Episode 229 · Where the Blood Went

Soles reached the far side of the bridge with one hand against his ribs. The Hunter had vanished among the firs. Blood marked the first pale stone beyond them.

He stopped there.

The blow had opened something beneath his dressing. His breath came easier than it had on the ledge, though, and that ease was worse than the pain. He had felt what the knife took. Somewhere in the man ahead, a whole life had ceased to exist, and Soles was using what had come back along the blade to stand straighter.

He made himself look away from the knife and at the stone.

The next drop lay beneath a fern.

He followed it without running. At the first fork, the brighter marks ended on the left. He almost committed to them, then saw where the man had pressed a bloody hand to a trunk before crossing the path. A smear shone on the underside of a branch to the right.

Soles went right.

The ground rose. In the soft earth between roots, the square heel he had seen at the spring printed cleanly; its owner was shortening one step.

He knew how badly he wanted an unbroken trail. He had followed a deer for twenty minutes because of the same wanting. Haya’s patience returned in the pause, in the need to see where the weight had actually gone.

He found the next print downhill.

An hour passed in small pieces of evidence: blood on a root, a branch moving after the wind had stopped, a scuff he caught only with his good ear turned to the slope. The man ahead had ceased trying to hide every step; he was choosing the ground that would let him keep taking them.

At a stream, the trail ended.

Soles stayed on the bank. The water ran fast and shallow over round stones, loud in his left ear; on the right there was only the ringing. Phenom’s instinct wanted him looking beyond the water, toward the stones a man could hide behind. He did that first.

No movement. He checked upstream, then started across. A handprint darkened the wet face of a low rock midstream. On the far bank, crushed moss held a few red beads of water.

He stopped beside the handprint. It was too neat: a whole palm laid flat, fingers spread, where anyone crossing would have to look at it.

Bait. My eyes on the rock, and water to cover the rest.

He looked right, toward the side he could not hear.

The Hunter was already out from under the cut bank downstream, coming up the stream bed in long, silent strides, one hand pressed to his side, the knife in the other.

Soles let the chain run and threw. The chain caught on the low rock, on the handprint he had been made to look at, and the blade splashed down short. Then the Hunter was inside its length.

The first cut came for his throat. Soles got the wrapped forearm up; the edge skipped off the dressing and opened his collar. The second came low, for his ribs. He twisted, and his boot went out from under him.

He went down on his back in the stream. The Hunter came down with a knee on his chest, and the knife came after.

Soles caught the wrist with both hands.

His mouth was dry, inside all that water. A drop of blood formed on the man’s cuff and fell onto his cheek. The point hung a hand’s width above his throat. The Hunter was not strong now; he did not need to be. His whole weight was going down onto it, and Soles’s left wrist, the one from the bedroom, had begun to give.

A finger closer. Another.

Inside his coat, against his chest, the folded release order was going soft in the water. He thought, absurdly, that the signature would run.

His side. What he did to me on the bridge.

He let go with his left hand, and because he turned toward the knife to free it, the point went into the top of his shoulder instead of his throat and stopped against bone, and his left fist was already driving up under the man’s coat into the wound the black knife had made.

The Hunter cried out, and his weight went sideways into the water.

Soles came up coughing on his knees. The Hunter knelt a pace away, folded around his side. For a moment neither could move. Then the man got up and went downstream, half falling.

Soles hauled in the chain. His arm would not lift the knife for another throw. He crossed the last stones on his knees and sat on the bank until he could breathe. The shoulder bled in a thin, steady line inside his shirt.

In water a hand deep. With one hand on his own wound.

When he could stand, he followed the blood again. Now it went straight, without forks or handprints. The man was no longer choosing his ground.

By the time he saw the cabin, his wet shirt had stuck to the dressing and to the new cut at his shoulder. He could smell damp cloth and the sharp iron smell from his own hand. Near the cabin’s step, the same smell came fresh from blood spread over the wood.

There was one door. A shutter stood open beside it; beyond the cabin, the ground rose into bare stone.

He kept the trees between himself and the window. Through it he saw a bench, the edge of an unlit stove and a boot resting sideways on the floor.

— Stay outside, the Hunter said.

Soles stopped beneath the window.

— You’ve left enough blood for both of us to know I found you.

— Come through that door and I’ll try again.

He sounded as though the warning cost him more breath than he had meant to spend.

Soles moved until he could see the man’s hands. One held a folded blanket against his side. The knife lay beneath the other. Blood had reached the floor and followed a gap between its boards.

He looked at the stone behind the bench.

— You could have kept going through that.

— And come out where? In this state?

The Hunter’s gaze went to the black knife. His hand tightened on the blanket.

— What did you do to me?

Soles remembered Bull’s frightened question during their fight. He could have said he did not know enough to answer. It would have been true and far too convenient.

— You won’t get it back, he said.

The man stared at him. For a moment his face held still in Soles’s memory: the effort of a mouth trying to make a question it could survive hearing answered.

— No, the Hunter said at last. I didn’t think so.

He moved his free hand from the knife.

Soles came in, staying beside the door. He had followed a man here to kill him. He had not decided what he would do if the man stopped trying to kill him first.

The Hunter noticed the dressing beneath his torn shirt.

— You were quick in that room.

— Not quick enough.

— Quick enough to be here.

He shifted the blanket. His breath caught, and he waited until he could continue.

— What did they offer?

Soles said nothing.

— Money doesn’t make a man look at the road behind him like that.

— Home.

The Hunter shut his eyes. It might have been pain. Soles thought it was recognition.

— Of course.

— Why did you run?

The man reached inside his coat. Soles raised the dark point.

— Slowly.

A folded page came out, wet at one corner. The Hunter put it on the bench between them.

— Read the bottom.

Three names. A transfer number. A statement that no one had survived to be transferred. Beneath it, a space for a signature.

The space was empty.

— They were alive when I put them in the van, the man said. I came back and found that waiting. They wanted my name under it.

— You asked where they’d gone.

— First. Then I asked to see them. After that I stopped being the man they wanted in the office.

He pressed harder against his side.

— They took my keys. One waited by the door. The other brought the same report back with a different date. I left through the washroom wall while they discussed what to tell me.

Soles looked at the page, then at the man.

He had seen men trying to buy mercy with a confession. This one kept looking at the empty space beneath the names, as if the worst thing that could happen now would be somebody deciding to fill it for him.

Soles believed him about the van.

Outside, water began dripping from the eaves again.