“And it’s the four of us,” said Keller.
“Her too?” demanded Scratch.
“Especially her,” said Bradshaw.
“Hell, if you want a real chippie, I got a few million at home.”
“You insult her once more and I’m gonna climb up there and give you a lesson in manners,” said Bradshaw. “Now apologize to the lady.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Scratch.
“Lean down, look at my face, and tell me if you think I’m kidding.”
Scratch emitted a sigh of defeat. “All right, all right. I apologize, lady.”
Bradshaw turned to Abigail. “Is that good enough for you, ma’am?”
She nodded an affirmative.
“All right,” growled Scratch. “But I’m gonna want something in return.”
“We’ll take care of it,” promised Wichita.
“Will you sign that in blood?”
“We ain’t got no blood, remember?” said Bradshaw.
“All right,” repeated Scratch. “I’m sick of the sight of you. Where do you want me to let you off?”
“Next wood and water you come to,” said Keller.
It took the horses a hard half hour of galloping, but finally they came to a sky-blue river running alongside a grove of tall Cottonwood trees.
“Remember this spot,” said Keller, as the four passengers climbed down. “You’re going to be stopping here from now on.”
“Why would I ever want to see you again?” demanded Scratch.
“Because even the dead get hungry, and we’ve got ourselves the best cook they’ve ever encountered, living or dead,” answered Wichita.
They used the timber from the Cottonwoods to build the place, and they called the finished way station—with her permission—Miss Abigail’s Rest Stop. Given their particular skills they were able to make sure that everyone behaved, and whenever an outsider wandered in, they sent him straight to Scratch’s domain as their part of the bargain. They even added a faro table in the back room. And to this day it remains the most popular way station along the route of the hell-bound stagecoach.
STRINGERS AND STRANGERS
SEANAN McGUIRE
Passing through Nevada, Westbound on the Southern Pacific Railway, 1931
“So where exactly are we going, city boy?” Frances Brown infused her words with the sort of exaggerated Arizona drawl that she hadn’t possessed in years, if ever. That was a danger sign if Jonathan had ever heard one. He raised his head from the papers he’d been reviewing to see Fran lounging bonelessly in her first-class seat, one foot propped against the windowsill and the other tucked underneath her.
“Boggsville, Colorado,” said Jonathan. “Do you think there’s any possibility I might convince you to stop giving the porters the impression of your being a woman of negotiable virtue?”
“Well, now. That depends.” Fran looked thoughtful. “Would I have to stop letting them pay to put their hands down my shirt?”
Jonathan rolled his eyes and went back to his papers, doing his best to shut out the sound of Fran’s raucous laughter.
Anyone peeping into their private cabin would have been struck by the sheer improbability of its passengers. Frances Brown was petite, blonde, and dressed like a farmhand, in wide-legged trousers and a button-down shirt. The empty gun belt at her waist was clearly custom-made, the leather worn smooth by years of handling. She wore no pistols. She didn’t need to. While the casual observer might not have known how many ways Frances Brown could kill a man, Jonathan did. His respect for her was unflagging whether or not her weapons were in view.
Jonathan Healy, on the other hand, looked like a visiting professor from some East Coast college, the sort of man who’d never seen a farm, much less worked at one. His suit was impeccable brown tweed, only a few shades darker than the sandy wheat blond of his hair. Glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He sat ramrod-straight in his seat, barely moving as the train bumped and twisted on the track. It was as if he had considered the laws of physics, declared them undignified, and gone back to what he’d been doing before the question was broached. Currently, that involved reading from a stack of papers, scowling as if they had personally offended him.
Fran watched for a few seconds, laughter fading, before she sighed and turned back to the landscape rolling by outside the window. “It’s pretty,” she said. “I’ve missed the desert.”
“It’s hot, uncivilized, and filled with venomous beasts,” said Jonathan.
He glanced up just in time to see her wistful smile. It was directed at the world outside the window; she didn’t seem to see him looking. “Like I said: pretty.”
“Fran…”
“Don’t start, city boy. I’m not going back to Arizona. There’s nothing there for me. Besides, what would you tell the mice?” Fran turned abruptly back toward him, smiling that sudden, heart-stopping smile of hers. Even after three long years, it still held all the power of the first time. “You know they’d miss me, and they’d never let you have a moment’s peace until you came and talked me into coming back.”
“That’s true,” he allowed, once he could find the words. His family’s colony of talking rodents was exceedingly fond of Fran. They would be despondent if she took him up on one of his periodic suggestions that she return to her home state.
If he was being completely honest with himself, so would he. And much like the Aeslin mice, who never forgot or truly recovered from losing the people they loved, he feared that he would spend the rest of his life regretting the moment when he’d let her go.
“So talk to me,” she commanded, twisting in her seat so that she was facing him rather than the window. “I’m still not clear on what we’re doing out here. Not that I don’t appreciate the vacation—I do—but it’s not every day I wake up to find you outside my room with a train ticket and a suitcase already packed for me.”
Rather than answering, Jonathan fished his watch from his pocket and ostentatiously checked the time. “Eleven hours, twenty-three minutes,” he said. “Mother will be most disappointed. She was sure you’d ask me by the end of hour nine.”
“I have knives,” said Fran.
“I have guns,” Jonathan countered. “What we’re doing here is attempting to determine the reason that the local Apraxis swarms have been moving during their settled season. The local hunters should be able to find them and burn them out, but instead, the hives are being abandoned before anyone can reach them.”
“Uh-huh,” said Fran. “I’m guessing that’s bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad,” said Jonathan. “The only good thing about an Apraxis hive is that once it’s been built, you know where the swarm is.”
“Uh-huh. And what’s an Apraxis hive?”
“It’s—” Jonathan paused. “I’m sorry, Fran. Sometimes I forget you weren’t born to this.”
“So educate me.” Fran shrugged. “I’m a quick study, and as long as there’s something I can shoot at the end, I’m a pretty good student, too.”
Jonathan laughed. “You are, at that. Very well, then: let me tell you about the Apraxis wasp. First, picture a yellow jacket the size of a shoe.”
“My shoe or yours?” she asked.
“Mine.”
Fran shuddered. “Pictured.”
“Good. Now, give that yellow jacket human intelligence.”
“You’re messin’ with me,” Fran said. “There’s no such thing as a bug as smart as a person.”
“No?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you have said the same about a mouse, once? If you allow for the existence of Aeslin mice, Fran, you have to allow for Apraxis wasps. Sadly, when nature makes room for the one, she also enables the other.”
“Well, ain’t that about the least pleasant thing you’ve said to me recently,” said Fran flatly. “So we’ve got smart wasps the size of shoes. What are we going to do? Beat them to death with brooms?”
“I prefer bullets, but yes, that’s essentially the plan
. Here’s the trouble: the Apraxis don’t stop at being intelligent. They’re memory thieves.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they lay their eggs in living flesh and, once the host has been consumed by their larvae, they acquire all the memories of the individual who incubated them. They prefer intelligent hosts. It helps to enhance the hive. Make no mistake, Fran: the Apraxis wasp has no concept of ‘mercy.’ They’re killers, plain and simple, and they destroy whatever they touch.”
Fran frowned. “Well, then, shouldn’t we be thrilled if something’s making them pull up camp and move on? We don’t want them hanging out where people live, do we?”
“Well, that depends. What would you call something that can make a predator this dangerous abandon its territory in what ought to be its nesting season?”
There was a pause while Fran considered her answer. Finally, her expression hardened. “Bad,” she said.
“Precisely why we’re going to Colorado to investigate. Now. Let’s discuss how we’re going to handle the threat, shall we?”
Anyone listening outside their cabin for the next few hours would have been horrified by what they heard. Fortunately for the both of them, no one stopped to listen.
* * *
A day and a half later, the train pulled away from the Boggsville, Colorado station, leaving the cryptozoologist and the cryptozoologist-in-training standing on the platform with their bags. “Now where?” asked Fran, turning to Jonathan.
“We’re going to want to find a place to sleep while we’re here,” said Jonathan. “I’ve written to some of the local cryptozoologists and hunters, to find out what they might know about recent events. It may be a while before we hear from them, and that will be easier if Father knows where to forward any mail.”
“Boarding house?” asked Fran.
“I’d prefer a hotel, but honestly, I’ll take anything with a bed and a door that locks.” His satchel bounced in his hand. He looked down at it and sighed. “A door that locks very well.”
Fran, whose first introduction to the Aeslin mice had been the result of rodent enthusiasm meeting insufficient locks, hid a smile behind her hand. “Well, then, let’s go ask the station agent,” she said. “He’ll be able to point us in the right direction.”
Jonathan nodded and let her take the lead, following her off the platform and toward the low-slung shape of the ticket building. In situations like this, where charisma and natural ease with people trumped knowing seventeen ways to incapacitate a basilisk without getting injured, he was more than happy to let her take the lead. He would have been happier to avoid situations like this in the first place, but beggars, as his father often said, couldn’t be choosers.
He was still pondering the frustrating nature of the trip when Fran walked back over to him, cheeks flushed with pride. “There’s a boarding house downtown,” she said. “Owned by a young widow whose husband went and got himself snakebit before their first anniversary. It’s reputable, affordable, and they guarantee no spiders in the privy.”
“Fifteen minutes in town and you’re back to speaking like a native,” said Jonathan, shaking his head.
“Speaking like a native gets us better beds,” Fran countered. “So does this place sound like it’s up to your rarified city standards?”
Jonathan fixed her with a withering look, earning himself a snort of amusement and a patiently raised eyebrow. Finally, he relented and said, “Yes. If you know the way, please, lead on.”
Fran laughed all the way out of the station and into the main street of Boggsville. Then her laughter died, replaced by a look of deepening confusion. Turning to Jonathan, she asked, “Is this how Tempe looked to you when you first came to town?”
For a moment he considered lying to her. Then he relented, admitting, “I suspect it was something similar, yes.”
“Damn.” Fran took another look around the deserted street. The sidewalks were made of unfinished planks; the buildings all looked as if they could use a coat of paint, a scrubbing, and possibly a structural overhaul—preferably before someone managed to fall through a floor. The sky was the color of dishwater, which was the only reason the heat was less than oppressive: it was coming on too close to winter for a true scorcher.
She sighed. “I’ve been living in the city too long.”
Jonathan’s hometown of Buckley Township barely qualified as a city by even the most generous of definitions. Still, Jonathan chose not to argue with her. “Can you find this boarding house?”
“In a town this size? I could probably find it without any directions. Since I’ve got ’em, we’ll be there before the scorpions get us.” Fran turned on her heel and strode briskly along the wooden sidewalk, leaving Jonathan to sigh and trot after her.
This was going to be one of those trips.
* * *
Dust from the street coated their shoes and the lenses of Jonathan’s spectacles by the time they reached the modest two-story home that Fran insisted was the boarding house. There was no sign or other indication that they were in the right place. Jonathan stopped on the sidewalk, eyeing the gingham curtains in the window. “Fran…”
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” she asked, with a generous shrug. “If we’re in the wrong place, we move along and try somewhere else.”
“The worst that can happen? My guess is that the worst possible thing that could happen is that we discover this is where the Apraxis swarms have been moving, and we’re about to be consumed by mind-eating wasps in search of new meat for their larvae,” said Jonathan.
“See? That’s the way to look for the bright side in a situation.” Fran stepped forward before he could protest again, rapping her knuckles on the doorframe.
Jonathan sighed as she stepped back into position next to him. “Forward momentum is the only sort you acknowledge, isn’t it?”
“It’s the only kind I’ve got,” she said, still smiling.
The door opened.
The woman on the other side could have been taken from an illustration in a medieval bestiary, in more ways than one. She was fair-skinned, with enormous green eyes and long blonde hair that made Fran’s lighter curls seem garish, like putting fool’s gold next to the real thing. Her clothes were demurely cut, as befitted a widow, high at the neck and low at the ankles, but there was nothing demure about the calculation in her eyes. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“We heard you might have a room to let,” said Fran, her smile growing broader and more ingratiating. “We’d rather stay in a nice place like this than in a nasty old hotel, and so here we are, come to throw ourselves on your hospitality.”
The woman swept her eyes along the length of Fran’s trouser-clad form, clearly not approving of what she saw. She turned her gaze on Jonathan and repeated the process, her frown deepening. “Are you nice folks on your honeymoon?”
Jonathan knew the message in her words all too well, having encountered it repeatedly since Fran began her accidental apprenticeship with his family: it was the “no one lives in sin under my roof” judgment beginning. Sometimes he claimed Fran was his sister, which worked poorly if it worked at all. Other times, when the hotels were large enough, they simply checked in on their own and worked things out later. Here, at a small boarding house in a smaller town, he couldn’t see where either option was going to work.
Fran surprised him by smiling, taking his hand, and saying, “No, we’re traveling to California to see my folks. That was the agreement, wasn’t it, sugar-pie? We live on the East Coast with his kin, and once every few years, we take the train out to see mine.”
Jonathan tried to follow her lead as best he could, saying, “My Frannie gets anxious if she doesn’t see her family once in a while, and I prefer she be as tranquil as a mountain stream.” From the way her mouth tensed at the edges when he said that, he was going to pay for it later. He was too amused to be particularly concerned.
“Why aren’t you wearing rings?” asked the boarding house own
er.
Jonathan gritted his teeth, wishing that the woman’s eyesight wasn’t so keen. “We left them at home,” he said.
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What on Earth would make you do a thing like that?”
Once again, Fran came to the rescue. “We don’t want to tempt robbers more than we have to,” she said. “I mean, my Johnny’s not much of a fighter. If we’re going to travel, we’re going to do it with as few valuables as possible.”
The woman sniffed. “That explains your attire as well. I suppose I have a room for the two of you. Payment is expected up front for the first night; you can settle up at breakfast for any nights you choose to stay after that. Meals are included, but they’re served when they’re served, and you’re not to expect me to hold them for you. I’ll thank you to wear skirts while you’re in my household, and refrain from any harsh language or lewd behavior. I know how you city folk can be.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Fran, with such exaggerated politeness that Jonathan knew she had to be seething inside.
“You folks have names?”
“Jonathan and Frances Healy,” said Jonathan. Saying the words aloud was almost startling, like he’d been waiting to hear them for years. The pressure of Fran’s fingers laced through his was suddenly very distracting. “And you are…?”
“Eleanor Smith,” said the woman. “My daughter, Betty, is at her music lesson right now. I’ll thank you not to bother her. She’s a good girl.” Her eyes flicked to Fran, carrying another silent message: She’s a good girl, and you are not.
“We wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” said Jonathan. “If we could come inside, we’d love to pay for our room and unpack. It’s been a quite long trip.”
“Well, come in, then,” said Mrs. Smith, as if she hadn’t been the one blocking the door. She moved to the side, and Jonathan and Fran stepped into the hall.
* * *
A short time later, the two of them were safely locked in their second-floor room, Jonathan sitting on the bed and cleaning his pistols while Fran paced and the mice—freed from their confinement in his satchel—explored the hidden space beneath the bureau.
Dead Man’s Hand Page 7