Page 13 of Remmen

He didn’t look nearly as concerned. “Damned Butchers causing problems. What was it this time? Brawling?”

“Butchers?” Anne asked. “Is that something they call themselves?” I could see the cogs in her mind clicking. It didn’t take a fancy education to know there could be emotional trauma involved there.

I hadn’t realized a therapist could smell blood in the water.

“They’re—”

“Troublemakers,” I cut Korfas off before he could intrigue her anymore with stories of the most broken of bulls. “They live out on that ranch you saw. They don’t play well with the rest of us. This isn’t the first injury Otho’s stitched up.”

“It looked like he had been gored by something.” Her gaze flicked to my horns. “Something sharper than horns.”

“Maybe it’s best if I take you home, Miss Anne,” Korfas offered.

“No,” I snapped. I didn’t know what came over me. Anne didn’t need to be here, she didn’t need to sit vigil for a man who would as soon slap her as talk. But if anyone was going to walk her home, it would be me, not Korfas.

The word came out sharper than the moment asked for, nothing like the calm mayor I tried to be.

What was that?

I didn’t like any of the answers, so I didn’t go looking.

Korfas looked at me. He didn’t say anything. But he had a way of not saying things, and what he wasn’t saying was that the mayor had just bared his teeth at a good man for offering a woman a walk home.

“I’ll ride out and take the report,” he said, letting me off the hook. “Ask around at the ranch.”

“They won’t tell you anything.”

“No.” He pushed off the wall. “But somebody has to ask.”

Better him than me. If I went out there tonight, with my blood up and the almost-taste of a kiss that never landed still in my mouth, I’d take the ranch apart looking for something to hit. Korfas would ask his quiet questions, get his quiet nothing, and come home. That was why the job was his.

He dipped his head at Anne on his way past, the complete picture of a gentlebull. “Miss Anne.”

Then the door shut behind him and it was the two of us and the closed surgery door. The smell of blood hadn’t washed off of her.

She was a mess. Mestyn’s blood and viscera were all down her arm, brown and stiff, and there was a smear of him at her collar where she’d pushed her hair back with her wrist. She’d scrubbed her hands twice at the basin and the red was still in the creases of them.

I wanted to clean the blood off her myself. I shoved that thought down rather than letting it bloom anymore.

“Sit down,” I said. “You’ve been on your feet since the ridge.”

“So have you.”

“I’m bigger. I last longer.”

She huffed something that was nearly a laugh, and I wanted more of it than I had any right to.

She sat. The bench Otho kept for men waiting on other men swallowed her whole. Her boots didn’t reach the floor. She looked small on it and stubborn and wrecked, and I wanted to sit close enough that she could lean into me and stop holding herself up. I sat at the far end instead. A good stretch of empty bench between us, and every inch of it needling at me.

“He wasn’t gored,” she said. Not a question.

“No.”

“Those were claws.” She turned her hands over in her lap like the answer was written there. “Four of them, dragged. And a bite out of his side. I’ve never seen something that could do that. Maybe a bear? Do you have something like bears here?”

“You don’t have to think about it tonight.”

“I really do. It’s the only thing keeping me off the rest of it.” She let her head fall back against the wall and shut her eyes. “So tell me about the Butchers instead. Nobody in that whole yard would look at me except the one who came to get us. What are they?”