Free Campbell by C. S. Starr Page A

violence often manifested itself in ugly ways. The beautiful thing about Andrew though, was his great capacity to love his siblings, which he’d demonstrated time and time again in situations where most would have faltered.  
    “I’ll talk to them later,” Lucy said quietly, giving her brother a weak smile. “See if we can’t sort something out. Joey, take them to the trailer, and stick someone outside the door. Send Chubs to get the plane and tow it to the lot behind the church.”
    “There’s not much to discuss,” Andrew grumbled, after Joey had dragged their visitors off. “What are those two assholes going to do for us?”
    “Maybe nothing, but we don’t need to start a war on two fronts now, do we?” She turned to face her sibling. “Half their territory wants to join up with us anyway, and if we have to go to war, we’ll need those resources.”
    “But we’ll just take them.”
    “Maybe there’s a better way,” she said with a shrug. “Or maybe we’ll just take them.”
    The two regarded each other for a minute, taking in one another’s appearance. Andrew had a dark tan from his summer up north overseeing the oil fields, a job Lucy had given him to keep him out of situations like the one they found themselves in that day. He was good at controlling the unruly kids that wanted to work out there, and had fostered a weird respect born greatly of his reputation. This respect got results, but Andrew Campbell was no diplomat.
    “Ce, you need to eat something,” Andrew said gently, taking in his sister’s exhausted features. “You don’t look right.”
    “I’m okay,” she said quietly. “And I’ll eat.”
    Lucy and Cole hadn’t spent a night in different houses since they were born. It was quite a feat; twenty years of co-habitation through all they’d gone through. Although they actually hadn’t shared a room since their mother died, without him in the house Lucy felt every second of the day. It was like a quiet hum in the back of her head, one she wasn’t even aware of, had suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening.  
    Lucy hadn’t spent the two weeks since Cole had gone missing in a vegetative state on the couch, as easy as that would have been to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’d been to Calgary and then Edmonton for a few days, to evaluate their resources there. She’d sat down with the local leaders there, her oldest and most trusted confidents, to try and devise a plan. The most fruitful meeting was an evening in a sweat lodge with Lucy’s best friend Sitting Bull, a hulking, handsome man with a closely cropped dark hair that had taken up leadership of the Blackfeet, and many of the other aboriginal groups that loosely fell within Campbell. They’d been close since she was eleven and he twelve, and had always worked together. He’d helped Lucy to mastermind their recent oil boom. The result of their meeting was the beginnings of a meticulously planned counter attack on East, once their numbers were increased by securing Seattle and Chicago, both very attainable goals.  
    A counter attack wouldn’t necessarily get the immediate result that Lucy wanted, which was getting Cole back, but it was the smart way to proceed. She had to trust that East wouldn’t hurt him as long as he was a bargaining tool, and he’d continue to be valuable to them for quite some time. If it came down to an ‘if you do X, then we’ll do Y’ situation with him, she’d negotiate, but as much as it pained her, there was a lot more at stake than her twin. She had thousands to consider.  
    It was late afternoon when Lucy woke on the couch, a quilt that she didn’t remember being placed there draping her from head to toe. The smell of something baked made her nostrils twitch and she followed her nose into the kitchen where Andrew and Zoey were standing over what looked like a partially eaten apple pie.
    “Someone brought it over. A girl from a farm outside town,” Zoey remarked, her eyes,