manicured lawns and spotless driveways toward the end of the block. He did not know why he was being chased or how these street people were connected to the dam, to the town, to what had happened, but he accepted that they were. He was not one to dismiss things that weren't supposed to be able to happen--not after all he'd seen.
He reached his street, reached his house. Dashing up the walk, he finally allowed himself a quick look behind him. As he'd half expected, no one was following. They'd either given up, or he'd lost or outrun them. He exhaled deeply, an honest-to-God sigh of relief.
Then an extraordinarily tall man wearing a torn T-shirt and woolen earmuffs rounded the far corner onto the street, and Liam ducked quickly inside the house, heart pounding. Wolf Canyon.
He locked the door leaned against it, trembling. The phone rang a second later, making him jump, but he made no effort to answer it, and though he stopped counting at fifty, the ringing continued on.
Then
Jeb Freeman bedded down for the night in a ravine.
He'd been traveling all day, stopping only for two short rests, heading south as he had been for the past week. His feet hurt. Sam, his mount, had died two days ago, and Jeb had been walking ever since, carrying his own bedroll and saddlebag. He'd been hoping to make it as far as the mountains by nightfall, but the terrain was rougher than he'd expected, and it became clear near sundown that he would not reach his goal today. He would have preferred to remain up top, to not have to waste time hiking down into the ravine and back up again tomorrow morning, but the winds here were fierce at night, and since he no longer had a tent, the only way to stay out of them was to stay below them.
There were a few dead branches on the rocky sandy floor, swept there by the last flash flood, and he gathered them up. He made a circle of stones, then placed half of the branches inside, dumping the other half a few feet away. He laid out his bedroll. A hard piece of almost un chewable salt pork was his supper, and he washed it down with a single.
sip of warm water from his canteen.
Nightfall lingered up on top, but it came swift and sure in the ravines, and his camp was swathed in darkness even as the western sky above remained orange.
There was no sound but the birthing winds above, no scuttle of rats, no cawing of birds, no noise from anything
alive. Not only were there no people in this forsaken country, there were not even any animals. Crouching down, he sprinkled a pinch of bone dust on the branches, dramatically waved his hand over them, and spoke a few words. The fire started.
He sighed. Reduced to performing parlor tricks without an audience.
He made the fire turn blue, then green, but it did not dispel the melancholy that had come over him. He had always been something of a loner, but he had never really been alone before. Not truly alone. If he had not always had living companions, he had always been able to communicate with dead ones, to conjure up the spirits of those who had passed on, to discuss his life with those who had finished theirs.
But here he was too far out. No people had lived here, no people had died here. He could communicate with no one. He was all by himself.
He stared into the rainbow-colored fire, surrounded by silence.
Eventually, he went to sleep.
Above the ravine, the night wind howled.
He met William the next day.
Jeb felt him before he saw him, sensed his presence, and he was filled with a grateful anticipation that was almost joy. He could not remember the last conversation he'd had, and it had been weeks since he'd even seen another human being.
And this man was one of his own.
Jeb continued south, his pace swifter than it had been since Sam's death. The land here was raw and hard and open, not blunted and covered and soft like the land in the East. It was what made the west frightening. And exciting. 20The world here seemed to go on forever, and only the lack of companionship had kept it from being a paradise.
A person was dwarfed by this landscape, but Jeb did not need to see the man to know where he was. He could feel him, and when he sensed that the man had stopped, was waiting for him to catch up, Jeb increased his speed even more, practically running across the flat ground toward the mountains.
He found the man sitting underneath a low tree at the mouth of a canyon, his horse drinking from a muddy pool. The man stood, shook the dust off his clothes, and walked forward, hand extended. 'Glad to finally meet you,' he said. 'I'm William. William Johnson. I'm a witch.'
William, it turned out, had been aware of his presence for days, and Jeb chose to think that it was because his own skills were rusty, because he hadn't been using them lately, that he had not been aware of William until he was practically upon him.
He had met other witches before, but in towns, in cities, and there'd always been a sort of implied acknowledgment of their kinship, a tacit understanding that they recognized each other but were not going to consort with each other so that no suspicions would be raised.
But out here they were all alone, with no one else around for hundreds of miles, and he and William were able to speak openly about things that had always before been only hinted about or left unsaid. It was a strange and unsettling experience, and at first Jeb was wary about saying too much, being too explicit, for fear that William was trying to trick him into revealing incriminating details about himself, trap him into giving away secrets. He knew intellectually that that was not the case--William was a witch just like himself--but the emotional prohibitions were still there, and only after his new companion had told his story, had revealed far
more than Jeb would have ever dreamed of sharing with a stranger, did Jeb feel comfortable enough to relax and really talk.
They had a lot in common. William had traveled throughout the territories, living for a time in various settlements, keeping to himself when he could, providing help when asked. He d removed unwanted pregnancies, performed small healings, made the infertile fertile. And he'd been punished for it: harassed, attacked, exiled.
Much as Jeb had himself.
They'd both tried their best to fit in, and had both been found out every time, persecuted for their natures, for who they were and could not help being, by the intolerant men and women who claimed to be speaking for God.
He told William about Carlsville, about Becky, the girl he'd loved who had betrayed him. He had never told this to anyone else, but he already felt closer to William than he had to anyone since..' well, since Becky, and it felt good to talk about it, to clear his chest.
He explained how he'd moved to Carlsville after his father's very public death back in the appropriately named town of Lynchburg. He'd escaped his father's fate for the simple reason that he had not been home when the mob showed up to the door of their house, and he'd lain low and headed west, traveling as far away from rrginia as quickly as possible. He'd finally stopped running in Missouri, deciding to settle in the beautiful town of Carlsville, where he was fortunate enough to find work as an apprentice blacksmith.
He was still in his teens then, and he portrayed himself as a young man with no parents who had escaped from a tyrannical orphanage back East.
The blacksmith, and indeed the entire town, welcomed him with open arms, treating him as one of their own. He was given a room at the stable, took
his meals with the blacksmith's family, and went to Church with everyone on Sundays.
He also fell in love with Becky, Reverend Faron's daughter.
From the beginning, Becky exhibited an interest in him that went beyond the merely solicitous. He found her very attractive as well, and discovered as they talked after church services that he enjoyed being with her. Of course, the fact that she was a minister's daughter meant that he had to be extra careful. He could not exhibit any abilities that were even slightly out of the ordinary, had to pretend not to know things that he knew, not to believe
