Ellen's Arc

Chapter 37 of 45

The crater in the road still smoked when Ellen understood her mistake. She had driven the hunter off, but the blast had torn out the chokepoint. The explosives were gone. The trap that once locked the road was a hole in the dirt. Now any rider could come straight to her door. By noon she saw the dust. Horses, moving fast, following the open road she had just cleared. Eight riders. Ellen knew the lead man before he stopped. Marcus Brennan. He had hunted Cade for months, and Cade sheltered inside her walls. Brennan reined up at the crater's edge and looked at the ruined ground. "You blew your own gate," he said. Flat. Certain. "Saved us the trouble." Ellen stood in the doorway with a rifle. Her six women watched from the third-floor windows, guns steady on the road. But eight men outgunned them, and the road lay open the whole way. She could not hold this. She needed the road closed again, and she had nothing left to close it. Then the air went cold. The dust stopped moving. Nyx stepped onto the road between Ellen and the riders, small and still, robe dark as a hole in the day. Ellen's chest tightened. This was the god who had marked her home, chased her ledger across the salt beds, and spared her only out of boredom. Nyx did not look at Ellen. Nyx looked at Brennan. "You crowd this ground," Nyx said. "I find it dull." Nyx raised one hand. Ellen did not wait. She grabbed the rifle and fired into the dirt at Brennan's horses, driving them back off the road. "Ride," she screamed. "Ride now or die here." She did not fight Nyx. She turned the god's arrival into a wall. Brennan's men saw the thing on the road and their nerve broke. Horses reared. The eight wheeled and fled the way they came, back down the open road, away from the god who could not be shot. Nyx lowered the hand. The riders were gone. The road held only dust. Nyx turned those white eyes on Ellen at last. "You use me," the god said. "Clever things bore me slower." Then Nyx stepped sideways into nothing and was gone. Ellen stood in the empty doorway, shaking. The road lay open still. But she had learned the thing she needed. The road being open cut both ways. Every hunter who rode it now rode into a plain with no cover, in full view of her third-floor guns. She could not close the gate. So she would make the open road her killing ground instead. That night she moved her women to the high windows and marked the range along the bare road with piled stones. The gate was broken. The road stayed her weapon.