The Blood of the Land by Angela Korra'ti Page A

she’d ever seen and it would rip her arm clean off her shoulder if she didn’t follow. Caleb meant to go ahead of her but fell behind, not only for the need to watch for pursuers, but also for the fright she could hear in his labored breathing. Fright, too, rang out in the calls of the men ahead of them in the darkness.
    â€œWhat was that?”
    â€œI don’t like it, I’m telling you I don’t like it! This whole damn wood’s haunted!”
    â€œHaunted my great-aunt Matilda! Lord God Almighty, if you lot don’t fall in I’ll—”
    A shot rang out then, and someone howled in surprise and pain. Dorcas and Caleb froze in their tracks, seizing each other by the shoulders, but no bullet had come anywhere near them. Whoever the round had struck was somewhere far ahead of them in the trees, past the barn where she felt the Power lying in wait.
    â€œFall back to the house!” called the last voice that had shouted, harsh with the crispness of command. “Damn all your eyes, I said fall back!”
    The voices and the tramping of feet faded then into the distant trees. Dorcas hauled in five gasping breaths, and then pulled hard at Caleb. “Come on! The way’s clear!”
    â€œNeed those provisions if nothing else,” he muttered, all the breath he spared as they bolted together towards their goal. He didn’t otherwise argue and she loved him for it. If that thought was enough to keep him moving while the tug of the Power propelled her, she’d accept it and be glad.
    But when they reached the barn door they found a trail of something dark staining the ground. Dorcas could barely see it in the gloom, yet needed neither sight nor the metallic tang in her nostrils to tell her it was blood. The sudden scream through her nerves told her all she needed to know.
    And when Caleb with trembling hands hauled open the barn door, they found the white man lying wounded inside. Dorcas sensed him even before they darted into the barn; though he lay unmoving, Power roiled around him so thickly that she could almost see and hear it. It had a voice of its own, and that voice keened of loss and agony. Behind her Caleb groaned, high and thin with fear. So did she. With this kind of Power awake in the air, it wasn’t any wonder the men they’d heard thought the woods were haunted. She wasn’t entirely certain they were wrong.
    Yet her own Power would not be denied, and it pulled her hands to the slack body lying on the rough dirt floor. She heard Caleb scrabbling in his pockets for the matches he’d carried off during their escape, but by the time he had one lit she didn’t need it. Her Power illumined the man she began to heal.
    He wore a laborer’s simple garb, and if the magic hadn’t been on her that might have drawn her anyway—yet with the magic on her, Dorcas couldn’t spare the strength to pay it any mind. As it was she noticed his disheveled brown hair and the sideburns that framed his thin face only because the shine from her hands, white as moonlight, rose up to show them to her. But they weren’t important, not when a bullet in his shoulder shrieked against flesh and bone. Her magic screamed back, but before she could let it have its way, that bullet had to come out. It was a mercy that the man was unconscious, Dorcas thought grimly. He wouldn’t be aware of what she was about to do.
    Or would he? As she slapped a hand down upon his damaged flesh his eyes flew open, unveiling a near-black gaze gone vacant with something beyond pain. He writhed under Dorcas’ touch, and with a strength a wounded man should not have possessed, he seized her hand and cried, “I walk in the valley of the shadow of death!”
    She knew the Christian prayer, knew which words came before and which behind, yet Dorcas couldn’t bring herself to utter them now. There was no comfort in the rod or the staff, not when they came down upon the