He took a step over the first glossy marker.
No ideas, no understanding. Keech frowned. There had to be a message here, something more than a simple bough aimed to the south. He reached out and touched a finger to the tree’s wet bark.
Duck said, “Well?”
“Nothing. I don’t get it.”
“Well, there ain’t no time to figure it out,” Nat said. “We’re losing light, and like Duck said, we’ll freeze to death if we don’t go to ground.”
As if to prove his point, a few more flakes of icy rain pelted Keech’s cheeks. A brilliant shaft of lightning blazed across the sky, illuminating the heavy clouds. A violent crash of thunder rolled across the hillside.
“Keech, we have to go,” John Wesley said.
Disappointed, Keech turned away from the bending tree and stepped toward Felix. They were back to where they had started. Except, when he threw a final glance over his shoulder, he thought for one second he saw movement inside the crook of the oak’s south-facing bough. A scurrying patch of darkness, unnatural yet somehow familiar.
Somehow, the tree’s shadow had twisted. Like a snake springing to life.
Keech’s eyes must have been fooled by another lightning flash. He mounted Felix and popped the reins. Duck glanced back at him as they all headed back to the path. “Sorry, Keech. It was worth a shot.”
He forced the girl a quick smile. “We’ll figure this out. Pa wouldn’t have sent us on a wild-goose chase.”
The young riders veered back onto the road and continued toward the structure, where Keech hoped they could find a little rest and perhaps some peace of mind.
CHAPTER 4
MERCY MISSION
The blockhouse in the wild was not a barn but some kind of abandoned stone church with a wedge-shaped roof. Keech suspected the building’s tall oak door hadn’t been opened in years.
“Whaddaya know, it’s a mission,” Nat said.
A dilapidated sign stood on two stilts in the church’s weed-choked plot. As the young riders crossed the desolate yard, Keech gazed at the words carved on the wooden slab:
MISIÓN DE LA
MISERICORDIA
EST. 1820
SOBRE ESTA PIEDRA
EDIFICARÉ MI IGLESIA
“My Spanish ain’t so good,” Nat said. “Cutter?”
Cutter trotted Chantico closer to scrutinize the sign. “First couple lines say, ‘Mercy Mission.’ The last part’s from the Bible. It says, ‘Upon this rock, I will build my church.’”
“Not another Bible verse,” John Wesley groaned.
“It’s from the book of Matthew!” Duck said.
Keech understood Duck’s excitement and John Wesley’s despair. Back in Missouri, Pa Abner and Noah Embry, Nat and Duck’s father, had scattered clues from the book of Matthew all over the countryside. The young riders had discovered one of the verses in Floodwood forest, as well as another engraved on the tombstone of Granny Nell’s husband, Abraham. But this was no clue to the Char Stone. This was simply coincidence.
More flecks of ice walloped Keech’s face. A moment later, the impatient clouds released a torrent of stabbing needles. Thick pellets of ice bounced off the brims of their hats.
Nat bounded off Sally, ran to the mission’s arched doorway, and pushed against its long iron handle. The door didn’t budge. He pushed again. There was a jangle as the top of his hat bumped a brass bell dangling over the arch.
“Someone help me!”
Dismounting, John Wesley sprinted over and threw his weight against the door.
“On the count of three,” Nat said. “One, two, THREE!”
The two large boys shoved.
With a boisterous squeal, the swollen door scraped inward, revealing a dusty gloom that reminded Keech of the Floodwood bear’s cave, deep and dark and full of menace.
Furious bundles of ice pummeled them, followed by a gust of wind so powerful, it made the horses stagger.
“Everyone inside!” Nat yelled.
“What about the ponies?” Duck asked.
“Bring ’em!”
Once the gang had led the horses inside, Nat shoved the heavy door. As he strained, the storm wrenched the oak out of his grip. “I can’t close it!”
Keech darted to the rancher’s aid and pushed with his shoulder. There was a cavernous slam! as the oak met its frame, and the howls of the norther diminished to a low moan. Cold darkness encased the young riders.
For the moment, they were safe.
Still holding fast at the entrance, Nat called to John Wesley in the dark. “John, fetch us a little light, would ya? We need to find a way to bar this door.”
“What for?” asked John.
“In case those bounty hunters come this way. If they decide to come looking for us, at least we can make it hard for them to get in.”
When John Wesley lit a match from his saddlebag, the tiny orange light didn’t do much to reveal Mercy Mission’s true size, but Keech could tell its stone walls reached back a good distance. Long, narrow church pews filled most of the room, but otherwise the big chamber looked empty of furnishings. He did spot a tall metallic object standing in a nearby corner. It was an old brass candelabrum, its five points draped with cobwebs. “Hey, that should work,” he said.
Duck grabbed the candlestick and handed it to Nat as John Wesley’s flame died and darkness refilled the chamber.
Keech heard a loud clunk as Nat shoved the five points of the candle tree against the door’s iron handle. A second later, the foot of the candelabrum scraped against stone as Nat angled the base down onto the floor, creating a sturdy wedge that locked the main entrance.
“There,” Nat said. “Now let’s find something we can use for permanent light.”
The young riders spread out, searching along the walls. Keech scared up an old lantern sitting on the floor by a church pew. To his delight, the globe still contained kerosene.
After John Wesley lit the lamp, the steady light revealed the mission’s true size. Its walls stretched back almost a hundred feet, and above them, cobwebbed rafters pointed up like arrowheads to a shadowy peak. On the opposite end of the chamber sat a raised wooden platform where ministers or teachers had once given their lessons.
“They built their church upon the rock but forgot to build a town for the worshippers,” Duck observed.
Despite the chill in the air, Nat’s face gleamed with sweat. “Let’s take inventory.”
The young riders spent a few moments checking their saddlebags. Not much remained of the rations that Sheriff Turner had given them except for a meager loaf of rock-hard bread, bags of salt and pepper, and a couple of sacks of salted peanuts, which they passed around.
Luckily, they still had their most important accessories: the amulet shards.
As Duck placed her crescent charm on the floor in front of her, Keech took Pa Abner’s pendant from his own shirt and gazed at the strange markings in the silver. Pa’s dying words murmured through his mind: The amulets are sacred. They can hold the Reverend’s power at bay. I shattered the original piece into five. The other Enforcers have the other fragments. Find the shards, Keech, and unite them.
“All right, here’s the situation,” said Nat as they all joined together on the floor in a tight circle around the lantern. “I’m low on powder for the Hawken, and our rations are near gone. I can shoot plenty of food for a day or two, but we ought to fetch a supply for the gun pronto.”
“How, though?” asked John Wesley. “It ain’t like we can just mosey into a store. We’re as poor as a buncha toothless coyotes.”
“Yeah, Blackwood spent all his pennies in Floodwood,” Cutter said with a chuckle.
The kids had taken off their hats and placed them on their laps, and Keech thought they looked like apparitions in the soft light. Maybe they were. Maybe Keech was, too. Maybe they had all died in Bone Ridge Cemetery and Sheriff Turner had sent a posse of spirits off to Wisdom, Kansas, unaware that he had deputized five dead kids.
>
Keech shrugged off the foolish idea. Ghosts didn’t bleed and get hungry. Ghosts got along much easier than the living.
Nat’s breath chilled in a white fog around his face. He had placed the Hawken rifle close beside him, prepared for battle should the bounty hunters come knocking. “We’ll have to figure something out. If we don’t, we’re likely to starve.”
A deep hush fell over them as the banshee wind raged outside and the sleet banged on the roof. The brass bell on the other side of the door clanged and rattled a hectic melody.
“We won’t starve,” Keech said. “As long as Cutter’s got his blade, I know a thousand ways to fetch us food without a gun. I can make bows and spears.”
“Let’s hope it don’t come to that,” Nat said, then rubbed his weary-looking face. “Now, I reckon we should get some shut-eye—”
A loud thudding noise from somewhere in the back of the church jarred Keech’s ears. Every kid sat up straight. Nat’s hand dropped to the Hawken and gripped the stock. Duck seized the lantern’s handle and swooped the light around the cold darkness.
“What was that?” Cutter hissed.
“Sounded like a boot banged a piece of wood,” Duck said.
Nat stood and swung the Hawken’s barrel toward the direction of the noise. The gang listened, no one stirring or breathing, but the sound didn’t repeat. Keech could hear only the furious whistle of the norther outside and the jing-jing-jing of the bell at the mission door.
Cutter pointed to the southern end of Mercy Mission, where the cobweb-shrouded platform stood before the rows of church pews. “It came from that stage. I’m sure of it.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Nat said.
The young riders hurried down the center aisle with the lantern. Going first, Nat kept his Hawken aimed in front of him; Cutter drew his long blade. Keech had scooped up his and Duck’s amulet shards off the floor. Neither charm had sparked any sort of unnatural cold.
Standing at the edge of the platform, Duck shone the lantern over the raised wooden floor. The lamplight revealed a tall cross made of dark cedar, fastened to a pair of wooden feet. Next to the cross stood a pulpit, the place where the ministers would have issued their sermons, resting on a wide foundation of pine. Duck flashed the lamplight on the pulpit, exposing a familiar etching on its face:
SOBRE ESTA PIEDRA
EDIFICARÉ MI IGLESIA
“‘Upon this rock, I will build my church,’” Nat said. “Same as the sign in the yard.”
Duck hopped onto the stage and swept the lantern light around the floor. Handing her amulet back to her, Keech tucked his own into his coat pocket, then searched the platform for clues to the strange noise’s source.
“I’d swear it came from right around here,” Duck said.
Keech’s eyes fell on a couple of long, shallow scratches in the floor, two small channels that resembled claw marks. “Duck, take a gander at this.” When she brought the light over, Keech dropped to his haunches and ran a finger over the score marks. “Looks like something got dragged away from here and made these scratches.”
Duck followed the cut trails. The path took her to the minister’s pulpit. She shone the light down on the bottom, then tilted the lectern away from her, revealing the pointy ends of two rust-red nails protruding from the square foot. “Somebody dragged this pedestal across the floor, but I reckon they didn’t realize there was nails on the bottom.”
Keech knocked a boot heel three times against the pine. The noise that returned was deeper and more hollow than it should have been, and the sound of it renewed his dread. “John, help me move this pulpit, would ya?”
Working together, Keech and John Wesley slid the pulpit a few feet across the stage, the rusty nails in the base scoring two new tracks in the floor. Beneath the place where the pulpit had stood was a small metal ring fastened to the pine. The ring had been put there, from all appearances, to raise a panel.
“It’s a trapdoor!” Keech said.
Nat turned to Cutter. “Stand ready.” He aimed the Hawken’s barrel down on the pine door. Cutter positioned himself in a similar fashion, his blade pointed toward the false floor. Duck held the light steady.
“Open it,” Nat said.
Keech put his finger through the ring. A bump and a crash echoed up from below them. “Someone’s on the move down there.” He heaved on the ring. The wooden panel opened, presenting a square of damp darkness. Keech motioned for Duck to lower the light.
The trapdoor had been hiding a stone staircase. The stairs descended at least fifteen feet below the mission.
Steeling himself, Keech planted a foot on the first stone.
A voice bellowed up at him from below: “Hold it right there! Take another step down, I’ll make you regret it!”
CHAPTER 5
QUINN REVELS
Keech dropped into a fighter’s stance as a figure emerged from the shadows at the base of the stairs—a dark-skinned boy with a lean, rawboned face. He moved with purpose, wasting no time in meeting the young riders head-on. He clambered up a few steps, his teeth clenched, but when his wide eyes caught the glint of Duck’s lantern, they blinked in surprise. He stopped, his chest heaving.
Nat stood at the lip of the opening, pointing his Hawken down the stairs. “Don’t move a muscle!”
The boy in the darkness dropped back a step, away from Duck’s light and the Hawken. “Don’t y’all come any closer!” he shouted, but his voice quivered with doubt. His hands were tucked down in the gloom, possibly hiding a weapon.
For Keech, the moment froze like a winter sky as he recalled the bounty poster that Sunrise Albert had shown them. “Are you Oscar, the kid who escaped Wisdom?”
Panic and uncertainty and other emotions Keech would never understand crossed the face of the boy below. “That ain’t my name no more,” he said.
“Well, what’s your name?”
The boy ignored the question. “I just wanted to sneak a peek. I heard kids’ voices and got curious. I didn’t mean to scare y’all. I just want to be left alone.”
Keech didn’t know what to think or how to react. For close to a decade, Pa Abner had trained Keech’s body and mind to respond to situations with calculation and control, but now neither his body nor his mind could establish his best move.
His memories slipped back to a cold December afternoon, a few days before his tenth birthday. Pa had taken him and Sam into Big Timber to purchase a Christmas ham from Greely’s General Goods. Keech’s birthday was the same day as Christmas Eve, so he had been doubly excited for the coming festivities at the Home—till he saw a bearded roughrider stroll into Big Timber on a rugged, slab-sided Appaloosa.
The man steered his speckled mount down the center of Main, rambling at a leisurely pace, but he was not alone on the street. Another person walked a few feet behind the horse, a gaunt man with striking, dark skin and threadbare clothes unsuitable for December. The walking man’s shoes were an embarrassment of tatters, and his hands were bound to a pair of rusted iron chains that stretched to a couple of rings on the Appaloosa’s saddle.
Keech and Sam watched the procession in horrified silence.
As the bearded horseman passed Greely’s, he doffed his hat with a dingy smile. Keech didn’t smile back. Instead, he locked eyes with the dark-skinned man in the chains and filthy rags. The fellow trembled in the cold and stumbled a bit. The horseman yanked at the chains, pulling the fellow along. The walker returned his attention to the street, but Keech had seen that his reddened eyes were hollow, full of misery, empty of hope.
A couple of townsmen had stepped out of the Big Timber Drugstore and halted the horseman in the center of the street. You ain’t wanted here, one of the men told the rider. Didn’t you see the sign? No slavers!
Apologies, the horseman said, spitting on the ground. I thought this was a free country, where a man could go where he pleased. Then the rider led his desolate footman away, disappearing into the wilderness beyond Big Timber.
; Back at the Home, Keech and Sam pressed Pa Abner for some kind of explanation. Those men told the rider to leave town, but they didn’t say nothing about helping the man in chains, Sam said.
Pa Abner looked down at the sitting room floor. Sometimes you have to pick the best way to stand your ground. The men of the town did what they thought was best for our folk.
Keech remembered his pa’s words now—an answer that had never stuck well in his heart or soul—as the boy on the stairs faced down Nat’s Hawken.
Keech backed away from the trapdoor. The jumble in his mind untangled a smidge as he moved, keeping his gaze on the stranger. “Nat, lower the gun.”
“We are deputies of the Law. Show us those hands, nice and slow,” Nat said.
The kid ignored the command. “You don’t look like no deputies I ever saw.” He had a pleasant voice that sounded shrewd, though a touch of rasp enveloped the words, no doubt from the wintry bite in the air.
“We’re not going to hurt you. You’ve got my word.” Keech raised his hands, palms out, to show them empty. “Nat, put the gun down.”
Nat shook his head. “We don’t know this kid.”
Keech started to repeat his demand, but suddenly a large hand seized the barrel of the Hawken and tugged upward. Keech braced himself for the fierce blast of the gun, but instead of firing, the rifle slipped completely from Nat’s grip. Keech and Nat wheeled about, stunned.
John Wesley stood between them, clutching the Hawken. “He said he just wants to be left alone.”
“Give me the gun,” Nat said.
John Wesley stepped back, out of reach. “Go suck an egg, Embry.”
Duck touched her brother’s hand. “Nathaniel, calm down.”
Nat’s face turned a furious shade of red, as though he might explode and lash out with fists, but when his eyes dropped to meet Duck’s, he swiveled and walked away a few steps.
Turning back to the kid on the stairs, John Wesley said, “We ain’t gonna hurt you, friend. We swear it.”
The Fang of Bonfire Crossing Page 3