“That means the hunters will be coming.” And they wouldn’t be degenerates, they’d be demons in their prime. “We need to be long gone when they get here.”
“Iwant a horse.” Grayson slid her knife through the belly of the last trout on her pile. One of Eli’s cousins had told us whatkindof trout it was, but I couldn’t remember the fish’s proper name, because we’d heard twenty of them in the two hours Finn, Grayson, and I had spent practicing new fishing techniques that morning. “Brother Isaiah’s right,” she continued. “Horses don’t require gas.”
She looked up from the fish hemorrhaging its innards on her plastic mat to where Eli was brushing his large tan-and-white mottled mount across the campgrounds. Several feet away Melanie sat with a group of women roughly our mother’s age, listening to them discuss their own childbirth experiences while they cleaned wild greens and a few thin, edible roots.
“In the winter horses need hay,” Reese pointed out with weary patience from beneath the hood of the SUV. In the five days we’d been traveling with Eli’s division of the Lord’s Army—only one of several, according to Brother Isaiah—Grayson had become fascinated by them and by the skill with which they subsisted off the neglected American landscape. “And horses can’t carry as much as a car trunk.”
“Yes, but if and when they die, you can eat them and wear them.” Grayson ripped the innards from her fish and dropped them with a splat into the bucket we were sharing. “You can’t eat or wear a car.”
I refrained from pointing out that Eli’s group utilized both horsesandvehicles, because that wasn’t the point. At least, not for Reese.
“And you can’t drive a horse eighty-five miles an hour to escape a contingent of Church exorcists.” He held the SUV’s dipstick up to the sunlight to check the oil level.
“True.” Grayson sliced the head from her fish with two confident cuts. “But you can’t feed apples and carrots to a car. A car cannot love you back or lick your face. A car is just a hunk of metal that can never need or be needed!” She stood and dropped her fish onto the pile of trout ready to be grilled, and her brown eyes lit up when Eli waved to her from across the park, carrying a leather pouch loaded with dull butter knives.
“Which is it you want?” Reese called after Grayson as she took off for her knife-throwing lesson, leaving me to fumble my way through the last fish alone. “You want to eat a horse or be friends with it? You can’t have it both ways!”
When Grayson didn’t respond, Reese ducked beneath the hood of the SUV and let loose a soft string of heartily felt expletives.
“There was probably a better way to handle that.” I pulled the head off my trout and shuddered when its guts tumbled onto the ground perilously close to my boots. I was fine with burning the souls from deformed demons, but pulling the innards from fish never failed to make me cringe. “She loves you, Reese.”
“I know.” He unhooked the metal prop and let the hood fall closed. “ButElican drop a degenerate with a crowbar. From horseback. He can live off the land and teach her hymns I’ve never heard of and stop her from poisoning herself with the wrong mushrooms. I can’t do any of that.”
“You could learn,” I pointed out. The rest of us were learning, but the more interest Grayson took in the Army’s lifestyle, the harder Reese resisted the new knowledge. “But Eli can’t teach her to pluck a demon from the air or scorch it from its human host. You have to play to your strengths.”
He picked up the bucket and held it while I dropped the discarded bits of fish inside. “You think I should help her trigger the transition?”
I shrugged and wiped my hands on a clean scrap of cloth. “Is she ready?”
“Maybe.” There was an odd bit of resistance in his voice.
“You’ve been putting it off. Intentionally,” I guessed, and he glanced at me in surprise. “Why?”
“Because once she transitions, she’ll be able to take care of herself. She won’t need me anymore.”
I stood and angled us so that Reese couldn’t see Eli teaching Grayson to throw butter knives at a tree trunk. “Even if protectionwasall she wanted from you, keeping her from her true potential will only make her resent you. If she’s really ready”—and based on the number of degenerates we’d been fending off, she was—“the best thing you can do for her is help herreachher potential.”
Reese blinked at me. “Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds kind of reasonable.”
“Good.” I reached up to give him a pat on one enormous shoulder. “Might I suggest sooner rather than later?”
“I’ll tell her tonight. After dinner.”
“Perfect.” I took the bucket of innards from him and waved one hand at the pile of cleaned fish. “I caught and cleaned.Youcook and serve.”
“Voilà!” Reese handed Finn and me each a stainless steel camping plate with a raised lip around the edge. Each plate held a grilled trout fillet, a hunk of the flatbread Joanna and her mother had shown us how to make, and a scoop of wilted dandelion greens from the pot Melanie and Anabelle had made under Brother Isaiah’s supervision.
It was the best meal we’d made for ourselves since we’d lost access to New Temperance’s electricity and kitchen appliances.
I grabbed a steel spork from a can of camping utensils and dug in.
“Thatisimpressive,” Devi said from the other side of the circle as Reese loaded two more plates from the foldable steel grill straddling our campfire.
“I made the bread!” Grayson used a knife to slice the last batch into pieces on a tray balanced on her lap. We’d been happy to share several bags of flour with Eli’s people in exchange for a demonstration of what could be done with it even without yeast.
Firelight flickered over Grayson’s wide smile as she handed the next slice to Melanie.
“It smells amazing.” Maddock sat on the ground next to Devi and accepted a plate from Reese.
