“John!” Duck called, but the boy didn’t answer.
Movement at the stairwell made Keech pivot.
Big Ben reached into his riding coat and drew out something black and shiny. Keech recognized it as the whistle bomb he’d been carrying when Big Ben had ambushed them. “You won’t get away, Red Jeffreys,” the outlaw murmured, and squeezed the orb. The whistler began to whine its mad song. Big Ben reared back the hand gripping the ball.
John Wesley vaulted from the window with Doyle in tow.
From across the room, Nat screamed, “Don’t let him throw it!”
Keech bounded onto a table and leaped at Big Ben. Hitting the large man was like running into a solid wall. Yet despite the jarring impact, he managed to wrap one arm around Big Ben’s neck.
Nat appeared a blink later and seized the man’s shoulder. Duck followed close behind, clutching the outlaw’s leg. Big Ben kicked out. There was a loud cry as Duck went flying halfway across the room. Then his free hand reached up and grabbed Keech by the scruff of his coat.
Keech hooked his hand around his other arm and squeezed, hoping to cut off the man’s wind. Instead, Big Ben hurled him away.
The violent trill of the whistler grew in pitch. As Keech tried to scramble back to his feet, he saw Nat latch his strong rancher hands around Big Ben’s arm. The boy locked eyes with Keech and Duck. He regarded them the way Pa Abner had once regarded the orphans—with a desperate tenderness.
“Go,” Nat said to them, almost peacefully. “Get out.”
Confusion twisted Duck’s face. “What are you doing?”
Nat hunkered low, laboring to restrain Big Ben’s titanic arm. Through clenched teeth, he said to Keech and Duck, “I’ve got him. Go. Keep each other safe and never stop fighting.”
“Nat, c’mon,” said Duck.
Lifting his head to the ceiling, Nat bellowed to his sister, “I love you, Duck!”
Understanding melted Keech’s paralysis. Time snapped back, and the world became a lightning blur.
Keech scooped up Duck and hugged her to his chest.
He ran for the front door.
“No!” screamed Duck, kicking in his grip. “Let me go, Keech! Let me go!”
Racing as fast as he had ever run in his life, Keech rushed out of the Big Snake. Down the street he saw Cutter running toward the hotel with Hector’s reins in one hand. He waved the boy back.
Struggling in Keech’s arms, Duck cried, “Nathaniel!”
Keech heard Nat thunder four words—“Ride, Lost Causes! Ride!”—then the whistle bomb exploded.
CHAPTER 23
CLEMENTINE
Heat like the sun pressed against Keech’s back, and silence clapped over his ears. An invisible hand snatched him up and threw him and Duck violently forward. As he plunged, Keech became distantly aware of jagged pellets of wood and glass flying around him like a swarm of hornets.
Crashing sideways against the ground of Main Street, Keech caught a fleeting glimpse of the explosion. Big Ben’s whistle bomb tore away the entire front of the Big Snake Saloon, then a second and third blast followed. The building’s walls bulged, then burst; the second-floor balcony ripped apart. Great curtains of fire cleaved the hotel up the middle and climbed high into the air.
Keech’s ears buzzed with a distant moan. The sound was far away at first but mounted slowly, and he realized that the power of the explosion had stunned his hearing. As his ears recovered, the moaning grew louder.
He lifted his head. Duck was sitting in the icy mud beside him, her arms hanging useless by her sides. She was looking at the devastated hotel, her mouth twisted in disbelief, and Keech finally understood that the sound was her howling.
He struggled to his feet, slipped in the dirty snow, and felt someone seize his arm at the elbow.
It was Cutter. Horner’s white stallion stood behind him, and both the boy and the horse were covered in thick grime. “What happened, Blackwood?” He seemed oblivious to everything that had taken place, even John Wesley’s leaping out the front window with the Ranger over his shoulder. Then Keech realized that Cutter had moved Milos Horner’s body off the street. He had most likely not seen the confrontation directly.
Cutter shouted something into Keech’s ear, but most of the words weren’t striking home. Keech blinked stinging grit from his eyes and said, “What?”
“I said, Where’s Nat?”
Keech looked again at the obliterated saloon, hoping beyond hope to see Nat emerge from the maelstrom, dust off his hat, and smile. But, of course, there was nothing to see but flame and smoke rising into the night sky.
Overwhelming heat rolled off the hotel and baked Keech’s face. The world wanted to twist and blur, but he hammered the feeling back. His breath rasped out of him. “Cut, I need you to find Quinn. He went around back to stand watch, but Coward slipped out, and I’m afraid he got hurt. Go fetch him. Please.”
Cutter gazed around, stunned, clearly still searching for Nat. “What’re you gonna do?”
Keech glanced over at Duck, who was still wailing at the sight of the scorched wreckage. “Meet us back at the ravine. Take Hector in case Quinn’s hurt. You’ll need a fast way out. I’m gonna carry Duck out of here.”
“Keech, tell me. Where is Nat?”
“Gone.” It was all he could say, and it came out like a cough.
Cutter’s face paled. “Okay. I’ll find Revels. We’ll see you back at the ravine.” Then he spun and mounted up on Hector. “Vámonos,” he yelled, and the Enforcer’s stallion trotted away.
Keech hobbled toward Duck. She didn’t look at him, even when he called her name. “I’m gonna get you out of here,” he said, and bent to scoop her up.
The girl shoved his hands away. “Leave me alone!”
“We’re not safe, Duck. There could be more thralls. We have to get off the street.”
When she refused again, Keech dropped to his knees in front of her. He looked her straight in the eye. Though the hotel’s fiery tumult scorched every inch of him, he forced a gentle smile. “My little brother Patrick was four. Did you know that? He used to climb up the side of the stairs. Sometimes when I walked by, he would jump onto my back and pretend to be a squirrel. I’d tell him to hang on, and we’d run around the house, then head out the back door and race all the way around the property. Patrick loved those piggyback rides.”
Duck glanced up at him, her stark blue eyes disoriented. They reflected the cinders of the nearby chaos and burned like small brands.
“Let me give you a piggyback ride,” he pleaded. “I can carry you all the way.”
“All right,” she said, trembling.
Keech scooped her up, then shifted her weight so that she was resting on his back and holding on to his neck. She felt light for now, but the journey back to the ravine would be long. She clung to him like squirrel Patrick, and by accident, she shoved his bowler hat over his eyes. Keech reached up and pushed it back straight.
They walked down the street, away from the burning hotel and toward the log wall north of town. “Don’t look back,” he said. He could hear the girl moaning in his ear, a devastating sound he knew he would never forget.
Wisdom’s shabby wall appeared just ahead. Keech grimaced when he saw that the gate was closed. “Duck, I’m gonna have to put you down. Okay?”
“All right,” she said again.
He set her down, and she returned to her knees in the mud. He hefted the wooden crossbar that secured the passage. When he pushed open the gate, two thralls appeared before him, clutching long torches. They wore army uniforms, like all the rest in town, and when they saw him, they shirked back toward the shallow moat that stretched in front of the wall. One of the rotten soldiers tumbled over, landing in a patch of ice, while the other backed away from Keech on rattletrap legs. “Have mercy, Enforcer!” the creature hissed.
In the darkness, the monsters must have thought he was Doyle. “Duck, can I borrow your shard?” he asked.
The answer retu
rned in a small but grim voice. “No.”
Duck rose from her knees, her boots squelching in the mud, and fished the glowing shard from her coat. Her expression was utterly blank, as if nothing would ever again frighten or delight her. She approached the terror-stricken thralls, and they shrank back, dropping their torches at the sight of her.
Duck leaped at them. Before Keech knew what had happened, both monsters were squawking on the ground, their false life rupturing from their black veins. When she returned to Keech’s side, her eyes looked like dazzling jewels in the torchlight of the nearby watchtowers. “Nobody else gets this shard,” she said. “Not ever again.”
“Okay.”
Keech allowed himself one more glance back at the ravaged ribbon of Main Street. A few blocks away, the night glowed a pale yellow from the fires burning the town. The whistle bombs that had gutted the old hotel and flattened so many surrounding buildings had scored the earth, making the town center collapse inward like a giant wrinkled mouth. Above this devastation, the Reverend’s crows drifted like shadows in the blighted sky, the flames etching red and orange light onto their distorted bodies. The crows had kept their distance during the battle—just as they had at Bone Ridge.
Keech turned back to Duck. The amulet shard dangling from her hand, she had grabbed one of the thralls’ torches and was peering out into the black forest. A steep embankment stood like a bulwark before the town, the same hillside the young riders had climbed down earlier, before entering the burg.
Duck leaped over the worthless moat and started slogging up the rise—but then she stopped, and the torch dropped to her side.
Hopping over the moat, Keech stood beside her and again prompted the girl onto his back. “Come on, let’s keep going. Just a little farther.” She passed Keech the torch, then climbed on again, her breath hitching.
Keech resumed the hike. Moments passed, but he didn’t care to count them. All he could see in his mind was the first time he’d laid eyes on Nat Embry. The tall rancher had walked out from behind Copperhead Rock on Big Timber Road, so strong and confident, appearing like another version of Pa Abner in Keech’s life. You have my word no harm will come to you, Nat had said. Then they had shaken hands.
As Keech and Duck skirted through the cottonwood trees, the cursed darkness began to peel away, like curtains of black cloth ripping back, layer by layer. Keech had assumed they would walk into the sunlight of a new morning—their excursion into Wisdom had felt like an entire night—but when the last gauze of darkness tore free from the natural world, he walked in normal night, illuminated by the gentle glow of a waning crescent moon.
Duck’s voice came to him like a breath to his ear. “What time is it?”
Keech gazed up at the sky. Snow clouds drifted over the pale moonlight, but the moon’s position told him enough. “It’s about ten.”
“Put me down.”
“We should keep going. We’re close to the ravine. We’ll be safer there.”
She didn’t ask again but squirmed off his back and dropped to the ground. Keech propped the torch against a rock and sat beside her. The night was freezing, but it was a normal, rational cold, free from curses and blights.
For a time, there was only silence, then Duck said, “He ain’t coming back, Keech.”
“I know.”
“Nathaniel’s gone. He promised we’d meet back in the ravine.”
“He meant to.” Feeling tears well up in his eyes, Keech placed a hand on her arm. She didn’t fight him, but she offered no indication that she felt the touch. He went on. “Let’s just rest here for a spell. Cutter and Quinn will be back soon, and we can fetch the horses and go make a camp.”
Duck’s voice trembled with a new kind of fear. “I got no family left.”
Keech lifted his hand up to her neck and drew her close. “You’ve got me.” When her small body began to quake against him, he remembered the wooden doll in his pocket. Though it felt somewhat silly, he tugged it out and laid the figurine on her lap. At the Moss house, Duck had told him she used to have a doll much like this, only with yellow britches and a blue hat. I called her Clementine, she’d said. She was a present from Nat. I played with her in the mud holes out behind the house.
Duck peered down at the doll taken from Erin Blackwood’s grave and brought it up to her neck. She held it close to her throat and squeezed her eyes shut, as if making a wish upon the doll’s head. “I don’t even like this thing,” she said. “But thanks.”
Keech didn’t know how to fix Duck’s broken heart, so instead he did the only thing that made sense. He hugged her close, and together they wept.
PART 3
BONFIRE CROSSING
INTERLUDE
BIG BEN IN THE RUBBLE
A shape moved in the heart of the Big Snake Saloon wreckage.
A crack of snapping wood sounded inside the smoldering ruins, and wooden beams creaked as if under pressure from an intense weight. Scraping metal knocked, then rattled as a pile of slag shifted.
Big Ben Loving rose, his steaming body covered with ash. Char and cinder had smeared his skin, and his long red beard had been singed. He surfaced with slow agony as each joint in his body creaked. Gashes crisscrossed his arms and face, and his riding coat and shirt were in tatters, exposing his shoulders and chest to the frozen rain.
The fires at the center of Wisdom were burning out, and thick smoke ascended into the cursed sky. The Reverend’s crows circled above, watching in silence, and a few perched on the rooftops of leftover buildings that looked down on the devastation.
Wisdom’s remaining troops, a pathetic smattering of thralls, had gathered on Main Street. They didn’t speak as Big Ben shook himself free of the rubble and stepped onto the avenue. Many of them scurried back as if hoping to hide from his frightful gaze.
He had survived flame and destruction, but now the Prime inside him was weak, and he was cold. He gestured to a nearby thrall. “Give me your coat.”
The dead man obeyed, fumbling out of his jacket with haste. Like all the other thralls in town, this rotten creature was a product of Ignatio’s necromancy, under orders to obey Big Ben.
One of the circling crows descended to street level, resting on a crooked hitching post. It screamed a wicked Ack! and turned a red oily eye to Big Ben.
Always devout in the Reverend’s presence, Big Ben bowed his head.
“You’ve done well, Ben.” The crow spoke aloud so that all present heard the Reverend. “You cornered the traitor Jeffreys, and now Coward has recovered my Stone. But your work in this territory is not complete.”
“The Fang of Barachiel,” Big Ben answered.
“Yes. Retrieve the Fang and destroy Bonfire Crossing. It can no longer serve as a sanctuary to Enforcers.”
Spasms of pain coursed through Big Ben’s body, and he felt he might collapse. “Master, I spent the last of your Prime mending my bones and resisting the bomb. I’m worthless till I’ve taken time to rest and heal.”
“No.” The crow flapped its wings, a gesture of irritation. “We must push our advantage.”
“But what can I do like this? I’m empty.”
The crow regarded the small company of thralls that had gathered around Big Ben. The creature’s red eyes glowed with a fierce inner light. With a deafening screech, the bird took to the air. It flapped in small, vicious circles, then the Reverend’s terrible voice thundered down upon the dazed dead men.
“You all cowered during the battle, watching from safe corners as your brethren fell. You betrayed the Prime that your master, Ignatio, granted you.”
Trembling, the pack of thralls screamed denials. Some begged for another chance, and others turned in panic and stumbled over themselves to get away from the crow.
A freezing wind kicked up around the scrambling congregation, blowing the reek of decay into Big Ben’s face. The thralls began to shake. Black veins coursed over their flesh, turning the sight of them even more monstrous. Unearthly wails arose from the pack.
>
Thick wisps of black smoke poured off the soldiers. The dark tendrils floated out over Main Street, wrapped together to form a single pillar, then curled back down to cover Big Ben like a blanket. The fog seeped into his nostrils, his open mouth. Waves of vigor charged his once agonized muscles. The hot ache in his joints eased, his back straightened. Fury and purpose filled every corner of his mind.
Every last thrall tumbled to the ground, their bodies empty husks, their Prime withdrawn.
Big Ben lifted his head and shouted to the crows in the sky. “Thank you, Master!”
The birds released a collective cackle.
A moment later, the Reverend’s voice grated directly into his mind. “Summon your Man Slayer. Send it to track the Enforcer children from a distance, but they are not to be killed. Not till they find the door to the Crossing. Once they yield the location, the Man Slayer may finish them.”
“Yes, Reverend.”
“Red Jeffreys must not be allowed to retrieve the Fang.”
Big Ben shook with newfound power and rage. “There will be no quarter given.”
“Once you secure the relic, you will join Ignatio and Black Charlie in the mountains to search for Enoch’s Key. They will be waiting for you. Lost Tucker will be holding her position farther north.”
“Your will be done, Master.” Big Ben closed his eyes and bowed his head.
“Go now. I will be watching.”
CHAPTER 24
RENDEZVOUS
Keech and Duck traveled back to Edgar Doyle’s rally point in silence. The moment the torchlight revealed the group’s ponies in the ravine, Keech felt another hefty wallop of sadness. Nat’s horse, Sally, stood beside her brother Irving, waiting for Nat to reappear. When Duck saw the Fox Trotter, she dropped the sputtering torch to the ground and began to whimper anew.
Scooping up the light, Keech pointed to a smooth dip beneath a tree. “There’s a nice spot you can rest up,” he said gently. “As soon as Quinn and Cut get back, we’ll head to a safer place to camp, all right?”
The Fang of Bonfire Crossing Page 19