by K. M. Tolan
“You were going to tell me about wanting the rock for yourself?”
“Yes.”
He set his pole down. “Can’t you trust me even for a moment? Damn if I haven’t trusted you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” She regarded him with a set expression. “I’m not going to fight over this with you, Vincent. I wasn’t going to tell you anything until we freed your sister. She needs to be part of the conversation.”
“She needs to start telling me the truth and so do you.”
Her lips parted, and then closed. She seemed to gather herself before continuing. “What if Freedom doesn’t want to go back with you? What if your sister lied to you all along? You can’t force her, Vincent. Not and still be her brother.”
“So she’s really going to give you the rock, is that it?”
“That’s the idea. I’m sorry. I really am. I thought it would be easy to play you along, but it’s not. I really was going to tell you.”
“And what if you’re the one she’s lying to? You expect me to hand the rock over, Sammy?” He swallowed, wishing he could hide the truth as easily as she could. “I won’t do that.”
Her face was no less giving than the granite they sat on. “I know.”
“So I bring back two pieces,” he offered, seeing a simple answer to both their problems.
“You won’t be able to. I don’t know why, but you can only bring back one piece. That’s what Freedom told me. I guess there are rules in hobo heaven too.”
The reluctance in her voice assured him he wasn’t just talking to a baron’s scheming daughter. She really was trying to be sincere, for once. “Fine, then I’ll go back again for another piece.”
She swallowed, her eyes softening for a moment before recasting themselves as twin diamonds. “You won’t. Nobody would.”
He felt a wall of ice forming in the void where words failed him. Taking hope from her was the last thing he wanted to do. She needed something to fight the yegg inside her. He needed to face the emotions growing inside him these past weeks. Leaning forward, he kissed her. “I will if you start trusting me.”
She shuddered, and scrambled away from him like he was a coiled serpent. “No.”
“No? No, what?”
“I’m not worth hurting you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he answered, moving forward to warm the chill between them in his arms. “Is meaning something to me that much a crime?”
“You deserve better, you just don’t realize it.” She twisted from his embrace.
Dumbfounded, he watched her dash back toward the house.
His initial foray into her personal feelings was but a chilly dip ahead of plunging in deep over his head after evening fell. They hardly talked over a dinner of grilled fish, but Samantha’s sleeping arrangements left light conversation behind when they closed the door of a small bedroom. He stared at the single bed with its quilted comforter. Bone-tired or not, he wasn’t going near the thing.
He slumped in a creaky old rocker next to an antique dresser. “The shed’s better than this.”
She winced, her back against the door. “Don’t you dare. I’ve had enough of Chepi’s looks for one day.”
“What did she say this time?”
“It’s what she used to say. I can still see it in her eyes. She’d tell me I was the reason fish ran away—because the lake’s warmer.”
“Wonder where that idea came from,” he drawled.
“It’s not what you think. I didn’t expect you to do that.”
“You mean kiss you?”
“Nobody kisses me. I mean, nobody ever…” Groaning, she sat on the bed. “Yes, I like you too, and that’s why I don’t want to hurt you.”
Vincent drew in the pleasant perfume of lilacs from her recent bath to rid herself of the smell of fish. The green print dress Chepi gave her clung to Samantha’s wiry frame, nearly offsetting the hardness he knew existed beneath her pale skin. Well, at least she admitted liking him in turn. He flashed an encouraging smile. “Can’t say I won’t kiss you again. How about we get some sleep and worry about the rest tomorrow?”
“I’m not having you sleep on a chair or on the floor like some dog. If anyone should—”
“Don’t start with who deserves what again,” he pleaded.
Hell with it. The evening tea they shared before heading here was already dragging him down by his feet. He unceremoniously dropped onto his side of the bed, showed his back to her, and was content to slam his mind’s door on a very long day. The jeans and old gray shirt Red had lent him after his own shower would do just fine in lieu of pajamas.
The lights went out. The mattress rocked once with Samantha’s arrival.
“Goodnight, Vincent.”
“Goodnight, Sammy, and it’s Vin.”
“Then goodnight, Vin.”
Vincent didn’t remember when he stopped hearing her soft breathing beside him, so quick did sleep take him. He woke with a start. He turned to find Samantha sitting up. She wasn’t even looking at him.
“Vin.”
What in the hell? “Yes?” he managed.
“Let’s go.”
He watched uneasily while she rolled off the bed and stood as if in some zombie movie. “Go where?”
“Cave’s this way.”
Was she sleepwalking? Should he shake her awake? Somehow, that old woman had gotten into Samantha’s dreams with her talk about caves and such. At least she’s staying human.
She was already opening the door and heading out.
Swearing, he followed, amazed at how she sleepwalked herself through a darkened living room and out the cabin door without so much as hitting a table corner or chair. The air outside was cool as one would expect for a spring evening in Ohio, the only sound being a low rush of wind through the surrounding trees. A quarter-moon provided dim contrast to the garden path down which she moved with purpose.
Samantha paused near the back shed. “Iron has to be worked out.”
“Fine,” he muttered, trying not to kill himself on some unseen sharp object while rummaging for mining tools. Pick? Shovel? How in hell did they do this? The best he came up with was one of the hammers Red Socks used for pounding out metal. That and a chisel.
His choice seemed to satisfy her. She turned for the woods behind them. Samantha’s eyes remained distant, much like those of the fish they pulled from the lake earlier. He followed behind her, while deep inside he wondered why he was doing this. He ought to be yelling at her to snap out of this, not humoring such craziness. Then again, the last time he interrupted her sleep, she’d gone all nightmare and claws. Considering Red’s inferred warning about her turning yegg, it was best to ride this one out.
Sure enough, he saw a cave, or more to the point, a root-entangled cleft piercing a rocky tumble along the lakeshore. “Just stay here,” he cautioned, gratified to see her obey in a listless mimicry of a marionette shorn of purpose.
Vincent wedged himself into the crack, eliciting a tumble of loose earth and pebbles while edging through vines thicker than his arm. He felt fortunate that this wasn’t really a cave. Otherwise, there wouldn’t still be the weak illumination of a quarter-moon overhead.
The fissure dipped down and widened, his breath becoming frosty with a numbing cold. Ugly memories of home boiled up unbidden with each puff of breath. He felt more than saw the rough bulges of ore deposits along the granite walls. Vincent got to work with the chisel, the chill increasing around him. The rock sparked and rang out, summoning recollections of a young girl’s cry. Katy begging him to save her as the train swept her from him ten years earlier. Just like Dad did while beaten to death in the back alley. He didn’t move. Didn’t bother. It wasn’t his job. Darkness grew around him like a rising cloud of venting steam.
A horrid feeling of something monstrous behind him grew too intense to ignore. He whirled in time to see Katy’s tiny white body tumble lifelessly from black talons. Snarling with accusation, the creature inside of Sa
mantha lunged, exacting revenge for what he had done to his sister and father.
Vincent fell numbly to the floor among the iron clumps hewn from the rock. He curled up in a defensive ball. The yegg raked him repeatedly. The pain was an awful electric agony across his back. The thing’s rage enfolded him with its roar. Beyond it, he heard Samantha’s whimper.
“No!” Vincent pushed himself through those lashing claws. He seized the person struggling against bindings black as fear itself. He wouldn’t let her go. Not like he had the others.
“You’re coming back!” he screamed, ignoring the pain as he tugged against the bleak morass with all his might. Steam locomotive or dark terror—it didn’t matter. He was done with losing. “Fight it, Sammy. Stay with me, I’ve got you.”
A hand bereft of claws gripped his. He found the other grasping fingers through the miasma of rage and betrayal and pulled hard, refusing to let the sucking vortex of hatred win.
“Not this time!” Samantha gasped, pushing herself free from the writhing tendrils. “I won’t. I…will…not.”
They stared wide-eyed at each other across tangled sheets, their arms locked in a desperate embrace.
“Sorry!” her cry wrenched out between deep shudders. “I’m so sorry!”
Vincent held in the scream exacted by stripes of agony across his arms and shoulders. “Think I’m still bleeding.”
“Help us!” Samantha shouted hoarsely.
The bedroom door opened with a suspicious immediacy. Red Socks and his wife flicked on the room’s fanlights, the pair looking like they, too, had chosen to sleep fully dressed.
“Get some black cherry tea going,” Chepi instructed, pushing past her husband. She inspected the bright red welts across Vincent’s arms. “I’ll need some hot towels and paste.” She gave a clucking sound while inspecting the marks. “Anywhere else?”
“My back,” Vincent said, wincing as Chepi gingerly lifted his shirt.
The woman raised her voice. “Bring that jar of salve I made this morning.” She turned to Samantha. “How about you, little hanikwa?”
“Just weak,” she replied, her voice heavy with guilt. “I’m sorr—”
“Hush that,” Chepi broke in. “You both came back with brave hearts, so stop your blubbering. Some don’t come back at all.”
“What happened?” Vincent managed.
The Shawnee shrugged. “You went to the cave.”
Thirteen
A cool morning breeze drifting in from the lake offered Vincent a soothing enticement to nod away on the porch rocker. Yes, the claw marks on his back and arms still tingled, but Chepi’s medicinal paste quenched most of the pain. Having Samantha’s head resting on his shoulder helped too. The gulf between them wasn’t so bad, now. He could glimpse the other side where her mind worked its machinations. “So you really dreamt the same thing?”
She turned slightly to regard him with sleepy eyes. “Yegg and all. You pulled me out of myself. How’s your back?”
“Tolerable.”
“Damn Chepi and her mushrooms,” Samantha muttered. “That tea she gave us, she must’ve laced it. We vision quested together.”
“Those aren’t hallucinations running across my back, kid.”
“You know who caused them,” came her half-whisper. “Chepi figured if we worked together, the yegg would finally be pulled out of me. It came out fighting, just like last time.”
“You gave her those scars on her face?”
Samantha nodded. “This was her second try. I’m afraid the results weren’t much better. I haven’t changed.”
“You pulled yourself out of the yegg, remember?”
She smiled up at him. “As I recall, you wouldn’t let go.” She adjusted her head, and then managed a half-hearted chuckle. “I could get used to this. Not a lot of touching in my family.”
“I would imagine.”
“Oh, my real father, Jake, he’d hug me once in a while. Rub my head with those big knuckles of his after…” Her shoulders slumped. “We’d go hunting together as those things. Didn’t matter what we came across. Or whom.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Vincent replied, glimpsing the phantoms behind her nightmares.
“Teaching me how to kill wasn’t what the baron hired him for, but Jake didn’t want me running away from what I was. Quite the opposite. Her sigh sounded full of deflated hopes. “Thanks for this moment, but I’m still a monster.”
“I didn’t see a monster last night.”
“It’s still in there. It’ll always be there until I can clean it out. Your father told Freedom the Rock Candy Mountain would cure anything. Even me. I guess you’d say your sister gave me hope.”
Vincent groaned. “That’s one hell of an assumption you want me to die for.”
She reached over and squeezed his hand. “You won’t die. Gandy dancers can come back. Your father did. You will too.”
“If Freedom really doesn’t want to go back home as a human being, the rock’s yours. Assuming I can get it at all. I can’t give you a better deal than that, Sammy.”
“I know your sister better than you do. She loves being what she is. Freedom won’t go back with you. She never will.”
Hearing some hesitancy in her voice, he pulled her close. “You don’t sound too convinced. Has there been any case of a steam child becoming human again?”
Samantha shook her head. “With the kind of freedom these riders have? It’s not just that, Vincent. I once met a steam child named Midtown who claimed she was nearly two-hundred years old because she was still having fun. How much fun is Freedom going to have if you change her?”
“This was her idea,” he pointed out.
“That’s the part I have a hard time believing.”
It was an odd sort of banter to cuddle by, but Vincent accepted the pleasant ambience of the moment. This was probably the nearest thing to peace either of them was going to get for a while, so he figured they might as well enjoy the illusion.
The creak of an old wheelbarrow preceded Red Socks coming around the corner of the house. He set down his load of rusty brown rocks and waved. “Feeling better, I see.”
“What you got, there?” Vincent inquired.
“Your ore. Not a bad haul, son. You did good.”
Vincent straightened in the chair, Samantha reluctantly uncurling herself. “I did what?”
“A man’s job,” Red congratulated. “Sammy, if you can stand parting company, I need Brass down at the shed. Time to get cracking on his lining rod.” He gripped the wheelbarrow’s handles and continued toward the garden path.
Vincent looked at Samantha. “Hallucination, huh?”
She shook her head. “There’s no cave around here, damn it. We didn’t leave the bedroom.”
He grinned. “Then explain the mud on my shoes this morning.”
She stood, gazing skyward with an exasperated groan. “You’re the gandy dancer. You explain it. I’m going in and learn how to make that medicine Chepi slathered on you last night. Got a feeling we’ll need it again before this is through.”
“Claw me and cure me, is that it?”
“Until you get this thing out of me for good,” she returned, stomping across the patio’s floorboards on her way to the door.
Vincent rose to his feet, and at a snail’s pace, negotiated the porch steps and swung around the back of the house.
As soon as he arrived, Red motioned him out behind his work area where they first met. “Time for you to meet Confused Dragon. She ain’t the prettiest thing, but she gets the job done.”
A knot of tall milkweeds separated the anvil and benches from a second smaller shed with rusty metal sheets propped up by wrought iron pipe. The wheelbarrow sat inside next to a conglomeration of bricks and blowers suggesting a collision between an outdoor grill and a machine shop.
Red tapped at air tanks sitting next to a wooden bin overflowing with charcoal. “Think of this as mulligan stew, except we’re using a smelter. A little oxygen here and a das
h of carbon there. Mix in your iron at high heat and let simmer a few days. But, just like the stew, you gotta contribute. In our case it’s sweat, and lots of it.” He grinned, and sat down on a makeshift hammock thrown up between two poles. “Sweat’s going to be mostly yours. You can start by firing up the rock crusher.”
It took Vincent several pulls to start an old motor attached to a series of rollers into which he fed the iron ore. He heaped the result atop a bed of charcoal inside Confused Dragon’s brick belly, setting it alight with a whoosh of propane. The same engine drove blower belts, bringing the smelter’s contents to a bright red glow.
“You got to put yourself into this,” Red encouraged over the engine’s din as he fed the air tank’s contents to the blowers. This’ll be yours, Brass. Nobody else’s.”
“So what am I supposed to be making, exactly? Something like that steel rod I saw you handle?”
“Yep. Comes in handy if you’re in a fight, too. Got a nice point for sticking into a yegg’s belly. Present company excepted, of course. Leastwise, I hope so.”
“Don’t think I could do that,” he confided, stepping back from the smelter’s heat. “I owe Sammy for bringing me here and saving my neck earlier.”
“I’d say she’s growing on ya.”
He nodded, smiling at the admission. “I told her I’d give her the rock if my sister didn’t want to use it.”
Red’s face wrinkled with derision. “Why in hell would any rider want to become human again? You ask a lot from people.”
Vincent wiped at his forehead, not liking to hear Samantha’s observation repeated. “Yeah, guess I do, but there’s ten years of back-pay I got coming.”
“Or ten years’ worth of chains,” Red tossed back. “Ever think it’s not only your sister who needs rescuing?”
Vincent blew out a calming breath. “Thought we were making steel, here.”
Red Socks’s laugh promised no letup. “Hell, it’s gonna get a lot more personal than this before we’re through. Bet your ass on that. Not just iron we’re pouring into that fire. We’re pouring soul. By the way, mind the meter and put in another shovelful of charcoal. Need to keep this stuff at exactly the right temperature.”