TWENTY-TWO
A BABY, SHE SAID. A baby to love. The idea was quaint in the face of what the child meant, and the way it always ended.
Gideon saw her not as she was, standing on the packed soil in the wan late-September morning light, but in the swirling blizzard that would claim them both if he failed to act. She was beautiful, she seemed to believe what she was saying, but she didn’t know what he knew. She couldn’t. He shivered as the image from his nightly terror appeared before him now, the baby’s arm outstretched in a deadly, gleaming reach.
Hope in the human creature was risky and left you alone eventually; as a species, they were fallible. Everyone he loved had failed him. His mother was the first, vanishing as he slept in his crib. What mother would abandon a child? He’d stared at h
