Read Online The Kept by James Scott - Free Book Online Page A

thick sheets, erasing the stars. His feet hung free. He chewed on an old boot string. His father’s rifle sat across his thighs.
    He imagined himself leaping down from the loft as the birds scattered at the first shot. Perhaps before that. He would have heard them coming, or detected some change in the air, like the mornings when Emma would come to get him for breakfast and he’d be at the edge of the loft even before the creaking of the door. This would be the opposite, a call like the one that had brought his father to the other side of the hill late one night, a low, rumbling thunder like a storm miles off, so faint it might be nothing more than the creaking of the trees, except somehow his bones would know different, and he would have jumped down from the ladder and grabbed his Ithaca. He loaded it as he crept along, the shells clicking into place. Emma saw him and he motioned her inside. Her eyes betrayed no fear, so strong was her faith in her brother. Or maybe he picked her up under one arm and placed her safely in the house, telling her to latch the door. He edged along the periphery of the pen bent over, under the cover of the fence. One hand planted on the post and he vaulted over it. He circled back around them, down a path in the hill between birches and elms and evergreens that only he knew, and as he came up behind them he would say, “Put those weapons down. There’ll be no killing today.”
    But of course he would kill them, because they would not drop their weapons, and he would feel no remorse. Afterward, his father would find the perfect Bible passage to make everyone feel that what he’d done was right with God. Even Caleb would listen. And he would believe it—and the man who was saying it—deep in his core.
    They would bury them in the plot on the other side of the hill, where Caleb had first discovered death, a simple marker their only connection to the living world. He could also penetrate the frozen ground and dig a perfectly rectangular grave. That was what the Caleb who could kill would do.
    The Caleb who could not fire his father’s outsized rifle into the night sky, imagining the bullet losing speed and falling harmlessly into one of the rolling fields below, perhaps sending up a small cloud of snow, probably not. His shoulder throbbed from the kick of the gun and he knew he’d have a bruise for a week. The sound was lost in the descending blanket of snow. It was a call to the killers, a sign from Caleb that he would find them, that he would be different when he did. Or so he hoped.
    Elspeth murmured. When he got to her, everything appeared to be the same; he wondered if he’d imagined the noise. He checked the bandages, cleaned the wounds with whiskey, and dabbed at her forehead with the rag. When he withdrew it, her unsteady pupils tried to follow him. “Caleb,” she said. She forced a smile and small dots of blood burgeoned on her cracked lips.
    Caleb feared she saw his guilt, but hoped she saw how he’d changed: He would defend them, he would find those men, and he would kill them for what they’d done to his family.
     
    E LSPETH HAD BEEN living in dreams so long the pale dawn confused her. The bandages made no sense, either, and then she remembered the shot, and her last seconds of consciousness. The wraps were clean but loose and tied with poor knots. In spite of the pain, she tried to stand, and surprised herself by getting to her feet. She shuffled to the barn doors and leaned her weakened body against them until they opened. The air struck her and nearly knocked her over, and she searched for her balance, the task made more difficult by the dizzying effect of the snow swirling lazily outside. Nausea rippled within her.
    The house was gone. In its place, a blank hole. The elm that had overhung their home had shriveled into something black, no longer quite a tree. In the clutch of her fever, she’d thought it strange that they slept in the barn and now she realized why—the