by Ann Gimpel
“Unless those danged Indians cause more problems,” the other occupant of the Overland Stagecoach spoke up. Luke Caulfield was a fortyish gunslinger, who hadn’t said much since introducing himself when he boarded back in Sterling, Colorado. Twin colts graced his hips, and rows of bullets crisscrossed his broad chest in leather bandoliers. Black hair fell straight as a stick past his shoulders. Unsettling green eyes stared right through her, almost in invitation to reveal her ability. At times she’d caught him fairly vibrating with power. Others, no matter how hard she looked, he was as unremarkable as a rain-washed windowpane—at least in terms of magic. No live, breathing woman would ever consider Luke unremarkable in any other way.
Muscles bulged under his form-fitting leather clothes. He was so masculine he made her squirm, and Abigail pressed her thighs together, suppressing thoughts of what she’d like to do with that leather-clad body. She laced her fingers tightly in her lap thinking she’d be damned glad to get off this stage and away from both Carolyn and Luke. The child was a pain in the rump and the man too sensual to even consider. He probably had women in a dozen cities across the country drawing straws to see who got to warm his bed. Not that she wouldn’t like to be one of them, but he was a complication she didn’t need right now.
“Oooh, Indians would be exciting,” Carolyn trilled. “Do you really think they might attack us or something?”
“Of course not.” Abigail jumped into the breach and shot what she hoped was a meaningful look across the small, enclosed space.
“Do you have to ruin everything?” Carolyn snarled, and reached out with pincer-like fingers. Abigail anticipated her, though, and caught the girl’s hand before she could strike.
“If you try that again,” she snapped, “I will tie your hands behind your back.” Or feed you to what’s outside this carriage.
“You wouldn’t dare—”
“Oh yes, I would. It’s what we do to young ladies who refuse to behave as such.”
“I’d tell.”
Abigail grabbed the girl’s chin, forcing her to look up and meet her gaze. “Yes, and so would I. I scarcely think your parents would be pleased by your behavior.” That earned her a sulky silence. When Abigail glanced at Luke, the corners of his mouth were twitching. “Ever raised one of these?” She waggled a finger toward Carolyn.
“No ma’am. Can’t say as I have.” He chuckled. “Not looking like a very attractive proposition, watching you.”
The stage ground to an abrupt halt, throwing her forward and then back against the seat cushions. The hum of brass gears, which worked as an assist to the horses through rough terrain—that she’d been powering with a steady stream of magic—fell ominously silent. Luke tensed his jaw into a worried line. One of his guns found its way to his hand so quickly, Abigail didn’t see him draw it. She quirked a brow, but he shook his head and said, “I don’t know why we stopped. We’re not due at the next station for an hour.”
“I’m going to go outside to look,” Carolyn announced and lunged for the door latch.
“The hell you are, youngster.” Luke’s other hand closed around Carolyn’s wrist and the girl yelped. She tried to draw her hand back, but Luke held fast.
Carolyn wailed. Abigail, edgy because she had a bad feeling about was happening, slapped her. Not hard, but enough to get her attention. “You will be quiet,” she hissed. “Do you want to advertise your presence to whatever’s out there?”
“What’d you see outside?” Luke’s question was so quiet, she wasn’t certain she’d even heard it. The shriek of a horse whinnying filled her ears. It sounded like it was dying. The stagecoach canted crazily from side to side as the horses pulled against their harnesses. Luke tapped her leg with his pistol. “Quick. Tell me.”
“Wraiths.”
He drew his lips back from his teeth in a snarl. “Figured as much from the smell. You need to help me or none of us’ll get out of this.”
“What are wraiths?” Carolyn sounded more like a frightened child than a surly almost-teen.
“Never you mind,” Luke shot back. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to stay out of grownup conversations?”
“What do you have in mind?” Abigail asked, ignoring his question to Carolyn. She felt power pour off him, and wondered why he bothered with his six-guns. The horses started shrieking again.
“You and I need to go out there and take on whatever’s stopped us. This isn’t a time to hide what you are.”
“Carolyn,” Abigail kept her voice low, “you will stay inside the coach. No matter what. Do you understand me?”
“Y-yes.”
“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents that you were killed because you didn’t do what I told you.”
“All right. I’ll stay here,” the girl muttered sullenly. “Just go outside and get rid of whatever it is.”
Child always has to have the last word. “Ready when you are.” Abigail reached deep, down to the reservoir that held her power. Thank the goddess she’d eaten and rested. Magic was persnickety. It knew when she was worn down.
“I’ll take this door.” He gestured. “You go out the other one. Blast the holy crap out of ’em. Watch out for the horses. Sounds like we only have three left.”
“Were the horses how you knew about my, um, abilities?”
He rolled his eyes. “As if I couldn’t hear the gears whirling. Driver didn’t have a lick of power. ’Sides, most coaches need six horses to pull these grades. We only had four. Now get the hell out there, woman, before we lose another horse.”
His door slammed open, clunking against its stops. The last thing Abigail saw before she leapt out her door was Carolyn cowering, as far back as she could get against a seat cushion. Good! Hope she stays there.
Cursing her long skirts and cumbersome petticoats, Abigail used magic to skip the coach steps. Power blazed from her hands before she could see what she was aiming at. She was afraid if she took even a few seconds to hunt for a target, something would get her. Being dead wasn’t desirable, but it was better than the other things wraiths could do to her. Those turned her blood to ice chips.
With her booted feet planted firmly on the ground, Abigail finally got a good look at the wraiths. She drew magic from deep in the earth and sent it chasing after them. Insubstantial as tall, thin puffs of smoke, they had glowing charcoal eyes. Long, blood red claws graced what passed for hands. Binding their victims with fiery strands was a favorite trick—just before they sucked your soul right out of you, leaving a handy vessel for one of their masters to occupy. Wraiths used to only feed on the dead, making them into new wraiths. They’d been bad enough then, but now they functioned as hired thugs for practitioners of the Black Arts. It was what gave them their ability to operate in broad daylight. Abigail wondered who this crew worked for. The Alchemical Council? Black Magick?
Good God but there were a lot of them. Why? Surely they weren’t interested in the contents of the coach, which only carried mail and Carolyn’s substantial luggage. Ducking and spinning to escape being entwined in a blazing net, she thought about the girl’s steamer trunks. Abigail only helped pack two of them. The third had been locked and ready to go. Could that be what the wraiths were after?
She shut off her thoughts so she could focus. The ragged sound of her own panting thrummed loud in her ears as she chucked one killing blow after the next. No point in running anything less than wide open. For each wraith she obliterated, three more showed up to take its place. Her chest ached from breathing sooty air, and wraith stench.
Heat seared her back. Damnation! Her skirts were on fire. Abigail funneled magic behind her to quell the flames, but it didn’t work. Smoke stung her nostrils. If she dropped to the ground to put out the fire, which had already eaten a long gouge in one of her hands, the wraiths would pounce. Terror licked at her along with the flames. In spite of her brave thoughts earlier, Abigail did not want to die. Not here. She cursed her corset. It was hard to get a decent breath. If she’d known she
was going to have to fight—
“Keep after ’em,” Luke growled from behind her. “I have your dress under control.” She felt him drape something heavy around her shoulders—a lap robe he must have snatched from inside the coach—and press it close against her with his body. Gratitude wrapped warm tentacles around her. Having him right next to her made her already pounding heart do flip-flops, but she forced herself to focus on something other than all those rock-hard muscles jammed against her back.
“Are they all on this side of the coach?” she wheezed, still struggling to breathe. Between the smoke, her stays, and Luke’s body so near, it was a losing battle.
“Pretty much. Guess they want you more than me. Actually, they’ve been trying to get to the trunks up top.”
A discordant warning note sounded in the back of her mind. What the hell was in the girl’s luggage that would draw wraiths?
Her back wasn’t hot anymore, so she assumed the fire was out. It was still so smoky it was hard to tell. That fire, maybe. The one inside me is just getting going… She squirmed from more than the smoke and struggled not to turn around and press the front of herself against Luke. They had bigger problems than his undeniable raw charisma. Luke didn’t seem to be in a hurry to move away, though. He remained front to back with her, and she absorbed power flowing from him. Damn, but he was strong. What she wouldn’t give for that kind of magic. It would help if I could breathe…
With difficulty, Abigail forced her mind away from Luke’s charms. “The driver?” She hadn’t been round to the front of the wagon to check.
“Dead.”
“Ever driven one of these things?”
“Concentrate on killing, woman. If we can’t get shut of the wraiths, ’twon’t matter a diddly damn.”
Anger flashed through her at Luke’s highhandedness, and she stepped away from him; the lap robe slithered to the ground. She shook her head, pulled magic, and killed three more wraiths. It was convenient they didn’t hang around. They just sort of winked out once hit. For all she knew they weren’t dead at all, just returned to some sort of central depot for reanimation. A flash at the edge of her vision set off alarms, but her reflexes were sluggish, and she was a hair too late. A wraith closed, slashing deadly nails down her already-burned hand. Abigail howled with pain. Luke’s gun roared, making her ears ring, and a hole opened in the wraith’s chest that got bigger and bigger until the thing folded in on itself.
“Thought you couldn’t kill them with bullets,” she gasped, staring at the place the wraith had been.
“Silver does the trick. I mix it with iron in my gunpowder, just to be on the safe side.” Taking aim, he fired again.
Her breath came in little pants. She had a stitch in her side. Her face burned and her injured hand was gashed so deep bone showed. She twisted her head from side to side and looked for more wraiths, but couldn’t find any.
“They’re gone. Must not have liked the odds.” Luke holstered his guns.
“Bravo. Nicely done.” Clapping came from one of the open stagecoach doors.
Abigail looked toward the coach, her eyes hot and gritty. Carolyn sat on the floor of the stagecoach with her legs dangling. Something inside Abigail snapped. She raced to her charge, grabbed a fistful of her blonde hair with one hand, and slapped her across the face with the other as hard as she could. It made her hand ache as if someone had stuck a knife in it, but she did it again. “You little bitch,” she snarled. “What do you think this is? A sporting event?”
Blue eyes huge as pinwheels, Carolyn twisted in her grasp, trying to get away, but Abigail held tight. “You’ve needed this for years. While we’re at it, what’s in your luggage?”
“Good point,” Luke muttered from somewhere close behind her. “We should take a look in there.”
Carolyn screamed epithets no well-bred child should even know. Abigail pulled harder on her hair. “If you don’t stop that right now, I’ll use magic to bind you.” The threat seemed to work because the girl shut up.
Abigail stepped back from her and eyed a stream running by the road. She stumbled over to it, knelt, and threw water on her face and hands. It felt good, cooling the places her skin was charred and split. She pulled the pins out of her hair, bent forward, and soaked the singed, sooty strands. They floated in the current like exotic, dark red seaweed. What she really wanted to do was loosen her corset, but she’d need to strip down for that. Not something she could do in front of Luke.
“I won’t look,” he said.
Giving her hair a final dunk, she pulled it out of the creek, and wrung as much of the water out as she could manage. She straightened and met his gaze. “You have the mind reading gift?”
“That and other things.” He turned away from her. “Go ahead. We’ve got some hard work ahead of us. It’ll help if you can get a straight breath into you.”
Unbuttoning her dress, she pulled at the laces holding her stays. She’d planned to just loosen them, but once they were undone, she let the whalebone-reinforced undergarment slip under her skirts where she could just step out of it. She inhaled all the way to the bottom of her lungs and smiled grimly.
Yes. More like it.
“You took your underthings off in front of a man.” Carolyn sounded scandalized—and fascinated.
Abigail stomped back to the coach and tossed her stays inside. “And you just cursed a blue streak. We need to have a talk, but not right now.”
Her wet hair soaked through the bodice of her dress, but at least the day was warm enough it didn’t matter. She twisted and looked over both shoulders assessing just how damaged her dress was. The thick linen fabric was singed, but not so badly she couldn’t still wear it. Good thing, since she’d only packed three others. She focused a few strands of magic to dry everything and moved to the front of the coach.
One of the horses was, indeed, dead. The others pranced, eyes rolling as they attempted to distance themselves from their fallen companion. She tried to soothe them enough so they wouldn’t kick her. When that didn’t work, she reached into their minds with a strong suggestion they settle down. Now. While she waited for the horses to stop snorting and pawing the ground, she diverted a trickle of magic to patch up the worst of her injuries. There wasn’t time to truly heal herself, but she did take a bite out of her pain. She also retrieved the lap robe and stuffed it back inside the coach.
“How should I hook them up?” she asked Luke, finally satisfied she could approach the horses safely.
He’d already pulled the driver off the box and was piling rocks over his body. “One in front, two behind. I’ll help you once I’m done here.”
As Abigail worked, she speculated just how much more magic it would take to run the gears that powered the wheels and helped the horses over the steep parts. That had been one of the attractive parts about this journey: getting paid twice. Once for shepherding Carolyn and again for helping with the stagecoach. Still panicked, one of the horses nipped her with its broad, flat teeth. She thwacked the side of its head and wondered what was keeping Luke.
“Looks like you’ve about got it.” As if in response to her thinking about him, Luke materialized by her side and started tightening the leather straps. Carolyn had been mercifully silent since her last outburst.
“Should we open her luggage?” Abigail feared what they’d find.
He laid a comforting hand briefly over one of hers. “Nah, let’s wait until we’re well clear of this spot.” Luke jumped onto the box and gathered the reins. “Get inside with the hellion—ah, I mean the girl.” He laughed, but without much warmth. “She’s not what she appears, but there’s not time to talk about that right now.”
“Humph.” Abigail sprinted for the coach. She slammed one door, and then went around and got inside through the other. She’d barely gotten the door latched when the stagecoach lurched forward. She paid out magic to the gears. Once they were humming along nicely, she turned her attention to Carolyn. The girl stared defiantly at her.
“You have witch eyes. Are you going to hit me again, witch?” she asked.
“Not if you do what I tell you.” Abigail trained her hazel eyes on the girl. “Why make a fuss about magic? Your parents are part of my order.”
“I’m not their daughter,” she said sullenly.
That might be why she doesn’t have any magic. Abigail waited, but Carolyn held onto an edgy silence. Finally she asked, “Who are you?”
“Goody Osborne.” The girl smirked, as if daring Abigail to challenge her.
Skin stretched along the sides of Abigail’s face as her eyes widened. She can’t be the witch from the Salem trials— “What’d you do with Carolyn?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
The girl shook her head. Abigail considered using magic to force truth out of her, but saw in the girl’s eyes she’d die before giving up her secrets. I need Luke. Maybe he can read what’s in her head.
“Don’t try it.” Something shadowy and feral flared from Carolyn, darkening her blue eyes to almost black.
Abigail did a double take. The girl didn’t have Coven magic. The power she’d taken care to cloak—until now—came from the other side. From the Satanists and their ilk. Understanding dawned. “You called the wraiths. You or whoever you work for.”
“Did I now?” the girl mimicked her inflection.
Abigail’s skin crawled. The thing sharing the carriage seat suddenly felt like consummate evil. Was there any way Goody Osborne could have taken possession of Carolyn? Spirits did that, body hopping for centuries to give themselves corporeal form.
“What if I’m lying to you?” the girl-thing piped up. “Maybe I really am Carolyn Giraud. After all, I look a lot like the girl in all those pictures you helped me pack. The ones where my parents have their loving arms around me.” The girl smiled. Something about her expression froze Abigail’s blood. Her grip on sanity slipping, she focused on the gears, wondered how close the next stage station was, and prayed like hell it would come soon.