Darci's Pride

“Don’t talk,” she said as one of the paramedics—Pete Rutherford, he thought—kneeled in front of him and started to check him over.

“I have everything under control,” she announced, tears over, and magically, with the same efficiency she did everything, she produced the laminated checklist they’d designed for emergencies. “I’ve called your parents,” she said as old Windbag materialized at his feet, panting frantically. “And Russ.” She glanced toward the shadows milling nervously in the far pasture. “He’s already here.”

Russ Chaplain was their head veterinarian.

“Have we…” Tyler coughed as Peggy shot him a look of reprimand. “The horses,” he got out with a hand to the dog’s back. “Have we lost—”

“Too soon to tell.” That was Daniel. With the whites of his eyes glowing against a face covered in ash and maybe a smear of blood, he crouched in front of Tyler. Andrew and Shane flanked him. Daniel started to speak, but when he coughed instead, Shane took over.

“As best as we can tell, all barns are empty,” Tyler’s brother said, and relief rushed in like oxygen. “We’ve evacuated Barn C as a precaution.” Shane was not a horseman, never had been. He’d chosen the family’s other business, a vineyard elsewhere in the Valley. But in that moment, with the hat pulled low over his head and the ferocity in his eyes, he looked as though he lived and breathed the land every bit as much as Tyler did. “The horses are in the pasture. They’re secure. We’re trying to count them, but…”

The words trailed off, didn’t need to be said.

Not all animals were accounted for.

“Light…ning?” He could still see the animal frantically pawing the back of his stall.

God, even over the shouting and the sirens, the fire and the water, he could still hear him….

His brother and Daniel exchanged a tense look. “Russ is with him,” Shane said. “He took in a lot of smoke.”

Tyler’s eyes burned. Lightning Chaser was a fighter, Tyler knew that. If any horse could survive—

Survive. That was the best they could hope for. For Lightning Chaser to survive.

But already Tyler knew his champion Thoroughbred, the big strong bay colt who loved nothing more than to run, would never race again.

“The brigade is wetting down the surrounding area as a precaution,” Shane explained, but the words barely registered. Tyler stared dry-eyed at the gnarled flames devouring two of his barns, and felt the sickness churn in his gut. Just that afternoon—

He could still see young Heidi sitting in the shade of a now scorched gum tree, with an apple in her hand.

Acutely aware of his brother and cousin, he straightened his shoulders and stood, noticed the young groom standing with the other two dogs. The kid was covered in smoke, had rips in his baggy, long-sleeved plaid shirt and something that looked like blood on the side of his face. But his eyes…it was his eyes that got Tyler, the horrified, haunted glow of shock.

No one would walk away from this unscathed.

“Preston,” said a quiet, intense voice over the wail of the fire engines. Tyler turned, saw Detective Sergeant Dylan Hastings of the Pepper Flats station striding toward him, not in his normal attire of jeans and a button-down, but the protective gear of a volunteer firefighter.And in that instant the voice clicked and Tyler realized who had followed him to Lightning Chaser’s stall and pressed the breathing apparatus to his face. “Pete here tells me you’re going to be okay.”

Tyler stuck out his hand. “Thanks to…” he started, but another spasm stole his words. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Thanks to you, mate.”

Hastings’s eyes were hard, flat. “Just doing my job.”

That’s all he ever said. Tyler had been teaching young Heidi the ins and outs of riding for almost a year, but her father still treated Tyler with a formality typically reserved for strangers.

Heidi.

He glanced toward the remains of Barn A. A smaller building, the fire there had already been put out. “A-Anthem?”

Hastings shook his head. “Don’t know yet,” he said grimly, as Tyler again noticed the groom in the bush hat hovering nearby. “I’m needed back over there, but before morning we’ll need a full accounting of what happened here tonight.”

A rough sound broke from Tyler’s throat. He turned toward the inferno that had once housed his Thoroughbreds, his entire stable of two- and three-year-olds, surrounded now by the fire brigade. Hoses shot water against flames that didn’t seem to give a bloody damn.

“The note,” Tyler muttered, and Dylan’s eyes met his. The two had talked earlier in the day, when Tyler had called to report the threat against Lightning Chaser. “GodAlmighty.”

Dawn brought an otherworldly glow to the eastern horizon.

“We’re lucky,” David Preston insisted. He had been the one who had first walked the rolling hills of the northern Hunter Valley that had become Lochlain, who’d struck out from America almost forty years before, who’d used his inheritance to found the dynasty denied to him in America.

He and Tyler’s mother had arrived from Sydney just as the main fire had been brought under control, less than two hours after Peggy had called them. The horror of what he’d found burned in his hooded, dark green eyes.

“That’s what we have to focus on,” he insisted, standing with his two sons outside the corral where the horses milled. They were quieter now that the strobe light had been turned off and the bullhorn had fallen silent.

Quieter after the fire went dark, and the remains of the stables had fallen.

“We can rebuild,” David said in the same strong, stoic voice Tyler remembered from his childhood, when Tyler had found his father kneeling in the soft hazy light of sunrise, next to a mare and a foal who’d both been lost in childbirth.

It was the same voice David had used six years before, when Tyler had gotten caught with his pants down, literally, and almost lost Lochlain.

Tyler looked at him now, at his father, strong and robust even in his late fifties, at the lines carved into his weathered, rancher’s face, the tight lines of his mouth and the devastation he couldn’t quite hide, and quietly vowed to make sure David Preston never had to see Lochlain in ruin again.

“You’re alive,” father said to son, and Tyler felt his chest tighten. He should say something. He knew that. But that would mean letting go of the tight rope he’d been holding since staggering from the barn with Lightning Chaser. And once he let go…

“No one was seriously hurt,” David went on. Cuts and bruises, a groom with a broken wrist, another—the new handyman Reynard, who’d fought to control the panicked horse after a beam had fallen—diagnosed with fractured ribs. “That’s what we have to focus on.”

But the same could not be said of the horses. Three had yet to be found. Two had been put down shortly before sunrise, one due to a shattered right front femur, the second to intense smoke inhalation. The others…

“Lightning will recover,” David Preston said, tapping into his son’s thoughts just as he always did.

“You saved his life,” Shane added, but the trace of hero worship in his younger brother’s voice, something Tyler had not heard since they were kids, scraped.

He glanced from the smoldering remains, where the fire brigade still battled hot spots, toward the horses on the other side of the soot-smeared white fence: the big bays and chestnuts; the shiny black two-year-old who’d run his first race only the week before; the Appaloosa who started each race like a streak; and the little filly who’d never even gotten a chance to show her stuff. Her maiden race was still two weeks away.

“They’re goddamn bloody innocent,” he finally said, and even now, hours after he’d emerged for the last time from the burning barn and sucked in fresh oxygen, each word seared against his throat. “They didn’t deserve this.”

But his father misunderstood. “Son,” David said, and with the quiet word, put a hand to Tyler’s shoulder. “Don’t.”

Tyler’s throat tightened. He turned to meet his father’s gaze, felt something hot and salty sting his.

“This is not your fault,” David insisted. “You did everything right here. You don’t store hay in the horse barns. Smoking isn’t allowed. The wiring is new…hell, Peggy says it passed inspection just two months ago. There’s no bloody way—”

Tyler’s eyes must have flashed. He felt the streak of fury, saw the confused look that passed between his father and his brother.

“Someone did this,” Tyler said, pulling the crumpled note from his pocket and pressing it into his father’s hands. “Someone wanted to hurt him.” Hurt Lightning Chaser. To punish him. Punish them all. “Because of the Queensland,” he gritted out. Because More Than All That had been disqualified, and Lightning had taken home the purse.

Shane moved beside his father, and together they stared down at the thick words scrawled against the picture of Lightning Chaser in full, magnificent stride.

It was a long moment before they looked up. “You think it was arson,” David said.

The words were hard, incredulous, and Tyler felt his jaw tighten in response. He glanced back toward the horses, automatically searching for young Heidi’s horse, Anthem. He’d yet to account for the filly. “I know it was.”