashen skin beneath. His lips were even pale, wan and sallowish around the outer edges. Cal was surprised to see his nephew's eyes open and moving. 

Cal permitted himself a glance at the blood covering Skinny's thigh. Someone had attempted to tie a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but it was obvious that blood was still gasping from the wound with each pump of his heart.

Calvin returned his gaze to his nephew's eyes, imagining he could pin Skinny here to earth with determined obsidian. What if I don't let him go? He can't go if I don't allow it. I won't let death take him. 

Skinny's eyelids began to lower. 

Cal seized his nephew's hand and gripped it tightly — tight enough to turn his own knuckles white. As he felt the sticky red-brown gore smear his hand, he had to fight back the bile rising in his throat. Even with the scent of fresh rain lingering in the air, his nose was still beset by the nauseating odor of lifeblood. 

Past clenched teeth, he growled, "Skinny, don't you dare." Even to Cal, his voice sounded harsh and biting, like icy water, but this was the only tone that had ever gotten through to Skinny. If his nephew couldn't be saved by any other means, then Cal would drag him back from the brink of death, order him to stay. He would do whatever it took to keep Skinny here because when the boy saw his mother again, Cal did not want him to look as young as he did now. 

He'd promised April on her death bed that he would take care of her son after she was gone. Why had he made such a foolish promise when he'd known in his heart it was doubtful he could accomplish what she'd asked?

Cal was thrown back in time, back to the ramshackle farmhouse where April had continued living even after her unreliable husband disappeared. Skinny ran out to greet Cal before he'd even stepped down from his horse. The boy was all knees and elbows, freckles and shaggy blonde hair, eyes too big compared to his prominent cheekbones. He was both April and not April. Too gawky and energetic. He had none of his mother's calm, but all of her spirit. In the end, that's all that mattered.