Free House of Mercy by Erin Healy

regarded Garner over the lip of the mug. Her blue eyes seemed unnaturally dark in the poor light of the storm, and Garner noticed that not one table lamp in the comfortable space was lit. They spoke by the shifting beams of the swinging lamps outside, and by the weak backlight that spilled out of her rear office. The effect was momentarily unsettling.
    But then Cat offered him a half smile before she took another sip. She said, “Of course it does, Garner. Especially your tea. You know I’d do anything for you. But we’ll go tomorrow, not now.” Then she drank again, and the tight spot in the middle of Garner’s stomach relaxed.
    “There’s no rush to leave this second,” he agreed.
    “It’s safer that way.”
    “It is.”
    “Come have a cup with me.”
    “Thank you. I will.”
    “The dead are never in a hurry.”
    It wasn’t the dead Garner wanted to see, but he found himself nodding in agreement anyway.

7
    I t had become Beth’s habit, when the timing of her work shifts allowed it, to take Hastings out for a ride in the summer evenings. Rather than face her family, she would slip onto the Blazing B from a rear access road, park on the backside of the barn, and fetch Hastings’ saddle before anyone knew she was home.
    The first few times Beth did this, she was distracted and delayed in the tack room by the sight of the empty rack that had held the silver saddle, but she soon learned not to look at the accusing vacancy. She became efficient at saddling Hastings quickly and riding off to a creek that separated the ranch from the bordering public lands, where she’d stay until the sun set.
    The day Lorena joined the family, Beth discovered Hastings waiting for her, already saddled up, gnawing on a tuft of grass that had poked its green fingers into the dusty corral. He abandoned it at the sight of her and whinnied. Descending sunlight reflected off his chestnut coat, marbling it with gold. Storm clouds gathered behind the foothills. It would be raining hard up in the San Juans.
    She wondered who had noticed her habit and made this kind gesture. Even as she asked herself the question, she caught sight of a rider heading southward, away from the stables. By now he was the size of a figurine, an erect cowboy on a snowflake Appaloosa. Both the spotted mare, Gert, and the Indiana Jones hat crammed low over the man’s ears belonged to Jacob Davis.
    If he had ever noticed his saddle missing, he hadn’t mentioned it to her.
    Beth watched Jacob’s form diminish. “Are you courting Gert without my consent?” she murmured to Hastings while stroking his nose.
    The gelding nickered, a polite insistence that butlers did not deserve their reputation as covert agents.
    “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
    She mounted him from the corral rail and felt the stabbing ache in her shoulder where the wolf’s paw had torn it. The skin had healed, but the deep wound remained. Beth didn’t hint to anyone that it had been a wolf’s paw, not the blow of the fall, that crushed her. There simply was no evidence that a wolf had ever set foot on the Kandinskys’ land, or on the Blazing B. As everyone else saw it, with Phil’s help she’d kidnapped Joe, forced him to ride blind into a lather, and turned his leg in a snake hole.
    When she reached a high branch of the creek, Beth dismounted and let Hastings wander while she followed the water upstream to her favorite rock, which was squat and flat. The rocks in this area were mostly black and coarse, remnants of a catastrophic super-volcano. The La Garita Caldera, a crater twenty-two miles wide and forty-seven miles long, was not far away from this very spot as the eagle flew. Eons ago, when La Garita had erupted and devastated most of the state of Colorado, it released enough pyroclastic material to have buried California in thirty-nine feet of the stuff. The event was granted a ranking in the upper tiers of Earth’s most destructive volcanic eruptions ever. And then,