The Long Past & Other Stories

by Ginn Hale

  Lucky swung his battered Sharps rifle down from his back. Only one shot, and he wasn’t certain he’d make the distance. Dalfon pelted across the loose sand.

  Lucky aimed for the milky-white lens covering Bernard’s left eye, then drew in all the raging power he could contain and poured it into the bullet as he pulled the trigger. The Sharps kicked into Lucky’s shoulder, and at the same moment he heard Bernard’s rifle roar.

  Bernard’s bullet sent up a ribbon of red light exploding only inches from Dalfon. Dalfon fell to his knees but staggered up and kept running. Bernard’s rifle dropped from his hands and clattered down the cliff.

  Lucky set aside his rifle and reached out to Dalfon as he stumbled through the deep water and rolling waves. He lunged forward; Lucky caught his hand and hauled him aboard the boat. They held each other. Dalfon shivered and pressed his face into Lucky’s shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” Lucky asked. “They didn’t hit you, did they?”

  “Not nearly as often as they tried.” Dalfon pulled a game smile, but he sagged in Lucky’s arms, and his face looked as white as the sail. “Bernard may have winged my flank.”

  Lucky glanced down and horror gripped him. Blood streamed from Dalfon’s left side. It pooled over the floor of the boat, and Lucky knew instantly that Dalfon was losing far too much, far too fast. Dalfon sank from Lucky’s arms and sprawled against the thwart.

  “No.” Lucky crouched beside him. Hot tears filled his eyes. “No. You can’t be hit. We’re gonna get away together. It’s our fate.”

  Dalfon stroked his cheek, and his fingers felt icy.

  “It’s your fate. It’s always been you…” Dalfon’s hand fell limply.

  “No. No, you can’t leave me again.” Lucky tore open Dalfon’s coat and shirt. The ragged gash in Dalfon’s abdomen gaped jagged as a shark’s maw. Bernard’s cartridge had ripped straight through his back and punched a hole in his gut. Desperately, Lucky attempted to staunch the river of blood, but his hands couldn’t even cover the open wound. Burning hot blood welled over his fingers. He couldn’t stop it.

  All the sea for him to call upon, but he couldn’t stop this one red stream.

  Dalfon’s head dropped back at a terrible angle. A sob wrenched from Lucky. He couldn’t lose Dalfon. He couldn’t. The money, the land, even finding his father—none of it was worth Dalfon’s life.

  His eyes fell on the burnt-out charm hanging around Dalfon’s neck. The dull star of Dalfon’s Magen David. The charm had healed Dalfon before, but the alchemic stone that powered it was gone—burned through. But if what Dalfon said was true, Lucky could power the charm himself by touching it.

  Without hesitation, Lucky grabbed it, clutching the cold metal hard in his fist. The six points bit into his palm, then a sickening vertigo swept over him and a burning sensation tightened his throat. The burn flared to scorching agony—as if his veins were blazing seams of coal igniting his whole body.

  His hand jerked reflexively, but he forced himself to keep his grip on the charm. It didn’t matter if it killed him, not anymore. He clenched his eyes closed and let the power of the surrounding sea surge through him as the charm burned him away.

  He didn’t fight the flood of darkness and cold water that engulfed him. Instead he welcomed the strength it brought him to fight for Dalfon’s life. As briny water filled his lungs and burned his eyes he opened himself to the immensity of the ocean. He drank in vast waves as if they were air. He reached down into black depths, lit only by flickering strange creatures and pulled power from the dark currents. Lucky’s senses rose across miles of open water and coastlines of crashing surf, drawing up swells of immense force.

  In the midst of roaring storms and cresting waves a strange calm filled him. He was beyond drowning. Nothing could harm him here.

  In a cool, distant way he knew his body lay, small and shaking, stretched across Dalfon’s. The tiny hull of a fragile boat held them both. He was there and at the same time miles away, twirling through waterspouts and racing beneath howling gales.

  “Lucky.” Dalfon’s voice sounded soft and far away, but it drew him like a siren song.

  “Lucky. Darling, please don’t…” The pain in Dalfon’s words reverberated through him. He recognized that hurt—that broken-hearted loss—too well.

  Lucky’s senses flew across the vast leagues. He threw himself from the grasp of the surrounding waters and fell like a cresting wave back into his own cold flesh.

  Strong, warm hands caught his fingers and pulled them free of the charm. Lucky opened his eyes to see Dalfon sitting up on the thwart and holding his hand. Dry blood streaked his abdomen, and Lucky could see fine hair and smooth skin beneath.

  He threw his arms around Dalfon, hugging him hard, and Dalfon returned his embrace, pressing his face into the curve of Lucky’s neck.

  “I thought you were…” Lucky couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

  “Me too, darling.” Dalfon sounded almost surprised. “I felt sure I was a goner, but then there you were.” He lifted his head and grinned. “Shining over me just like my Lucky star.”

  Epilogue

  Above the Inland Sea 1900

  Dalfon studied the view beyond the airship portal. Fat white clouds drifted over the dark waters of the Inland Sea like islands released from their earthly bonds. Gulls and pterosaurs swooped past, and the setting sun gilded them to the luster of 24-carat gold. Then the airship breezed into the icy, white mass of a cloudbank, and the view turned uniform and pale as a blizzard. Delicate patterns of frost limned the edges of the portal.

  Inside the airship, heat generated by the humming alchemic engines whirled through overhead fans, producing the feeling of a tropical evening breeze wafting through the lounge. Glancing around at the well-heeled travelers, a man would never have suspected that they soared through driving February winds or that only hours earlier they’d raced to outdistance the dark winter storm that had seized Chicago.

  No, here in the lounge an atmosphere of relaxed luxury reigned.

  Heiresses, socialites, robber-barons and captains of industry gathered around the mahogany tables, sipping cocktails and chatting.

  In the midst of the well-heeled crowd, Dalfon picked out Jim Miller, a ham-fisted son-of-a-bitch whose leptoceratops herds had grown at the same fast rate that other ranchers turned up dead. The five weathered men playing poker at the table next to Miller had stripped down to their waistcoats and shirtsleeves, and judging by the revolvers hanging from their hips, Dalfon guessed they numbered among Miller’s army of hired guns.

  Two tables farther down, looking overdressed and uneasy, Miller’s scrawny wife sat among a group of laughing women. They’d all worn feather stoles up to the lounge. But unlike the others who merely draped their wraps over the backs of their silk chairs, Mrs. Miller made a show of summoning her maid. She berated the girl for her tired appearance and handed her iridescent stole over while remarking that the authentic ridingbird feathers were more valuable than the maid would ever be. The women surrounding Mrs. Miller appeared aghast but Mr. Miller beamed at his wife’s mean display.

  Charles Dickens had penned a few condescending remarks about the coarse quality of certain newly rich folks, and Dalfon thought those sardonic sentiments applied pretty well to the Millers. Except where Mr. Dickens’s characters were tacky with furniture polish, the Millers struck Dalfon as rank with the stench of human degradation and murder.

  Feeling his mood sinking, Dalfon turned his attention away from Miller and his party. He sipped his the gin gimlet and opened up the memoir he’d purchased just before Lucky had booked their flight to Fort Arvada.

  At once his mood lifted.

  The biography was the second in a series and followed the scandalous adventuress, H. Astor, on her journeys deep into India as the country threw off the rule of the East India Company and England. Only fifty pages in, and
already Dalfon was riveted. The author’s disgust with her fellow countrymen, coupled with her growing friendships with native merchants, scholars and beggars, filled Dalfon with a thrilling anticipation for the bold acts of treason that now made H. Astor infamous. (And got her books banned in the new British capitol of Ontario, Canada.)

  But beyond that the text itself was permeated with fragrance and poetry. Butter lamps and camphor incense perfumed the pages while thunder transformed into the eerie roars of tigers prowling the dark night. The fragment of one poem in particular held Dalfon’s attention.

  The stars will be watching us, and we will show them what it is to be a thin crescent moon. You and I unselfed, will be together, indifferent to idle speculation, you and I. The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar as we laugh together, you and I.

  He’d never heard of the Persian poet, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, who’d penned the verses, but he wished he could know more of the man’s work. It made him think of lying in the moonlight with Lucky, and he smiled as he read the lines again.

  Dalfon rushed further into the memoir while around him soft conversation drifted through the room, not quite drowning the melody plucked out by the latest player piano. At the end of a chapter Dalfon looked up just as the airship broke through the cloudbank. A spectacular sunset blazed between the towering peaks of a snowy mountain range, while below a vast dark sea crashed and rolled.

  Dalfon frowned. How damn long could it take an engineer to give Lucky and a prospective buyer a tour of the bridge and engine rooms? Then, remembering the wide-eyed exuberance of the weedy engineer who’d designed this newest airship, Dalfon reckoned he still had a good half-hour to wait. The man had rhapsodized over the newly installed wireless telegraph and something he called the radio spectrum for nearly the whole hour he’d shared the carriage ride to the airfield with Dalfon and Lucky. Dalfon sighed and resigned himself to a little more time of solitude in the bustling lounge.

  Black-suited waiters cruised the lounge, surveying the pampered, wealthy passengers and furnishing them with drinks, exotic fruits and other extravagances when called upon. Dalfon remembered his gin and applied himself to it.

  Across the room he could see that either not enough whiskey or too much had gone down Miller’s belly. The man glowered out at the sunset and slumped in his chair with the petulant expression of a bulldog grown too fat to lick its own balls. Miller kicked the chair of one of the men playing poker. The fellow, who’d had his back to Dalfon, turned.

  Dalfon scowled. He hadn’t laid eyes on Tom Horn in eight years, and if it had been eighty it wouldn’t have been long enough. Back then Tom had been the one with a Pinkerton’s badge, and Dalfon had idolized him more than a little. He’d been the sort of imposing, hard man of the world that, at eighteen, Dalfon had longed to become. Quiet, sardonic and already famous all across Colorado, it was said there wasn’t a man he couldn’t track or a firearm he couldn’t handle with deadly accuracy.

  To Dalfon’s displeasure Miller jabbed his thumb in Dalfon’s direction and leaned forward to mutter something to Tom. At once, Tom’s attention snapped to Dalfon.

  Both of them reflexively dropped their right hands to their revolvers. Dalfon reckoned he could draw a hair faster then Tom, but he knew for a fact he didn’t have it in him to open fire in a room full of innocent folk. Tom on the other hand had already proven himself perfectly willing to gun down any number of unarmed, uninvolved bystanders. He’d slaughtered two of Dalfon’s associates whose only offense had been to witness him and his men murder the upstart ranchers, Nate Champion and Nick Ray.

  Tom had lost his badge and his job over the incident, but to Dalfon’s mind he should have been strung up. It wasn’t as if the minor rebukes had kept Tom from going on to assassinate countless other innocent men and boys at the behest of wealthy ranchers like Miller.

  Dalfon lifted his right hand from his gun belt and took another sip of his gin. Tom smiled and he too released the grip of his revolver. Then he stood and sauntered to Dalfon’s table. He didn’t ask to join Dalfon but simply pulled out the chair intended for Lucky and dropped his big frame down.

  “Well, it’s been a coon’s age since I last laid eyes on you, Dalfon. But you know I never forgot your face. Last I heard you were throwing down for Pinkerton.”

  Dalfon nodded.

  Studying Tom, he took a little pleasure in recognizing that the years had not treated him kindly. Gin blossoms flowered beneath the deep tan of his weathered skin, and most of his thick black hair had retreated leaving an isolated oily tuft to sit over his forehead like an abandoned outpost. The whites of his eyes had turned as yellow as his teeth, and though he remained as tall and straight as ever, his muscles looked withered.

  “You’ll forgive me for not recognizing you right away, Tom.” Dalfon forced one of his sharp, bright smiles. “You’ve gotten so damn old, I mistook you for my granddaddy at first. What are you now, a hundred?”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed, and Dalfon could see him considering taking a swing. Dalfon stared right back at him, ready to take Tom down to the floor and beat the life out of him. But Tom just barked out a dry laugh. His gaze remained cold and assessing.

  Dalfon realized that Tom hadn’t survived to forty by taking on younger, stronger men in fair fights. It wasn’t surprising that as he grew older he’d become less notable for his fast draw and brawling nature and more notorious for shooting men in the back from a safe distance.

  “Sometimes I do feel like old man Methuselah, considering how many of you green boys I’ve outlived.” Tom gestured to one of the waiters and the young man blanched. He slunk to the table and all but shot away from them after Tom ordered pisco and fresh oysters for himself and Dalfon.

  “Miller don’t mind footing your tab as well as mine. He can afford about anything you might want,” Tom told Dalfon.

  “I had no idea that the man was so sweet on me,” Dalfon replied.

  “You have a reputation.” Tom shrugged. He didn’t appear particularly impressed but he wouldn’t be. In all the years Dalfon had hunted other men, he’d never gone after a fellow who hadn’t taken a life.

  “His dance card looks full enough already.” Dalfon inclined his head towards the four other men seated to Miller’s left. In fact, now that he considered it, the number of armed men Miller had brought with him for a flight aboard a secure, luxury airship struck Dalfon as so far outside normal that it seemed less indicative of a need to display his wealth to the other passengers and more of an act of paranoia.

  “If I didn’t know better I’d say he’s looking as haunted as Macbeth after Banquo’s ghost dropped in on his banquet,” Dalfon commented.

  Tom frowned and the lines in his face became deep as canyons.

  “No Banquos in our parts, but there was a rancher who had an accident near Miller’s place a few months back.” A smile twitched across Tom’s lips, giving away the part he no doubt played in the man’s murder. Then his scowl returned. “Turns out the widow is one of them damn wind mages and has about a thousand blood relatives up north in Sovereign Tribes Lands. Miller thinks they’re on the warpath for him.”

  Dalfon almost laughed because if anything would serve bastards like Jim Miller and Tom Horn right it would be the Sovereign Tribes turning the might of their mages against them. The last bastard who’d merited such wrath had been Captain Edward S. Godfrey, who had given the command to open fire and sparked the massacre at Wounded Knee. (Ironically, Godfrey’s attempt to end the Ghost Dance had woken immense power in the Black Hills and united hundreds of bands into the independent nation that now controlled much of the northwest.)

  Dalfon shook his head. “Miller’s done a hell of a lot more than have one rancher killed if he’s managed to provoke the Sovereign Tribes.”

  “What Mr. Miller’s done in the whole of his life isn’t my business and I don’t figure it’s yours either,” Tom replied, and Dal
fon felt certain that Miller wasn’t the only one up to his neck in shit. Likely Tom stood just as deep.

  “The man’s paying good money,” Tom went on. “And there’s bound to be one hell of a ride ahead for any man tough enough to sign on with him. So are you in or not?”

  For an instant Dalfon felt that old drive for action and adventure rise in his blood. Maybe if Tom had made the offer to him when he’d been a fifteen-year-old runaway, he’d have accepted just to feel excited and alive. But now he’d seen more than his share of action and learned that the measure of a man’s character could be taken not only by the battles he won but also by those he refused to fight.

  As Dalfon formulated his response, seemingly every person in the lounge went quiet, turning rapt attention upon the doorway. Both Tom and Dalfon looked as well. And Dalfon’s heart swelled with a strange mix of joy and pride.

  There stood the now-famous heir of the immense Moreau fortune, Luc Song-Garcia. Dalfon’s own Lucky.

  With his shaggy dark hair fashionably shorn and slicked back, the fine angles of his face stood out clearly. All the world could see the expressive quality of his dark eyes and appreciate his handsome, full mouth. When he smiled, his whole face lit up, and he appeared somehow both young and worldly at once.

  The increase in his income hadn’t done his wardrobe any harm either. Gone were the loose sack overalls and the shapeless shirt that had hidden the hard lines and dexterity of his body. Now a black jacket cut from supple pterodactyl leather and a vest embroidered with gold silk emphasized his corded shoulders and long waist. Fine gold threads glinted from the dark cloth of his fitted trousers, and his boots gleamed like obsidian.

  Gazing at him, Dalfon was reminded of a description he’d read of a deity carved into a Hindu temple: grace and power playing through lithe limbs and a seductive smile. Dalfon guessed he wasn’t alone in the thought, when he heard one of the nearby women whisper, “He looks like an Indian prince.”