“What about Zavi? Who is he?”
“Zavi?” He scoffed. “Who knows what’s in that bastard’s head? But he pays us handsome.”
“With borrowed magic,” Uncle prompted.
“Some people think that’s enough. Me, I want more’n just fur and claws every now and then.” His eyes trailed over Hettie hungrily. “But then you get guys like Bill … why, he had barely enough power to light a matchstick. Him and some of the others get a nice healthy dose of Zavi’s juice, and suddenly they’re working for him.” He snickered. “Butch don’t like that much.”
“What does Zavi want Diablo for?” Hettie demanded.
“Could want it to scratch his asshole for all I know.”
“But … doesn’t Butch want it?”
Hedley snorted. “Butch has been chasing Diablo since Jack made off with it. Zavi promised him he’d get it after he was done with it, whatever that means. And that’s all I know.” He smiled slowly and perused her body again. “You know, girlie, I am good in the sack. If you ain’t been pricked yet, I could show you how it could be. Seeing as Butch or Zavi’ll probably kill you, I’d do you that favor.”
Hettie stared through the ratty, oily-haired man. And she thought what a disgusting, pathetic creature he was and how much he deserved death.
Do it, Diablo urged.
The bracelets around her wrists suddenly snapped open and tumbled to the ground. Diablo appeared in her hand, solid and warm.
“Hey— Drop that gun!”
The lawmen drew their sidearms. Hettie was so startled she threw her hands above her head.
The movement made the men panic and fire. Hettie dove for the ground as bullets ricocheted through the steel cabin. The door burst open, and the guard with the shotgun entered, swinging the business end around.
“They’re trying to kill me!” Hedley screamed. “They’ve got a gun!”
“Stop where you are.” The guard took aim just as Uncle and Ling scrambled to their feet. Hettie tried to let Diablo fall from her hand, but the thing clung like tar, her fingers convulsing around the grip as she tried to toss it away.
Are you trying to get me killed? she thought, but the revolver would not let go.
She raised her hands. “Stop! I’m not going to shoot!”
“Put the gun down!”
“I can’t!”
Another shot rang out. Without meaning to, she squeezed the trigger.
The air thickened, and she watched the ball of energy soar through the room and explode against the far wall. Shrapnel and fire blew out through the huge rent torn in the metal, as if a giant fiery fist had punched through it like paper. The lawmen were thrown to the ground, and wind whistled into the car as the train sped on, the flat grasslands rushing by in a blur.
The guard with the shotgun lurched to his feet. Hettie rolled behind a crate as he fired. Ling tackled him to the ground and knocked him out cold while Uncle trussed up the other two stunned guards.
“Well, aren’t you all a bunch of surprises.” Hedley’s whoop devolved into a fit of coughing, and he clutched his stomach. Blood poured from a wound in his gut. One of the guard’s bullets must have hit him.
“C’mon, we gotta move,” Uncle shouted. “The Pinkertons will be on us.”
“But … we’re on a moving train.”
“Ain’t gonna stop them.”
“Wait,” Hedley pleaded. “I could take you to Zavi’s camp. Let me out and I’ll take you straight there.”
“Ain’t no one gonna let you outta that cage,” Uncle snapped.
“He has power you can’t begin to imagine,” Hedley said urgently. “He’s a Kukulos warlock, but he’s more powerful than anyone I’ve ever known. He has a secret…” He screwed up his eyes as agony took hold. “You gotta take me with you.”
Hettie chewed her lip. Assuming he’d told her the truth about where Zavi and Butch and his gang were holed up, she had no need of him. And she couldn’t trust a single thing out of his mouth in this desperate hour.
Ling said quietly, “That gutshot’s not going to heal. I can’t do anything for him.”
“What’s Zavi’s secret?” she demanded.
“Open the cage and I’ll tell you.”
The man was dying. He had little left to lose. Hettie searched the guards’ pockets and produced a large iron key while Uncle and Ling unlocked their iron bracelets.
“You’re insane, you know that?” Uncle grumped.
“I have to know.” She unlocked Hedley’s cage and stepped back as he dragged himself out. Blood flooded his hand, and he moaned.
“Damn,” he gritted, then laughed. “This is not the way I was supposed to go.”
She stooped down to his level. “Tell me about Zavi and I’ll have Ling heal you.” She cut the healer a look. He didn’t speak.
“Zavi … He’s worse than any Kukulos I’ve known. He had us … bringing him kids. Little ones. Paid Butch handsomely for them. I don’t know what happens to them, but they keep them in a room deep down…” He moaned. Sweat sheened his pale face. “Damn, I’m thirsty. You have water?”
“Tell me everything and I’ll bring you anything you like. Why does Zavi want the children?”
“Sacrifice. I think he means to use ’em in some ritual. I don’t know, he doesn’t talk to me. Butch’ll know.”
“How many children are there?”
Hedley rolled to his side and vomited blood.
“Hell’s bells, Hettie.” Uncle yanked her back. “We don’t got time for this.”
“How many children?” She grabbed Hedley by the hair and pulled back to look into his face.
But Hedley was in too much pain to respond. The acid in his stomach was boiling out of the bullet wound, eating him alive. He reeked of sick and defecation.
Hettie pushed him back, furious and disgusted.
“Wait—you promised…” he sobbed.
She paused only briefly. Abby’s smile flashed in her mind, but so did the look of terror in her mother’s eyes. She turned her back on the writhing man.
“For crying out loud.” Uncle drew the guard’s sidearm from its holster and put a neat hole in between Isaac Hedley’s eyes. Jeremiah’s murderous glare pierced her cold heart. “You don’t leave a man to suffer. Not when he’s sure to die. If you’re going to kill a man, you do it cleanly, get the job done.”
Hettie raised her chin defiantly as her conviction crystallized. “He didn’t deserve a quick death.”
Their gazes clashed. Uncle looked away first as he shoved the gun in his waistband. “Let’s move. The Pinks are coming.”
“How’d you get your bracelets off?” Ling asked as they made their way back through the train. People stared as they passed. They must have caused quite a ruckus, but if anyone suspected them of foul play, they weren’t getting up to stop them.
“Diablo did it.” Hettie couldn’t say how she knew, but she did. She’d thought the Devil’s Revolver couldn’t be summoned within the confines of the metal car, but apparently the rules of magic did not apply to the infernal mage gun. It was as if it had a mind and will of its own.
“It’s gaining strength,” Uncle murmured. They reached Sophie’s cabin. Marcus frowned as he surveyed them. “We need to get off this train. Now.”
“We’re nowhere close to Houston.”
“We don’t need to be.” Uncle held up a round stone with a small depression on it. “I found this on one of the guards. Judging by the type of magic coming off it, I’m pretty sure it belonged to Hedley.”
Hettie took it from him and turned it over in her hand. “This is like one of those stones the Pinkertons sent me.”
“It’s a remote Zoom beacon. If Hedley had this on him, it meant he expected he’d be returning to wherever he’d come from. Maybe even with you in tow.”
She pu
t the stone in her pocket. “So you’re saying whoever is opening Zoom tunnels for him is waiting for his signal.”
“Exactly.”
“How do you even know it’s his?”
“The local marshals barely have enough for horse feed. You think they could afford remote Zoom sorcerers?”
“It could belong to the Pinkertons,” Marcus said.
Uncle shook his head. “I doubt it. No reason to be giving these out to random sheriff’s deputies. The Pinks don’t have any interest in Hedley. They work for hire, not for justice.”
“Where do you think the tunnel will open?”
“It can only open to one place, and that’s wherever the conductor is. Although with the remote Zoom it usually takes a group of twelve or more sorcerers—”
“Or one very powerful Kukulos warlock,” Ling finished.
Uncle nodded. “What we have, then, is the key to Zavi’s hideout.”
Hettie started toward Sophie’s cabin. Marcus said, “Shaw’s still in there—”
She flung the door open. Walker, Sophie, Shaw, and Jemma all looked up.
“Mr. Shaw! I think something’s happened to your men—we heard gunshots!” Hettie sent Sophie a look. She understood instantly.
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed. “Is it bandits? Has there been a jailbreak?”
The marshal shot out of his seat. “All of you stay in your cabins. I’ll investigate.”
“Oh, do be careful, Mr. Shaw,” Sophie added fretfully as he marched out. They didn’t scramble until he’d left the car. “Well played, Hettie. You might have a future as an actress.”
“Why on earth did you do that?” Uncle exclaimed. “As soon as his men come to, they’ll tell him what we did.”
“We’ve just bought ourselves an extra five minutes. It’ll take him that long to get to the prison car, rouse his men, and come back for us.”
“We shoulda thrown them off the train,” Uncle grumbled.
“What happened?” Walker loosened his tie and reached up into the overhead storage for the trunk that carried their weapons.
“Hedley’s dead. We need to get off the train. The Pinkertons are coming.”
Walker glared at her. “You fired Diablo again?”
“What are we worrying about? We’re on a moving train.”
“That’s the worry,” Walker said. “They’ll track Diablo’s energy and try to open the Zoom aperture as close as possible.”
“You mean … in the train?”
“Or on the track, if they get it wrong. And if that happens while the train is moving—”
“Half the train and the passengers could end up on the other side of the tunnel where there are no tracks. It’ll tear the train apart.”
Hettie scrambled to the window and flung it open. She threw Diablo as far as she could. It landed on a grassy slope. “That should buy us some time.”
“We have to get off right now,” Uncle reiterated. “There’s no telling what the Pinks’ll do once they realize we’re aboard.”
“You think they’ll try to stop the train?” Sophie said.
He cut her a jaded look. “No, I think they’ll blow the whole damn train sky-high if they know we’re all on it.”
“It’s not like we can jump off,” Marcus said. “Even if we survived, what then? We can’t leave the horses behind.”
“We can disconnect the horse car,” Hettie said. “It’s the last one on the train, right? So we unhitch it and let the rest of the train move on, and get off as it slows.”
“That means going through the prison car,” Ling said. “I don’t think Shaw and his men are going to be too pleased to see us again.”
But they were already hurrying back through the cars. Passengers stirred uneasily, wondering what all the rush and panic was about.
“Sophie, you don’t have to come with us,” Hettie told her earnestly. She knew what Uncle was thinking—they’d use the beacon to open the Zoom tunnel. If the Pinks were after them, he wouldn’t care where it led, even if it was straight into the mouth of hell. “Just tell the lawmen we had you under an influence spell or were holding you hostage.”
“I’ve no intention of giving up now. Besides, this is such an exciting adventure.” She grinned.
“You’re going to be the death of me, Miz Sophie,” Jemma muttered, following on quick feet.
Hettie estimated that Shaw would just be getting the story out of his men now. They would be heading back through the train to apprehend them any minute. She forged ahead. One car before the prison car, she stopped. “Shaw will be looking for us,” Hettie shouted over the whistling wind. “We have to move across the prison car on the roof and climb back down to the horse car.” Everyone hustled up the ladder. If anything should have scared Sophie and her two protectors off, it was climbing a shaky ladder on a moving train, but the debutante plowed on fearlessly, billowing skirts and all.
“Be careful. The train is moving faster than you think, and it’s slippery,” Walker warned.
The wind bit through Hettie’s dress and tossed her skirts about violently. Trails of smoke and steam streaked and billowed at her back from the powerful engine, stinging her eyes. Her cap flew off, and her freed hair lashed her cheeks. Walker led the way across the rooftop, crouched against the rush of air buffeting their backs. At the end of the car, he peeked down at the couplings, then put a finger to his lips and gestured at the group to wait. He hopped across the gap onto the roof of the prison car, lithe as a cat, and kept low as he crouch-walked across. Once he hopped the next gap, he gestured for the rest to follow. Ling went after him, making the trip look easy. Uncle deferred to Sophie and Jemma to go ahead. The train took a gentle curving turn as it climbed a slight rise, which made Hettie’s depth perception wobble.
Suddenly, the cars clattered and jolted, and Sophie lost her footing. She fell to her stomach, her chin bouncing hard on the roof, then started sliding over the edge. Jemma cried out and lunged for her hand, but she’d already tipped off the precipice.
Marcus flung himself across the gap and landed next to Jemma, nearly piling on top of her to grab Sophie’s other hand. They stopped her fall, but she dangled from the train, screaming, legs kicking.
Below, Hettie heard voices. “What in the blazes—?”
She shouldn’t have looked down. Marshal Shaw stared up at her, confusion turning to recognition and understanding in a lightning flash. He drew his handgun and shouted over his shoulder.
“Uncle!” She pulled back from the gap as the first bullets whizzed past her ear. She flattened herself against the roof at the boom of a shotgun. Jeremiah swore and pulled out his sidearm. Diablo appeared in Hettie’s grasp, making clinging for her life a little more difficult as the train again shifted on the track snaking around the low hills.
Sophie wailed as Jemma and Marcus tried pulling her back from the edge. Walker and Ling had drawn their sidearms, but they were looking north where an ominous pitch-black iris formed midair.
Uncle rolled to one side as the shotgun peeked up over the roof and sent a blind blast in their direction. Hettie flinched as pellet shot grazed the edge of her bunched-up skirt, fluttering high above her knees. She raised Diablo.
You just have to stop that gun, she thought as the muzzle of the shotgun popped up once more. She squeezed the trigger.
The ball of fire that exploded from Diablo seemed to expand as it neared its target. The shotgun caught the blast full-on, glowing red, then white-hot in the blink of an eye. The shooter yelped and tossed the weapon away.
Hettie glanced back. The remote Zoom tunnel had fully opened, and she felt the flash freeze even from here. It was a big tunnel, and it quickly became apparent why.
She’d only ever seen pictures, but the two automobiles that came barreling out of the aperture were unmistakable, their engines roaring like grizzly bears. Eight fas
t horses followed. One of the cars had a great machine in the back that looked like a telescope or something on a tripod, and the man behind it was draped in long, wide belts of bullets.
“Gatling gun!” Uncle shouted. “They’re going to mow down everything that— Ah!” He cried out as blood blossomed on his chest. Shaw rose from the gap and fired again, aiming to kill.
“No!”
Hettie’s heart seized as Diablo exploded in a pulse of light that leaped from the muzzle to the lawman’s gophering head. One moment, Shaw’s face was there. In the next, it was not. All that was left was shoulders spattered with blood.
The buzz in her bones exploded into an all-out assault as her body ripped itself apart. The anguish of aging another year was only momentarily interrupted as she slid from the roof, hit the gravel by the side of the tracks, and rolled away from the speeding locomotive.
She surfaced long enough to see the caboose whip past, the figures of her friends growing smaller as the train plowed on. Hettie struggled to stand, but she’d bruised her ribs, and every muscle screamed.
The Pinkertons peeled away from their pursuit of the train and circled back toward her. Hettie breathed through her agony and climbed unsteadily to her feet. Diablo hung heavy in her hand.
The Gatling gun swung around as the automobiles neared, spluttering and jouncing across the uneven terrain. The horses reined in, panting hard, nostrils flaring, and their riders trained every gun they owned on her.
Hettie panned the semicircle of men surrounding her, heartbeat slackening. Slowly, she raised her hands in the air.
“Put the gun down!” one man shouted.
Hettie opened her hand, but Diablo stuck fast.
We can get out of this, it urged her, and her fingers curled tightly around the grip once more.
“Hold your fire, everyone.” Out of the second car—the one without the Gatling gun—hopped Thomas Stubbs. He leered at her as he straightened his jacket. “Nice to see you again, Miss Alabama. You’re looking … well.” The way he said it made her feel slimy all over. “You’ve led us on a merry chase.” He strutted toward her.
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