Twenty-four – 05

Thordin took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, taking a deep swallow from his mug before he continued on.  “They owned a ranch and that’s where I grew up, playing in the pastures and never being afraid of anything I saw out there—not snakes, not coyotes, nothing.  In fact, there was one coyote I’d managed to mostly tame.  The mother who birthed me and loved me as a child, Lili, she hated that, was terrified of it.  Sven just told me to be careful, that it was still a wild thing.  I think he understood better than she did.

“I was out in the field with that coyote with the too-bright eyes that afternoon.  I’d come home from school and gone out to play.  It was what I did; I was ten years old.  He drew me out further into the tall grass on the hill pasture, grass so tall that you could just barely see my head—and only if you knew where to look.  Mamma knew where to look for me.  She knew better than anyone else.

“I heard her scream while I was up there on the hill and I ran back down.  Coyote tried to stop me, tried to keep me from going down there.  It was as if he knew what was happening down there and didn’t want me to see it.  There was no stopping me, though, not when I heard that.  I knew that it was bad.”

“Thordin, you don’t—”

He shook his head slightly at Neve’s whispered words.  “You all deserve to know.  I’ll tell Phelan eventually, when the time’s right.  I’ve held this story too close for too long.  The only people who know are Laura and Grayson, who raised me after Lili and Sven were gone.”  He closed his eyes for a moment.  “I remember when Grayson came into the house.  He was wearing cowboy boots, old jeans, and a herder’s jacket.  He reminded me a little bit of my father.  Laura was this blonde vision behind him in a deputy’s uniform.  She reminded me of you a bit, Sif, but…warmer, comforting.  Motherly.”

Sif flinched and Neve felt a pang of sympathy for her.  It couldn’t have been easy to hear that.

Thordin sighed and shook his head.  “But that came later.  After I heard Mamma scream, I ran to the back door, but something made me slow down, kept me from bursting into the house like some terrorized creature.  I crept inside through that back door and hid in the kitchen.

“There were three men in the family room, two of them stabbing my father over and over as they held him on the ground and the other was holding Mamma and making her watch.”  His voice shook a little as the words kept coming, his eyes focused on something long ago and far away.  “Then he slit her throat and one of them spotted me.  They were coming toward me and then they just…stopped.  They stared at me for a moment, then they just left, as if I wasn’t worth their time.”  He sucked in a breath and exhaled it slowly.  “I don’t know how Grayson and Laura knew to come,” he whispered.  “No one told them to come.  We lived outside of town, all alone.  No one would have known unless we called and no one called.  Somehow, though, they knew to come.

“I remember that Laura asked me what my name was and I told her it was Thordin.  Mamma’s blood was all over my hands but I couldn’t cry, not then.  My blood was boiling.  Those men had killed my family.

“It rained for five days, the worst thunderstorms folks had seen there in ten years—since the day I was born.  I did that.”  He gulped down some more coffee.  “Heaven help me, I did that.  My pain did that.  I thought somehow I would be able to drown the men if it rained enough, that somehow they’d be trapped and Grayson and Laura would be able to catch them and then they’d face justice for what they’d done to my parents.

“But we never found them.  They vanished like smoke in the wind.”

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