Wake of Vultures

by Lila Bowen

  When the trigger finally clicked without kicking, she dropped the Henry and put fingers to her eye socket. It was a mess of gunk and blood and burning hurt, and she felt the bile rise up her throat as she reached around, hunting past the bone for the bullet. She was crying, but it hurt so bad, and no matter how many times she called out to the Captain and Hennessy and even, desperately, Virgil and Milo and Jiddy, nobody stirred from their sleep.

  When her stomach flipped, she struggled for Sam’s pistol, but firm hands landed on hers, pulling them away.

  “Stop, Nettie. If you shoot me, you’ll be alone.”

  The world spun when she looked up into the solemn face of Coyote Dan. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop shaking. She couldn’t quite see as much of him as she should’ve, and he was stark and flat and strange when seen through only one eye.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Dan. I was…” She swallowed hard, tasting tears and blood. “I should be whole, Dan. Hunting the Cannibal Owl. Ending all this bullshit. What happened?”

  Dan let her hands loose to gently hold her head, which normally would’ve made her twitchy as hell. As it was, she let him pull her to the fire and lay her back, one eye open to the stars and the black spot where the moon should’ve been.

  “Looks like you got shot.”

  “Delgado. Delgado shot me. What the sweet goddamn was he? Why didn’t I feel him?”

  “Shh.”

  Dan held her face down with one hand, fingers gentle as moth wings. With his other hand, he suddenly dug into her eye socket, making her scream at the explosion of pain. His knee hit her belly, pinning her down as she struggled against him. All of a sudden, he grunted and pulled something free with a sick, wet suck. She felt the healing start, soft parts and skin knitting together in her skull like a darned sock. It hurt, but in a reverse sort of way. Waiting for her sight to return, she closed her other eye, more aware than ever of the darkness and trying to remember that first vampire, the stranger she’d caught in the eye with a sickle. Had his eye healed before she turned him to sand?

  She couldn’t remember. It was like a nightmare, then and now.

  Dan released her gently to the ground. “He shot you with a silver bullet. What was he?”

  “Hellfire, Dan. How should I know? He had a snake tongue, but his eyes weren’t all buggy like a chupa. He said something about Pia Mupitsi. I didn’t even feel him. In between you and Jiddy and Cap’s watch, I just thought his food made my gut squirm. Aw, hell.”

  “There are things that I don’t know. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you.”

  “That’s your problem, Coyote Dan. You always think you know everything. And you don’t know shit.”

  “That’s what my mother told me, before she died in my arms. She was human. It happened so fast. I was out hunting that night, too, when Pia Mupitsi struck my tribe. Did I tell you that?” She couldn’t see his face, but she could hear him fighting tears. The world was in a strange place, if Dan was admitting that he was lost.

  Nettie swallowed hard and tried opening her eye, but it wasn’t done doing what it was doing, and all she saw was black. She probed it gently with a finger, tried to close her eyelid. Nothing happened.

  “But how the Sam Hill did we all miss that? You, me, Jiddy? Nobody noticed Delgado?”

  Dan cleared his throat, and when she blinked, she saw that he was back to normal, jaw set and tears gone. “Things that want to stay hidden often do. Coiled snakes especially. Perhaps he was a halfbreed, more human than monster in body if not in deed. When many voices are talking, it’s hard to hear an individual’s song, especially if they sing it softly.” He exhaled in annoyance, his fingers pressing the taut skin around her shot eye. “Which is just me acting wise because I never thought that horrible cook might be more than what he seemed. Maybe he was poisoning you all along, maybe there was magic in his food. But you. Nettie, tell me. What are you?”

  His finger probed her eye, and she moaned and thrashed. He put a firm hand to her shoulder to hold her down, and Nettie curled her hands into fists and pounded the dirt. “I don’t know what I am, goddammit! I thought I was the Shadow you kept talking about. You told me I was human. But now a bullet popped out of my shoulder, and your hand’s on the wound, and it don’t even hurt anymore. My hands are all healed, but my eye ain’t. I’m something, but I don’t know what. What the hell am I?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand. What happened here?”

  “Here?”

  “The Rangers are asleep. What did Delgado give them?”

  “I don’t care. My eye, Dan! What about my eye?”

  “It’s not growing back. The lid is gone, but the skin is knitting over the wound. I’m going to wipe away the weeping. I’m sorry for the pain this will cause.” He untied the bandanna around her neck, and her stomach roiled at the feeling of wet, wadded cloth dabbing in her eye socket. It was peculiar, how it didn’t feel like a wound anymore, didn’t sting and burn, but she still couldn’t see. And it smelled like Monty, goddamn it. The sweat on his bandana was just another reminder of her failure to save something fine for the second time.

  She clutched at it, pulled it free. “No! No. Just give it time. It’ll come back. It has to.”

  Dan sighed sadly and tugged her hands away. “There’s no time to waste on mourning what’s gone. Keep moving or perish. Don’t you hear that sound?”

  Nettie swallowed, tried to hear around the pounding of her heart. Her ears were sharper now, as if the world had always been full of tiny rustles that she couldn’t quite catch.

  And what she heard was the harsh sound of air, of metal, of feathers, of…

  “Wings,” she rasped. Her good eye winked open, and she sat up. “What’s coming?”

  Dan scrambled to collect the guns of the nearest sleeping Rangers and pile them on the ground beside Nettie. As the flapping grew louder, she checked the pistols, making sure they were loaded. One of the other fellers—Virgil—had a Henry like the Captain’s, and she scrambled over to grab it from his limp arms. Coyote Dan was stark nekkid, lacking even his little skirt, but Nettie didn’t care about anything but her missing eye and whatever was blotting out the stars and screeching like hell’s own demons. She had a new appreciation for Dan—a feller had to be right brave to go into a monster fight without his clothes, considering how terrified she was even while wearing all her clothes and surrounded by guns. Putting the Henry to her shoulder, Nettie tried and failed to squeeze her eye shut and realized she’d never aim that way again.

  That didn’t matter now. All that mattered was killing what needed to die.

  CHAPTER

  26

  The first of the harpies punched through the night, claws outstretched, and Nettie’s Henry popped off the filthy critter’s head, sending her crashing to the ground.

  “You knock them down. I’ll go for their hearts,” Dan shouted, and Nettie focused on the rain of buzzard-women streaking toward her, their feathers glinting like thousands of tiny swords in the firelight.

  She had sixteen more shots from the Henry, and she didn’t pause between bullets. The rifle was hotter than Hades, and her shoulder was beyond bruised, but each shot knocked one of the vultures out of the sky and onto the ground, where Dan pounded her between the dugs with a quartz knife. And, hell, Nettie’s bruises would just disappear now, wouldn’t they? She was a monster.

  But the goddamn harpies kept coming, and no matter how many shots she fired, no matter how many pistols she picked up fully loaded and discarded hot and empty, no matter how many bodies Dan punched into dirty sand, still the tide didn’t slow down. Arms aching, ears ringing, one eye weeping, Nettie Lonesome learned what eternity was that night.

  Eternity was stars blotted out with heavy bodies and sharp feathers.

  Eternity was clever talons clutching the back of her shirt, ripping into her back, tightening around her arms, heaving her up into the sky, screaming.

  Eternity was the time
it took Dan to turn to her and reach into the air, nekkid and sweating and covered with bloody sand, shouting her name until he was hoarse, his hands clutching nothing but wind.

  Eternity was a wake of vultures, a harem of harpies, a brigade of bragging bitch-buzzards carrying her through the night, flying her toward the gaping mouth of a cave at the top of a mountain that nothing on two legs could ever reach.

  Eternity was the time she fell through space before landing roughly on stone.

  Eternity was the hollow laugh from the darkness, followed by six barked words:

  “Been a long time, my child.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  Nettie was on hands and knees on the floor of a cave. Her good eye saw as much as her bad one, which is to say: not a goddamn thing beyond the starlight kissing the rock ledge.

  “Gonna be a lot longer when I kill your ass,” she shouted, figuring that bravado beat honesty at least half the time.

  A dark chuckle wiggled up the cavern. “Come closer. Let me see you.”

  With a groan, Nettie stood, rubbing a hand over her face. She’d been all cut to ribbons and bruised to lumps by the harpies’ rough treatment, but she could already feel things healing up, as if her body had no truck with the wounds of such nasty critters. She’d always healed fast, but never this fast.

  She could just barely stand without scraping her head, and she looked around real quick to see if she was alone. The front of the cave felt tidy, swept clean, yet somehow carried the scent of death. One tiny moccasin curled by the ledge, and Nettie picked it up, running a finger over the intricate beadwork. Her heart wrenched, and she tried to throw it out of the cave but failed. Instead, she tucked it into her shirt and let the tips of her boots hang into space as she played with the idea of jumping. Suicide was a pleasure she couldn’t afford.

  Instead, she looked away.

  Far below, in the valley of bones, the harpies roosted in their trees, whispering together and smoothing the metallic feathers mussed by their passage. From up here, they looked right personable and homey, like silver chickens with highly wringable necks. Across the river, in the shadows, a dark figure sat a wet, black horse—not pointing, this time. Just standing. Waiting. Even farther away, across an infinite gulf of space and sky, a nekkid man moved around a fire on top of a tableland, stabbing silvery bodies and brushing away clouds of clinging sand. She wanted to call to Coyote Dan, but she didn’t see what good it would do. He had plenty of work to do, taking care of the half-dead harpies.

  She had to do this alone. And she’d always known it, hadn’t she?

  Nodding to herself, Nettie checked for what she had left. A stone knife in one boot, a silver knife in the other, and a sharpened Bowie knife in the sheath on her belt. A hand-stitched leather bag containing coins, various fangs, and a crushed, bloody bullet that matched the hole in her shirt. One old red bandanna that smelled like an old man’s kindness and was still wet with blood and fluid from her destroyed eye. One last sliver of a bone knife, squirreled away between her breasts under the tight wrap of muslin. Twisting away from a peculiar pain in her back, she felt around inside her shirt until she found the offending object: a harpy’s feather, sharp as a man’s straight razor. Taking it out, she held it up to the moonlight and reasoned that although it looked much like a vulture’s flight feather, the quill was made of bone, the end pricked with black blood from where it’d been pulled off a monster’s wing.

  Well, fine, then. She hoped the harpy suffered from the loss. She tucked the feather into her hat for luck.

  Deep within the cave, something clicked with a worrisome rhythm that made Nettie’s skin crawl.

  “Don’t make me wait, child.”

  The voice was strange, alien and gritted and high.

  “You waited this long, Pia Mupitsi. I reckon you can wait a little longer.”

  The chittering laugh that reached her set Nettie’s teeth on edge, and she figured she might as well find the Cannibal Owl before the goddamn thing annoyed her to death. Unsheathing her Bowie knife, she put one hand in front of her and edged into the darkness. She slid forward, light in her boots and wary of the many ways she might be attacked. The only sounds were the rock scree sliding under her heels and the beating of her heart, which she swore she could feel in her gone eye. Dead black was the tunnel, and it angled ever so gently upward. With every inch she moved, Nettie expected to fall endlessly into a hole, to run into a wall or the roof, to be attacked by a thousand deadly monsters she’d never even heard of. She expected bats and bears and harpies and chupacabra, vampires and scorpions and unforgiving men with snake tongues. But all she found was darkness and cold.

  “Almost here. The fire is waiting.”

  The voice was still forever away, and Nettie was tired to her very bones. The day had lasted years, and it took everything Nettie had not to turn around and run for the ledge and launch herself out into the night and be done with it. But every time she thought about giving up, deep in the bowels of the mountain, she’d feel the weight of the moccasin in her shirt, the fangs rattling in her bag, Monty’s bandanna around her neck. She carried revenge in her heart, and it drove her relentlessly forward more surely than any ghostly finger pointing ever west.

  For Monty, she kept walking.

  For the tiny foot that might’ve fit this moccasin before it’d turned to sand, she kept going.

  For every hurt she’d ever received, every bit of warmth she’d never known, every beating she’d ever taking with closed lips, she inched forward.

  And then she heard a familiar whimper and broke into a run.

  So Winifred was still alive, but the terrified sound that had just echoed down the cave made it clear that the girl’s future was hanging in the balance. The chittering laugh came again, almost covered up by the pounding of Nettie’s hobnailed boots and the desperate beating of her heart.

  She smelled the fire before she saw its light dancing with nightmare shadows against the widening walls of the tunnel. Knife still outstretched, she skidded to a stop and looked, for the first time, on the Cannibal Owl.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Greetings, girl,” said the monster.

  “Go to hell, monster,” said the girl.

  Winifred just whimpered.

  As Nettie edged around the fire, the monster tracked her with eyes as big as dinner plates and as yellow as a dead man’s teeth, blinking with terrifying infrequency. The sharp, black owl’s beak clicked like a thousand insect legs, sometimes opening to show all-too-human teeth. It was everything she’d never hoped to see, a collection of wrong parts put together as if by an angry child with a hammer and a box of bent nails. It crouched behind the fire in something like a human’s form with a raptor’s silent wings arching overhead, wearing a black suit that reminded Nettie of the town preacher, like it wanted to be fine but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

  The arms and legs of the suit were too short for the overly thin beast, the knees shiny and shabby where they were drawn up under the creature’s chin. Long, clawed fingers like dying stick bugs clicked and curled and uncurled, that strange snicking sound that had been so vexful, all along. The noise was oddly familiar, oddly painful. To one side of the creature sat a large, woven basket, and inside the basket was Winifred, on her back and pierced through the belly by a long, silver spike. The girl was alive and hating every second of it, her blood pooled and soaking the basket, and Nettie put out a hand and edged toward her friend.

  “Business first,” the Cannibal Owl said, reaching out to smack Nettie’s hand with a claw. “Sit.”

  “What if I don’t want to sit?”

  With an awkward shrug, the creature stretched out a long arm, placed its claws on Winifred’s chest, and pushed her down farther on the spike, causing her to cry out something awful.

  Nettie sat.

  “You ain’t my long-lost mother or something dumb like that, are you?” she asked.

  The Cannibal Owl just laughed, high an
d mad. “Your Comanche call me Owl Mother and Ghost Mother, but I am neither. I have no children. I eat children.” It paused, tapped fingers against its beak. “And only the softest bits of those fully grown. I ate your mother’s guts.”

  All the air rushed out of Nettie’s body; she hadn’t known the long-dead truth could break her heart like that. “Fine. You ate my mother. What do you want?”

  The Cannibal Owl twitched its head sideways and clicked its beak, its giant eyes boring into Nettie’s soul.

  “Same thing I’ve wanted since the first time I lost you: to eat you. Nothing more.”

  Nettie’s fingers ached for the knife in her boot, but she didn’t make a move for it.

  “If you want to eat me, why’d you have to go to so much goddamn trouble? You could’ve knocked me over with one finger in the desert a few weeks ago. You could’ve snatched me from the porch of the hellhole where I spent the last fourteen damn years of my life. Your goddamn harpy almost took me down with one bite.”

  The Cannibal Owl leaned forward, fingers lacing together arounds its knees. “Not my harpy. Took a long time to find you. Wanted to study you. Wanted to understand the only creature that ever escaped me. What are you?”

  Nettie’s one-eyed glare was flat, her patience gone. “I’m the feller that’s going to kill you.”

  “You’re not a feller.”

  “That’s not yours to decide.”

  And as punctuation, she whipped out her Bowie knife and leaped across the fire to plunge the blade into the creature’s chest. It sunk in like butter, but the critter didn’t dissolve into sand. Its beak clicked, and the long fingers laced around Nettie’s shoulders and pulled her away, the knife with her. Lifting her as if she didn’t weigh a goddamn thing, the Cannibal Owl flipped her onto her back, spun her around, and ever so gently draped her over the basket, the long, silver spike digging into Nettie’s back, right under the ribs.

  Nettie shrieked and scrabbled to get hands and feet onto the edges of the basket, to hold herself away, but the material flopped under her hands.