Bound for Glory by Tess Lesue

Author:Tess Lesue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

16

HE COULD SEE much better than he let on. And Cleopatra didn’t look at all the way he’d imagined. For some reason, he’d pictured someone smaller, more wizened. Much older.

She sounded like one of the hardy homesteaders you met on the plains—practical women with cynical edges. He’d pictured someone stringy and seasoned, a tough old boot of a woman. But now that he had limited vision back—oily, indistinct, but there at least—“Cleopatra” upended all of his assumptions about her. For one thing, she was tall. And she wasn’t wiry. She was built like someone who spent a lot of time on a horse: she was muscular and athletic. And she was certainly vigorous; she was a crackling ball of energy, striding this way and that, never still. He couldn’t see her very clearly; she was just a chalky red-gray blur in a misshapen hat, but even just that blur suggested that she wasn’t at all what he’d been picturing.

Deathrider’s vision had started to return only the day before, and it was mostly just a smear of blurred light and shadow, but it was enough to reassure him that he probably wouldn’t be blind forever. Lucky for Micah, or he’d be a dead man.

If he wasn’t already . . .

Hell. Deathrider didn’t have time to be blind. Or sick. While he sat around here, unable to even feed himself, Micah was being dragged straight into the mouth of hell. Who knew what Pete Hamble had done to him by now . . . ?

Deathrider wasn’t used to being impotent, and he didn’t like it, not one bit. When he’d gone down with the fever, he’d fallen into a surreal swirl of dreams, most of which included Micah: Micah in the pink dress, hauled across the desert, always just out of Deathrider’s reach, a pink flicker ahead; Deathrider could hear Pete Hamble’s voice echoing, repeating, over and over and over, Stay down. Staydownstaydownstaydownstaydown.

It was his fault, all his fault. And he was powerless to stop any of it.

And then she broke into his dreams. Cleopatra. The woman who’d found him in the desert. The one who had more prickles than a prickly pear. He’d been stone-cold blind when she’d found him, so he had no idea what she actually looked like. All he knew was that her voice broke into his fever dreams like rain falling in the desert. Her voice meant water. Her voice meant life. Her voice led him safely out of the desert and out of his fever.

Fortunately for him, she talked a lot. She never left him alone in the darkness for long. She talked to him, to her horse, to Dog and most of all to herself. He’d seen it before in people who spent a lot of time alone on the trail: they talked incessantly, whether there was anyone to talk to or not, because solitude could be overwhelming, particularly when you were out in the wilderness. The vastness made you feel small, and all you could do to exert your selfhood was talk.

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