House of Mercy by Erin Healy Page A

twitched. The muscles over the antelope’s rib cage also flickered.
    And then the icy weight that seemed to sit on her head began to melt. It came apart the way an ice cube does in the sun, pooling at the base and spreading out. A sensation of liquid warmth ran down every strand of her hair and dribbled onto her back and spilled across her shoulders onto the antelope’s coat.
    Beth’s mental command to her body to sit up finally connected with her muscles. She jerked up, expecting to see that the rain had started. She was entirely dry.
    The animal jerked too, as if he shared Beth’s surprise, and then his whole body was rolling toward her, nearly pinning her knees. He threw his weight forward toward the creek, and Beth feared he would crush her. Though she wasn’t paralyzed any longer, her hips and legs felt heavy and thick, and the ache in her joints had spread out into a stabbing pain that followed the lines of her skeleton. She couldn’t rise.
    But the antelope’s two-toed hooves missed her, and when she looked up at him again he was standing on all fours in the middle of the water. He dipped his head to take a drink.
    The gash in his neck had vanished like the wolf. No dangling flaps of flesh exposing bloody muscle, no gurgling breaths. Only a pale pink inky spot stained the water where he’d been lying a moment earlier. The current erased that evidence in seconds. But her cotton shirt lay on the rocks by her knees, soaked in blood.
    All sensation and function returned to her limbs, and she jumped up, her mind making gazelle-like leaps across the plains of common sense. She didn’t understand what she was seeing.
    The antelope lifted his head and flicked his ears toward a movement behind Beth. She turned. Levi stood several yards behind her.
    He held his rifle, which at first seemed only natural and then seemed entirely unnecessary. Unless he’d also seen the wolf. The antelope behaved as if being in the presence of an armed man was no cause for alarm.
    “Where did he go?” she asked.
    “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” There was anger in Levi’s tone. For all of Beth’s life, as she remembered it, Levi had stooped in a posture of resentment as if his spine were a frown. He seemed to regard his little sister’s birth as a conspiracy to thrust him into the demanding role of firstborn son and assassinate his privileged life as an only child. None of this had ever made sense to her. But she checked her tone.
    “The wolf,” Beth said. “There was a wolf.”
    “You were supposed to be home an hour ago, and we’ve all been out all day on the fences. We could use your help with all the stuff that had to be put off for that. I don’t have time to chase you down.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Your apologies aren’t worth much these days.” He was eyeing the pronghorn.
    “That antelope was injured. I was trying to figure out . . .” She didn’t know how to explain.
    Levi turned away. His truck was likely parked in the narrow flat around the creek’s bend. Beth took a sweeping look around once more for the wolf. For Hastings.
    “Levi, there was a wolf here,” she called out. “I saw it. It attacked the antelope.”
    “The buck looks fine to me.”
    “We should keep an eye out.”
    “You go ahead. I’ve got the rifle.” He turned away and headed back to wherever he’d parked.
    “Seriously, Levi—”
    “Seriously, you might think you can redeem your sins by meditating with the wildlife, but I don’t have time. C’mon now, or I’ll let the wolf hunt you .”
    She took a couple of leaping steps after him, her bloody shirt wadded in her hands, trying to get off the slick bank and onto drier ground. “I’m doing everything I can to get the family off this hook,” she said.
    Levi spun back to her and raised both hands in the air the way their easily exasperated mother was prone to do lately. But the rifle in his hand made him look more like an inflamed insurgent than a cattle