The Renegades: Nick by Genell Dellin Page A

his horses. He turned away from the glimpse of her from over his shoulder, her bright hair gleaming, her face so resolute that she looked curiously wise. Well, she had better be, damn it, or these people would die because she had brought the Goingsnake to lead them.
    He slammed his mind against her again and sat his horse, feeling the wind. The flames were visible now on the horizon, leaning a little toward the west. They didn’t look to be sweeping straight to the north, where they could get his place and Callie’s.
    But they could change direction in a heartbeat. They could blow straight east in the next minute and consume their bodies, and their claims wouldn’t matter, then.
    “We’ve got three barrels of water here,” Mr. Peck shouted through the hubbub.
    “Wet the sacks and blankets,” Nick shouted back.
    He sent Callie a glance meaning that she should oversee that. She replied with a straight look and a short, solemn nod that told him she would, then set to the task.
    Nick swept his gaze around at the waiting settlers.
    “As the women wet the blankets, you men go pick one up.”
    And then come with me. We’ve got to set a backfire, and now
.
    The words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He cleared his throat, but no voice would sound. What if the backfire turned on them?
    Yet they had no other weapon. And three barrels of water was no more than a drop in the ocean.
    His hands and feet wouldn’t move. The Shapeshifter danced restlessly beneath him, throwing up his head to whinny his protest at the smell of smoke, fighting his instinct to run from fire while he waited for direction from his rider.
    Yet Nick sat there with the reins frozen in his fingers and the sweat running down his spine. The boy who had come to fetch him couldn’t be more than ten years old, yet he was lining up with the men for a wet towsackto fight the fire. What if he didn’t live through it?
    Everyone was doing exactly as he had said, obeying his instructions to the letter, each man looking to him as he picked up a wet blanket, waiting for the next words out of Nick’s mouth as if he were Moses on the Mount. He had to do something, or sit here and let them all burn to ashes for sure.
    Or do something wrong and cause them all to burn to ashes.
    His mind’s eye flashed to two sixteen-year-old boys’ bodies on the ground, their handsome young faces already buried in the soft green grass of the Nation, their backs dotted with trickles of blood flowing from the bulletholes. He could hear the sudden, deadly cracks of the shots.
    He’d looked to the screen of trees where the assassins were hiding in ambush, knowing even as he did so that he’d never see their faces, never be sure of their names. They would not face justice; they would get away with taking two young lives for no other reason than that the boys rode with him.
    Or that he’d been the target and they’d missed him.
    Either way, he was helpless to save them, helpless to do anything that would make a dime’s worth of difference.
    Something touched his leg. He jumped andlooked down to see Callie standing at his stirrup, her green eyes wide and deep.
    “The wind’s shifting to come out of the east, don’t you think?” she said.
    Still frozen, he sat and looked down at her.
    Her skin had gone so pale that the freckles stood out across her nose, but not from fear. Her eyes blazed with hope and trust. In him.
    “Nick, you can do this,” she said. “I’m sorry that you must, but you can.”
    She believed it with all her heart.
    He might as well believe it, too. He couldn’t very well turn and ride away, could he?
    Wetting his finger, he lifted it into the wind.
    “Pray it’ll hold,” he managed to say.
    Then he tore his gaze from hers and swung around in the saddle. He looked out across the ragged bunch of neighbors he had never wanted, held his hand high, and shouted, “We’re setting a backfire! Men, follow my lead. Boys, form a line behind them. Women, keep every