The Crimson Fall (The Sons of Liberty Book 1) Read Free

once more to his son, leaned in close, and whispered what he had always silently spoke before a kill.
    “We are the hunters, Judah,” Adam said. “It is the prey.” He then nodded to his son to take the shot.
    Judah—his young teenage boy, who was about take a giant step toward becoming his own man—sighted in his target with his new compound bow and slowly drew the braided cord to his cheek. To hunt with a rifle was something the average man would have done, but Adam and the men who came before him did not want to settle for merely average. Hunting with a bow was not only a test of strength and dexterity, but of stealth and the strategy required to stalk such a cunning animal. A bow had been the revered tool in the Reinhart family’s rite of passage for generations, and regardless of what they would one day do as a man, every boy who wanted to become a man first mastered the lethal weapon and finished their most sacred of hunts.
    The massive elk below raised its head, as though it knew its duty was to make that moment as magical as possible, and let out a bellowing cry that echoed off the side of the barn and down into the wide valley. Judah took a deep breath, and with a beam of joy on his face, he let loose his deadly missile.
    The arrow whizzed not three inches above the elk’s back, missing the animal completely before cracking hard against a half buried rock behind it, shattering into numerous pieces. The startled animal sprung forward and darted away toward the trees. Adam quickly nocked an arrow, took aim at the running beast, but slowly lowered his bow for fear of wounding it instead of delivering the clean kill shot it deserved. Shock replaced Judah’s enthusiasm and he began to breathe deeply. Adam set his bow down and embraced his devastated son.
    “Judah, it’s okay,” Adam said. “Look at me. It’s alright.”
    His son took uneven breaths, trying in vain to hold back the tears that were already forming. It had been the perfect moment Adam had hoped for, but Judah had somehow missed the shot he could have made one hundred times in a row. The trip they had planned for many months would now come to a close as a failure, but still he had to comfort his boy.
    “I’m sorry, Dad,” Judah said as his breathing began to transform into a familiar rhythmic wheezing.
    “Judah,” Adam said, “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to be sorry.”
    “But I missed it, Dad,” Judah said in between the painful breaths. “I never miss.”
    Adam took out Judah’s tiny electronic inhaler and the boy gulped the soothing mist to calm his asthma.
    “We all miss sometimes,” Adam said. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “But we’ve been talking about this forever, and I screwed it all up,” Judah said as his lungs finally relaxed. “We should have stayed at home.”
    “Don’t say that. We both know you wanted to come,” Adam said.
    “This was your trip, Dad. Not mine. You’re the one gone all the time working and this was your chance to make it up. And I ruined it. I missed my shot, and I’m sorry. You always do everything right and I always ruin everything,” Judah paused for a moment, inhaling once more before he mumbled under his breath and tucked the small tube in his pocket. “I’ll never be like you.”
    The final words stung like a dagger to the heart. Adam struggled to counter what had been said, but nothing came those first few moments. During his adult life he had always found it easy to say what people needed to hear, and when they needed to hear it, regardless of the circumstances. It was one of those things that made him so good at what he did for a living. But standing there idly with his firstborn child as the old barn slowly creaked with every gust of wind, he could barely think of what to say to the boy he could hardly connect with anymore. He hated the fact that his devotion to his job had caused him to become part of the ever-growing absent fathers of America club. However, to try