“Nothing has been disturbed,” he said, but as if his mind was on something else. “All my spells are untapped.”
They’d booby-trapped the car. I was so shocked I barely stopped myself from lighting into ’em. “I hope you don’t mean that anyone touching your car would be harmed,” I said with as much control as I could summon up. “In these parts something as fancy as this car is a real attraction, and all kinds of people would love to have a gander at it. Not to harm it or take something from it. Just to look at it, and see the engine, and crawl underneath, and talk about how it works.”
“We could not answer the questions,” Paulina said without a trace of shame.
“Not even Eli?” I tried not to sound shocked. Sure, there were women mechanics, like Lavender. And I knew the parts of an engine well enough. But generally, the ones bitten by the lust for car parts were men.
“Not even Eli,” he said soberly, but I could see he was almost smiling.
I gave the car as good a going-over as I could, in honor of the people of Segundo Mexia.
The Celebrity Tourer had a square cut in the roof, a big one, and there was some kind of a top to roll open and closed as the weather demanded, and a hard square to insert over that. The square locked into place on the inside, I noted with approval. It was April, only the beginning of the dust and sun season. I tried to reduce my anger at the booby traps. And the booby traps, they’d be handy in other towns.
I just didn’t want anyone I knew getting hurt for being naturally curious.
It was a relief to watch Eli lock the shed door after he’d checked the gas and oil levels. At least he knew that much. I felt better someway.
When they were about to shoot off for the Antelope, I decided now would be a good time to tell them a few things. “You hired me to guide you and be your gunnie,” I said. “I know you two are big bad wizards, but you have to let me do the job you hired me for.”
They both stared at me without any expression. I waited for them to ask a question. Nope.
“So what I do is this. I leave a building first in case anyone’s aiming at the doorway from across the street or on a rooftop. I go into a building first, same reason. I tell you to get down, you get down. I tell you to run, you run. Okay?”
More of the staring.
“In the morning,” Paulina said, “we leave for Ciudad Juárez. Please be here no later than eight o’clock.”
“I will,” I said. And that was the end of our conversation.
The grigoris didn’t seem to have any other use for me the rest of the day. I was glad to part ways with them.
I went home. My friend Dan Brick came by, and we went out in the desert to shoot, which always calmed me down. He’d brought a couple of pork chops—not from Big Balls, unfortunately—and I cooked them with some onions and peppers and made some biscuits and peeled an orange and topped some strawberries. That was a good supper. I felt so much better—since I’d gotten off the horse, my head felt like a normal head—I could actually enjoy the food and the company. It was a relief to be with someone I understood.
After we’d done the dishes, Dan left. I packed again, this time with care. I didn’t have many clothes, but I had to take what I could. I didn’t know when I’d be home again, or what opportunities I’d have to wash.
More importantly, I packed up all my firearms and ammo. I had two extra magazines apiece for the Colts. I felt rich in guns right now.
When I’d gone over everything twice, and taken some strawberries down to Chrissie because they’d go bad in a day or two, I turned in, determined to enjoy my last night in my own bed. I hadn’t expected to leave town so soon.
The next morning I walked away with a look back at my little house. I had a bad feeling that it would be a while before I saw it again. Of course, there was always the chance I wouldn’t come back.
Paulina and Eli seemed surprised when I loaded my big leather bag of weapons and ammo into the back seat. Paulina looked outright scornful. “You brought more guns than clothes,” she said.
“Am I not your gunnie?” I tossed the much smaller bag of clothes and other stuff into the trunk, where two suitcases were already tucked. I’d gone on trips before, sure, but had seldom spent more than two nights in a row away from Segundo Mexia. I told myself that this would be an adventure. I just hoped it wouldn’t be too much of one. At least we’d packed big water bottles, and food, though it wasn’t easy to have a good meal off things that wouldn’t spoil in a hot car.
The way out of town led south past the schoolhouse. My mother was outside with the kids, and I waved. She lined up all the children and waved back, because seeing me in a car was an interesting moment.
“Was that your mother we passed?” Eli, who was driving, seemed to be curious about everything.
Mom did look different from the day I’d gotten shot. Her hair was loose, and she was with the children, which always made her happy. “Yes,” I said.
“Her name is Candle, she said. She’s young.” Eli glanced back in the rearview mirror.
“Sixteen when she had me.”
“Young to be wed,” Paulina commented, but not as if she gave a shit.
“Old enough to be raped.” That shut them up.
As I’d previously noticed, Eli and Paulina weren’t anxious to share their plans. But as the day passed, they grew more comfortable with talking to each other in front of me. After all, I was just the hired help, along to keep them from getting killed in a mundane way. I began to piece their lives together from bits of their conversation.
Paulina had left England as a young woman, at least ten years before, to travel to the Holy Russian Empire. By herself. That took some starch. She’d heard that wizards were welcome in the HRE; wizards were even admired.
Eli had been born in Mother Russia, but he’d come to our country—what used to be our country—on one of the boats in the armada that had carried the royal family, the remaining nobility, their surviving servants, and a lot of army, during the great rescue of 1918. Of course, Eli had been a child. He had living parents, and at least one brother.
I listened, and I watched and waited.
That first day the country we drove through was calm but busy. We saw other cars and trucks, more people on horseback and afoot. It was about fifty-fifty Texomans and Mexicans, not that you could always tell the difference. I kept an eye out for trouble, but I spent a lot of time observing Eli and Paulina, watching the way they were with each other.
It was better than remembering Tarken and Galilee and Martin, or wondering what I would do when I returned home.
I’d never been around real wizards. I’d only talked to assholes with a smattering of talent, like the man who’d raped my mother. I could smell the power on Eli and Paulina. It didn’t exactly scare me, but it made me cautious. Paulina was older and the leader of this little expedition, for sure, but Eli seemed to be almost equal. He had some edge over Paulina, at least from her attitude; she’d catch herself up short when she was about to stomp him in a disagreement. I couldn’t figure it out.
We weren’t anywhere close to a town around nightfall, so we camped. The weather was good, and we had a meal we’d brought with us, packed at the Antelope and kept cool by a chunk of ice, so the evening was easy. I didn’t exactly sit with the grigoris, but I didn’t sit too far away, either. No one had been following us, but there was never any telling who’d appear out of the desert. I kept alert.
Before we went to sleep, Eli cast a spell around our campsite strong enough to keep a bear out, he told me. His hands moved, and his lips, too. I watched. Paulina didn’t. She trusted him to do it right.
I’d never seen anything like this. Eli seemed all wrapped up in strength.
“If this spell of yours will keep bears out, why do you need me?” I said.
“It won’t keep out bullets,” he said.
That was a good answer. “I’ll keep watch tonight,” I said.
“This night I don’t think you need to,”
Paulina said. “I need to check your bandage while it’s still light enough to see the wound.” She stood and waited, none too patiently.
Feeling like a child, I went over to her. Gently enough, she removed the old bandage and looked. “The healing went well,” she told Eli. “It looks a week old now.”
Eli looked, too. This was massively irritating. But now I knew what I’d suspected was true. I’d been feeling so much better than I’d had any reason to because they hadn’t just bandaged me up. They’d hurried the repairing. I had accused them unjustly of being thankless, when they’d done something practical to pay their debt.
“You won’t need the bandage any longer,” Eli said.
“Good. Thanks for the help.” I forced out the words.
I spared a cup of water to rinse off the healing furrow. Now that I could touch it directly, I could feel a slightly puckered new scar.
I used a little more water to brush my teeth, and that made me feel more myself. I’d been told (mainly by Tarken) that I was almost extreme about being clean, but the two grigoris spent more time on grooming than I’d ever known adults to do.
That night Paulina brushed her hair, and then washed her face with our precious water, before getting into her sleeping roll. First thing in the morning, Eli shaved, though his face hair was light enough that he could have waited another day. He, too, brushed his hair thoroughly. Before he tied it back, it hung over his shoulders in a light curtain. I’d never seen a man who wore his hair that long, except for the Indians.
I stopped myself before I could run my hand over my head again. I’d remembered my last look in the mirror. I could tell my hair had already grown some. Soon it would be long enough to curl. Then there’d be the damn ringlets. They made me look like a child. But now I thought it was lucky I had thick hair; when it grew back, maybe the scar wouldn’t be visible. That was vanity, and it was ridiculous to think about my hair when I faced so many more challenges. I forced myself to get busy packing up the few things we’d used.
We got an early start, there being nothing else to do. I wasn’t as familiar with this part of the country, but from my crew’s previous visit I remembered that the terrain would get rougher. To reach a town sizeable enough to have a hotel by that night, we needed to make good time. We were able to gas up early at an isolated garage. I imagined the big trade there was fixing flat tires and taking care of overheated engines.
As the day went on, we sighted people less and less. When we did, they were almost always on foot and staying parallel to the road, but not on it. We were close to the Texoma-Mexico border. From time to time, to get a better view, I stood up on the floorboard of the back seat with my head out of the air-roof, or whatever it was called. This annoyed Paulina, but I didn’t care. Danger had sidled up to me and given me a nudge and a wink.
About an hour after noon—we’d had a quick lunch—we were driving on a dirt road that wound through low, rocky hills. There were stands of oak and some boulders on either side of the road. Great cover. I thought of the last ambush, on the Corbin road. My nerves were strung high and tight. I looked up to see a buzzard riding the air, wings broad and beautiful against the clear blue, as we were rounding a bend. So I got knocked around a little when Paulina put on the brakes.
There was a tree lying across the road, leaves still green. I could see the fresh cut on the trunk.
“Ambush,” I yelled, and here they came. I was standing up on the rear seat, shooting through the air-roof, before I finished saying it. I shot two of them with Jackhammer, and they went down like bags of sand. That left two. I winged only one of those, due to a lurch of the car. I could see him squirming on the ground and got off a second shot, which killed him. I had swung around to drop the last bandit when Eli popped through the hole alongside me. He was reaching into one of his vest pockets, and pulled out a stone, which he clutched. He said a few words.
Before I could shove him to get him out of my way, Eli made the man’s blood leave his body.
It was an eye-catching way to kill someone, that’s for sure.
Eli dropped into the car like his feet had vanished from under him. Scared the shit out of me; I thought he’d gotten shot somehow. Turns out doing death magic takes a lot out of you, and some grigoris feel it sooner than others. Eli felt it sooner.
A fifth bandit leaped up from behind a boulder and began to run. I was so distracted by Eli that my quick shot just creased the bandit’s shoulder. Paulina was out the passenger door and after her like a bullet looking for a body to hit. Paulina brought her down and left her moaning, by some means I couldn’t see. Maybe she’d just tackled her hard. Then Paulina strolled back to turn off the car.
I climbed out. Though the surprise was still making my hands quiver, I had brought down our attackers. While Paulina’s and Eli’s help had been nice, I could have done everything myself. After the disaster on the Corbin road, my relief was enormous. I let out a deep, shuddery breath, and I smiled at Paulina. Out of sheer surprise, she smiled back.
Between us, we hauled Eli from the car and laid him under the shade of a tree. I was sitting by his side, my back against the tree trunk, when he came to, some ten, fifteen minutes later. Eli’s broad face was a bad color, sort of gray, and his green eyes rolled toward me, checking who I was. I could tell he recognized me.
“Listen, wizard,” I said. “Don’t ever put your head between me and my shot again. I coulda blown your skull away.”
“Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t sound sorry. He, too, almost smiled. “I wanted to try the spell.”
“Yeah, okay.” I handed him a canteen with the screw top removed, and he raised his head with some difficulty to take a swallow. I took the canteen and had a swig myself. “You needed a rock for that?”
“I invoked the spell with the rock. It was residing in the stone, I’d put it there, and I said a word of power to make it active.”
“Quite a spell.”
“Extreme,” he agreed.
We had some shade from the bright sun. The landscape around us had woken up since the gunshots had faded. I could hear bugs moving and birds making their little noises. A few yards away I saw a quick movement. A very large spider was making its way to the west, getting away from us with good speed. It was kind of peaceful, now that our enemies were dead and we were not.
After a moment Eli said, “Where’s Paulina?”
“Interrogating the one left alive.” I had just learned “interrogating” was another word for torture.
“Oh. Just a bandit, surely? Not after us in particular?” He turned his head to one side as if he was looking for her.
“Yeah, well. She seems to want to make certain sure.”
A voice rose and fell, babbling like a child’s.
“Is that who’s talking?” He looked at me.
“I think the gal’s telling Paulina what she had for supper five years ago. Your friend can make people talk.”
“Not you, though.”
“I’ll talk when I got something to say. Want some more water?” I said.
“Please.” Eli lifted his head a little and I unscrewed the canteen again. This time he propped himself up on an elbow and took a bigger drink. He sighed and lay back down.
“How much longer you got to stay flat?” I said after a while, though I wasn’t anxious to be in the car again.
“A little while.” Eli’s eyes closed, so I shut up.
After a minute he said, “You see how bright the sun is?”
“Yeah.”
“But we are in the shade right now. Not just the tree shade, but we’re in the shadow of the cloud overhead.”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“Sometimes I feel like that,” he said, sounding almost drowsy. “I serve the tsar, and he’s the sun. The people who turn and twist in their politics under him, they’re the clouds. And we’re the people who get caught in the shadows.”
“That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” I said, but I knew what he was talking abou
t. They had their mission, I thought with a lot of grimness. I had mine. I wondered what would happen to me if they discovered I’d deceived them about who my real father was.
Eli lay silent for a while after that. The breeze picked up a strand of his hair and blew it across his face. With a little hesitation, I brushed it to the side. He didn’t move. Good.
The natural sounds of the land were interrupted only by the distant rise and fall of the bandit’s voice. From her Spanish, she’d come across the border from Mexico. I’d checked the pockets of the others. One had Mexican papers, the others were Texomans.
The next time I looked down, Eli’s eyes were open.
“You’ve had to do this often?” I said.
“Stop bandits? Only once or twice. You did very well.”
“It’s my living,” I said.
“How long?”
“How long have I been a gunnie? Since I got out of school. At first with whoever needed an extra hand, and then with Tarken and Martin and Galilee.”
“Your mother didn’t have other plans for you?”
“Did your folks have other plans for you?” I said.
He laughed, just a little, and then winced. “Not this,” he admitted. “But it was my talent, and the best service I could offer my tsar.”
A shriek rose in the air and was abruptly cut off. After a moment Paulina came into view. She was wiping off a knife on the kerchief I’d last seen on the wounded woman’s neck. Guess “wounded” wasn’t the correct term anymore.
“Random bandit,” she said. “If there was some kind of targeting, she didn’t know anything about it.”
The idea that they’d been waiting for us, just us, to come along . . . I’d wondered about that. This was a good place for an ambush, out in the middle of nothing, no witnesses. If I had been a thief, I’d have picked this spot. But you might wait for days for a good enough target to pass through. On the other hand, if you knew someone was very likely to use this road because it was the obvious route to Juárez . . .
An Easy Death Page 9