by Lila Bowen
The glass jars of sand on the feed tent shelves disappeared quietly, one by one, as men came to claim their friends. When Rhett arrived, the Irish were sitting at the bench around one such jar, handing around a bottle of whisky and toasting Shaunie O’Bannon and whatever had become of his stubborn bastard of a brother.
“I know him,” Rhett said quietly. “That Earl O’Bannon.”
The burly fellers turned to stare at him with wet red eyes and distrust.
“Like hell you do, Injun,” one started.
“Little feller. Has an unhealthy attachment to his burgundy shirt. Missing two toes. Turns into a donkey. Snores something awful. Loved his brother. Won’t stop pestering a body until they go back to the railroad camp and kill the big boss. Sound about right?”
They looked him up and down like he was a lame mule.
“You?” the same feller asked. “You’re the one who did Trevisan in, then?”
Rhett nodded and held up his palms to show the starburst-shaped scars from the silver spikes. “I am.”
“How?”
Rhett grinned, knowing they wouldn’t believe the truth. “Inde magic,” he said solemnly.
The Irishmen glanced at one another in unspoken conversation, and the biggest one, even bigger than Bruiser, pushed the jar of sand toward Rhett. “Maybe you’ll be takin’ this to wee donkey-boy, then? Tell him his brother died brave.”
With a manly nod, Rhett took the jar. “I’ll get it to him.” Then he allowed them a small grin. “I been callin’ him donkey-boy, too.”
The big Irishman grinned back. “Hates it, don’t he?”
“That he does, lad. That he does,” Rhett said, and the big feller toasted him with the bottle, and they laughed, every one.
The camp was clearing out. The train and tents had been sacked of anything of value that could be easily carried, and Rhett had no doubt that his doctor’s bag and anything else he’d once considered his was long gone. Men collected into groups, hitching up wagons or doubling up on mules or perched on donkeys or getting bucked off half-wild mustangs or turning into wild beasts with glowing eyes, not caring that they looked like fools if it meant they would make it back to civilization without losing any more body parts or falling prey to other monsters. Rhett left them to it; he had two good horses and a mule waiting for him with his friends. But as he watched the last of the mules being fought over by Beans and Notch, he did wonder how Cora and Grandpa Z planned to get their supplies and Meimei back to Calafia. Could you even drive a wagon in dragon form?
With a grunt of self-satisfaction, he walked purposefully to the mule lot, hoping to find a creature left with four good hooves and not too many teeth. He hadn’t dared think it, much less speak it out loud, but he reckoned he’d like life in general a good bit more if Cora was nearby. She was like no one he’d ever met and didn’t get on his nerves much at all. She was a hard worker, had a sense of humor, was never rude. He liked her body and what she did with it, and she’d fit in right well with his friends. Maybe the Captain would take her on for doctoring and such, considering the man didn’t mind if folks were odd. But she wouldn’t want that, would she? She’d want to go home to Yerba Buena and do whatever it was she’d done in the big city by the sea, long before she’d met a mixed-up cowpoke with a habit of getting shot at and losing pieces of himself in the bargain.
The only thing he could find was a donkey too small for the other men to ride. It wasn’t the most pleasant of creatures, but he figured it could hold Meimei, and that’s what Cora would care about. She could come with him and ride in Prospera’s old wagon—hellfire, after fixing Winifred’s foot! And then they could all go back to Las Moras or Gloomy Bluebird or any ol’ town near the Las Moras Outpost. Even if Cora was a day or two’s ride away, he’d still be glad to see her a few times a month.
Fashioning a rough halter from a bit of broken harness, he towed the donkey behind him, missing the reasonable good sense of a horse—any horse. He’d tossed an old feed sack over the creature’s angrily hunched back, and the donkey had already bucked it off several times. He put the jar of sand on the ground where the creature couldn’t kick it and tied the harness to the wagon waiting outside Grandpa Z’s tent.
But when he poked his head inside, he found nothing but trouble.
It was mostly empty, the cots and rugs and worktable long gone. Only Cora was left, sitting cross-legged in the mud beside a sodden blanket and sobbing like her heart had fallen out. Despite himself, Rhett ran to her and fell to his knees with a splatter.
“What’s wrong? Is she hurt? Did they take her?”
Cora shook her head and muttered in her own language before dashing her tears away. She looked at him, dragon eyes fierce with rage and sadness, and flipped back the top corner of the blanket to show a pile of silvery sand.
“Meimei?” Rhett asked, feeling his own tears rise up.
Cora shook her head. “Grandpa Z. My Meimei is nowhere to be found.”
Chapter
25
Not knowing what to do with a heartbroken woman, Rhett settled for wrapping his arms around her and patting her and murmuring the sort of soft things he would say to a frightened horse. It worked for a moment, but then Cora exhaled angrily, pushed him away, and stood. Her hair was askew, her face puffy and her clothes spackled in mud. He’d never seen her in pieces before, but it didn’t bother him.
Rhett stood, too. “You want me to go find her?”
His mind worked the calculations. All he had to do was go outside, shove a feller off a horse, and follow the Shadow’s instincts. But Cora just shook her head.
“Ned, there was no one else. I left them here together while I readied the wagon, Grandpa Z and Meimei. They were playing games and laughing, sitting on this blanket. I have not seen him so happy in many years. When I came back, there was only sand, and this.” She held up a shiny silver spike, small and sharp. Rhett recognized it immediately.
“That was in Trevisan’s car. He threatened to kill me with it.” Turning it over in his head, he made the connections. “She must’ve brought it with her. I…I didn’t see it after…”
In the wet mud, small slipper prints were clearly visible, a slick spot where a small, wee body had wriggled out from under the tent.
“Why?” Rhett said, his voice suddenly small. “Why would she do that?”
Cora’s head dropped. “I don’t know. Who could know? What poison did Trevisan whisper to her? He kept her with him for two years. I asked her what he did, if he touched her, made her drink anything. She would only smile and shake her head and call me Beloved Sister. Like he had broken something inside of her. Like there was nothing left but a doll.”
“I can find her,” he said. “She can’t have gotten far. I can change—”
“Then change. Go. Bring her back. I don’t care if she’s broken. I will fix her.”
The girl’s eyes flared white, fathomless and hot. A thin curl of smoke rose from her lips.
Rhett stood and kept his eye locked with hers as he tossed off his eye kerch, Winifred’s pouch, Sam’s hat, Dan’s clothes. He stepped out of his boots, his bare feet sinking into the soggy ground. He didn’t mind her seeing him nekkid, not like this or anything else. Not that he was proud or wanted to impress her or seduce her, and not that he was altogether comfortable in his skin. Just that he knew it didn’t matter, compared to real love like she had for Meimei.
Tugging the golden string inside, Rhett became the bird. Lammergeier was the word Trevisan had used, and that word didn’t mean anything to Rhett. But Trevisan had also called him the lambhawk, and Rhett reckoned maybe that meant he could find the lost little lamb. For Cora. As the bird thoughts took over, he bobbed his ugly head, flapped out of the tent, and fumbled into the sky, leaving taloned prints in the muck.
The bird thrashed into the blue. His wings ached slightly from where the silver spikes had torn them, right near the biggest flight feathers, but he didn’t waver. He was missing a claw, too, but he didn�
��t care. His one good eye could see, and his body still knew how to fly. They could keep on carving bits off of him, and he would keep on riding the wind just to spit in their eyes. All of them. Humans scurried below doing senseless human things, but he soared out in a focused circle, looking for one thing.
A little girl in a red silk jacket.
But he knew he had to look for other things, too. A little girl in a disguise. A horse or donkey with an extra lump. A small creature on foot, lost and confused. A man hurrying too fast, alone, carrying a sack. A wagon where no wagon should be. Maybe she’d left on her own, as Cora supposed. Or maybe someone else had taken her again. Little creatures were so easily stolen, as Rhett knew well enough.
The bird wobbled in flight and dropped a bit as Rhett realized that he was having man thoughts and bird thoughts, all at once. Together, both creatures sought the same thing with the same intensity they’d once given Earl O’Bannon’s red shirt.
Find the child.
Wider and wider he circled. The man’s mind ticked off and catalogued what he saw. There, Digby and some of his crew, traveling on foot behind a mule pulling an open wagon full of food and a couple of pickaxes, their only weapons. There, a great dragon, big as a train car, leading the Chine men on foot. There, the Irishmen, a tidy line of donkeys, sheep, and goats with bags strung around their necks or over their flanks, hot-stepping toward Lamartine. Most folks were headed that way, and few had anything to hide. Humans only saw what they wanted to, didn’t they?
Circling away from the city, Rhett saw figures he recognized, Notch and Arrows and Beans, each alone. He heard Preacher preaching before he saw him, not surprised to note the uppity man had collected some of the sadder fellers in a wagon, including the one-legged Aztecan from the feed tent. But he didn’t see anything that could’ve been Meimei, and his Shadow-self didn’t wobble in any particular direction except back toward the camp. So when he’d exhausted his possibilities, he raced the sun back to earth and landed by one of the last remaining tents, where a beautiful girl waited by a hunchbacked donkey, her eyes streaming as she watched the oddest-looking bird in Durango Territory turn into the oddest-looking man in Durango Territory.
“No sign?” Cora asked, knowing the truth already.
He shook his head grimly and took the shirt she held out to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, although it didn’t seem like nearly enough. “I felt for sure I’d find her. I always know how to do what needs to be done. But this time…I just don’t.”
“Maybe she’s gone.” Cora raised her hands as if taking in all the sunset-tinged prairie. “Just more sand amid so much sand.”
“She ain’t sand.” Rhett knew the hard truth of that, too, as the words left his mouth. “I know that much. She ain’t sand.”
Cora fell to her knees in the mud, startling the donkey. “Then, what? What else? What now?”
Rhett yanked down the tent’s canvas until it covered the mud in an unwieldy heap. He caught Cora around the waist and dragged her back against him until they lay together, him curled around her spine and her curled around whatever hope she had left.
“Then we sleep, a little more free than we were yesterday. And tomorrow, I’ll take you away from here.” His voice was soft, sweet, a whispery voice he hadn’t known he contained.
“If I go away, I will never find her again.”
He brushed her smooth hair back over her cheek. “Staying won’t bring her back.”
“Stay. Go. It is all the same. She was my only compass, and now she is gone.”
“Sometimes things come back. Sometimes there’s a better path. But you have to leave, first, to find it.”
Cora sighed as the stars began to peep out, one by one. Her body relaxed against him, just a little. “Perhaps you are right, Ned.”
“My name is Rhett,” he said, so quietly that the stars couldn’t hear. “Before that, it was Nat. And before that, it was Nettie. And before that, it was something Injun.”
Cora turned her face to put her cheek against his, smooth and cool. “Which name do you like best?”
“Rhett Hennessy Walker.”
“Thank you, Rhett Hennessy Walker.”
He gulped, well aware that he’d failed her. “For what?”
“Freedom,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “And maybe, hope.”
The morning dawned pink and cool with just the faintest hint of the winter to come. Rhett saw one good puff of breath before the heat started to find itself. He didn’t move, though. He would prefer to stay curled around Cora for the rest of time, or at least until one of them had to attend to bodily needs. So far as he understood it, things were about to change again. Things had changed a lot, after he’d left Gloomy Bluebird. Most of the time he didn’t mind, but this time, he was mighty uneasy.
He hadn’t yet asked Cora which direction she favored. And he hadn’t yet allowed himself to consider what he would choose if she wanted to head east or west instead of south toward his friends.
Beside him, Cora exhaled and stretched, arms up and legs down, her body going rigid and then boneless as she rolled to her back.
“She watches us,” Cora said, and Rhett was about to ask who, but he looked where she was looking and saw the moon’s coy smile.
If Rhett had had any sense, he would’ve kept track of the damn thing, at least to time his courses. But he resisted, as if resisting could change anything. There was something sly about that silvery crescent that plagued him lately. Ever since the Cannibal Owl, he’d figured he was better off not giving the moon that kind of power over him.
“It’s like she’s grinning at her own joke,” he said, considering. “I don’t know if I trust her.”
“That’s what is so funny,” Cora said lightly. “She does not care, either way. She will go on, waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing, long after we are sand.”
Rhett licked his lips and considered his next words carefully. “I don’t know which way you want to go, but you said you owed me, and I reckon I should call in that debt before you get too far with your planning.”
Cora rolled toward him, her small, fine hands dragging down his chest in a way that made him tense with hope. “And so here is the asking,” she said, half-playful and half-suspicious.
“I got this friend,” Rhett said.
“Do you?”
Cora’s hands traced the more sensitive places of his anatomy, and he almost shut his damn mouth and gave in. Instead, he said, “And her foot got cut off.”
The hands pulled away, and so did Cora. The air between them went cold, and her voice dropped. “Her.” A pause. “You wish me to heal her?”
Hating himself and shaking his head in loss, Rhett said, “I reckon that if I got one favor to call in, that’ll be it.”
Cora sat up with a sigh, maybe of disappointment, or maybe of resignation. Rhett didn’t understand women well enough to know.
“Where is she, this friend?”
“About twenty miles south from here, I reckon. Maybe closer. I got a whole posse, armed to the teeth and waiting on me. We got horses and a wagon. And I hate to admit it, but we got a better tracker than me, and he could have an idea of where Meimei might be.”
He propped himself up on one elbow and looked around at the empty camp and the long, dark train standing sentinel, the only shape rising from the flat prairie for miles. It might never move again. But if Rhett knew railroads, or at least the sort of men who built them, it would keep on chugging across Durango, with or without Trevisan. Damn thing would probably build itself just out of sheer stubbornness.
“I don’t get it, though. My belly usually leads me toward whatever I’m supposed to chase, and my belly says I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
Cora rubbed his belly with a glint in her eye. “Just like a man. Following your appetites.”
“Not like that. I just get a feeling. That’s all.” He almost told her what he was—the Shadow. But something stayed his tongue.
“Maybe you’re s
upposed to stay with me,” Cora said.
In her eyes, Rhett saw mischief war with longing, and he ached to roll her over onto her back and give the moon something real to see. But he didn’t.
He looked toward the west, trying to imagine how far the land might stretch until it met some magical goddamn thing called an ocean.
“Maybe,” he said, but he gave her a grin that said it wouldn’t be such a horrible fate, staying with her a while longer.
Rhett stood and held out a hand to pull Cora up beside him. He felt big and capable next to her, although hellfire knew she was capable enough in her own right. And a damn dragon to boot. He hoped to see her change, someday, but was too shy to ask about it. It seemed a mighty personal thing to do, if someone’s life wasn’t currently on the line.
The donkey was still tied to the post, although it looked even grouchier than it had yesterday and had left several nasty piles of wet slop in the area. Rhett was glad he’d left the jar of Shaunie O’Bannon’s sand far away from the frachetty creature. The wagon still waited, its contents covered with a rug, the horse twitching its tail. Rhett felt a quick twang of guilt for having left the creature in such a state overnight, tethered to future work.
“You got everything you need?” Rhett said.
Cora kneeled and dug around the tent’s rumpled canvas until she found the blanket containing her grandfather’s sand. A gust of wind whistled through the camp just then, and she clutched the blanket close as her hair whipped across her face. In that moment, Rhett thought she was the saddest and most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and his heart wrenched in his chest something fierce. He wanted to protect her, but how could he? The world had already taken the two things she wanted most.