Dead Iron

by Devon Monk

  He rubbed the mule’s muzzle, then pointed her in the direction of Mae’s house, and sent her on her way.

  Moonlight, silver and pure, burnished the dry, golden land. And Cedar Hunt’s fingers found first the tuning fork, then the crescent moon and arrow chain still around his neck. He hoped the chain would help him keep his reason and wits one more time, so that he could find Elbert, find his brother, and hunt down Mr. Shunt.

  He arched his back, bathing in the moonlight, no longer feeling the pain of his injury, no longer feeling any worries, any cares. If he couldn’t kill Mr. Shunt as a man, he’d sure as hell find a way to kill him as a wolf.

  Cedar gave in to the change, relished the warmth and the thick haze of sensation that stretched and remade him. And then he lost himself, drowned himself in the killing needs of the wolf. And ran, toward town, toward Mae Lindson.

  Rose Small considered not returning to her home. But there were things stashed there she might need, things that might help her save Mae. She ran up the porch stairs and through the main room to the stairs that led up to her bedroom tucked against the rafters. As she ran, her mind sorted options.

  She didn’t have much time. If Mr. Shard LeFel had a few minutes more, she was sure the entire town would be marching out to burn Mae’s house down. Speed was the best she could do. Reach Mae before the town reached her. Warn her to run.

  But if that didn’t work, they’d need weapons.

  Rose pulled out a knapsack. The canvas was stiff, the buckles old, but strong. Into the bag she stuffed her spare dress, underthings, shoes, and sweater. She added the leather-wrapped tools Mr. Gregor had given her on the sly, and which she kept stashed beneath her bed, out of her parents’ sight.

  She hesitated over the bits of brass and gears in the box under her bed. She had gathered all of it over the years, things she used to make things, fix things, devise things. She didn’t want to leave so much behind, but didn’t see how the weight of it, nor the bits themselves, would be of practical application tonight.

  Instead, she packed bullets for her Remington and derringer.

  Rose pulled on her overcoat. She’d added pockets on the inside of the coat, and into those she stashed bullets.

  Rose found the messenger satchel, which she’d fashioned out of oiled leather. She tucked into it a sheaf of paper, pen and ink, her three books, and a thin but sturdy wool blanket.

  Lastly, she drew her heartiest bonnet and a tool belt out from under her bed. She buckled the belt around her waist, holstering both guns into it, then put on the hat.

  She took a moment to look around her room, at the only home she had known. Even though she wasn’t wanted, she would miss it. But it was time to move on. She’d known it for years. And now there was no denying it anymore.

  Just as she turned toward the door, she saw one last thing. A palm-sized china doll that had been wrapped up in the blanket with her when she’d been abandoned on the doorstep. Impractical to take along now. She’d need room in her packs for other things. Like food.

  Rose picked up the doll and hugged her tight to her chest. She had whispered all her hopes and fears to that doll, had held her and pretended she was a gift from her real mother, an admission that her mother left her behind out of love, not hate or shame.

  “No place for you now,” Rose whispered to the doll. She placed her on the window, facing the street below and the horizon beyond, so she could look out at the world.

  Then Rose left her room, her home. She closed the door behind her and did not look back.

  The grumble and growl of the crowd spilling out from the church, the racket of horses and wagons being mounted, lined up, and loaded, pricked fear into her heart. Rose ran down the street, taking the shadows, taking the less-traveled ways. She might yet be able to steal up a horse at the livery and ride hard out to Mae’s. She might yet get there before the town had even started their hunt.

  The edge of town was coming up quick. The livery just a few yards off. She could smell the wet straw and stink of the horses inside. Almost there now.

  Hands grabbed her arms and waist, lifted her, and pressed her against the wall of the livery outbuilding.

  Rose struggled, and worked to get at her gun in her pocket. “Let me go, Henry Dunken!”

  “Hold on, now,” a voice said. Not Henry.

  Rose blinked, and realized it wasn’t Henry who had hold of her wrists. It was the Madder brothers. All three of them, hair wild, eyes wilder, and their smiles looking half-crazed.

  “We hope you’ll excuse us our sudden detainment of you,” Alun said, “but time is ticking down.”

  “Let me go,” Rose demanded.

  The brothers, Bryn and Cadoc, who held her on either side, let go of her. Rose hadn’t expected that.

  “This is a matter of grave importance, Rose Small,” Alun said. “Otherways we would not have snatched you down in the middle of your flight.”

  “I have matters of my own to attend and no time for any other grave things, Mr. Madder,” Rose said with her chin tipped up.

  Alun’s grin appeared in his beard. He nodded. “Aye. Then tell us this and we’ll let you about your way. What did you see in that boy back at the church?”

  “Why do you care?” Rose replied. “It may as well have been nothing for all the good it did.”

  “Enough of nothing that you’re running, pockets full and foot-fast, out of the town you’ve been raised in,” he noted.

  “They won’t believe me,” Rose said. “I thank you for standing up to Mr. LeFel back there on my behalf. But that doesn’t make us beholden to each other.”

  Alun glanced over at Bryn, who shrugged his heavy shoulders.

  Cadoc, the youngest brother, spoke. “Please forgive our crude manners,” he said. “We’ve been long, too long, unto these lands, and the heat of our concern tempers our actions.” Here he gave Alun a look. Alun shook his head and stared up at the sky, shoving his hands in his pockets as if awaiting a late train.

  “What we wonder, Miss Small,” Cadoc continued, “is if you see the Strange.”

  Rose caught her breath. What should she say to these drunken miners? She’d barely spoken to them in the time they’d been in town, and she had no reason to trust them not to do her harm. Except for that they had stood up for her back in the church.

  “I don’t know that I understand your meaning,” she hedged. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go now.”

  “Rose,” Alun said softly in the tone she’d always thought best suited a father. “Miss Rose,” he corrected. “We mean you no harm, lass. But if you can see the Strange, it would make a difference to us, and to what we can do to help you save your friend Mae Lindson.”

  Rose blinked and tried to swallow that all down. “Help me? Why?”

  Alun grinned and it was a wicked thing. “If for no other reason than to make that whoreson LeFel squirm.”

  “I don’t throw my lots in with strangers,” Rose said.

  “We give you our word.” Alun extended his hand.

  “Our word and honor,” Bryn added, placing his hand alongside Alun’s.

  “Word, honor, and protection,” Cadoc said, leaning in to add his hand to the brothers’, so that their hands were offered, palm to back to palm, toward her.

  Rose supposed it wasn’t a safe thing to accept the promise of men who were likely mad. But then, folk thought the same thing about her, and they were wrong. “You’ll help me save Mrs. Lindson?” she asked.

  “Aye, girl,” Alun said. “That and more.”

  “And what will you expect me to pay?”

  Alun nodded approvingly. “Your answer to our question. And a favor.”

  The sound of the town rising up and making ready made Rose glance over her shoulder. She half expected to see men riding with torches and guns. No more time to think this through. She had made her decision.

  Rose shook their hands. “Done.”

  “Can you?” Cadoc asked.

  “Can I what?” Rose said.<
br />
  “See the Strange?”

  Rose looked into his eyes. He was patient, waiting, as if he had all of time for her answer.

  “Yes,” she said in a rush. “I can. Mostly. But that doesn’t matter now. I need to warn Mae Lindson.”

  “No horse, no mount, no wings,” Bryn mused. “You’ll not get there fast enough with those feet of yours.” He gave her a sly look. “You weren’t figuring to procure a horse from the livery, were you?”

  Rose felt the blush fire her cheeks. “There’s no other way I can get to her place fast enough.”

  “We’ve ways,” Alun said. “Come this way, lass. We’ve a shortcut.”

  Alun rambled off into the dark, moonlight sliding over him and setting him to burnish as if he were made of steel. He waved his hand over his shoulder. “Now, girl. There’s not much time.”

  Rose started off after Alun, his brothers following behind her. This was madness, following three crazy devisers into the brush, alone, in the night. “This shortcut will take us to Mae Lindson’s house?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Alun’s voice floated back to her through shadows cast by trees and the stretch of chimneys and walls of the town. “But first, we’ll need weapons.”

  He stopped by a large boulder and Rose stopped behind him. They were on the edge of the town where scrub rolled up and away across the rocky hill. Alun looked over at her. “We trust you’ll keep this secret minded,” he said.

  “Is that the favor I owe you?”

  Alun’s eyebrows shot up, and then he laughed, loud and bellyfull. “You’ve got wit, for sure. No, that’s not the favor proper. That favor we’ll come to terms on after we take care of your friend. But I have your word?”

  “Yes.” Rose was about willing to promise anything if the brothers would hurry this up. She was losing far more time than she was gaining.

  “Good.” Alun pulled a lever, cleverly hidden at the base of the boulder, and the boulder itself rolled aside, clunking and grinding as if unused, dragged on pulleys beneath the ground.

  Cadoc and Bryn struck flint and steel to candles they produced from within the voluminous pockets of their coats, and Alun did the same. In the wan candlelight, Rose could see a wooden ladder leading down deep into the earth.

  Alun walked to the edge of the hole and started down. “Hurry on, girl. These tunnels will take us quickly to your friend’s side.”

  Rose looked away from the fall of his candlelight sinking deeper and deeper, looked instead at the brothers Bryn and Cadoc.

  Bryn said, “We have supplies hidden in the tunnels. And have mapped a route that will take us to the Lindsons’ farm. You’ll see no harm at our hands, Miss Small.” He gestured toward the mouth of the tunnel. “After you.”

  Rose took one last deep breath of clean air and nodded. Then she started down the stairs into the heart of the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Shard LeFel looked out upon the people who hung on his every word. They were hopeful, angry, vengeful. They wanted what he told them they wanted: revenge upon the witch who had hurt one of their young, who had damaged one of their innocents.

  “In these modern times, we have laws and jails,” Shard LeFel said to the people gathered by torchlight and lamplight outside the church. “But there is an older law, an older reckoning, that bids us to tend to our own. To protect our own. And to punish those who are wicked and vile even—no, especially—when they are among us.”

  A murmur rose up from the crowd.

  “I would not presume to tell you good people what it is you must do. This is your town, your laws, your home. But justice must be done.”

  There was a pause. LeFel watched, calmly waiting to see who would strike the tinder he’d so carefully prepared, and set it ablaze.

  “Burn her!” It came from the back of the crowd. From Mrs. Dunken’s boy Henry. And his cry was picked up, carried by each voice, until it became a chant.

  “Burn her!” the crowd cried. “Burn the witch!”

  LeFel tugged at the lace at his cuff and then rested the tip of his jewel-encrusted cane upon the ground. Mr. Shunt sidled up beside him, silent as death’s gaze.

  “The wick is caught,” LeFel said to the Strange while watching the sheriff and Henry Dunken make out their plans of surrounding the witch’s cottage, and calling her out to stand trial.

  “We’ll approach her and give her the chance to turn herself in,” Sheriff Wilke said. “I want you all to understand we’re not going to raise a gallows tonight. There will be a trial. Justice will be served.”

  “But if she resists,” Henry said above the rise of voices, “we’ll burn her out. I won’t stand idly by while she does her devil’s magic. Nor shall she harm another man, woman, or child of this town!”

  “And now,” LeFel said quietly, “we shall watch the fire I’ve set in these mortals do that which even you failed me in, Mr. Shunt.”

  Mr. Shunt said nothing. He folded his bony fingers together, each one clacking against the other, metal upon metal, bone on bone, as if wishing for a neck to break between them. “Yes, Lord LeFel,” he murmured.

  The townsfolk assembled in the street, men gathering horses and wagons, guns, and torches while the women all rushed off with Mrs. Gregor to tend and fuss over her and the Strange Elbert.

  Shard LeFel stood in the shadows, mostly forgotten, as he intended. He would let them ride forth and smoke the witch out. And he would be waiting, near enough that he could snatch her out of their hands. He would take her. And kill her for his own purposes—her and the wolf and the real little boy—to turn the tumbler and locks and open the door to his land.

  And if the townsfolk turned their rage on him . . . well, he would simply let Mr. Shunt take care of that.

  Cedar Hunt ignored the weeping pain of the wound in his side, ignored his hungry belly, ignored the night that called him toward the rail, called him to find Strange, any Strange, to kill.

  He ran despite the limp it caused him, toward the witch’s house, toward the wallow of trees in front of her property. There, he would find the dying scent of his brother. There he would find the scent of the Strange who had taken him, who may have killed him. There he would track the Strange who was going to fall beneath his fang and claw.

  The wind brought him the scent of fire and wood and oil burning. He heard the rise of voices, felt the rumble of wagon wheels and horses coming from the town behind him. He stopped on a ridge that looked over the town. Orange and yellow globs of light marched down Hallelujah’s main street. Torches. Heading out toward the witch’s house. Heading out toward the stand of trees.

  The beast in him twisted his hold. Hunt. Kill.

  Cedar pushed against the urge. Why would the people of Hallelujah be out in the night, burning torches, riding through the darkness? Were they headed to the trees? Were they looking for the same Strange as he?

  Muddled by the wolf’s need to hunt Strange, Cedar could not think through why the town was rising in the night. But he knew they would destroy his brother’s trail if they tromped through the forest before he got there.

  Cedar started down the ridge, and ran, faster than the men, faster than the horses, faster than the torches of Hallelujah, to catch the scent of his brother’s murderer.

  Mae Lindson had waited the full day for Cedar Hunt to keep his word. But now it was well into night, and clear he wasn’t coming back to her.

  Just a short while ago, while she was outside pumping water, her mule, Prudence, had plodded up and stopped at the corral gate, wanting to be let in for water and food. Bundled on the saddle were Jeb’s clothes and a spare set that must belong to Mr. Hunt. Strangely, his canteen, goggles, and guns were also with the supplies. Or perhaps not strangely. Now that the moon was on the rise, she guessed his curse would be in bloom, and he was traveling the night as a wolf, not a man.

  Which left the finding of Mr. Shunt and the killing of him in her hands alone.

  “Do as you please, Mr. Hunt,” Mae said as she t
ended Prudence, removing her saddle, and brushing her down. “I have a killer to find.” Mae finished caring for the mule, keeping the Madders’ shotgun in one hand, the Colt tucked in her belt, and an eye out for anything stirring in the shadows.

  The night was full of natural noises—animals and insects skittering about in the underbrush. A restless wind tugged from the northwest, and for a brief moment, she thought she smelled smoke on the breeze, but otherwise the night was quiet.

  Mae resaddled the mule and took Cedar Hunt’s clothes and gear off the saddle. She had left her supplies for hunting Mr. Shunt back in her house, though she had already banked the fire and locked the cupboards tight. While it wasn’t a common thing to head out on a hunt in the middle of the night, she knew her time was nearly up. The pull of the coven’s voices stabbed at her like claws in her lungs, insistent now. She would have to be heading east, likely by tomorrow. If not, she’d fall too ill to make the return.

  But before she left this pocket of the West, she would see Jeb’s killer dead at her feet.

  Mae patted Prudence’s side. “Won’t be a minute more, girl. I’ll gather my things.”

  She strode back to the house, the moonlight doing some good to light her path. She would use the Madders’ gun to kill Shunt, full charge. The other times she’d used it against him, it hadn’t been ready. Which would mean she’d have to charge the gun before she spotted her target.

  She paused at her back door. A chill pricked her skin, even through her heavy coat.

  Not a breath of Mr. Shunt. Not a shift of a shadow, nor a glint of his coal-lit eyes. He was not here, but something in the night made her uneasy. Even Prudence snorted.

  Mae tipped her head, listening, waiting for a hint of what was tickling at the back of her spine. But the night was silent.

  Mae pulled together everything she could take with her without hitching the wagon. A satchel of food, herbs, clothes. She did not want to leave her spinning wheel behind and hoped once she had killed Shunt, she could return for it before heading east.