Red Gambit: Book One of the Harvesters Series by Luke R. Mitchell

Author:Luke R. Mitchell [Mitchell, Luke R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-14T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Jarek fancied himself a hard man, more or less. He’d certainly been known to rough it often enough. But as he shifted his numbing butt on the thick stump that was his seat at Alaric Weston’s round wooden table, he decided that proper chairs wouldn’t have been too much to ask for after having saved the day.

Michael was pointing at him. “You’re telling me that you, Jarek Slater, talked your way through a hostage situation?”

He shrugged. “I was gifted with a silver tongue, Mikey. I’m not sure why you’re so surprised.”

Michael glanced at Rachel, who sat at the table with them as they waited for Alaric’s return.

She gave her own shrug. “Yeah, as long as you consider having two marauders gunned down in front of a roomful of children a victory, Jarek totally nailed this one.”

He held his palms upward. “Hey, no one died. You know, except the guys who—ah, I’ll take it anyway.”

Michael leaned his elbows on the sturdy bulk of the table and frowned. “I’m not seeing it.”

“Ye of little faith,” Jarek said, sitting on his stump as sagely as he could manage.

Michael rolled his eyes and looked around the room for about the trillionth time in the past hour. “Well, I hope that silver tongue’s ready to make the hard sell to Alaric when he gets back.”

It wasn’t hard to tell that Michael was restless. He understood. Fighting was stressful enough, and they had what might very well turn out to be the hard part still ahead. Repetition, like obsessively looking around a room over and over again, could be soothing. It could help convince someone they were doing everything they could despite not really doing anything at all. But try as he might, it wasn’t as if Michael were going to suddenly spot Alaric hiding behind the bread box or under the table.

They’d barely had the chance to exchange more than a sentence with Alaric, but saving an altar-full of kids had a way of breaking the ice. He’d asked that twitchy Bobby kid who’d nearly been executed before the fighting started to show them to his cabin and insisted they take a breather while he helped the townsfolk cart the surviving marauders to their small jail, which turned out to be next to Alaric’s house anyway.

According to Bobby’s ceaseless chatter, the location wasn’t coincidental.

When Alaric had fled the east coast five years prior, he’d apparently arrived just in time to liberate the town from a violent batch of would-be rulers. When they’d realized he was a local returned home, they’d named him sheriff. He’d refused the badge but accepted the call of duty. As thanks, they’d pitched in as a community to build him the rustic cabin they were sitting in, made with wood cut from the trees of the very hillside next to them, if you could believe it. (Thank you, Bobby.)

Maybe the kid’s verbal flatulence wasn’t unreasonable given he’d almost been killed thirty minutes earlier, but Jarek had a sneaking suspicion that Bobby never really stopped bouncing off the walls, near-death experience or no.

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