Yea Though I Walk

by J. P. Sloan

  “Because I have a vision.”

  “Your great city under the mountain? We both know whose vision that really was.”

  “You’re a man of compassion, Denton. You should understand what I’m trying to do, more than any other.”

  I pocket the flask and straighten up. “I understand what Kate is doing. She’s making a home for her kind. A place for the orphans to live and thrive when everyone else has abandoned them. What you’re doing,” I add with a thrust of my finger, “is gathering slave labor. I won’t allow them to toil under your heel.”

  Richterman crosses his arms. “So, now you know the truth about your dear, dead wife.”

  “The truth, such as it is.”

  His grin melts. “She lied to you.”

  “So it seems.”

  “She made you this way.”

  I nod.

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  I shrug. “I can’t say with absolute certainty.”

  He laughs. “She’s a demon! She drinks the blood of the living. She’s a walking corpse. A parasite. You don’t think affairs will change now that you know what she is?”

  “I suppose everything will change.”

  Richterman sighs and drops his arms to his side. “You’re as bad as Odell, now.” He adds with a nod past my shoulder, “No offense.”

  “None taken, you bastard-ass.”

  I chuckle, turning to Odell. “You were so ravaged with guilt over your feelings for Kate. Now it makes sense. I suppose your virtue remains intact, such as it is.”

  He reaches out to place a light hand on my shoulder, then nods.

  I look around into the darkness that surrounds us. “How do we escape this?”

  Richterman grumbles, “You haven’t reconciled who you are, you dolt.”

  “I know who I am.”

  “How do you expect you’ll be able to live with the three of us lingering on every individual thought? It’ll be pointless. We’ll have to establish dominance first.”

  Odell grumbles, “Suits me,” as he lifts his Remington and fires a shot into Richterman’s face.

  My heart throbs.

  Odell holsters his gun and gives me a wink.

  “Is… is he gone?” I mutter.

  “Probably not for good. But he was right on that account. He’s been hanging on to your notions and feelings for a while, now. About time we turned that around on the old buzzard.”

  “What are you suggesting, a collusion?”

  “None of this changes the fact that a horde of cannibal beasts is about to sweep into this valley. We have work to do, Denton. I’m here to help.”

  “You think we’re capable of this tightrope act? The two of us in one head?”

  “We’ve been at it for weeks, now. This way, we won’t be at odds.” He holds out a hand. “Do we have an accord?”

  I consider his hand, and the darkness surrounding.

  “We do.”

  I grip his hand, then open my eyes.

  ate stands in front of me, still clutching my shirt. Her face is human, perhaps more so than I’ve ever seen it before. She looks pale and harrowed, with tears welling in her eyes.

  A knot forms in my chest. Anger. I’m not used to seeing her face and feeling this way, but here it is. Recognition of her deed. Still, I’ll have to say something.

  So I say, “Until just now, I’ve never realized how much guilt you’ve been carrying.”

  My words strike her like a weight, and she releases me to stumble backward against her bedpost.

  “Denton?” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  The tears break free from her eyelids, streaming down her sharp cheeks to gather at her chin.

  “How… do you feel?” she ventures.

  A snicker slips from my throat, surprising us both. “Now that makes sense.”

  “What does?”

  “Those strange affectations. Curious questions you tend to ask me. ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Do you know where we are?’ ‘I love the sound of your name. Can you say it for me?’ I wish I hadn’t put you to such lengths.”

  “Then you remember―”

  “Everything.”

  Her tears redouble, and she wipes a finger across her cheeks without much effect. “Denton?”

  I reach out with a stiff arm to hold her at a distance. “You broke me, Kate.”

  “I know.”

  “Ten years. A decade of my life, wallowing in this lie. You’ve robbed me of my very identity. How am I supposed to feel about this? What am I supposed to do?”

  Her face stiffens.

  “It was my doing,” she mutters with a fluttering breath. “The thrall. Something was wrong that night. You flew into a panic. I had to make a choice.”

  “And your choice was to shack up with me on the prairie?”

  Her lips narrow, and she turns her back to me. “I made a life with you, Denton. Don’t you dare profane it now.”

  “Profane? We aren’t―we don’t know each other. I’ve never been the man I was born, not since Lewisburg. How do you know I wasn’t more like Richterman before we met? Or Scarlow? I’m a wartime deserter, for the love of Christ. And you? I have these memories flooding back into my mind, mostly from Richterman. I can’t know who you are anymore.”

  She turns with a hard face, straightening her spine.

  “I made up my mind about you long ago, Denton Folger. Whatever you think about me, that will be your burden. I fell in love with a poor, broken coward.”

  “Why?” I shout, desperation flooding my voice.

  “Our first day together. Your lunacy broke just before sunrise. I was trapped with you near some rail station. Do you not remember it? You carried me into the boxcar, and you stood watch.” She takes a cautious step forward. “Soldiers came. They could have spotted you. They could have questioned you. You could have run, but you did not. You stayed with me.” She takes another step. “You ask me why I kept you alive? I have asked myself the same question for years. My only conclusion, you are a good man and I love you.”

  I bow my head. “I don’t want my feelings for you to change.”

  “Why should they?”

  “The truth. It matters. It matters to me. Probably more so than religion to the masses. Murder, theft, carnal sins. None cut me quite so quick as deceit.” I turn to her bureau and lay my hands down, giving myself a long glare in the mirror. “And I betrayed that virtue all by myself. I was willing to bring slander against Richterman. No, I’m not a good man, Kate. I’m just another wretch in this blighted valley.”

  She reaches with her hand to rest it on my shoulder, but pauses, hand trembling in the air. She probably fears this is a temporary state of clarity. She could be right.

  “What about… him?”

  “Which one?”

  With a squint, she answers, “Lars.”

  I nod and turn to face her.

  “He thought I was weak. Thought I needed protection. And so he was here when he thought I needed him.”

  “No,” she grunts. “He wants to control you.”

  “Perhaps, but I’m in control now.”

  A grin flickers on her lips. “I want to believe that.”

  “Then believe it. For now, just right now. Because it’s true at this moment.”

  She rushes forward and wraps her arms around me, holding me with a firm measure of her inhuman strength. I squirm a little to catch a breath, then succumb to it. She reaches for my lips with hers and kisses me, but I turn my face away. She goes stiff and steps away, fingers trailing along my sides.

  I say as I wipe the tears falling down my face, “You were right, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Odell. He saved me after all. Whatever happened in my mind, whatever broke inside, I had to explain it to him. I think that made the difference.”

  She steps back and sits on the bed, a decade of struggle melting off her shoulders. “Is he still…”

  I take a seat beside her
and draw in a deep breath.

  Odell leans in the corner, hat hung low over his eyes, arms crossed over his chest.

  “He’s around,” I offer.

  “What does this mean?”

  “Odell came to pull me out of this… situation. This schism. I’ll need his help against Magner. And Richterman. Assuming I can reconcile my own actions as a tyrant.”

  “If there is evil at work, my love, then it is my own,” she says.

  I turn and give her a frown. “That’s what you think of yourself? That you’re evil?”

  “Am I not cursed with evil?”

  “Kate?” I nudge her chin to face me. “You are not evil. Cursed perhaps, but evil is an illusion. I understand that now, better than you can realize.”

  “You do not know what he has done to those orphans,” she whispers.

  “But I do. I remember it all, Kate. Everything I’ve done. To the Strigoi, to the town. The people I’ve had killed.”

  She frowns. “And you are comfortable with it?”

  “No. But it’s done, now. It’s the past, and I can’t erase history once it’s been written. These deeds are nothing but the flailings of a frightened man. All this has proceeded from a place of fear. Lars couldn’t face the outside world, so he turned this valley into his personal fiefdom. And the one good thing he’s accomplished, this underground city for the orphans? It wasn’t his plan after all. Never was.”

  “It was always his plan.”

  “No, it was your dream, slipping into this crack you made in my mind. These thoughts took seed in my brain, but this has always been your master plan, Kate. This has been your labor of love. And these orphans? Richterman may have conscripted them into corvée labor, but there has only ever been one Master Strigoi in this valley.”

  She clears her throat and pulls my hand onto her lap.

  “I want to be done with all of this, Denton. The city. The town. This war with Magner.”

  “That’s only despair. It will pass.”

  I set my jaw. I want to comfort her, but inches between us have become a gulf. A cold, bitter gulf filled with uncertainty. It’s painful. I abhor the feeling of it, so used to her affection as I have been. I’m not ready to submit to the truth just yet. Perhaps I’m not ready to forgive. I can’t feel guilty about that. Not tonight. There’s too much to do.

  And Odell looks impatient.

  “We’ll finish this war tonight. Perhaps the town, as well.”

  She nods. “People will die.”

  “I know. They’ll die anyway, if we do nothing.”

  She releases my hand. “You still wish to save them?”

  “We save who we can. We bury the rest. And we move on.”

  “You don’t sound like Denton.”

  “Denton was weak. Richterman wasn’t wrong about that. But I am more the man I should have been, now. At least I feel strong. And, yes, people will die. We might die, but I can’t stop feeling hopeful. I feel we will win. We have to, or at least we have to believe we will.”

  “Now you sound like Denton.”

  We sit together for the last of the sunlight hours.

  At some point I realize my press has been utterly dismembered and cobbled into Edward’s contraption. I feel a twinge of grief at the passing of an old friend. That press had been my grindstone, my only weapon of war. It had been my crucible to burn away my cowardice, my desertion, all of my sin.

  A friend. I suppose Scarlow was my only true friend in this valley. He wanted to jar me loose when I was Odell. He used Richterman to survive, but more than anything he felt he belonged with Richterman. And in Odell he saw a fellow outcast. And as for the real me, he always treated me with respect. To manage all of these personalities not just with patience but with aplomb? He was my friend. And I’ve run him off. It was probably the best gift I could have given him. If he escapes the hills, he’ll survive. He’ll ride west and settle somewhere near Seattle. He’ll find someone else to enable his life of maximum reward for minimum effort. I doubt I’ll ever see him again.

  Kate stands again, and by the dark orange hues slipping through the cellar doors, I sense that sunset is upon us.

  “We have much to do,” she says.

  I stand and stretch my neck and back as she sweeps with no hint of stiffness to the far side of her parlor to snatch a cupful of blood from one of her stone pots.

  “Where you do get it?” I ask.

  She lifts a brow from over her cup and takes a long swallow. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “The town.”

  “You take blood from the townsfolk?”

  “A little at a time. I never leave them wounded, and I never take enough that they feel ill.”

  “And you never kill?” I urge.

  “That would be stupid.”

  I nod, and she takes in more blood before placing her jar and cup neatly away.

  “Then this actually works. This ranch of humans? It’s working for you. It will take a lot more living stock to feed all the orphans in the mine, I suspect.”

  “After tonight, there may not be many left to feed.”

  “They know where Magner’s creatures are?” I ask. “I assume they know the hills better than anyone.”

  She nods.

  “I found the Hitchenses out in the open plain,” I mention. “Looks like they got hit by Strigoi and left to get picked over by vultures.”

  “They weren’t mine, unless they were newcomers. Hungry, still without a guide.”

  “I’d assumed Richterman had sent them on the Hitchenses out of revenge. If this valley is home to more of these newcomers, then there will be more bodies out in the prairie. That will attract some attention.”

  She stiffens and narrows her eyes. “What do you expect? I cannot control that.”

  “Well, you have to. You are their Master, from the moment you call them here.”

  “How do I control them before I have even seen them?”

  “That’s how you’ve created this valley, this city. This system. You’ve assumed responsibility over these orphans.”

  She lifts an impatient hand and huffs.

  “This has never been attempted before. In Strigoi circles, orphans are mistakes. Reckless things that are meant to be culled. You cannot expect me to be their Master before they have arrived. That is unreasonable.”

  I wait for her ire to settle, and for the monster gray to drain back out of her face.

  “All I’m saying is you’re going to draw attention from the same element you’re escaping. Corpses come up, the Law will notice. And Odell’s Godpistols? They and others like them are out there. I’m not giving you orders, Kate. It’s just something that must be dealt with.”

  She takes several unnecessary breaths, her way of expressing her discontent with me, before returning a long, slow blink. “Why does this feel so suddenly heavy?”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe you can do it. Especially now that you won’t have to ‘handle’ me.” I add as I hoist two of the jugs of lamp oil, “You’re not alone anymore.”

  The strain in her features eases. She reaches for her wardrobe and produces her armor. She tightens the buckles of her leather-plated accoutrement around her arms, hips and chest, then snatches the rest of the oil.

  We ascend from the cellar into a starkly biting winter wind. The grass is doubled over in pounding waves of northern air. I hustle toward the shelter to find Ripper stamping and complaining. I should have blanketed him. This shelter without walls is no good for this winter breeze. I begin saddling Ripper, casting a quick eye to the far corner of the house and the four grave mounds beyond. So clear, now.

  Kate swipes up the last of the oil, hoisting them in her grip with ease. Without her shawl, she looks less like an angel and more like a warrior from an ancient world. Her hair flies sideways with the wind, fluttering like a regimental flag. She is her own legion, ready to march.

  I mount Ripper and give her a nod. “You know what
to do?”

  “With this wind, we shall have no problem starting a blaze.”

  “Be careful. Fires move quick in a gale like this. Your people can get trapped if they aren’t careful.”

  “Do you realize how terrifying the flame is to our kind?”

  I give her a slow nod.

  “Then you understand how deeply they fear these Wendigo, to brave the flames.”

  “You be careful, Kate.”

  She stands with stiff arms and a resolute face. “I shall.”

  “I don’t want you hurt.”

  The glimmer of a smile flashes in the corner of her face before she sweeps in her Strigoi fashion away into the tall grasses, plowing a line to the hills.

  Odell steps into view from around the back of the shelter.

  “You ready to call down all Hell?” he quips.

  “I rather wish Richterman were here. This was supposed to be his task, taunting out Magner and his creatures.”

  “Well, if you insist he’s the only one who can put a burr up Magner’s ass—”

  “I don’t want Richterman in control.”

  “I’ve been known to raise a hackle or two. If you prefer, I can ride for you.”

  “No. I’ll do it. Feels… necessary, somehow.”

  “All right, then.”

  I kick Ripper into a slow trot. The poor horse looks ragged and cold. He’s been with me for over ten years. Unlike me, he was never a deserter. I’d bought him off Army surplus after moving to this valley. Despite not sharing a rogue’s past, I’ve felt fondly of him. Though I haven’t giving him proper accommodation. Nor have I treated him with mercy, continually driving him forward and backward every night as Folger takes his slumber only to rise as Richterman. I wonder why this animal doesn’t hate me. Perhaps he knows what I’ve suffered. Perhaps he felt I needed him.

  It takes a good hour to reach the hills. The sky is dark, shrouded in thick winter clouds rolling in from the north. I run my eyes along the line of ridges, searching for any sign that Kate’s orphans have committed to the work. Ripper nips at some grass beneath me as we wait. I keep my nose working, searching the wind for―

  Smoke! It’s faint, but I smell it. That sharp, sweet scent of pine needles smoldering on a driving wind. The fire is set somewhere.

  A rush of birds in the distance announces their alarm as flames advance on their roost. I sit in the saddle, listening over the wind for more telltale signs of impending catastrophe. The forest seems to slither with activity, but from wildlife or the unnatural denizens within, I can’t say.