Free A Few Good Men by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

needn’t think you can fool me. I don’t care what my father says.” His voice wavered and he stopped, looking startled, not so much at the wavering, I thought, as at the idea he’d talked at all. If it were possible for a man to stare in bewilderment at his own mouth, he’d have done so.
    But slowly, he focused on me again. I’d often heard hate described as fire, but I’d never before understood. Now I felt as if, if I stared hard enough at Nathaniel’s dark eyes, I’d find a red pinpoint of smoldering hatred in them. “If you hadn’t got yourself put away, safe and cozy ,” Nathaniel said. “You’d be dead and Max— And he—” a watery sound drowned his words, even though his eyes were dry.
    It wasn’t funny, but the wrenching of my feelings away from Ben and to Max was so startling, the juxtaposition of Never-Never or even the jail before that—where I’d had to fight tooth and nail to keep the slighter-built Ben from being beaten or worse—and safe and cozy wrenched a surprised laugh from me.
    Nathaniel was standing maybe two steps from me, glaring up. At the laugh, he started and jumped, as though I’d slapped him.
    His bunched fist shot forward too fast for me to react. It caught me hard on the mouth, and sent me reeling back a step, but not far enough that his left fist didn’t catch me again.
    My mind had figured it out by then. I didn’t know why Nat Remy hated me, but surely he had plenty of reason.
    And I didn’t know what he thought he was doing, but some things I did know. I knew this was a man in the grip of such a powerful emotion that it had to have totally overpowered his mind. I knew he wasn’t thinking of the penalties for striking the sole, despotic ruler on whose good will his life and the lives of his relatives depended. And I knew he’d forgotten my very existence was his and his family’s only bulwark against destitution and maybe death.
    And I knew too that he was Sam’s oldest son and that Sam loved him. That much had been obvious in the way Sam looked at him. And I knew Sam was one of the few—perhaps the only man left alive—for whose good opinion I still cared.
    As Nathaniel raised his foot to kneecap me, my mind got hold of my body and I went into my fast mode. I couldn’t allow him to injure me. I couldn’t allow it, not because I didn’t deserve it, but because all Good Men united in punishing crimes against one of them. It was maybe the only thing they all agreed on. And if Nathaniel seriously injured or killed me in a way Sam couldn’t cover up, Nathaniel would die for it. And Sam didn’t deserve that. Not over me.
    I dove away from where his foot would have hit, and behind him. Taking advantage of his being off balance, I grabbed both his wrists, secured them into one of my hands, while my arm snaked around him and pulled him tight against me, I pushed him up against the wall, pinning him.
    The man didn’t know the meaning of quitting. Or the meaning of self-preservation. He jerked his head trying to hit me, and his attempts to kick backwards made me shift my hold and make it tighter, all the while trying to ignore that he was warm and alive because this was not what I’d thought of when I’d imagined holding someone warm and alive in my arms.
    It would have been easy to kill him or incapacitate him from this position, but my purpose was not to kill him.
    Not knowing what else to do, I just held on tight, breathing as steadily as I could. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually he stopped trying to attack and began to shake like a leaf in a wind storm, his teeth knocking loudly together.
    I recognized the reaction because Ben had had it too. It was the whiplash of the berserker. Nathaniel, like Ben, was a berserker, and when a berserker fit was cut short, he got hit with a near-painful reaction. Ben had never gone berserk at me, but he’d gone into that state a few times in broomer lair fights and had to tamp it down.
    Nathaniel had also gone