The fire was blazing hot. Whoever had set it wasn’t too concerned with it being seen, that was certain. The flames crackled. The sound masked Creed’s approach. He felt like his heart would drive itself out of his chest if it got beating any faster.
"Damn," he whispered. "Just what in the hell have I gotten myself into?"
Three tall shadows surrounded the fire. Two had their backs to him, and the third stood directly across the fire. They each had long poles in their hands. It seemed as though they were intent on stirring the coals and keeping the fire burning hotter, but as Creed eased back a low hanging branch to get a better look, it was all he could do to bite back a scream.
The fire pit was maybe three feet across. It was deep, and even from where he stood, twenty or thirty feet back, the heat was stifling. It was like a bowl carved into the earth, filled with glowing coals. To one side they’d stacked a pile of dead branches to feed in when the heat died down, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon.
None of that mattered. What mattered was the man – thing? – trying to claw its way free of the inferno. Creed recognized the three immediately. They were the strangers who’d invaded his room. He reached instinctively for the reassuring handle of his six-shooter but stopped no more than an inch from the grip when he realized how useless the weapon was. At least one of them ought to have been dead; he’d been pumped full of enough lead put down a horse.
Long arms covered in blackened, searing flesh groped for the sides of the pit. There was a mewling, mindless sound that might have been a voice, once, but whenever it rose, one of the three slammed the end of their pole into the side of the thing’s head, or its shoulder, pressing it back and silencing it with the force and shock of each new blow.
Something beyond the obvious was wrong. It took Creed a moment to sort it, and then he frowned. Fire. Meat. Wood. Charcoal. But there was no smell. Any one of those things ought to have been giving off some sort of smell. The meat, a sickly sweet stench – he’d burned bodies before – during a bout of plague further west – but all he smelled here was the maddening, cloying sweetness of the fog of incense.
The man-thing lunged to one side. It rose half out of the pit, and Creed reeled back, biting his lip hard to prevent any sound from escaping. Where the man’s torso should have met hips and leg, nothing but charred trailing guts and blood dangled. One of the crow men lashed out with his stick, and the thing tumbled back, an almost surprised grimace of pain crossing its ruined features.
Creed didn’t know what to do. He knew he was no match for the three. Together with Brady he'd barely managed to chase them off. They were like a pack of crows – chase them out of your field all you wanted, they’d just circle and come back. He didn’t know what that thing in the pit was either, though he suspected that – at least at some point in its existence –it had more in common with him than the others. There was nothing he could do to help, but he couldn’t just stand there and watch it being tortured and burned.
He reeled away from the translucent barrier as a heart-chilling cry broke like shattering ice over the clearing. In the silence between heartbeats a huge shadow enveloped everything, snuffing the light from the fire and plunging the world into utter, impenetrable darkness.
Creed staggered back and hit the wall. He winced as the cold, icy pain tore through his body. He opened his eyes again. The darkness was gone, only the pain remained. No, he realized, a tall willowish woman stood beside the fire-pit. She glared down into it contemptuously. Creed’s hand slid instinctively toward the six-shooters on his hip. He tried to slow his suddenly rapsing breath. His hand shook. He gritted his teeth and pulled the gun. The woman turned her head slightly and looked right at him. She shook her head, just once, very slightly.
"I wouldn’t do that if I were you," a voice said inside his head. The crow men fell away before her in a flutter of dark clothing and shuffling feet. If she frightened them, Creed wanted no part of her. So far, she hadn’t told them he was nearby, and he thought – for some odd reason – that this was reassuring. He holstered the gun.
She turned toward the camp and strode up to the shimmering barrier. It brought her closer to Creed. He backed away step after stumbling step as she neared. She didn’t acknowledge his presence at all. When she reached the wall of light she placed her hand flat against it and scowled. Luminous rings rippled out from her fingertips along that transparent surface. For a dozen feet either side of her the barrier was suddenly lit by a bluish glow. Stepping closer, she placed her other hand beside the first. And pushed.
A jag of blue light arced down from somewhere far above and sheered through the barrier between her outstretched hands. Creed watched, fascinated. The fault in the otherwise perfect surface pulsed angrily. The crow men let their poles dangle, taking only random pokes at the wretch struggling weakly in the fire pit. They focused all of their attention on the woman. Miniscule fissures rippled out from the fault, breaking the barrier open inch by inch. The whole thing reminded Creed of ice on a river – though it had been years since he’d seen water freeze.
The three crow men turned to the fire and jabbed violently with their poles. It was, Creed thought, as though a single thought controlled them. They speared the wretch in the blaze from three sides, the red hot iron tips driving deep though his charred living corpse, and lifted him above the fire. They held his writhing body easily.
Creed was torn. Did he watch the crow men or the woman? He thought about Brady, and Silas. He thought about the woman whose locket he wore.
The crack widened. The barrier screamed like a living thing. The sound was worse than any death rattle he had heard.
Creed saw things – faces, hands, oddly elongated bodies that glowed and writhed, trying to make their way to the widening rift. Something held them back. It was as if the woman had opened a hole and rolled the edges back, forming a wall. The fissure was narrow at first, but widened slowly.
When Creed looked back toward the fire the crow men turned toward him. For a heart-stopping moment he thought they had seen him, but they weren’t looking at him, they were staring at the woman’s back. Whatever was going on in that camp, he wasn’t going to be able to do anything if he was stuck on the wrong side of the barrier. That said, he couldn’t believe the woman, or the crow men, breaking their way through was a good thing, either. All he could do was watch as she tore the fault wider. When it was wide enough for a man to slip through, he made his move.
Keeping low to the ground, he ran, hard, fast, parallel to the fire. He had his gun in his hand before he took the first step. It was habit. Even though he knew on a gut level it was useless, it felt good to hold it. The first of the crow men started to turn as he drew level with the fire. Creed spun and fired from the hip.
Three shots.
Each bullet caught a crow man full in the face, splitting bone and feather as they went in deep. That single second of gunplay was without doubt some of the best shooting he’d ever managed, but he didn’t have time to savor it. They staggered, and the poles they were using to brace the wretched thing between them shivered. One of the iron tips tore free, unbalancing all three crow men. As one, they loosed a horrifying screech – it was halfway between the cry of an eagle and the laughing bray of a hyena.
The woman, as though startled, turned a fraction casting a backward glance over her shoulder. Creed didn’t hesitate. He charged at her. At the last possible moment, as she raised her hands to protect herself, he threw himself to the side, scrabbled in the dust and, even as she twisted, hurled himself headlong into the gaping fault she’d opened in the barrier. With a scream of rage she clawed at him, but that broke her contact with the shimmering wall and the fault sealed itself in an explosion of light and sound.
On the other side Creed scrambled to his feet and turned back, guns raised. He saw the woman staring at him in fury, and then her expression changed. Of all things, she smiled. Then, with no warning, she threw back her head and laughed. The sound was
distorted by the barrier. For a moment it sounded eerily like a parliament of owls screeching.
Creed turned his back on her. She was on the other side of the barrier and as much effort as it had taken her to open that one crack, he was pretty sure there was nothing she or her bird men could do to hurt him through it. He crouched low and started into the Deacon’s camp. Heart pounding, he started out around a row of camp wagons and headed for the back of the great tent. Whatever was going down in there, he didn’t think it was going to be long before things started to get interesting.
He wanted a good seat.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lilith strode to the fire and pushed the nearest of the crow men aside contemptuously. She stared down at the wretched, struggling carcass that was all that remained of their prisoner. She pulled a small pouch from the folds of her long, dark dress and teased it open. She took a pinch of powder and – blowing on it once – she sprinkled it over the fire.
The thing in the pit stiffened. Its skin crackled, grew as red as the coal feeding the flames that tormented it, and blackened. As the undead, pleading eyes stared up at her from the fire, the earthly remains of Benjamin Jamieson fell away to ash.
Seconds later, the pit was cold and dead – nothing but blackened soot remained. The woman pulled out a larger pouch, leaned down, and very carefully scooped the cinders from the pit. She let them fall through her fingers and into the pouch. When she was done, she sealed the drawstrings and touched the leather to her lips before handing it to the nearest of the crow men. It nodded, taking the pouch from her. The feathers had reformed around the wound in its face, leaving no trace of the damage caused by Creed’s lead.
"When the time is right, you will know," she told it. "You know where the weakness lies."
The bird man turned, and with a harsh cry took to the air, losing his human form in a flurry of wing beats as it blurred into the shape of a very large, very dark crow. The others followed. The woman stood for a moment, watching them depart, and then stepped back to the barrier and stared at it as though she might penetrate the shield with the force of her gaze alone.
"Soon," she said softly. "Soon all debts are paid."
Then, with a soft whisper of silk, she melted to shadow and was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nothing moved. He heard the music from the main tent, and he heard The Deacon’s booming voice. It carried clearly but for some reason he couldn’t make out the words. The sermon was oddly rhythmic. Creed listened to the roll of the preacher’s voice. It wasn’t like any sermon he’d ever heard, but given the Deacon was about as far from any preacher he’d ever come across it didn’t surprise him. Walking away from the invisible barrier and all of the hells he’d seen on the other side of it, Creed doubted if much could surprise him anymore.
He kept to the shadows. Just because he couldn’t see anyone outside the main tent didn’t mean there was no-one out there. He didn’t trust appearances where the Deacon was concerned. The man was almost certainly paranoid when it came to his own safety, which meant he’d be pretty much aware of every shadow worth jumping at and would have set one of his weird flock to watching them. Creed didn’t want anyone getting in his way before he at least figured out what in hell was going on. Actually just knowing half of what the hell was going on would have been nice.
His mind raced, thoughts like blind horses stampeding: what had happened to Brady? The thought of the sheriff in that tent listening to the odd, chanting sermon with the flickering candlelight didn’t seem right. Scratch that, it seemed damned wrong. Creed had known Moonshine a long time, and he’d figured to find the man outside rolling a smoke and waiting for the rest of Rookwood to come back to their senses. There was no sign of the sheriff. Creed sniffed the air but there were too many peculiar fragrances mixed up in it to pick out Brady’s smokes.
The front of the main tent beckoned. It wasn’t exactly inviting, but there was something about it that gnawed at Creed’s curiosity. He stood and watched the shadows play against the canvas walls, trying to harness a few more of those stampeding thoughts. He could just step inside and take his chances, but that wasn’t much of a plan. Either everything was fine for those inside, or something very wrong was happening. Given the way the last few days had rolled, Creed was inclined to expect the worst. So, assuming that worst, then something had almost certainly prevented Stick from getting out. Creed’s skin itched; every damned inch of him. It wasn’t exactly a great idea to waltz into the revival all guns blazing.
There was a smaller entrance in the rear. He knew it was there, the Deacon had come in through it that first day when he’d ridden into the camp. If he came in at the back of the main stage, maybe he’d get lucky. At the very least he ought to be able to creep close enough to gauge the temperature in the revival, and if it turned out to be hell-hot, figure out what to do. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was what he had.
He slipped past the wagons to the left of the central tent, keeping low and moving quickly. There was the sense of something imminent in the air – something wrong on levels he could barely understand. Everything felt strange. But feelings were just that, feelings. He needed something more concrete than a ghost dancing on his grave. He had the distinct sensation that there was very little time to spare.
He came alongside a long wooden framed wagon just before he passed behind the tent. The walls were painted with wild designs. He couldn’t make out colors in the moonlight, it all washed to shades of black and gray, but he stopped, just for a moment, and stared at an image of a man, his feet tied in a noose and hung from a branch, but the head to the sky – as if he were falling upward. He’d seen images like it before. In saloons back east there were gypsy women with gaudy, brightly colored cards. They claimed to read the future, to gaze into tea leaves and trace the lines of a man’s palm – and to read the world in decks of multi-colored cards. He had no idea what it meant, or why it was there.
What stunned him about this hanged man was the poor wretch’s face, or rather the familiarity of it. Creed could have been looking into a mirror so perfect was the likeness.
He tore his gaze from the disturbing gallery and continued.
He slipped around the back corner of the tent and stopped dead in his tracks. Without a sound, he pressed against the outer wall of the tent. Ahead, two figures stood just outside the rear entrance. One was a man, about Creed’s own height. The other was either a small woman, or a child. They stood in the shadows by the door, not hidden, but too close to allow Creed to slip past easily.
He stood still for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Creeping dread stole into him then, everything culminating in the single sure notion that if he didn’t move, and move fast, he wasn’t going to move ever again. It was as ludicrous as it was irrational but he knew the truth of it down bone deep. If he didn’t do something right then, nothing else was going to matter. Ever. He had no idea who those two behind the tent were, but they worked for the Deacon. Why else would they be there? So if they saw him trying to sneak into the back of the stage, they’d raise the alarm, that, or try to stop him themselves. Either way, the outcome was hardly likely to be quiet. That meant Creed had to make a choice, and he had to make it quickly.
"Oh hell," he said softly.
He pulled his gun and moved toward the tent. As he drew nearer he saw that the taller of the pair was an older man, possibly Mexican. A young boy stood by his side. They stared into the interior of the tent, mesmerized. Creed thanked his stars and decided to push his luck. Even as he drew very close, they didn’t look up. If they heard him approaching, they gave no sign of it.
"What the hell is going on in there," Creed said.
He kept his voice low. He knew he was going to startle them, but he hoped he could contain it. If they looked up and saw his gun, maybe they wouldn’t cry out. Maybe they’d hold their silence long enough that he could make the decision whether to try and silence them, or just kill them and be done with it. He didn’t like
the idea of shooting an unarmed man, and the thought of killing a boy ate at his gut, but there were a lot of people in that tent. Some of them he’d been saying howdy to for years, others had cooked him dinner and shared his whiskey. A few less he’d bedded, either with coin or a smile, depending on the woman in question. It all boiled down to the same thing. He couldn’t let it go, and so he had no choice.
In the end, it didn’t really matter.
The old Mexican glanced over at him. He didn’t look surprised, and he didn’t make any kind of move to stop Creed, or to pull a weapon. Instead, he grabbed the boy by his thin shoulders and drew him away from the door. Creed watched until the two were far enough back that he could slip past them.
He caught the old man’s expression, and in that moment he understood. They served the Deacon, but it wasn’t a service they’d chosen. Apparently they’d had no orders to guard the entrance, and so – they wouldn’t do it. Whatever Creed was going to see or do inside, he was on his own. The two of them backed out of it.
He tipped his hat very quickly, not holstering his gun, and slipped into the tent. The old man didn’t so much as twitch a muscle never mind move, and within seconds Creed was sucked into a world of light, sound, and energy such as he’d never experienced.
As he moved cautiously up behind where the Deacon stood, Creed jerked to the side and cursed very softly. He bit off the sound even as it tried to escape his lips.
He barely avoided the strike of the first snake.
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