Capture (28 page)

Unfortunately, not everything went so smoothly.
The last day we went to look at mobile homes, Grandma Letty and I got into an argument.

“
Be reasonable, Hayden. You and Tarah need a place of your own so you can have your own bedrooms. Right now, we’ve only got enough bedrooms for the families, and even they are going to have to sleep in bunk beds in order to fit. We need at least one more small house.”

“
For just Tarah and me? No way. That’s a waste of money and land.”

“
Then exactly where do you think you two will sleep? In your truck?”

“
You’re getting huge sectional couches for each house, right? So Tarah and I can sleep on them instead.”

“
In one of the living rooms? Oh please. Be serious. You’ve never even had to share a bedroom with your brother. All your life you’ve lived in a huge house. And don’t forget, you’re not in East Texas anymore. Winters are long and miserable up here, and everyone’s going to be cooped up indoors for months. Just where do you think they’ll be spendng all their waking hours other than the living rooms? You’ll have zero space of your own to get away to, and neither will Tarah. At least let me get you a camper to tow behind that truck of yours for you and her.”

“
Thanks for the offer, but I can’t take it. Spring will come soon enough. When it does, everyone’s going to start building their own homes and free up the bedrooms in the starter houses. Until then, sleeping on a couch will be fine for us.”

She spent another ten minutes trying to convince me, but there was no way she was going to change my mind on this.
Tarah would never agree to having a whole room of her own. And if I took an entire room for myself while asking each family of three or four to share a bedroom and bunkbeds, that would only cement everyone’s idea of me as a spoiled rich kid. While I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying in the village past spring, I definitely knew even a few months of winter would be far too long if everyone treated me like a spoiled brat.

Finally Grandma Letty gave up.
Or so I thought.

She
still got her way in the end. She just had to be a little devious about it. Just like a Shepherd.

Saturday, December 19th

On the day before the advance logging team was scheduled to leave, a honk outside had me yelling out, “FedEx.” While everyone scrambled to hide, I looked out the window. It was a delivery truck, all right. But it wasn’t FedEx, unless they’d switched to hauling strange, plastic-wrapped pallets on flatbed trailers behind big red trucks.

Grandma Letty took off outside without a coat, a bad habit of hers when she got excited.
I grabbed her coat from the entrance closet while pulling mine on, then followed her outside.

She clapped her hands together like a little kid on Christmas morning, ignoring me as I draped her coat over her shoulders.
“Oh, it’s here! I was so worried it wouldn’t get here in time. You have no idea how much extra I had to pay to bribe them to even get it here today. Normally they take weeks to put together, but we were in luck. They just happened to have this model in storage. Apparently somebody ordered it for Christmas then changed their minds.”

I studied the giant plastic wrapped cube on a trailer.
“What is it?”

“
Your future new home, of course!”

I groaned.
“Grandma, we talked about this.”

“
You said I couldn’t get you a trailer or an RV. This is neither. Technically it’s a house
kit
. You did not say I couldn’t get a house kit for you.”

“
That pile of stuff is supposed to become a house?” Hands on my hips, I walked around the cube in disbelief. Not a window or door in sight. Maybe she was pulling a prank here. Shepherds could be weird like that. It was the reason my father had always claimed it was safer to avoid family reunions. Of course, now I knew he was mostly just ashamed of all the Clann descendants in his family tree.

“
It’s a prefabricated tiny home. It includes a RV septic system, a toilet and shower, a ten gallon water tank with a Y shaped feeder system, an on-demand water heater, and detailed instructions. It’s prebuilt then taken down again for shipping, so it’s supposed to take only a hammer, a drill and a few days to put together.”

“What’s the point of prebuilding it then taking it down again for shipping?”

“So you can have the fun of putting it back together again, of course.” She grinned at me.

She had lost her mind.

“It’s going to be perfect for you and Tarah. It’s got loft beds at either end, one over the kitchen and one over the porch area, so you can both have your own little spaces to get away from everyone else as well as each other. And it’s got beautiful arched windows to let in lots of sunlight and a little wood burning stove for plenty of heat. The stove works for cooking too, though I also bought you an energy efficient griddle to run off the solar power system.”

I could tell she might go on for hours.
Taking her short pause for an opening, I jumped in with, “Thanks, Grandma. I appreciate this. I mean, I’ve got no idea how I’ll put the da—I mean, darn thing together. But it was very...creative of you to think of this.”

Actually, t
he longer I thought about it, the more creative a solution it seemed. It wasn’t even a fourth of the size of the mobile homes we’d bought for everyone else. And unlike an RV, it was going to take a heck of a lot of work on my part to get it put back together somehow, which should make everyone else feel a little better about Tarah and me having our own house. I could also imagine Tarah loving having her own tiny house to fix up. She’d always whined as a kid about not having her own playhouse in her backyard. Now she’d have one that went anywhere we did.

The delivery guy hopped out of his truck and held a clipboard for my grandmother to sign.
While she did, I studied the trailer and frowned.

Then again, w
ould Tarah even want to share a house with me? Grandma Letty was assuming a lot there. Whatever this thing was between Tarah and me was still new. We hadn’t even had a real date yet, and here my grandmother was trying to get us to shack up together. Tarah might freak out about that.

Well, maybe we could include a third bed in the living room area and Mike could live with us too.
That might make it more a group thing with less relationship pressure on Tarah. And she could always get a place of her own built in the spring if she wanted.

A loud clanging rang out as the delivery guy unhitched the trailer from his truck then left.

And then I saw the full ingenuity of my grandmother's plan. She was giving me my freedom, ensuring I’d always be able to move on if I wanted and still have a home I could take with me anywhere I wanted to go. But the complication of having to build it would force me to stay put at least long enough to give the village time to get off the ground.

Strategic planning for the long term, with plenty of manipulative incentives thrown in for good measure.
Yep, Grandma Letty was definitely a Shepherd at heart.

CHAPTER 16

Sunday, December 20th

A
nd then it was time for the logging party to leave. I was going to take three men with logging experience to make a clearing for the houses that were due to be delivered to the village’s site in three days. Three days wasn’t a heck of a lot of time for us to make the size of clearing we’d need for four mobile homes. But we needed to get our group out of Grandma Letty’s house as quickly as we could before her neighbors started to ask questions about all her visitors. We couldn’t go on hiding the bus and keeping Bud drugged and away from his family forever.

Tarah looked worried as we said goodbye early that morning.

“Hey, it'll only be for a few days,” I said, rubbing a thumb across her lips, which were currently set in a dark scowl the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were kids and she had to get that tetanus shot after getting hurt on a rusty nail.

“
Yeah, I know.” She sighed.

Smiling, I pulled her in for a hug and a kiss on her forehead.
It was nice to know she’d miss me while I was gone. “We’ll be fine. Just make sure this group doesn’t get too rowdy while I’m gone.”

She laughed.
“Yeah, right. Like your grandma would let us get away with much anyways.”

We kissed goodbye, then the guys and I left.

It was an eight hour drive to Spearfish,
South Dakota, made even longer when we had to drive slower due to icy roads. Just to be on the safe side, I'd gotten rid of the GPS unit, so we followed a paper map instead.

But when we got there and then found our way onto the Scenic Byway in the Black Hills National Forest, oh man, was it amazing, with steep, snowy limestone mountains towering at least a couple thousand feet above us on either side and the narrow Little Spearfish Creek winding alongside the road.
Cabins dotted the mountains’ charcoal gray and tan sides here and there, easier to see now that all the icy hardwood trees were stripped of their leaves. In the spring and summer, those houses were probably hidden fairly well. But in the winter...

We’d have to be careful and try to leave as many evergreens around our village as we could for more year round coverage.

We followed the directions Grandma Letty had written out for us, passing a turnout area for tourists to view the Bridal Veil Falls and later a red brick building on the left side of the road with a large sign labeling it as the Homestead Mining Company’s Hydro Electric Plant built in 1917. Along the peaks’ ridgeline at our left, a row of electric lines on wooden poles indicated a public source of electricity to homeowners even here in the mountains, though I had a hunch maintaining those lines was probably a big enough pain to drive electricity prices sky high for anyone requiring the service. Thankfully we would be completely off the grid and able to avoid that ongoing cost for our village.

About thirteen miles along the bypass, we reached the
Roughlock Falls Road, a lightly graveled and recently plowed sandy road that Grandma Letty’s map said we needed to take. The road went on forever and at first seemed way too public and popular, with the large Spearfish Canyon Lodge at the road’s beginning complete with a big, well maintained parking lot and another parking area for tourists to view the Roughlock Falls and the long metal bridge spanning it. But the farther we went along the winding single lane road, the more civilization seemed to fall away.

Even with the map, we still had a rough time finding the property.
The clue to its location was the wide stone and cement bridge spanning the creek, which at this point was only five or six feet wide and looked to be about two or three feet deep at most. Then the logging started. When Grandma Letty said the area was untouched beyond the bridge, she’d meant it. So we had to start by cutting a road wide enough to let houses through. I really wasn’t happy about this part; the stone bridge plus a road would invite curious drivers down it, even with a No Trespassing sign posted. We’d have to think up a solution for it later, maybe replant some trees and teach several people how to do Mike’s cloaking spell so they could work as a group to hide both the entrance and the houses. Thankfully the snow was hard and crunchy, compacting down under my truck’s tires like a dirt road as we worked, so we didn’t have to fight getting stuck as much as I’d expected.

For all Dad’s faults, at least I could thank him for dragging Damon and me out to join loggers in the woods a couple of times a few years back.
He’d intended the logging lessons to serve as nothing more than a photo op and a commercial shoot to prove he and his boys were real East Texas men in order to gain votes from the local logging industry. But the brief experience had also taught me enough to know how to handle a gas powered chainsaw safely.

And the work felt pretty good after doing nothing but riding around in a truck and planning for days.
The job itself seemed pretty simple...cut a tree, then use chains and the truck to haul the tree off to the side out of the way, and repeat. The cold was crazy, though, burning my nose and throat and every inch of exposed skin until I worked hard enough to get warm. Then I started sweating inside my coat and snow pants and gloves. Still, the frigid air helped me stay sharp and alert. And it was great to be actively doing something useful for a change instead of sitting around talking. I wished we could have used some spells to get it done a lot faster. But all we could think of to use was fire, and the resulting smoke volume would have been way too much for even Mike to hide.

As I worked, I tried to imagine what the village would eventually look like.
Of course, eventually spells of all kinds would probably end up getting used to design the village in the spring, either in the architectural designs of the eventual permanent buildings or in the landscaping or something. Did we have any outcasts who specialized in guiding the growth of plants? Maybe they could get creative, really help make this village look like a proper town for magic users. And did outcasts have to follow regular growing seasons like everyone else, or could we get started right away?

Revved up by the possibilities, I made a mental note to ask our group all these questions and more.
The sooner we could work as a team to design our village, the better. It would give us all something to do while we waited out the long winter.

As my arms fell into a rhythm of planned destruction, I kept my mind busy by imagining ways we could use s
pells to grow it all back even better. My favorite movies, which I’d never told anyone about except Damon because he was a LOTR nut too, was the Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel The Hobbit trilogy. In my opinion, the best parts were where they showed Lothlorien, the elven village that was magically erected along the steep sides of mountains. All the buildings in the movie featured these crazy, highly detailed, symmetrical Celtic-style weavings of tree branches that looked as if they’d been grown that way. Maybe something like that would look good here too.

We worked past dark, using the truck’s headlights to light our path.
I think we all would have stopped by about one or two in the morning for sleep if we’d been working as individuals. But something about working as a team helped us push on past the exhaustion. Or maybe it was the thought of all those people counting on us that kept us going. We’d brought bottles of soda, six five-gallon gas cans, oil and sharpening tools for the saws, which also helped.

Around sunrise, we got our second or third wind, the growing daylight shining through the forest spurring us on.
It was a beautiful area, and exciting to think that soon it would be our new home.

But by
nine a.m., we were running out of gas and energy, even as determined as we were.

“
Hey, guys,” I yelled over the whining of the saws.

One by one, they shut off the machines.

“How about we stop for awhile, grab a meal and some more gas and oil?”

Wearily, they brought the chainsaws back to the truck and I unhooked the chain from the back hitch.
I tried not to cringe as we piled into the cab, our heavy boots knocking off clumps of muddy snow into the floorboards. Mentally I promised my truck a full bath inside and out someday soon as I drove us back into Spearfish.

We opted to eat at the local Perkins restaurant, where we plowed through what my mother would have called an unholy amount of cholesterol and pork fat with good sized dollops of ketchup and Tabasco sauce on the side.
Then we had to chug more than a few pots of coffee to counter the food as all the blood rushed to our guts and turned our visions blurry.

To say we were pretty da
ng tired was an understatement.

The guys were all for taking a few packs of beer back with us to ease the pain of our overworked muscles.
But I’d met some loggers with missing toes and fingers as a result of combining high speed cutting tools and alcohol. Not a good combination. Besides, buying alcohol might require one of us to show an ID. Also not a good idea for people on the run from the law. So we settled for ibuprofen, packs of cola and bags of gas station sandwiches for later. Then we headed back to the woods.

Our woods.

By that night, I was referring to them as “that God-awful group of trees,” with more than a few curse words thrown in there. My arms ached from lugging around a sixty-pound chainsaw and fighting tree after tree. My back ached like an old man’s, popping and creaking every time I moved, especially when I had to bend over to deal with the chains to drag the felled trees out of the way.

Finally, I’d had enough, and a glance around told me the others had too.
I let out a loud whistle and made a slashing motion at my neck to signal it was break time. Then we all trudged back to the truck.

We sat on the tailgate, cooling off while we ate in silence and chugged down the caffeine as quickly as we could.
But my body didn’t care how much caffeine I drank. I’d hit the point where it had no effect on me whatsoever.

I swore, scrubbing at my eyes.
“All right. I know we all want to get this done. And I know a whole lot of people are counting on us. But if we don’t snag a few Z’s, somebody’s gonna end up cutting off something vital. And that ain’t gonna help anybody.” Geez, I was so tired I sounded drunk. I was actually slurring my words.

“
I can keep—” One of the men began.

“
Shut up, Harvey,” someone else said. “The kid’s right. Let’s rest a few hours.”

Harvey
grumbled but climbed into the truck with the rest of us. I cranked the engine, set the timer on my watch for four hours from now, and we all promptly commenced to sawing a different kind of log.

Beeping, high pitched, quick, and extremely annoying, dragged me out of a deep and dreamless sleep.
I reached out for my bedside alarm but found nothing but air. Somebody must have moved my clock. Probably Mom in an attempt to help me be on time for school for a change.

“
Aw, come on, Ma. Ten more minutes,” I begged, reaching for my pillow so I could use it to drown out the noise.

No pillow, no Mom arguing back.
Only male laughter. What the...?

I cracked one eye open then sat bolt upright as I realized I was in my truck a few thousand miles away from my old bedroom.
With a bunch of older men who were snickering at me.

Scowling, I shut off the alarm on my watch, opened the driver side door and had to roll out of the cab.
Holy crap, my whole dang body hurt!

Apparently I wasn’t the only one in pain as the other three doors opened and more groans and cussing filled the air.

“Aw, just ten more minutes, Mom,” Harvey whined then snickered again.

“
Yeah, yeah,” I said with a grin then called him a name my mother would have smacked me on the back of my head for saying. My hands hurt too much to flip him off instead.

Laughing,
Harvey and the others walked around to the front end of the truck to survey the woods ahead.

“
How much further, Dad?” one of the others joked in a whiny, little kid voice.

Smiling, the oldest of our group scanned the area then said,
“Probably another six or eight hours. If we work fast. And we’ll still have to squeeze the houses in pretty tight.”

“
That could be a good thing,” I said, trying to picture four mobile homes packed into this area. “We can face their entrances in towards each other. It’ll add more shelter from the wind if we keep the outer perimeter of trees fairly close to the houses. And it’ll mean less area to have to hide with a cloaking effect, too.”

Grunts, either of agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell which and was frankly too tired to care either way.

“All right, let’s get her done,” I sighed, reaching for the chainsaw I’d recently come to view more as a torture device.

We had to stop again a few hours later for more gas and oil and to resharpen the saws.
None of us was very hungry; all we really wanted was sleep. So we settled for more gas station sandwiches with a healthy side of ibuprofen and sodas. Then we were back at it. I had a feeling if the group had arrived right then, we might have all looked crazy to them, covered in sweat, sawdust, oil and gas fumes, our hair standing on end, noses steadily dripping from the cold, our eyes gritty and too round as we pushed ourselves way past our bodies’ natural limits.