Page 31 of Forbidden Protector

The road goes from manageable to nothing in the space of one breath, and I understand a half second too late that the storm didn't just arrive.

It was used.

He comes up fast in the whiteout, no lights now, and I put the wheel hard right because there's nowhere else to put it.

Metal on metal, high and short, and the hit spins us a hundred and eighty degrees on the ice before I can get any of it back.

My door catches the fence line somewhere in the middle of that spin, wire and a post both, hard enough that the window goes, spiderwebbed and then gone, glass and snow coming in together.

My arm's across her before I've thought to put it there.

I fight the wheel the rest of the way around. We come to rest nose-down in the ditch, engine running, the other vehicle already swallowed by the storm.

"You're not hurt?" My hand's on her jaw, checking her eyes in the dash light.

"I'm fine. You're bleeding."

I look down. Glass ground into the sheepskin above my wrist, blood already through it.

"Superficial."

"You don't get to decide that about your own arm."

"Half-ton," I say. "Ford, not Chevy. Newer than anything on Blackwater land. One headlight running high, like it took its own damage getting here."

She stops fighting her seatbelt long enough to look at me. "You got all that in a spin?"

"I got all that in the half second before the spin."

She writes it down anyway, on the pad, in the dark, by feel. That's the agent the Bureau sent to Rimrock, whether they meant to or not.

She's out of her belt before I finish talking. There's no arguing it. The truck's not moving again tonight.

I check my phone out of habit more than hope. No bars. This stretch never gets them, storm or no storm. It’s a dead pocket the whole valley complains about every winter, and no carrier's bothered fixing a hole that only ranch families ever fall into.

"Knox," she says. "Radio, landline, anything?"

"Nothing out here reaches him. And twenty minutes waiting in a ditch is twenty minutes somebody who just proved they know exactly where we are gets to come back and finish the job." I nod north. "Line shack. My grandfather built it on the south fence. Half a mile if we cut across instead of following the road."

"You're bleeding and you want to walk half a mile through a blizzard?"

"If you have a better plan, I'll take it."

She doesn't. That's the answer.

I pull the rifle off the rack before we leave the cab.

She's already got her sidearm out from under her coat, checked and holstered again, faster than I get the sling over my shoulder.

We cut across the pasture instead of the road, because a road is where a truck finds you twice.

She takes half my weight without being asked, my good arm over her shoulders, the other pressed to my own chest to keep the bleeding to myself. Every few yards a drop of it hits the snow behind us, dark against white. She sees every one and doesn't say a word about it, just adjusts her grip to take more of me.

Jacob got a mountain and a clean explanation. Mackenzie got a flue packed with rag and a room that nearly killed her while everybody's back was turned. Both were built to look like nothing happened.

Tonight nobody bothered dressing it up. Somebody drove at us in a storm they timed on purpose. A half second slower and we're two more bodies this county calls weather. Neither of us says that walking through a whiteout. It wouldn't change the outcome.

The shack's got a stove, a bed, and a phone line dead since before I was born. I get the stove going while she goes through the shelves herself until she finds a first aid kit behind a coil of rope.