Banshee, after a while: "You get any sleep?"
"Some."
"You should get more. You look like shit." He cracks a smile.
"I know."
"All jokes aside, I'm serious, Spur. Friday's going to be a long day. I need you sharp."
"I'll be sharp."
He looks at me sideways. Banshee's read me for ten years, and he knows what I look like when I'm not telling him everything. "What's eating at you?"
"The cigarette."
"Yeah?"
"Something about the burn pattern. I've seen it before."
"Where?"
"That's the part I can't figure out."
He nods and looks back at the horse.
"It'll come."
"Yeah."
"Sometimes you have to stop trying to remember and let the memory come back to you."
I look at him. "That's not one of your originals."
"It's a Bex line. She says it about lost horses."
We finish our coffee at the rail.
Banshee leaves before I do. I stand at the rail another while with the empty coffee cup in my hand and the cigarette still working at the back of my head. When I finally walk back to the main house, the sun is high enough that the mid-morning patrol's already changed shifts.
The property is what Phantom wants it to be by mid-morning.
Every brother accounted for. Every two-hour check-in landing on the group thread.
Every door of the main house locked from the inside with two patched men in the kitchen at any given time.
Marlena and Grace are both there now.
They had some of the prospects move over some things for Grace, Shadow, and Waylon yesterday.
Waylon's walking better now and has started this little jog sort of thing.
He’s running through the kitchen on legs that haven't quite figured out the corner where the hardwood meets the rug, and every time he hits that corner he goes down on his hands and laughs about it.
Marlena and Grace laugh too.
Cal's on a quilt on the living room floor with a stuffed cow under his cheek, asleep through the noise the way babies sleep through anything that isn't food or pain.
Phantom's at the kitchen table when I come in, coffee in hand. "Spur."
