by Alyssa Cole
“Well, as luck would have it, I’m not a slaver, and if I happened upon any they’d sorely regret that our paths had crossed.” He fixed Jim with a stare, but the man was too busy looking at his brother in consternation to pick up on Daniel’s subtle threat.
Augustus huffed. “I’m sorry, Jim. I couldn’t ignore someone hollerin’ like that. No way. Mama raised us better than that.”
Jim sighed again, bent and hauled a stack of blankets onto the back of the wagon. “You right. Long as these two ain’t trouble they welcome. We could use the help.” A peal of high laughter erupted and Jim’s gaze jerked toward the source. “Go help Shelley gather the children so we can load ’em up.”
After Augustus walked away, Jim turned to Daniel, rubbing his hands together to ward off the morning cold.
“You’re in charge here?” Daniel wasn’t quite rid of his suspicions.
“Yup. Though when we get stopped it’s Augustus who does the talking. Got our daddy’s colorin’.”
Augustus could pass anytime, depending on who he encountered, and Jim by dark of night or by firelight. Sending an Augustus out with your refugeeing slaves—or even a Jim—with no overseer was risky at the least, and more like flat out foolish for a slave owner who really wanted to keep his property. But here they were, heading toward their assigned destination with no overseer in sight.
It didn’t make sense, and Daniel couldn’t put his trust in things that didn’t add up. He could barely manage for things that did.
“Your master trusts you to travel without a chaperone? What’s to stop you from running off?”
Jim spat, then ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “This ain’t all of us.” He hefted a barrel into the wagon, and Daniel heard the cluck of a disgruntled chicken somewhere behind the stacked belongings. “He got mine and Augustus’s mama, Augustus’s wife, my sons, Shelley’s husband.”
The sick vouchsafe that had been put in place by Jim and Augustus’s master clicked into place for Daniel with a surge of anger. “He’s making you choose between freedom and family?”
“I suppose that’s always the choice for us, but yep.” Jim pulled his hat down on his brow. “My old man ain’t ever showed us a feeling besides anger, but he sure know how to use them soft ones against us when he need to. Some folk might run off, but all of us here got something to lose that we can’t imagine living without. Like he stacked the checkerboard and gave hisself a bunch of kings to start with.” Jim shook his head. “It is what it is. You welcome to join us long as you don’t start no trouble, like I said.”
Jim walked off, leaving Daniel beside the wagon. Daniel couldn’t think too long on the awful cunning, of their father’s plan. If they were heading the same way anyhow, perhaps they could be of use to one another.
He began loading children up onto the wagon as Augustus and the slight woman called Shelley brought them over. He realized this was another play by their master—escaping the South with this many young children would be near impossible.
Augustus made the introductions. “This here is Mr. Cumberland. He gonna travel with us for a ways with his woman.”
Shelley’s features opened a bit once she understood that Janeta and Daniel were an item. “Welcome. Janeta is very kind. Already helping us with the children.”
Daniel again almost disabused the strangers of the false notion about him and Janeta, and again failed to do so. It made no difference what strangers thought of them, and if his supposed attachment to her could make others comfortable, then he would let people presume. And if it kept her safe, well, that wouldn’t be too bad, either.
He rolled his shoulders in annoyance with himself. This was the part of having a partner he hadn’t wanted—caring about whether she was safe.
He could throw himself into dubious frays without a thought. It didn’t matter whether he lived or died, and a great many things would be better if he happened upon the latter. But having a partner, even one as annoying as Sanchez, created a link similar to the one that had these slaves escorting themselves over dangerous territory because they’d not let their families come to harm if they ran.
The image of her pinned beneath him on the wooden planks of the boat came back to him suddenly. The fear in the wide eyes of a woman who’d gotten herself mixed up in a war she seemed to know nothing about really. The softness of her.
He rolled his shoulders again.
“She is very easy to get along with,” he lied. He could be cordial when he wanted to. He’d once done it without even thinking. And though it strained him now, he allowed himself to savor the small mercies of this encounter. To these people, he was just a fellow traveler, who loved and was loved by a woman—the normalcy of that, in the middle of the awfulness of the truths that constantly cropped up in his mind unbidden, warmed him.
Of course, he could never love or be loved again, but he would take this brief oasis in the desert of his torment and continue the farce.
Janeta walked up, carrying a little boy on her hip who could be her own. A trail of children followed behind her, and a woman called Mavis, but the boy stared at Daniel wide-eyed.
“I found us a friend, Daniel,” she said, using his first name. She’d already picked up on the roles they would be playing. “Moses said that he couldn’t sleep because he was afraid of monsters attacking during the night. I told him that I knew a monster slayer.”
She winked at him and Daniel felt the oddest twinge in his chest. He remembered a conversation he’d had with Elle, when he’d assumed that their future paths were one and the same. He’d been talking about how he wanted children, and she’d shaken her head and told him she didn’t know how he could consider it in a world such as theirs.
“You can’t keep them safe, Daniel. You don’t know just how bad it can be.”
He’d hated how he could never talk her around to his point of view, never be right. But she had been correct about this thing, too. He’d learned that the moment he’d been unloaded on the plantation and saw the children crouched in the field at their mothers’ knees. He’d learned it when he’d thought he would use his education to help them, and had ended up providing nothing but sorrow.
Winnie’s father barged out of the shack, moving through the crowd of his friends and arrowing straight for Daniel. His face was a mask of fury and though he was smaller, he shoved Daniel hard enough to knock him back onto the hard clay ground. Daniel probably could have been knocked over by a feather, after the punishment he’d endured—noose around his neck just enough to hold him upright and just enough to kill him if his legs gave out. He’d spent hours on his tiptoes, muscles burning and bloody back wracked with pain, unable to relax an inch without his airway being cut off.
“Is Winnie all right?” he rasped. He wasn’t even sure the words made their way out. “I tried to stop him.”
“No, she’s not all right! Her hands—” Her father’s face contorted with grief, but then his anger pulled him back from the precipice of tears. “We was fine ’til you came here thinking you was so smart. Ain’t even smart enough to hide what you learned those children. Ain’t even smart enough to make the overseer think you stupid. That big brain of yours gonna fix Winnie’s hands? You know what use they find for a Black girl whose hands ain’t good for pickin’?”
Her father’s frustrated tears finally streaked down his cheeks, and bile rose in Daniel’s raw throat.
He’d only wanted to help.
Her father kicked at Daniel in frustration, but without much force. “You always talking about how you don’t belong here and you right. You don’t. Been nothing but trouble for us.”
He turned and walked back into the cabin, the other enslaved people following him, leaving Daniel alone on the ground, gasping for air.
Worthless. He was worthless.
Daniel shut his mind against the bad memories. He’d already relived them in his dreams, and he needed to pull himself together. Besides, seeing Janeta holding the boy and hearing her tell him that Dani
el could protect him made him feel good, even if it was a lie. He could pretend this thing for a little bit, too, just until they got to Meridian.
The boy looked up at him with open awe and Daniel sucked a breath in through his nose. It wasn’t a lie. He would slay anyone who tried to harm this child, or any of the children they were traveling with. He would never let such a thing happen again.
He walked up to the boy, mustering up a conspiratorial smile and stroking his beard. “Morning, Moses. You’ve been informed correctly. I am in fact a monster hunter, and a monster slayer when the situation calls for it. I have a special knife that I use for the task.” He lifted his wicked blade by its handle, revealing a flash of sharp metal before letting it drop snugly back into the sheath. The boy’s eyes widened and Daniel continued with faux bravado. “The monsters are the ones who should be afraid now. Not you.”
“Really? That knife kills monsters?” Moses glanced up at Janeta for verification and she nodded.
“Sí. But it’s not his knife that makes the monsters afraid.” She took Moses’s hand in her own and stepped forward, closing the gap between them until she could press the boy’s palm against Daniel’s chest.
The warm pressure of the small hand filled Daniel with wonder and joy, erasing the last vestiges of the nightmare he’d had earlier.
“You feel that heartbeat?” she asked.
Moses nodded.
“That is what the monsters fear. A knife is sharp and deadly, but there is nothing more frightening to evil than a kind heart and a strong soul, and Daniel has both of those.”
Anger slapped at the edges of Daniel’s enjoyment in their game. He’d put up with Sanchez for these past few days, but this was a lie too far. His body was strong, but the heart and soul within were weak. She’d witnessed him yelling pathetically into the night. She’d held him while he wailed like a child. She must be making fun of him, pointing out his weaknesses for all to see and laugh at.
His anger rose sharp and fast; then Janeta spread her hand out on top of Moses’s, the two warm palms pressing through the fabric of his coat as she turned that honey gaze up to his.
She didn’t speak, simply looked at him in defiance, as if challenging him to object to her words.
She wasn’t teasing, it seemed. Simply mistaken. Simply unaware that she was talking to a shell of a man whose only value was that the blood in his veins could be spilled in the service of his people, and even that wouldn’t be enough to save them. But Moses didn’t need to know those things. He’d learn one day, but Daniel would not be the one to teach him.
Daniel nodded, and stepped out of reach of their dual touch, the cold morning air rushing in to suck away the heat where their hands had been.
“Moses, you’ve got strength in you, too,” he said. “And goodness. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
With that he turned away from the pair and continued helping with the loading of the wagon. It was absurd how, despite the chill, it seemed like there was an ember glowing right in his middle, where he thought his fire had long since gone cold. Daniel ignored it. He couldn’t afford to warm himself at the fires of anything other than his own burning need for revenge.
This situation was pretend, but he was a monster slayer; they were working their way through a Southern labyrinth, and Daniel intended on killing the man, mythical as a minotaur, that supposedly awaited him if they reached their destination.
CHAPTER 12
“A lawyer, huh?” Augustus asked again, lips pressed together and brows drawn as they had been since Daniel had revealed the profession he’d once pursued. They were paused alongside the rutted country road after stopping to let the children stretch their legs.
Daniel had been unprepared when Augustus asked for his profession while peppering him with questions about life outside of slavery, and talking about the Loyal League didn’t seem like the best move to make just yet, no matter how friendly these people were. All it would take was for one child to overhear and pass the information on to the wrong person. And perhaps it wasn’t fair, but Augustus and Jim were as close to white as any mixed-race Negro Daniel had ever met. It would be so easy for them to use their privilege against him if the situation arose, and he couldn’t risk his fellow detectives or the secrecy of the Loyal League. He’d already risked them enough with his laxness since being assigned a partner. Instead, he’d reached into the scar tissue of his own past and painfully pulled out the truth.
“Yes. A lawyer.” He glanced over to where Janeta was conversing with Shelley and Jim, and a woman named Mavis. She was better at making conversation than he was, but he had once been a social young man and would do his part. “You changing your mind about asking me along?”
Augustus laughed and tugged at the brim of his hat. “No! It’s just I never thought I’d meet a Negro lawyer. I guess it’s true that anything is possible up North.”
“You still haven’t met one. I never achieved that dream,” Daniel pointed out. He wouldn’t share how his own naïveté had stopped him. “But I suppose that freedom, even the limited freedom we have there, makes many more things possible. I was lucky enough to be born in a place where there was a lawyer willing to take me on.”
And his own weakness had lost him that chance.
“It seem unfair, don’t it? How where you born can change everything? Jim always say that we was born cursed. Daddy said it say so in the Bible. Mama don’t like that, but what can she do?” Augustus turned his baleful eyes on Daniel. “You think we cursed?”
“I think it’s convenient to a great many people for us to think that we are,” Daniel said, affronted. It was one thing for him to believe himself cursed, and his country cursed. He would never go so far to say his people were, especially in support of a man who used that idea to justify evil.
“Daddy like to talk about the glory of the South, too. Say we cursed, but men like him were blessed with the land and the slaves, and a leader like Davis to guide them toward victory.” Augustus’s blue gaze was no longer kind and jovial. “Davis. Some days I wish I never had to hear that man’s name again.”
Daniel nodded. This was something else he wouldn’t share. He didn’t want Davis’s name wiped from memory. He wanted it to be a name remembered always—to be the name that struck fear into the hearts of those who had assumed the Confederacy could rise from the sweat of Negroes and not pay for its hubris in blood. He rested his hand on the hilt of his knife, wondering if the idea that had swirled in his mind since the Russians had told them of Davis’s voyage was going too far—or not nearly far enough.
Janeta came over to them then, her teeth chattering a bit as she smiled at them both. She still found this cold unbearable and she hadn’t even experienced her first snow. Her discomfort annoyed him, and he hated that part of that annoyance was the fact that he could do nothing about it. He shouldn’t care about her comfort. Shouldn’t amounted to a whole lot of nothing when he did.
No heart, he reminded himself. This is just pretend.
“Your man was telling me about his lawyering,” Augustus said. “But you know all about that, I imagine.”
Janeta shook her head. “No, I don’t know very much. He doesn’t know much about my life before we met, either. It can be hard sometimes, when you meet in the midst of war, to explain who you were before. Or sometimes you simply want to forget, so you make no explanations. And we are all of us changing, no? I am a different person than I was even a few days ago.”
She said the words so casually that all he could do was look at her. What was she about? He’d thought he’d known, but she kept turning out to be different. Better. He reminded himself that she was nothing but a burden that Dyson had tied him with. She was someone who knew what to say to get on a person’s good side.
He remembered the warmth of her hand over his heart.
“I guess I never thought about that. Just meeting someone,” Augustus said sheepishly. He shoved his hand into his pocket. “My wife, Clea, grew up on the plantatio
n, too, and Jim’s wife was from the neighboring plantation. Most of us here grew up with each other, so we always knew what we was like.”
“I’m sure you’ve still changed, though,” Janeta said. “I grew up around the same people and I don’t think they knew what I was like any more than Daniel does. But tell me more about where you lived, if you don’t want to forget.”
Daniel watched her as she spoke to this man she’d met only a day ago, how he blushed and started telling her what she’d asked of him. Daniel had underestimated her. Jim came over, more sober than Augustus, but he smiled a bit at the fact that his brother seemed to be enjoying himself.
If her conversation had seemed effortless, Daniel might have been jealous of Janeta’s talent. But though her lips curved up, her eyes showed tension as her gaze darted from person to person, as she paused to think of questions or responses. Maybe being surrounded by strangers didn’t set her on edge the way it did for him, but this was work for her, too, even if she did it without complaint or acting out.
He could manage until they parted ways with these people. It would, in fact, be good practice for whatever awaited them. Daniel preferred quick and dirty work, but if the Sons of the Confederacy really were meeting with European agents, it would take something more than brute force or even a well thought out attack.
“How did you two meet? If you didn’t grow up together?” Shelley had joined the conversation, and it was only then that Daniel remembered Elle, whom he had grown up with. He expected to feel the same anger or sadness, but before he could Janeta began to speak.
“Well, some friends of ours introduced us and told Daniel they thought we’d work well together. Daniel, of course, hated me.”
Everyone broke up into laughter—except him and Janeta.
“I wouldn’t say it was so strong as hate,” Daniel cut in. “It was distrust.”