This Fallen Prey (Rockton #3)(96)

I fire.

My aim isn’t perfect. This is not a slow dance. Only a few heartbeats pass between Dalton being clubbed and me realizing I must shoot before he is hit again. I pull the trigger, and my bullet hits Dalton’s attacker in the shoulder. It is enough. He goes down, and I spin on the other two men.

Dalton shoots one in the leg. The other is coming at me, and I raise my gun and Dalton has his up, yelling, “Stop, you stupid son of a bitch! Just stop!”

A shot fires. The man flies sideways, and Kenny stands there, gun gripped in both hands, his eyes wide. The hostile slumps to the ground, shot through the chest. Kenny stands frozen, breathing hard.

“Eric?”

I hear the voice, and I think it must be Jacob. It isn’t Kenny, and it comes from off to the side. It’s pitched high, but I am still sure it is Jacob—he’s frightened. Then there’s a movement on my right as Jacob and Storm cautiously approach from the left.

I turn toward the voice.

The woman stands on the path.

I have forgotten the woman. She’s gripping her knife, and there are four of her people on the ground, two dead and two injured, moaning and bleeding, and she doesn’t seem to see them. She’s staring at Dalton.

“Eric?”





53





Even before Dalton says “Maryanne?” I know who this is. A woman who left Rockton years ago. A biologist who’d mentored Dalton, taught him, shared his insatiable curiosity about the world around them.

When Maryanne left with others, his father made the militia pursue. Rockton did not allow residents to become settlers. Dalton had been the one to find their camp, with evidence they’d been attacked by hostiles. A year later, he saw Maryanne again, and she was a hostile—did not recognize him, tried to kill him, almost forced him to kill her. Maryanne is one of those pieces that makes me think my theory is not so far-fetched after all.

I look at this woman, and I try to imagine a biologist, rapt in conversation with a teenage boy. A brilliant woman with a doctorate who decided to go live in her beloved natural world, and who made that choice willingly. Chose that and ended up as this.

She looks at me, and she’s squinting, studying me as she did before, when we faced off and she did not attack. She squints as if trying to place me, too. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe she’s looking at me and seeing a mirror, reflecting something that sparks forgotten memories.

I used to look like that. Used to dress like that. Talk like that.

“Maryanne,” I say, carefully, too aware of that knife in her hand. “I’m Casey. This is Eric Dalton. You remember him, right? From Rockton.”

Dalton gives a start, as if snapping out of the shock of seeing her. “Right. It’s Eric.” He pauses for a second. “Eric Dalton. Gene was my father. We talked about biology. You specialized in black bears. I found papers you wrote, on vocalizations and body language. I read them a few years ago. You were a professor at a university in Nova Scotia.”

Her brow furrows, as if she’s trying to understand the language he speaks. Intently trying to understand. She might even be struggling to hear—I see the blackened ear he mentioned, lost to frostbite. But there’s more to her expression than incomprehension. It is as if she’s peering deeper into that dark mirror, catching wisps of shadows that look like people she once knew.

“Bears,” she says.

Dalton nods. “Right.”

“Eric?” Kenny says.

Dalton lifts a hand to tell Kenny to stay where he is. He never takes his eyes from Maryanne. “I found your camp after you left Rockton. I know something happened to you.”

“Eric,” she says. “The boy with the raven.”

“Uh, right.” He shoots an almost sheepish glance at me and then looks back at Maryanne. “I was trying to train a raven. I wanted to see if it could be taught to use tools. You told me there’d been studies on that, and you thought it might be possible.”

Dalton has never told me this. That look says he finds it a little embarrassing now. But I remember when he first caught me training “my” raven. He rolled his eyes then, but I’d gotten a sense that my experiment pleased him.

“Eric with the raven,” she says. Then she pauses. “Eric with the gun.”

“Yes. You wanted to learn to shoot. I showed you, but you couldn’t actually do it. You couldn’t shoot anything.”

He’s giving as much as he can, trying to prod those memories, like speaking to someone with amnesia, but I can tell it’s not quite getting through. It’s like talking to a small child, one who is listening mostly to the sound of your voice and picking up familiar words. She is making connections, though. She is remembering.

And she is not attacking. That is the most important thing, because in her restraint I see hope. The others attacked. The others now lie, bloody, on the ground. And yet it isn’t fear that holds her back. She could have attacked. She could have fled. But she sees Dalton, and something has changed from the last time. The rage is gone.

“Do you remember Rockton?” he asks. “Where we lived? Where you met me?”

“Eric. The boy with the raven.”

He nods. “I’m going back to Rockton. I would like you to come with me. You’ll be safe there. We have . . .” He pauses, as if struggling to remember something. “We don’t have ice cream. That’s what you said you missed most from down south. Ice cream. But we’ve shaved frozen milk before. You can have that. It’s like ice cream.”