Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

  His path was marked in blood.

  I held a hand over you and followed the bloody footprints out of the foyer and onto the front porch, where they strode down the steps and along the dirt path. What flowers had sprung up in my wake were dying now that the man in black’s presence was revealed. I crouched down next to one of the prints, wary of it even before I placed my palm in its center.

  It was then my mind left my body.

  When I blinked, my consciousness was no longer in an autumnal river town in Missouri but traveling across an open expanse of salt and shale. The ridges and cliffs faded in color from the blue black of a bruise to the vivid red of blood fresh from an artery. A breeze cut across the land and met no resistance, neither tree nor shrub nor flower to buffer its force. I thought I knew what howling wind was, hearing it whip across the plains in wintertime with nothing to stop it.

  But the plains were alive. They sustained life. This was a soulless land that sustained nothing.

  I knew of few places that featured such desolate landscapes. The scoria and sandstone and silence told me where the blood would lead.

  When I took my hand away from the print, I did so with a gasp, my consciousness returning to my body all at once and bringing with it memory of the path my prey had taken. I heard Charlotte’s voice behind me, felt her hands on my arm and shoulder, and once I was certain I was back in St. Louis, I let her help me to my feet.

  With the autumn afternoon burning down, we had little time to discuss what we would do and how we would go about doing it. I knew I was tempting fate every moment I stayed, but the truth was the presence of your cousins was a comfort I needed so. That time was better spent putting Aunt Griselda’s pieces together as best we could, laying her in the ground as best we could, joining hands in a circle in a gathering for the departed as best we could.

  By the time we had set fire to her remains and broken our circle, dusk had fallen. My cousins agreed to stay at the road-house and keep the hearth warm in anticipation of my return.

  I wish I could tell you they convinced me to stay, that Eva had told me what the ringing in her ears and the ache in her teeth told her. That she had even whispered it to Agnes, that she might act as the eldest, as the most mature of us. Agnes, who had never settled down with a man, who like as not never would, who drank and played cards and swore just the same as I did but who knew she was beautiful, who used her beauty as a focus for her Work.

  Though my cousins Worked in their own way—Eva handing me a packet of tea leaves and a bag of corn biscuits she had blessed to keep the baby safe, Charlotte pricking the pad of my thumb and pressing the well of blood to her third eye that she would be able to See me and assist me in spite of the distance, and Agnes taking the box of ammunition Hawking had had no cause to use in all this time and enchanting the bullets that they would find their mark in his time of need—I would not let them convince me to stay.

  Hawking and I bid our farewells, and we took Aunt Griselda’s cart and Aunt Griselda’s motherless horses to the trail that would lead us to the end of the world.

  13

  WE WERE ANOTHER MONTH on the road from St. Louis, Missouri, to the Badlands of the Nebraska Territory.

  My dear, if ever you have reason to travel west of the Missouri River, keep in mind the wide expanses of untouched land lain between you and your destination. This country began its life as thirteen colonies on the eastern shores of a populous and inhabited land, and the borders have pushed ever westward so long as American soldiers have had bayonets and gunpowder. I have no doubt in my mind another war will come to pass before you are grown.

  However difficult the journey had been on the way to New Orleans, the journey north was even more difficult still. To the fire kindled by grief, I had added unrelenting fear for your gran. I imagined her eyes blindfolded and her mouth gagged, her hands bound, slung over the back of a horse when she could no longer keep stubborn pace along the path. I imagined your father’s killer tearing her into pieces as he had your great-aunt Griselda.

  While I tormented myself with these thoughts, Hawking deteriorated. His hands shook even when he held on to the reins, and on more than one occasion he either climbed or collapsed down from the cart’s front seat to empty his stomach, no doubt raw after a lifetime of heavy drinking. I suspected he did not want to be nursed, and so I did my best to ignore his sickness until it became an impediment to me.

  “You can’t just stop all at once,” I said to him on the fourth day, when he was barely able to sit up on his own but insisted on doing so all the same.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Drinking. You trying to kill yourself?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “That dead rabbit we passed a few miles back looks better than you do.”

  “Darlin’,” he said, “you say the sweetest damned things.”

  Taking my heavy sigh as an indication of waning patience, he allowed me to stop the wagon early and start a fire that I could brew a tea made from milk thistle and nettle. This I added to a two-quart glass jar I had brought along for a similar purpose, along with enough whiskey as to cause the average person to become sick for the opposite reason. When I was through, I handed him the jar and told him to drink it.

  Though he griped, Hawking allowed me to continue driving the wagon while he rested. By the time he had finished the jar, considerable color had returned to his gaunt cheeks and his stomach had settled enough that he could take in solid food.

  He steadied himself and turned to me.

  “Lilian,” Hawking said, “I’m not sure I ever knew what this little mission of ours was about. That man shot me and killed Matthew. You were trapped in that cell, and Ness was going to see you hang, and that didn’t sit right with me. But I never really played it out.”

  “Well, you should’ve,” I said. “Now ain’t the time.”

  “Do you even know what we’re chasing?”

  “Shut up, Hawk. I mean it.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “I know whatever we’re chasing ain’t a man, and I know what happened that night wasn’t about someone getting angry at the doc for not being able to mend a leg.”

  “Please, Hawk.”

  “He’s been baiting us. He’s been baiting you. Ever since De Soto. We ain’t chasing him, he’s letting us follow him, and it ain’t cause he has plans for you to avenge Matt’s death or save your ma.”

  I regret how I treated Hawking next, but I was not ready to contemplate what lay ahead, and anger came to me easier than understanding.

  “Was she your wife?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The potter’s field in New Orleans. I followed you.”

  Hawking drew a deep breath, his jaws tight for a moment. Though he said nothing, I persisted.

  “How did she die?”

  “Natural causes,” he said. A long pause followed, and I held my tongue in anticipation of the truth. “Once upon a time,” he said, “in a little town called New Orleans, there lived a butcher and his wife. The butcher had inherited his business from his stepfather, a mean son of a bitch who died with more debt than even his accountant had known about, and while the butcher found this revelation distressing, the butcher’s wife was much calmer about the matter. She assured him the Lord never gives a man more burden than he can bear, and besides, she loved him.

  “Well, the butcher had a bit of a love affair with gambling, and long story short, he soon found himself not only still very much in debt to the bank but to a bad man who, it was generally agreed upon, nobody in the city wanted to owe money to. The butcher was in quite a bit of hot water, but his wife told him not to worry. They’d figure something out.

  “Well, the butcher kept on gambling, figuring if he kept splashing coin around on the table he would have to break even one of these nights. He didn’t break even. He got himself further into debt than he already was, and since he co
uldn’t pay up once he lost, his associates told him, ‘Sorry, pal, you’re not welcome here anymore. Try someplace else. Come back when your credit’s good again.’

  “Wouldn’t you know it, the last place in the whole city where the butcher’s money was any good was this little whorehouse in Storyville run by a Madame Chantal Lavoie.”

  Hawking cleared his throat, and though I suspected he would leave the story unfinished, he did not.

  “She was there. I went out of my damned mind, got tossed out by a couple of Lavoie’s kept men. Next time I saw her, she was hanging from a beam in the attic. Left me a note and a box full of cash, enough to pay off the rest of the debt and then some. Coroner said the baby in her belly’d been there since before she started whoring.”

  We observed a spell of silence, he having said all he cared to say and I feeling uncertain of what to say myself. Condolences would not do my thoughts justice, and Hawking would have laughed at my pity, anyway.

  So I let the silence run its course and then I asked, “That why you giving up drinking? You drinking ain’t got nothing to do with my failing Matt.”

  “Bah,” said Hawking, and spat in the road. “You didn’t fail your man, and we ain’t failing now, neither. We’re going to find the bastard, Lilian. And I intend to be sober when we do.”

  “I don’t know who he is, Hawk,” I said. “I don’t know where he came from. I don’t know why he killed Matthew. I don’t know what control he has over others, or why he chose me, or if we’re going to find him before he finds us.”

  “Does it matter?”

  The absence of an answer was an answer on its own.

  “You could turn back,” he said. “It’s a big country.”

  “Don’t matter how big it is. Did you forget I’m wanted for murdering my husband? The lawman chasing after me was his best friend. If he finds me before I find this man, he’s promised me the courtesy of letting me give birth in a jail cell before they hang me, so he can raise my child as his. And he won’t stop until he does find me. So there ain’t no way out except through.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “He killed my husband. He took my mother. Whether we’re hunting him or he’s baiting us, ain’t no way this ends without our paths crossing. So yeah, Hawk, that’s it.”

  We traveled in silence for a time, my blood up and Hawking’s spirits down. Before I could grow accustomed to it, Hawking broke it.

  “ ‘Died in a bullet storm’ makes a better tombstone, anyway.”

  14

  DE LA CRUZ WAS HIDING in a shack out in the Badlands.

  This I saw from the back of the cart, with only a waxing crescent moon for light. I filled a small clay bowl with water from the river we had crossed one week earlier, and I dropped into the water pebbles and two leaves I had picked up intact along the riverbed, and I pricked my finger with a sewing needle I disinfected with whiskey from the butcher’s reserves. The blood spoke of my intent. If my intent were unjust, I do not believe the water would have shown me an image of de la Cruz stirring stew over a low cook fire. I do not believe the leaves would have turned in their bath to show me the way to begin walking, nor continued to point that way once I had begun.

  By now I trust you believe magick is a fickle thing. It can be. Or perhaps it is only so fickle as the one practicing its ways. But for as much of the world as I have cared to see and as easy as I have found it to leave the place I once thought of as home, I do not believe this makes me a fickle creature myself. No more than the wind is fickle, or the trees or the waters.

  I did not know the exact way to take to reach de la Cruz from the road, or rather the bone-dry expanse of sand we chose to call the road, but I did know the ways around not knowing the way. How to find signs of life and match the signs to the life one hopes to find. So we drove the cart as far into the Badlands as the horses could go with the terrain as uneven as it was, and when the rocks threatened to crack the cart’s axle, we left the cart and the horses. It was not ideal for the beasts to stand in the dark, as they would bolt and take the cart with them if they spooked, but I tied their reins to a stump and left them there anyway. Reassurances of my return were like as not hollow when I took the only source of light with me.

  The lantern I had found scarce need for until this night. This and the rifle we took from the back of the cart, and the butcher held the lantern while I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders and twined the divining leaves into a pendant that I hung around my neck.

  “So what’s your plan?” Hawking asked before we set off into the valley.

  “I’m going to knock on the door,” I said, “and he and I are going to have ourselves a chat, and he is going to tell me where I can find the man who killed my husband and took my mother.”

  “You’re so sure about that.”

  “No,” I said. “I ain’t.”

  “How do you know you ain’t going to walk in there and find our friend waiting to dispatch your mother like—”

  My glare stopped him. “She ain’t there. I’d have felt it. And neither is he.” I considered Hawking and his hollowness in the light of what I now knew about him. “You should stay with the horses and cover me.”

  “I ain’t aiming to stay here while you get yourself shot.”

  “Well, then, steady your hands,” I said.

  “Hah.”

  “And watch your mouth,” I said. “He’s outnumbered and he’s got himself an itchy trigger finger, besides.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hawking said.

  When your father and I first moved to the Nebraska Territory, the way was not well known to us, and we had to trust our path and our safety in the thin maps drawn by those who had come before us and those we met along the way. I can recall feeling safer for knowing both your father and his rifle were there. Safety is nothing for which I would barter liberty, but that I have known at least the illusion of it in the past I count as a blessing.

  I knew this night I was headed into territory man had not yet charted. If an outlaw were to seek refuge in this place, he would have to have met and learned it while the sun still shone. The pendant about my neck had lifted from my bosom and pointed straight in the direction I was to go. As I walked, my nearness to the Mexican gave it ease. It lowered with time, and before it returned to lying against my chest, I saw dim firelight burning through a window in the distance.

  In the darkness I knelt, and Hawking extinguished the lantern before he began to creep forward. I too crept forward, as low to the ground as I could with the weight of you in my hips. Neither of us wore spurs or carried keys, and the only person who could feel you moving was me, yet the desolation of the landscape was so stark that I was aware of every sound, felt the tapping of our bootsoles on the rocky earth or your dancing around beneath my ribs was loud as a shout. So complete was the darkness, I could no longer see the pendant made of leaves. When I began to drift away from the house, I knew because I felt its shifting. Never have I so wished for a weapon beyond my own hands.

  I stopped moving and felt for a boulder I could use for support and found one sturdy in the dark. I could feel de la Cruz out there.

  Until that moment, I had not thought of whether I would recognize the cadence of the man’s steps, having heard them just the once, and in a state of alarm at that. I could not hear him moving even when I strained to listen. I heard Hawking as he crept farther away, his intent to flank de la Cruz clear.

  A rock popped as de la Cruz circled around the boulder I had chosen and set the pendant to turning. My eyes were soon adjusted to the darkness, and I wanted to reach for the lantern Hawking had left behind, but I did not want to alert de la Cruz to my location. We stayed like this for a time, long enough I felt as if the pendant had become a timepiece, its movement keeping with his circling around my location, neither of us daring to speak first.

  I heard the clattering of his rifle’s mechanisms as he pulled back the hammer. He was nearer to me than I thought he was. His accent and hatred stained his vo
ice. This was the man who had lied straight to your father’s face, who I counted just as responsible for the murder as the monster who had actually done the shooting.

  “I know you’re here,” he said. “I can smell you.”

  My dear, I wanted to hurt him then. The way he spoke to the darkness and the way he moved in it as if it and he were of a kind. To kill a man with magick is no task to take on lightly. It is difficult enough to do good with it, and to kill a man takes something from the soul of the one who does the taking. At that moment my fatigue was in part due to the demands of pregnancy and so much time on the road but in part, also, because I was preparing to kill the man with a hex.

  “You show yourself,” said Lorenzo Chavez de la Cruz, “and I will not shoot you. I will shoot you if you make me come and find you. ¿Comprendes?”

  If he were the sort of man to shoot at a woman heavily pregnant, then he would deserve whatever happened to him after that. This may seem to you a fair bit of recklessness, but in that moment you have to understand I was more concerned with what would happen to you than what would happen to me.

  I stood from where I had crouched behind the boulder and held my palms so the Mexican could see they were empty and left the lantern on the ground behind me. Though I wore a medicine bag tied to the hem of my tunic and the pointing pendant around my neck, I knew he would not believe me unarmed otherwise. My hair was dirty and so was my face. If he thought I was there to kill him, I would not fault him, but I was not there to punish him for his thoughts.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “You don’t recognize me,” I said.

  He was pointing the muzzle of his rifle in my direction, but I do not believe he had a true shot. Not in the dark and not with a flintlock weapon. Covered in dirt as I was, I could have called upon the dirt covering his palms and created heat. Made the weapon such as he could no longer hold on to it. This was an effort, and I began to make the effort.

  “Nah,” he said. “Now I do. You’re the doctor’s woman.”