At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(110)

“Halt!” she cried, her voice the clang of a bell’s tongue on copper.

He stopped. “Sally—”

“No!” She raised a palm toward him. “I know why you’re here, Father. You think you should stop me. You think you can stop me.” She lifted her chin. “But you’ve never understood the old stories. Not the way I have. You thought they were just stories. Scribblings. Wordplay. Entertainments. But I have grasped the truth. And I will see it out.”

Evan crouched, balancing Ginny on his fist while he felt through the snow with his numb hand, searching for a stick, a branch, anything.

Rhinehart clasped his hands in front of his chest. “Those old stories aren’t our stories, Sal. It’s not our way to act like gods. Not for us to decide who lives, who dies.”

“People do it all the time!” A flush rose in her face. “All. The. Time. They poison us. Lie to us. Ignore us. They tell us that their mines and their factories won’t harm us. Or the animals. And all the while, they rape the earth.”

Ginny screeched as if she understood and agreed.

“They found him,” Rhinehart said.

Osborn shook her head. “You’re lying to me.”

Rhinehart took a step forward, his hands still open and beseeching, his voice soothing. “The driver who killed that little girl was an out-of-work alcoholic. They’ve brought him in.”

Ah, thought Evan. There is the trigger. A hit-and-run. Another lost child. Tragedy piled on tragedy.

Osborn said, “A year almost, it took them.”

“I know, I know.” Another forward step. “But the important thing is they found him.”

“And what will they do now?”

“That’s for the court to decide.”

She curled her lip. “The way they decided for Alex? Is that what you mean? A slap on the wrist. A public scolding. An exchange of money or perhaps a detox program.” She swung the sword in low arcs, scarring lines in the snow at her feet. “Please, murderer, go on with your life.”

“I don’t understand these things,” Rhinehart said. “I’m just an old man who wants his daughter back. I love you, Sally. I’m proud of you. I always knew you would be a poet. Come home with me, and we’ll write poetry together.”

The runologist was weeping, the arrogance he’d displayed at the station house gone.

“Let’s go home.” He shuffled forward.

“No closer,” she said.

But he kept moving.

“Stop!” she cried. Now she, too, wept.

Evan paused in his search for a weapon, afraid to move, watching as a father reached out with shaking hands for his broken child.

“We’ll go to the beach,” Rhinehart said. “We’ll talk to your mother. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? She’s been waiting to talk to you.”

As if someone had severed muscle and tendon, Osborn’s shoulders dropped, and she lowered her head until her chin touched her chest. The sword came to rest point-down.

Rhinehart nodded. “That’s good, Sally.”

Then she moved, her left hand reaching into her jacket, returning with something small and dark in her hand. She raised her head.

“No!” Evan shouted at the same time the gun fired.

Rhinehart took a step back. Then another. Red bloomed on his coat. He stared at his daughter with surprise.

“You made me do it, Father,” she said. “Stepfather. I was Mother’s child. An Osborn. I was never really yours.”

He sank to his knees.

She fired again, and Rhinehart toppled sideways into the snow, blood reddening his clothes, the ground. The look of surprise on his face settled into softness.

He didn’t move.

Osborn pivoted back to Evan, her eyes wide and dark and deep. And completely mad. He yanked desperately on the chain that held him.

“Riddle me this, dwarf,” she said, as if she had not just murdered her father. “I am she who held her child, but though he lived, he could not hug me back.”

“I can’t—I can’t—” Evan’s mind gibbered with shock.

“Riddle me this,” she said again, biting off each word. “I am she who held her child, but though he lived, he could not hug me back.”

The trickle of sweat turned into a river. He forced his far-flung, frightened thoughts to coalesce. To focus. A child’s life hung in the balance.

Was the riddle about her own child? Impossible to know. But, whispered the whirlwind in his mind, she might wish first to link herself to that long-ago mother, the one who’d gone to Hrothgar’s hall seeking the blood price.

My blood-feud stillbirths your further crimes.

He uttered a silent prayer.

“I am Grendel’s mother, whose son returned from King Hrothgar’s hall, mortally wounded after Beowulf tore off his arm. Grendel made it home to his mother’s embrace, but he lacked two arms with which to hug her back. He died there.”

A growl rumbled in Osborn’s throat. “Who is the one who is mine and who is mine-gone? Who is the fallen whose fall was brought by the fall of others? Who is he and how did he die?”

The words from Talfour’s poem, mine mine mine—they weren’t a shout of ego, as Rhinehart had suggested, no doubt hoping to mislead.