Page 19 of Run Rabbit Run

The car climbs. The rain thickens on the glass, and the timber closes in on both sides of the road, older growth now, trunks like the pillars of something built before the country had a name for itself.

This is where the county road ends and my land begins, though there's no sign to say so.

I've never needed a sign.

Everyone who matters knows where the Vane land starts, and everyone who doesn't matter learns it fast if they wander in.

The gate takes us without a sound, and then it's just the long private road under the dripping dark, climbing toward the house.

My grandfather ran men on this land.

His father before him.

It wasn't called a game then, and the people who ran weren't given ten days to train or a fair set of rules or a door that opened onto freedom at dawn.

That's my improvement on the tradition. My forebears were blunt instruments, appetite without artistry, and they took what they wanted the way a bear takes a fish. I've refined it. I've made it into something with rules and hope and a running start, because prey that fights you and believes it can win is worth infinitely more than prey that simply submits.

The old keeper will have the north traps ready by the week's end. He learned them from his father, who set them for mine.

There's a continuity to it that I find satisfying, standing as I do at the end of a long line of men who understood that some things are not bought, married, or earned. Some things are caught.

Somewhere behind us, down the mountain and back in the gray little town, Wren Holloway is walking into a diner to lie to the one person who might save her, and she doesn't know yet that she's already started building her own cage, one small silence at a time, exactly the way I built it for her.

I close the account and put the dark of the screen against my thigh, watching my own wilderness come up out of the weather, gray and vast and waiting, every acre of it already thinking about her.

Ten days.

I've waited longer than that for lesser things.

I can be patient a while more, now that the patience has an end I can see, and the end has her name on it, and she’s going to run so beautifully before I take it all away.

CHAPTER SIX

Wren

Rue's already out of the booth before the door finishes closing behind me.

She meets me halfway across the diner, and she doesn't ask if I'm okay, because she can read the answer off me the way I read weather.

She takes my wet coat sleeve in her fist, steers me back to the corner, and pushes me down into the vinyl like I'm something that might fall over if she lets go.

"Talk," she says, sliding in across from me. "All of it. Marlene, top us off and then give us the room, would you?

Marlene, God bless her, reads the table and refills both cups and takes herself off behind the counter to aggressively wipe something that's already clean.

I wrap both hands around the mug.

The heat of it hurts the cold out of my fingers, and I let it, because the small clean pain gives me something to hold onto that isn't the rest of it.

Across the diner, Marlene's radio is playing something soft and old. Two booths down, a farmer I've known since I was small is working through a plate of eggs and the sports page, and the ordinariness of all of it presses on me like a hand.

This is the room I grew up in.

This is the town that fed my brother extra bacon and passed him on charm and never once guessed what any of us carried home at night.

In ten days I'll be gone from it, and none of these people will know, and that's the plan, that's the cruel design of what I agreed to in the rain.

Vanish clean. Leave the town its comfortable story.