by Ivanna Roze
Ash let his shoulders slump.
"You're right. I know better than that." He forced his legs to turn him around. "And I'm sorry about hitting you."
Hewitt gave a dismissive shrug. "I know what you're about, Ashton, you don't have to say nothin' to me."
Ashton's mouth spread into a straight-line split across his face. "Thanks. We might be able to make the next town if we're quick."
"Is it safe?"
"I stayed there two solid days before I found her, so I sure hope to hell so."
"Alright, then. Let's get going."
Ashton took them by the stable and they got another couple of horses that looked sturdy enough to take a hard ride. He wasn't telling the whole truth, and Ashton knew enough about himself to know that neither of them would believe the lie anyways. If they were fine with going, then they were fine with getting there a little past sundown. The risk wouldn't be too much until midnight, and if they were very quick, they might only be able to see that tiny sliver of a moon as they crossed into the town.
Ashton forced himself to wait. It was too tempting to head off without them. He knew the way, and they knew how to follow. They'd be behind him in no time, once the man was paid and the horses saddled up. If he didn't take it at full speed, then they could catch up no problem.
That is, if they pushed their horses. He knew that was the panic talking in his ear again. Wait for the boys. Wait until they're ready, and then you all three go together. That was the right way to do it, not to try to force yourselves to hurry it up and risk getting yourself killed because you didn't have backup.
That was the whole reason he'd gone and gotten them in the first place, but now at the first opportunity he was ready to ditch them because they took an extra ten minutes getting prepared. Ash shook his head and forced himself still.
When they were all up and ready he started. It wasn't wise to push the horses the whole way, but with daylight burning up it was hard not to. Ash pushed his mare about as hard as he figured it could handle. Then he pushed her a little harder. Time to find out what the girl was made of.
They rode together, slower than Ash wanted and faster than he thought was entirely wise. The mare was handling it like a champ, but he could feel her tiring. He traced their route on the map in his head. They were almost there. They might just make it in time to get into a room before all hell broke loose.
He held up a hand to keep his hat pressed down on his head and kept the horse moving, knowing by the sound that Hewitt and Samson were only a few lengths behind him. There was where the stage had gone down. Some time in the last week, someone had come by and cleaned it up.
Ashton remembered that long walk into town. It had taken as long as this whole trip took on horseback. Maybe longer. He made a mental note never to try that shit again. It was too dangerous, and besides that, the horses were faster. So long, that is, as Cora didn't have to ride one of them.
He saw the town at a distance and pushed the horse harder still. This was the final stretch, and he knew the route to the hotel wasn't far from the north edge of town. Ten minutes, tops, and Ashton would be going to fetch the stableboy to take care of the horses.
They hit the town going way too fast, and Ashton tied his horse up a full minute before Hewitt and Samson brought up behind. The same man who he'd been dealing with a week ago smiled at him, his crooked teeth a comforting familiarity that seemed more unusual in their ugliness than in how much Ashton found he liked the place.
The hotel was quiet, only a four rooms in the whole place and he'd taken one of them. The other three had been empty the entirety of his two-day stay, and now the man was about to get more business, Ash thought, than he probably ever fathomed.
Three rooms, three keys, and three bills to pay. Ashton dropped a ten dollar bill on the counter and told him to keep the change. They were only going to be staying one night, and then they'd be heading back out, after all.
The old man turned back with the keys in hand just in time for Ash to hand them off to Hewitt and Samson. They'd need to get inside, and fast. They were early, but not early enough. There were preparations to make before night fell, and they should have been done thirty minutes ago.
Thirty-Two
Cora couldn't believe the dress that they had ready for her. She'd come out here with three dresses, and it was easy to keep rotating through them, for the first few days. Nobody had said anything about it, so even though it would have been terrible embarrassing back in Detroit she let herself get used to it.
But when she'd told Enoch that she would marry him, if he thought he could save Harriett, the girls acted as if they'd been waiting on that signal for days and took her straight back to a room she hadn't been in before, one with a big bed with a white dress lying out for her.
And what a dress it was, too. Cora sucked in a breath the second she saw it. Finally, after a long time she turned to Delilah.
"Is that—for me?"
"It was your mother's. I know she'd want you to have it."
She could feel the hot tears already threatening to well up and spill out, and Cora couldn't do much to stop it but try. It was all too much.
"It won't be until tomorrow. We need to fetch a preacher, after all, and we need to fix up the wedding altar. But, oh, it will be a beautiful ceremony. I've seen three of them, and they just…"
Delilah daubed at her eye with a handkerchief. "It always gets me."
Cora smiled. She couldn't stop herself from smiling. It was too much to handle anymore. The tears came, burning hot lines down her cheeks, but she couldn't stop them, no matter how embarrassing it was. This was her mother's family. This was what she'd been so happy about in that letter.
She hadn't mentioned being sick, but maybe that was to avoid making Cora upset. The location had been wrong, too. There were unanswered questions, but there would be time for that. Ashton wasn't coming for her any more, and that meant that she had years to find out what had been going through her mother's head when she wrote that letter.
The thought that Enoch might not keep his word hadn't crossed her mind for an instant. In fact, the instant she'd seen him, he'd only been fretting over Harriett. He barely ate at breakfast and dismissed himself.
To his credit, though, Cora went to him with her idea. He didn't come to her. Then, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was gone again, bundled off into this room.
"This is the wedding bed. We leave it like this. Perfect. Every one of our sisters has the perfect wedding night, the best memory of their lives, in this exact room."
Another one of the wives spoke. "Perfect. Every single one of them."
Cora put a hand on one of the bedposts to hold herself up as everything continued to overwhelm her. "I'm sorry. I know you're all doing your best—"
"Cora, baby!" Delilah pulled her in tight and squeezed Cora into her comfortably large bosom. "Nobody is upset with you. We understand, don't we?"
A half-dozen voices rose in general agreement.
"You're overwhelmed right now. There's a lot going on. You're excited, you're probably pretty scared. But there's nothing to be afraid of, alright? Enoch—well, you know him. Would he hurt you?"
Cora took a couple deep breaths and tried to stop her tears. "No," she agreed.
"Would we let something bad happen to Carolyn's daughter?"
"No."
"So you cry as much as you need to, but just remember. You're going to be just fine."
Cora knew that. There was nothing to worry about, but it didn't mean she didn't worry.
"Now, we've got to go help Enoch get things ready, but we'll be around to make sure you're alright, okay darling?"
"Thank you."
Cora settled herself down in the bed next to the beautiful white dress. She could almost imagine her mother in it. Healthy, smiling, her eyes bright and her skin flushed with color and the excitement of the wedding going on around them.
What was it going to be like? She didn't have any family in
the area, and even if she wanted to invite them—which she didn't—there wasn't time before Harriett got bad. They couldn't afford to wait.
Would it only be the ten of them? Or would there be other guests? What kind of people did a Devil know, anyways? He seemed like a strange Devil, to say the least, so it was always possible that in fact they hadn't done anything at all. but somehow, she doubted it.
Cora wanted to know what she was supposed to do now. The other women, they all seemed to find ways to fill their time. They were reading from the absurdly large library, or doing needlework, or knitting, or tending the chickens.
What was Cora going to do? What had her mother done when she was still feeling better?
Cora laid her head back, a wave of tiredness hit her as soon as she felt the panic leaving, as if the nerves had been the only thing keeping her awake. She fought for a minute to try to keep herself awake. Long enough to move over to the room she had been staying in by herself.
The wedding bedroom needed to be perfect. They always kept it that way, what would it look like if she fell asleep in it?
Then, after trying to stay awake an instant longer, she decided that there wasn't much point in it. Tomorrow, everything would be busy. Crazy, even. Everything was going to happen tomorrow.
An evening wedding, so that they would have the whole night to become husband and wife. Cora was used to morning weddings, but that wasn't something to write home about. She was just doing what she had to do, and she was willing to accept much more than have a wedding at a strange time of day to save an innocent woman's life.
The idea of getting her mother back teased at the back of Cora's mind, but she tried to pretend that it wasn't there. This wasn't selfish. She was doing this because she needed to save Harriett's life, nothing to do with her own wishes or desires. It was the right thing to do, so she did it.
It was that simple. She'd let herself rest, and rest as long as she liked, and in the morning, she would be getting ready for the wedding. That would be interesting. Almost fun, even, she knew. There was so much left to look forward to.
Cora let herself drift off to sleep and hoped that her dreams weren't quite as enjoyably wicked as the last several had been.
Thirty-Three
They never questioned his route through the trees. Everyone there knew that Ashton wasn't going to get lost. He wasn't that kind. So when they broke into a thicket of trees and couldn't see more than a few feet in front of them for the thick bunches of pine branches coming together in a thick wall of green, they just trailed one behind the next and trusted Ashton to get them there.
He hadn't taken this way on the way out from the house. It was a risk, he thought. Always a risk that something was hiding in there, but partly because he hadn't wanted to rely too heavily on his own sense of direction. It had never served him wrong before, and he could recall the surveyor's maps showing this little forest here just as well as anything.
But it was the thought that this might have been the time that things went wrong for him that kept him from using the most direct path.
Now, however, they were in a hurry, which meant that risks had to be taken. There was no other way, plain and simply. He already had a wrenching feeling in his gut that they were too late, but he'd had that feeling since the minute he left the estate. Now, the only question was whether or not something had changed since they were there.
Ashton took a long breath and slowed his horse just long enough to confirm that his sense of location and direction lined up with the map, lined up with the few signs he could make out that might have been on the map.
Then he kept going, as fast as he could pick through the trees without being knocked off the horse outright, until they broke through to the other side, a few hundred yards from where the mountain broke away into the basin that held the manor.
He could already feel the cold wind whipping, could already feel the chill that the Devil brought with it wherever it went. He pulled the coat a little tighter around him, knowing that it wouldn't help him but doing it anyway.
Then he started to pick his way down the narrow path into the basin and assumed that Hewitt and Samson would follow along behind. Not even once did he look back to check on them, and not once did they fall behind more than a few feet.
They had worked together more times than Ashton could count, all those years ago when he was under apprenticeship with the old man, and in that time all of them had grown accustomed to working with each other. Ten years had changed a great many things, but it didn't change how they fit together.
As they got close to the cabin, Ashton could feel himself getting light in the saddle as the wind picked up to the point where he had to hold onto the saddle to stop himself being blown over. He pulled the amulet from his bag again, held it out for the others to see, and put it on. Behind him, the other did the same thing.
Ashton tied his horse off loosely. If something was going to go wrong, this horse had no reason to be killed because it couldn't leave, but that didn't mean that Ashton wanted it wandering all over tarnation, neither.
Once he was sure that Sam and Hewitt were down and ready, they stepped inside. The place stank. Before there had been little more than the scent of old, musty wood. Now there were a mix of dozens of smells, fine or foul, that mixed into a horrible concoction. Ashton put a gloved hand over his nose, trying to counteract the scent with the proximity of leather. Ash took a deep breath to test it. The biggest scent he noticed, as he hoped, was oiled leather. The rest fell into the background.
Ashton's hand dropped to his gun. There wasn't a Devil in the world created just that smell, and that meant there would be trouble. More than one in the area, something must have been going on. They didn't gather like this. In fact, they explicitly stayed away from each other.
That meant that something unusual was going on. Something that would bring them all together, and that was exactly the situation that Ashton had hoped not to be walking into. Well, now that they were there, the damage was already done. He forced himself to focus. The first thing they needed was to find Cora. Then they needed to find the Devil that had taken her. The others could wait.
He went down the doors, same as he had before. They were only on the right for a ways, with stairs to the left. There had been a time when they might have considered splitting up to cover more ground, but that idea had been ground out of them by King Peters before he let any of them go on a mission with him.
Splitting up was a great way to get yourself killed, and worse, have your body used as a puppet for some sort of sick Devil's tricks. That, in turn, was a great way to get all your buddies killed. Never split up, and it never turns into a problem. You see him go down, you know not to trust him when he shows up claiming that he's totally fine. If he was fine, you'd have picked him back up before you moved on. And even then, if he wasn't fine, you'd have gone back for him once the danger seemed cleared up.
The rooms were the way he'd left them. Cold, dark, spartan. One body per room, starting very old and getting younger. There were six doors before the one he'd found Cora in the first time, but whatever she thought was going on in this house, she was probably able to leave it. He didn't expect to see her there when he went inside, and he didn't.
The woman's body was, though. As cold, now, as ice. He slipped his glove back on. The doors on the left side had finally started, and he couldn't wait to find a room that wasn't just like this one.
The room on the other side, the one he'd put so much hope in, disappointed him. The same as the others. Except for one major shift. No body. The room didn't look much less glum than the others, but it showed signs of recent use. This was Cora's room. This was where she'd stayed.
He knew it with a strange certainty. On to the next pair of doors. Another bedroom, this one empty. Then another. The place could have served as a prison if you weren't worried about the risk of escapees. The rooms were about the right size, and the place had space for what must have been hundreds.
&nb
sp; A hallway off to the right, so he kept up with the doors. Bedroom, bedroom, bedroom. Dozens of them. He finally got to the end of the hall, Hewitt and Burke still making cursory checks of the rooms behind him. Ashton waited for them to come behind him, and tried the door at the end. The handle wouldn't turn. He lifted a heavy boot and kicked it through the door.
The half-rotten wood gave way easier than the lock had. Another damn bedroom, but at least this one showed something a little bit different. A master, four-post bed. There was even a little window in the side, the shades drawn shut.
Ashton thought it was odd that there were no mirrors in any of the rooms, but then he dismissed it. This was a Devil's house. Whatever they saw in their reflections, they weren't going to like it. That by itself was enough to justify not filling the place with mirrors, and unless he missed his guess, he could put visions of whatever the hell he wanted in their heads.
He gestured with the pistol to point them back, down the side hall. Stairs leading into a basement jerked off to the left, a closed door on the right. He checked it. Not locked. He had his pistol up before the door had opened more than a fraction of an inch. Ready for whatever was going to come. Empty. He wasn't surprised any more, but that didn't mean that he could afford to relax.
The second that he let himself relax, that was the second he would walk right into a trap.
Thirty-Four
Cora had never in her life been happier. Surrounded by her soon-to-be sisters, finally doing something important with her life. It had taken twenty years, but there was finally something that needed her, something that called out to her.
That it was a man—well, that was a surprise. Aside from the political marriages that her brother always talked about, she assumed her closest companions would be storybooks and the half-felt conversation at dinner parties. But now that was all gone. She had a library for the storybooks, certainly. The size of that library was such that she would never in her entire life be able to read one tenth of those books. That didn't mean she wasn't going to make the effort at it, once she settled in.