1

  Something Beautiful

  “McKlellan!” yelled a cheerful young woman with a strong Southern twang.

  The mechanic in question pushed himself out from under an 80s model Hilux and to his feet with an exaggerated groan. Wiping oily hands on the rag hanging out of his back pocket, he turned to face the summons.

  “I’ve been hollerin’ your name the past five minutes, Owen!” exclaimed the honey blonde standing in the open doorway of the garage, arms crossed very attractively. Her face was lit up with humorous indignation.

  “I can’t hear anything in here,” grinned Owen sheepishly, a crooked grin flashing that was reserved almost exclusively for his wife of two years.

  “Not when you’re waist deep in one of your follies, anyhow,” she laughed.

  “What do you need, Mandy?” Owen chuckled with good humoured indignation.

  “You can tell me how much you paid for this, for starters!” Mandy replied drily, pointing loftily to the long package at her feet.

  “Good grief, woman, how did you even lift that?” asked Owen, aghast.

  “What is it?” she asked, genuine curiosity replacing the teasing censure.

  “My suspension parts … some of them, anyway. Are they around the front?”

  “Sure thing! But those can wait. Now … I want you to come inside and have some lunch.”

  “You sure know how to twist a man’s arm,” Owen laughed, moving to the garage bench and scooping out some of the grainy soap he used to rid himself of oil stains. Mostly. Some of the time.

  “You sure know how to leave a girl waiting,” was Mandy’s tart reply before she flounced off, her sky-blue dress swirling about her knees. It was freckled with daisies.

  Owen contented himself with a few moments leaning against the ute he had been crawling about underneath and simply appreciated the mental image of Mandy standing in the garage door with her flirtatiously aggressive personality radiating from both her expression and posture.

  That dress was okay, too …

  “Up and at ‘em,” Owen chuckled to himself, pushing away from the vehicle and strolling out the door. He paused to nudge the set of leaf springs further into the garage with his foot and then closed it up behind him. “Gotta give the other woman some attention too,” he explained to the annoyed-looking Hilux within. It did not seem impressed with his excuses.

  He found Mandy in the kitchen, industriously clattering about as she put away the dishes. The noise seemed unnecessary to him, and frequently came close to driving him insane, but he told himself that if he wasn’t going to do it, he needed to shut up and be grateful that she did the onerous chore.

  “You bring a turkey?” she laughed. “It’s almost Thanksgiving!”

  Owen rolled his eyes. “It’s been fifteen seconds,” he retorted good naturedly. “Wait a second … what’s that?”

  Mandy’s demeanour changed immediately.

  “Your lunch,” she said softly. “Tell me if it’s terrible … I know you miss home. I just wanted to try somethin’ special. You know?”

  Owen sat down at the breakfast bar, as entranced as he was amused by how something so mundane could have this effect on him. It was a meat pie, topped with mashed potato, and surrounded by roast pumpkin and boiled veggies.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this about a pie, but … this looks amazing, Mandy. Thank you.”

  “You haven’t tasted it yet!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Owen shrugged. “I kind of just want to wrap it up and keep it with my model car collection in the garage for all time.”

  “Don’t be silly, I did my best!”

  “You succeeded,” he smiled sincerely. “I’m sorry. It is seriously …”

  “Stop your yappin’ and eat it!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Owen laughed, and got stuck in.

  Mandy watched him like a hawk the entire time, as if searching for any sign of her own shortcomings. She didn’t seem to find any evidence of a fault, which made her only look more suspicious of his contented sighs.

  “Well?” she asked almost desperately as he finished the last bite.

  “Bloody beautiful,” he grinned.

  “Don’t say that, you savage!” she exclaimed. She smiled shyly. “You mean it?”

  “I do,” Owen nodded firmly. “I feel like you could make whatever you wanted sometimes.”

  “Oh, stop it,” laughed Mandy. She smiled brightly. “I’m glad you liked it,” she said primly. “Maybe, if you’re a very good hubby, I’ll make it again one day.”

  Owen pushed his chair back and got to his feet before looming over his wife.

  “You trying to intimidate me, Dundee?” she asked playfully, taking hold of his shirt in her hands.

  “That’s a lost cause. I know better than to try to put the fear into a honey badger,” Owen chuckled.

  “You just like me looking up at you, don’t you?”

  “I just like … you.”

  “Ugh, gross,” Mandy groaned, trying to push herself away.

  “C’mere,” Owen laughed.

  “I’m busy! I have things to do! Someone’s gotta keep this house standing!”

  Owen released her with his trademark crooked grin. “Thanks for lunch,” he said seriously.

  “You’re most welcome,” smiled Mandy over her shoulder. “Now, I have a list,” she went on, back to her business-like manner. “Can you head into town?”

  Owen laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  He took his other ute; the one that still had suspension and wheels. Generally, he didn’t like to make the forty-minute trip into Billings on the weekend. There was enough that needed doing around the property without wasting two hours of the day on errands he could have done after work during the week. But he loved the fierce woman who had attached herself to him almost before he even knew what was going on. Owen had come to a place of peaceful resignation regarding the likelihood of any future romances when she waltzed into his life and – for reasons still unknown to either of them – decided that she liked him and therefore they were now ‘a thing’.

  I always thought the Lord worked in mysterious ways, he thought with some humour. That really took the biscuit, but.

  He turned the considerably newer Hilux into the supermarket’s parking lot and found a nice, shady, spot in which to leave his vehicle in the afternoon’s summer sun. Dismounting from his vehicle, he stretched out his back and gave a happy little groan. Mandy accused him of making ‘old man’ sounds, but in Owen’s opinion, they were simply noises of inner contentment. Then again, his twenty-five years were basically old man territory in Mandy’s eyes, so perhaps it was all the same to her.

  “Bless her feisty heart,” Owen mumbled humorously to himself.

  He followed the list given to him to the letter, as he always did, and did his duty by using his initiative to buy his lady chocolates as well – the kind that were generally safe from his own sweet tooth. Owen still didn’t understand why she liked the cheap chocolates that she did, but it was yet another thing that he had quietly filed away in the “Life’s Many Mysteries” category and felt no need to understand this side of Eternity.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Some people just like the things they like, I guess, he shrugged to himself. He benevolently threw another block of cheap chocolate into the shopping trolley and headed at his usual leisurely pace for the checkouts.

  Owen wasn’t a big man by any stretch of the imagination, but he did note that he was looking other men in the eye more often than not. He both jokingly and objectively called himself an ‘everyman’. He was solid, though, with the arms of someone who grappled with heavy machinery daily, and the body of someone who had to use their core to do much of the lifting and twisting while lying in a cramped space. His angular jaw – he claimed – was by far his best feature, although Mandy asserted that he had finer assets, not including the roguish smile he reserved for her. But his hair was an unremarkably dirty shade of brown, with his eyes being a similarly boring hazel. For most of his life, he had called his ‘everyman’ nature his woman filter, with Mandy being one of the few to poke further, and the only one to like what she found there.

  And I’ve got resting axe-murderer face, so that doesn’t help, he thought drily.

  The supermarket and hardware staff knew him well enough by now and were always friendly on sight. Some of the other customers looked surprised at the cheery greetings he got, and even more surprised when a lopsided grin cracked his mannish features.

  “Good afternoon, Owen,” sang out one of the cashier girls, proceeding to open a lane just for him. He got some dirty looks but decided he would rather irk strangers than embarrass the girl whose car he had pulled out of a ditch and was only trying to show gratitude.

  “Appreciate it, Jess,” he smiled wearily. “How’s the old girl?”

  “Oh,” she said, abashed, “I took her in like you said I should. They said the only damage was cosmetic. Only injured my pride!”

  “Good to hear,” Owen chuckled, beginning to unload the trolley. “Glad I could help.”

  “How’s Mandy?”

  “Very Mandy,” he snorted. “Keeping me alive and our house in one piece all at once.”

  “She’s so lovely,” said Jess wistfully, as if she wanted to be just like her one day.

  “Lovely and fierce,” Owen affirmed.

  Jess finished bagging the goods and Owen loaded them back into the trolley.

  “Hit me,” he grimaced, fishing for his wallet.

  Jess gave him a rueful figure in the hundreds, and Owen sighed.

  “Oh well. I did buy myself more car parts …”

  Jess gave her guileless farewell and Owen gave his more reserved one before heading back out into Montana’s mid-afternoon sun. The errand wasn’t a bad one, as errands went. Owen could think of worse ways to spend an afternoon than a leisurely stroll around an air-conditioned supermarket bookended by relaxing country drives. He had been tempted to stop in at the hardware store and peruse the socket and ratchet section – just in case there was some variation he could imagine a use for in the future that he did not have already.

  Eh. Another time. Maybe on Monday after work.

  There were a couple of suits across the road, studying an enlarged map of the area as if looking for something in particular. Owen briefly considered offering his assistance, but he also didn’t like their look. They wore the arrogance of the self-righteous like an extra outfit over their perfectly pressed coats.

  Exactly the kinds of people I don’t like to get mixed up with, he thought grimly. He flicked the ignition on and pulled the Hilux out of its spot, ready to head for home. Maybe he would have time to at least get the front shocks done before dinner. Buoyed by that positive thinking, Owen trundled out of town before gunning it down the open highway, and settling into the forty-minute trip home.

  The Hilux bounced onto the dirt track that served as the McKlellan driveway and another couple of minutes passed before Owen pulled up outside the rundown farmhouse that he and Mandy had bought knowing full well how much work it would need. And they had done a lot to improve it so far, but there was always more to do.

  Anyhow … it doesn’t leak, and it keeps out the hot and the cold well enough. Not sure what else we really need.

  Once upon a time, Owen would have taken literal pains to get all the groceries inside in one trip but living in the country had done a lot to slow him down. Today he allowed himself an extravagant three trips, although Mandy’s long list justified it. With a groan, Owen deposited the goods on the kitchen bench and was not at all surprised when Mandy found the chocolate in an instant and promptly ferreted it away into her snack nook.

  “You’re welcome,” he laughed.

  “Thank you for my treats!” she announced obligingly.

  Dinner was coupled with Mandy’s usual external processing of the day’s events, and Owen enjoyed listening to her talk. Occasionally he got caught out when she expected an answer to something, but generally she just wanted to vent. They finished up, made a team effort of loading the dishwasher, and retired to the couch.

  “What are you thinking about?” Mandy pried after more than her fair share of sitting in a companiable silence.

  Owen smiled secretively to himself but wasn’t long in coming clean.

  “You’re one hell of a fine woman, Mandy,” he said in his matter-of-fact way.

  She smiled innocently back at him, her wide, blue, eyes a direct window into her fiercely loving soul. Then her eyes narrowed.

  “But did you like dinner?”

  “Good grief, woman, yes!” he protested with a laugh. Owen caught his wife in his arms and hauled her bodily up onto his lap. She snuggled there possessively for a long moment, as protective of him as she was of the rest of their property.

  “Good,” she mumbled into his chest.

  There was a gentle, if firm, knock at the door, and Owen looked up with an annoyed little noise. Then he sighed.

  “Sounds like old man Kleijn,” he chuckled. “I’d better see what he wants.”

  “Don’t be long, y’hear?” Mandy commanded imperiously as she slid off him and back onto the couch.

  “No, ma’am,” Owen grinned.

  The old man who greeted him at the door owned the vastly larger property on the other side of the highway, and generally restricted his visits to chat about the weather and the current state of the world to the daylight hours. Every now and then, however, he would bring the odd victim of a vehicle mishap over. While mechanically minded himself, Kleijn did not have the physical strength he once had.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kleijn,” nodded Owen, and his quick eyes immediately noted the two suits behind the old man, standing on the border of the porch light’s ability to illuminate the darkness. They were the same ones he had seen in town, he thought. “Who’re your friends?”

  “Evenin’,” wheezed Kleijn. “Their big, fancy, taxpayer-funded, gas-guzzler broke down outside my place … I hate to intrude on your evening, kid, I really do. But these folks are in a tight spot.”

  “Say no more,” Owen reassured him, his smile only for the old man. The suits looked about as entitled to his help as they had seemed when bickering over the map in town. “Hun?” he called back into the house.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “I gotta help some stranded folk. I’ll try not to be too long.”

  “Okay,” Mandy called back, hiding her disappointment well.

  Kleijn coughed and spluttered, and Owen turned to check on his elderly neighbour. He froze at the sight of blood speckling Kleijn’s white beard, as if he had coughed it up. The old man looked bewildered himself, and then staggered violently. Owen bore Kleijn to the ground, managing to get his arms around him before he could fall. He looked up to call for help, only to see that one of the suits was suddenly standing directly behind where Kleijn had been, a long, blood-streaked, blade in his right hand. There was a cold indifference in the suited man’s dark eyes.

  “What …,” croaked Kleijn, his life ebbing away as he lay in Owen’s arms.

  An instinctive insistence within him that he and his wife were in danger drove Owen to close various emotional doors and settle into a cold, driven, desire to protect and overcome. He didn’t take his eyes off the suits as he laid Kleijn’s crumpled form on the porch and rose purposefully to his feet. His hand went out for the baseball bat that Mandy insisted live just inside the doorway. The suits were faster. Impossibly faster.

  A hand shot out palm first and struck Owen in the middle of his forehead. He felt his head snap back, and then an odd weightlessness as he flew backwards. Suddenly, there were two bodies at his feet, and it took him an eternal heartbeat to realise that he was looking down at Kleijn and himself. A chill paralysed him, and he saw that there were no longer only two assailants.

  A command was given in a harsh, cutting, language that Owen had never heard before, and two of the newcomers swarmed over his prone body and fastened restraints. Only the original two wore suits. The three others all wore grim-looking robes that varied in colour between a light grey and dark charcoal. Their hair was long and unbound, and in their hands were blades of various persuasions.

  Mandy. I have to get to her. I have to warn her. Why can’t I speak?

  “Ah, but you are speaking,” said a quietly sad voice in his ear.

  Owen whirled in horror, unable to process the nightmare unfolding around him. It had to be a nightmare. Nothing else made sense.

  There was a woman clad in a robe of ebony, the coldly chiselled expression on her fine face somehow also indicating a deep sadness and regret. Her hand rested lightly on the katana-like hilt of the blade laced at her hip.

  “Come. I must show you some things that will change your life.”

  Owen’s tongue might as well have been lead for all his ability to form coherent sentences in that moment. He had no choice but to obey. Whatever had been done to him, it seemed as if this version of himself was completely and utterly at the strangers’ mercy. With a casual flick of her finger, the woman beckoned for him to follow, and his presence – separated from his body by some unbelievable force – was tugged along like a kite on a string.

  “This will not be easy on you,” the woman said with a sad flatness. “And while you are still able to listen, I will offer this single, pitiful, consolation. She never even had time to understand that she was in danger.”

  Owen’s heart caved in on itself at the woman’s words, and at the same time, they came to the doorway to the living room. There was blood. So much blood.

  Mandy was sprawled on the couch. She would have looked almost peaceful if not for the way her head lolled to the side, her wide-open eyes staring vacantly at the corner of the room. And if not for the violent explosion of blood in which she lay. Owen stared, unable to comprehend. He could see a frenzy of puncture wounds mutilating her torso, and Mandy’s dress was a tattered mess.

  An intense sense of loss did not so much threaten to engulf him as suck every ounce of warmth and will out of him into a vast vacuum from which there was no retrieving it. He wanted desperately to sink to his knees in grief and scream out the horror building inside, but even that was denied him. All he seemed to have the power to do was stand there and stare.

  The raven-haired woman looked at him, still cold and sad at the same time. Alien.

  “I severed her soul before I did that to her body,” the woman confessed quietly. She repeated her earlier promise. “Your wife did not suffer. She is with the Creator now.”

  Why are you doing this to us? Owen wondered, empty-hearted and unable to accept the reality of it.

  “You have been selected to serve,” the woman revealed. “Your partner is dead … your law will believe you have committed two particularly barbaric murders and gone into hiding. There is nothing to come back to here. You are effectively dead now.” She looked over his shoulder and nodded. “Take him.”