Iron Inheritance Read Free Page A

to cry with joy. “My baby’s finally growing up.”
    I rolled my eyes and started for the garden. Nate got out too, his red hair bobbing up and down as he walked toward the workshop near the back of the property, his job of getting me home safely achieved. I’d known him for four years, and he’d always been that way—more like a loyal bodyguard than anything else…except for Ria. To her, Nate was a lot more than “anything else.”
    I walked carefully around the perimeter of our brown and tan single-story house, the paint peeling just enough so people thought someone either very trendy or very old lived there. A twenty foot ring of “treasures,” as Grandpa called them, were embedded in dry patches of grass and bare red soil around the house so people knew someone crazy lived there. Some of the treasures were old trinkets he’d collected from his travels in the military. Most of them were pretty nice too—old glass bottles from the early 1900s, rusted medallions, and coins with coats of arms and people I couldn’t even find in Google. But after the trinket stash was depleted, he’d started planting shiny rocks and things he found on the side of the road.
    Grandpa called it decorating.
    I called it hick-ifying.
    That had been in seventh grade before Ria told me about hickies.
    The total effect of whatever it was called was a minefield of objects to avoid with a game of skips, jumps, and treading lines so straight and narrow they could have been tightropes. The game started for fun when we were six. Now we kept it so we didn’t trip.
    I turned a corner and found Grandpa’s white shirt and beige Panama hat hunched over the garden—green tomatoes hanging from vines.
    I pushed down my nerves and forced a smile. “Those don’t look ready to pick.”
    “The vine will yield its fruit, and the heavens will give their dew.” His voice was deep and gravely, sinking into the soft brown earth he’d cultivated to perfection.
    “The dew might be a problem, seeing as we’re still living in the desert.”
    He turned and grinned, wrinkles around his eyes cracking into existence. The brim of his hat was smudged with dirt, and his gray mustache looked like a thick caterpillar on his upper lip. “God always finds a way.” He pushed up his hat as his old eyes were finally able to focus on me. “In all these years, I thought I’d taught you to block punches as well as throw them.” He looked sympathetically at my busted lip.
    A knot released in my chest. He already knew. I shook my head and exhaled through my nose. “You taught me a lot of contradictory things. Like learn every possible fighting style but never use them.”
    “I never said never.” He scowled and stood with a slight groan. “Only that you should exercise control.” He walked around the other side of the garden and inspected more of his parched crop.
    I waited for him to say something more. Everything was a test with him—could I exercise enough self-control not to say anything to defend myself? Could I be patient?
    I liked it better when these games ended in him giving me a cookie.
    He adjusted his hat again and looked up at the sky with a sigh. “Do you remember what set you off? What triggered it?”
    My moment of indecision resurfaced with the burden of guilt. “He hit her,” I said, pushing the feeling back down into the pit of my stomach. “I tried to stop him, to get her to come with me, but then—” I remembered his finger flicking my shirt. “Until that point I was fine—in control. Then he broke her nose and I blacked out.” I flinched, wishing I had left out that detail like I had with Ria and Nate. Blacking out only made this whole thing worse—like something was wrong with me. “When I came to, he was down.”
    I turned away as Grandpa looked at me intently with bright blue eyes, waiting for me to say something more.
    “Did you take any hits to the head? If you blacked out, maybe we should take you to the hospital. Get an