Guarding the Alpha I Tried to Kill

The Anchor smelled of spilled lager and diesel, the way it did every night the trawlers came in, and the jukebox in the corner had been playing the same three songs since nine.

I sat on my stool by the door with my back to the brick and my boots hooked on the rung, counting. Front door behind me. Kitchen door past the bar. Fire exit by the toilets, its push bar wrapped in duct tape because somebody kept propping it open to smoke. Three ways out. There had been three ways out for three years.

Nell came past with a tray of empties balanced on one palm. She was nineteen and quick, and she’d learned in her first week to keep her hip turned away from the booths along the back wall.

“Table six wants another round,” she said.

“Table six can want.”

“They’re Silas’s boys.”

“Then they can want louder.”

She snorted and kept moving, tray riding high over the heads at the bar. I watched her go. I watched table six watch her go too.

Four of them, still in their work jackets, the anchor stitched on every left shoulder. I knew all four by name, and the loudest by the way he sat, legs spread, an arm along the back of the booth like the booth owed him rent. Brandt. He’d been a year behind me in training and twice my weight, and he’d never once put me on the mat.

He hadn’t forgotten it. He looked across the room at me now and raised his glass, slow, so the foam slid down the side.

I raised my soda water back.

The jukebox ran out of songs and started over. Outside, the river slapped against the pilings under the deck, and somebody’s truck idled in the lot with its heater going, the exhaust curling past the window in the orange light from the street lamp. No moon tonight. The sky over the water was black from one bank to the other.

Nell carried their round over at eleven. I was on my feet by the time the glasses hit the table.

Brandt’s hand went where I’d known it would go, around the back of her thigh and up, fingers spreading under the hem of her skirt while his friends laughed. She went rigid with the tray still in her hands. She didn’t drop it. She’d learned that in her first week too.

I crossed the room in eleven steps. Nobody at the bar turned around. They knew the sound of my boots by now, and they knew what usually came after.

“Hand,” I said.

Brandt looked up at me. His eyes were wet from drinking, the whites gone pink, and he smiled the way he used to smile in the yard before a drill, all teeth.

“Look who’s working,” he said. “Doorgirl. You want something, doorgirl?”

“Your hand. Off her.”

“Or what? You’ll write me up?” He squeezed. Nell made a small sound through her nose. “Silas took your knife, Kade. Took your rank. You’re a stool by a door.”

The table laughed. Brandt laughed loudest.

I took his wrist.

Not hard, not at first, just my thumb on the inside where the tendons ran and my fingers wrapped around the back, the way you’d take someone’s pulse. He tried to pull away and found he couldn’t, and in the half second it took him to understand that, his grin went loose at the corners.

Then I turned it.

The bones went with a sound like a green branch underfoot. He screamed, high and thin, and the glass in his other hand went over and lager ran across the table and off the edge into his lap. Nell stepped back out of reach with the tray clutched to her chest. The regulars kept their eyes on their glasses. The jukebox kept playing.

I let go of him.

Brandt folded over his own arm, cradling it, his face gone the color of the dishwater in the sink behind the bar. One of his friends half rose. I looked at him and he sat back down.

“It’ll knit by morning,” I said. “If you set it. Don’t let it heal crooked.”

“You bitch.” He was panting. “You stupid—Silas will—”

“Silas will what?” I picked up the fallen glass and set it upright, out of the spreading puddle. “Take my rank?”

Nobody said anything after that.

They took him out five minutes later, two of them under his arms and the third holding the door, Brandt’s boots dragging through the sawdust by the bar and his broken wrist clutched to his belly like something he’d been handed to carry. The third one stopped on the threshold with the cold coming in around him.

“Silas will hear about this,” he said.

“Then tell him yourself. Save Doyle the call.”

He looked at me for a moment longer, and whatever he’d been going to add, he took it out into the dark with him. The door swung shut. Through the window I watched them load Brandt into the back of a truck the way you’d load a sack of wet sand.

I went back to my stool. Behind the bar, Doyle was already pulling the mop out of the bucket, his face doing nothing at all, the way it had done nothing for three years every time I stood up.

I flexed my right hand on my knee. The knuckles had gone white along the old nicks, the way they always did afterward, and a fine tremor ran through the fingers and was gone.

Three years ago that hand had held a silver knife at a stranger’s throat in the dark. Now it broke drunks’ wrists for a hundred and twenty dollars a night and whatever Doyle forgot to take out of the tip jar. Nell came and stood by my knee for a moment with the empty tray hanging at her side.

“Thanks,” she said, very quietly.

“Go home early. Doyle will cover you.”

She went. I watched her get her coat from behind the bar, and I watched the empty booth at table six, and I watched the front window, where the idling truck in the lot had stopped idling.

Its headlights cut. The door opened.

A boy came across the gravel in the street lamp’s orange light with his hands jammed in the pockets of an anorak too thin for November. Sandy hair, uncombed.

Long arms and long legs that hadn’t finished deciding how they worked together. He stopped on the deck outside the Anchor’s door and looked in through the glass, past the regulars and the jukebox, straight at me.

Theo.

I hadn’t seen my cousin in four months. He’d grown again. He’d have to duck the lintel soon.

He pushed the door open and the night came in with him, river and frost and diesel, and he stood on the mat stamping his sneakers and not quite meeting my eyes. His gaze went past me to table six, to Brandt folded over his arm, to the lager dripping off the bench.

“Hi, Sloane.”

“Theo.” I didn’t get up. “It’s past midnight.”

“I know.”

“Your father know you’re out?”

“He sent me.” He rubbed the scar on his upper lip with his thumb, the little white nick he’d got falling off a dock ladder at eight. He did that when he wanted to be somewhere else. “He wants you at the Mill.”

I looked at him for a moment. Then I looked at the clock over the bar, its second hand ticking past the twelve.

“Tonight.”

“Now. He said now.”

Three years. Three years on this stool, and not one word from my uncle that hadn’t come through somebody else’s mouth. Not when they took my knife. Not when they gave my room in the bunkhouse to a kid out of training. Not when Doyle’s last doorman quit and somebody from the Mill dropped my name on the bar like a coin.

I picked up my jacket from the hook behind me and pulled it on. Leather, cracked at the elbows. The only thing I’d kept from the old life except the scar along my collarbone, and that hadn’t been a choice.

“What does he want?”

Theo’s eyes went to the floor.

“Theo.”

“You haven’t heard?” He said it to his sneakers. “Nobody’s told you?”

“I sit by a door. People tell me to get out of their way.”

“They signed it.” He looked up then, finally. His eyes were gray like mine, the Kade gray, and they were wide and too bright under the lights. “Tonight. Dad and Ezra Vance. They signed the Accord at the county line at sundown. The war’s over.”

The jukebox clicked over between records, and for a moment the whole bar was quiet enough that I could hear the river under the floor.

Eighteen months of border fights. Eighteen months of burned boathouses and slashed tires and men coming home to the Mill with silver in them, and I’d sat on this stool and listened to it all go by in pieces over the bar. Not one of them had asked me to stand up.

“Good,” I said. “So what does he want with me?”

Theo’s thumb went back to the scar on his lip and stayed there.

“Thornvale wanted a price,” he said. “For the treaty. Everybody thought it would be land, or the river rights, or the north dock. Dad offered all that. Vance didn’t want any of it.”

“Then what did he want?”

My cousin swallowed. Behind me, Doyle had stopped mopping.

“You,” Theo said. “He asked for you by name.”