Venture Unleashed (The Venture Books) by R.H. Russell Page B

his sweater, pulled it over his head, opened the door of the one-room cabin, then tiptoed down the creaky wooden steps until his feet met the sand.  
    The foaming and crashing of the surf and the salty ocean mist, stirred up by a restless wind, helped to whip up the storm within him. He’d missed the All Richland Youth Championship the last two years because it conflicted with Dasher’s schedule, but he would be participating in his first one this year, in nearby Bayside three weeks from now. He’d been looking forward to his stay here, thinking it would be nice to be back near the sea, back among pleasant memories of his early childhood, but instead he was plagued each night by one strange dream after another. This wasn’t the first time he’d crept out from their rented cabin on the beach, into the late summer night, among the sand and piles of kelp, the moonlight bouncing off the glossy black deep onto his face.
    He ran toward the water, scooped up handfuls of wet sand, and hurled them into the tide. He shouted all sorts of things in his head, and one word made its way to his voice and became an audible cry.
    “Why? Why?”
    “Champ!” Dasher’s familiar voice, a couple hundred yards away, announced his presence before Venture could embarrass himself any further.
    Venture sank down on a damp piece of driftwood, a big gray log, and rubbed his sandy hands on it as he waited for his friend to reach him.
    Anger. That’s what kept eating at him here. Anger and loss and guilt he thought he’d put behind him years ago.
    Dasher sat down beside him. “You okay?”
    Venture glanced at him, then down at the sand.
    “Who were you calling out to?” Dasher asked him, in such an interested way that Venture lowered his hands, looked up at him, and answered.
    “God.”
    Dasher gave a startled blink, then looked intently out over the vast water. “Do you think he’s listening?”
    “My mother always said he was with me.” Venture pushed a piece of torn black-green kelp, entangled with the white, hollow outsides of little crabs, away with his bare toe.
    “Do you think that’s true?”
    “I’m not sure.” He picked the stubborn grains of sand out of the peeling calluses on his palms. “He listens, though, I think.”  
    The cool wind came over the water and licked at his wet feet and hands, making them ache in the silence that followed.
    “You were lucky, to have a mother like that. I’m sorry you didn’t have her longer.”
    Venture nodded, though his mother had always said there was no such thing as luck either.
    He pointed across the water, to the north, where they could barely make out the beginning of a peninsula jutting out. “There’s Calm Harbor, where I was born. Where my parents were born. We didn’t have any land to speak of, just a little cabin near the water, a lot like this one.” He gestured with his head back toward the cabin. “My grandparents were bonded servants, on both sides. But my parents weren’t, once they were of age to choose. My father worked as a valet at the resort Grant Fieldstone owns there.”
    “Where’s your father now?” Dasher said, barely above a whisper.
    “Earnest never told you?”
    “I never asked. You don’t have to tell me.”
    “He didn’t leave us or anything like that.” Venture stared at the moonlit water. “He died.”
    Venture had lost more than his father the night he died. He’d lost his freedom. His father had already earned enough money to get Justice started as an apprentice to the local printer, but after his death, Venture’s mother had made the agonizing choice to have herself and Venture bonded to Grant Fieldstone.
    “I’m sorry, Champ. It reminds you of him, being here?”
    Venture looked at his hands, flexing his fingers. “A lot of things remind me of him.”
    “Champ, what is it?”
    “He used to fight,” Venture said slowly. “For extra money.”
    “Your father was a fighter?”
    “Not the way you’re thinking. It started