American Hippo

by Sarah Gailey

But Baton Rouge was the place he’d circled. And now he was gone.

  Archie swore again. A really good swear—a streak that would have curled the hair on Cal Hotchkiss’ toes, the devil rest him. How had she failed to notice? How had he carried out all of this correspondence right under her nose? She thought back to her nights out avoiding him, her trips to rendezvous with her own messengers—and she realized that it had probably been child’s play for Houndstooth to work around her all this time.

  Then she rolled up her sleeves and started removing letters from the wall, laying them out on the dining room table. Once she’d re-created Houndstooth’s tableau, she hitched up her pants and sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs that circled the table.

  She picked up the nub of grease pencil that Houndstooth had left behind, and then she got to work trying to figure out where it was that he had gone.

  * * *

  Six hours later, Archie was slapping open the swinging wooden doors of the Hop’s Tusk with both hands. She stood in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the low light inside the bar. The heat of the gaslamp just outside the doors warmed her back. She tilted back the brim of her bowler and used her cane to hold the door open beside her.

  She saw him at the bar before her eyes finished adjusting. His hat was on the stool next to him, and he was slumped over the scarred wood of the bar, his eyes fixed on a glass of brown liquor.

  Archie sat next to him, picking up his hat. She tugged the bottom of her vest down more sharply than was strictly necessary to make the fabric lie smooth. She tried to decide whether she should kill Houndstooth. She tried to decide if it would be a mercy to do so.

  “I’m not drunk,” he said after a long time.

  “Fine,” Archie replied. She could hear how taut her voice was, and tried to take a slow, deep breath.

  “I’ve been staring at this same damned glass for three hours,” he said. “Waiting.”

  “For me?” Archie said, knowing that wasn’t the answer.

  “For them,” he whispered. He looked up at Archie, and fervor burned in his eyes. “They’re here, Archie. Both of them. Hero and Adelia—they’re here, I know it.”

  “Chérie—”

  “No, Archie, no!” He shook his head hard. “They’re here, they’re staying here, and I’m going to find them and I’m going to find Hero and—”

  “I don’t think they’re ’ere,” Archie murmured. “You misunderstood, ’Oundstooth. I think Hero is dead.”

  Houndstooth shot up from his stool, and before Archie’s eyes could track the movement he was holding a knife to her cheek.

  “Don’t you dare—” He nudged his cheek with a rolled-up sleeve, his eyes fierce and glassy. “Don’t you say that. They’re not dead. I would know.”

  “If they’re not dead,” Archie said softly, feeling the burn of Houndstooth’s blade as it scored her cheek, “why haven’t they written to you?”

  Houndstooth’s arm drifted down, then snapped back up. “Adelia probably isn’t letting them,” he said.

  “Why would Adelia keep them alive?” Archie asked, and Houndstooth’s lips pursed. He swallowed hard around his total lack of an answer.

  His eyes slid away from hers. Archie eased the knife from his hand too easily. She laid a hand on his shoulder and pressed down until he was slumped on his barstool again.

  “They can’t be dead,” he said to the glass of whiskey. “We … we deserve better than that. Hero deserves better than that.”

  “It might not be about ‘deserves,’” Archie said. She tried to keep her voice soft, gentle. Kind. She picked up Houndstooth’s glass and pressed it into his grease-smudged hand. “It’s time to stop looking, mon frère. You are killing yourself.”

  Houndstooth looked hollow on the barstool next to her. He’d always been thin, but now Archie realized that he looked desiccated—like a crumbling leaf. He looked ready to disintegrate at a touch. Rather than test his strength, Archie pressed two fingers to the bottom of his glass and nudged it up toward his face.

  He drained it, then slammed the glass down on the bar, gasping. Archie raised an arm to signal to the pinch-faced innkeeper for two more drinks. He nodded from across the bar, then continued wiping out the same glass he’d been drying since Archie walked in. He eyed them from under furrowed brows. Then, his eyes darted to the door an instant before it banged open.

  “Archie!” A dark blur rushed across the bar, stopping just far enough away from Archie to avoid being grabbed. The girl was breathless, bone-thin, and swimming in layers of royal blue satin. She looked like she’d run from a dance hall ten miles away. But then the girl whipped off the hat—and the hair with it—and propped a leg on the barstool next to Archie.

  “Acadia?” Archie gaped at the girl. “Where did you get that dress?”

  “From the none of your goddamned business surplus store,” Acadia snapped, pulling a letter out of her boot. “Here,” she said, and thrust the rolled-up paper at Archie. Archie took it, and before she could unfurl it, Acadia had replaced her wig and hat and was on her way out the door, and then was turning on her heel to snatch the letter back.

  “You can read it after you pay me,” she said, holding out her other hand.

  “And will you be returning my watch in exchange? And my knife?” Archie held out a hand, and after her Châtellerault and timepiece had been deposited into it, pulled out a billfold from her breast pocket. She traded the girl more than she’d agreed to pay in order to get the letter back, more than the letter should have been worth. As she started to unroll it again, Acadia disappeared through the swinging doors, running as fast as her feet would carry her.

  Archie read the letter. She read it again. And she read it halfway through again before the still-swinging doors were stilled by a large pair of calloused hands. A shadow filled the doorway. One of those hands reached up to remove a battered black leather hat with a glinting silver star on the brim.

  Archie looked up as Gran Carter entered the Hop’s Tusk. Behind her, Houndstooth was still staring into his empty glass—but he looked up as Carter’s booming voice filled the room.

  “Archie?”

  Archie stared at him with wide eyes, the letter dangling from her fingers. He crossed the room in a few long strides, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her with all the desperation of a drowning man pushing his way into a pocket of air. He knocked her bowler hat off, tangling one hand in the lapel of her waistcoat, and pressed the full length of his body to hers. She grabbed the front of his duster in two fists, crumpling his own letter against his chest—but after a long moment, she pushed him away.

  “Archie,” he breathed again, pressing his forehead to hers. His voice was a bonfire. “I missed you so goddamn much.”

  “Carter—”

  “Did you get my letter?”

  “Just now,” she said. She squeezed her fist against his chest, and the paper crinkled against him.

  “Just now? But—if you didn’t read it before, then why are you here?” He looked toward the bar, where Houndstooth had braced his elbows on the counter and was holding his head in his hands.

  “We didn’t know,” Archie started—then she corrected herself. “I didn’t know.”

  Carter kissed Archie again, more briefly this time, and then started for the stairs. Archie followed fast on his heels, unsheathing a long, wicked length of steel from within her cane.

  Houndstooth looked up at both of them, then stood from his barstool. “Where are you two going?” He stooped to pick up the paper that Archie had dropped to the floor. He scanned it, then looked up to where Carter and Archie were running up the staircase. “Hey!”

  Archie paused, gripping the banister in one hand and her blade in the other. “I was wrong,” she said, “you ’ad it right. ’Oundstooth”—Houndstooth was already halfway to the foot of the stairs by the time Archie finished—“they’re here.”

  Chapter 7

  Bang.

  Adelia’s fingers were slipping.


  “Let go!” Hero called up. The words echoed faintly. Adelia’s fingers reflexively clenched around the wood of the windowsill as another bang echoed from within the room. He was breaking down the door.

  “Adelia,” Hero hissed again, “let go, I’ll catch you! It’s not that far!”

  The next bang was accompanied by a crunch and then a shout. Adelia felt one of her fingernails split as she dug it into the wood of the windowsill—she flinched as a splinter slid into her nail bed, and then the world spun, and then she was falling.

  “Oof—ghhuuuuh—” Hero was staggering under her, and then she was on her feet, although she still felt like she was falling. A firm hand on her back, and normally she would flinch away but the hand was cold even through her damp, clinging, too-hot shirt. It felt nice, like cool water—and then the cool hand was pushing her, and then they were running as shouts drifted down from the open window like blossoms falling from a magnolia tree.

  A hat settled onto Adelia’s head, and the cool hand was pushing her into an alley, and then Hero was beside her, breathing hard with their back pressed to wall and their face turned to the street.

  “Fuck,” Hero panted, wiping their forehead and throat with their kerchief. “Fuck, that was close.”

  “What happened?” Adelia’s voice was raspy, shaking, and she realized belatedly that she was shivering. Hero noticed and shucked off their coat. As they reached across her to pull it over her shoulders, their forearm brushed her left breast, and pain erupted all through her chest. Her vision tunneled.

  “Whoa, there,” Hero said, catching Adelia before she could fall. “Whoa, now—”

  And then Adelia was the one falling like a magnolia blossom; she watched the ground float up toward her, watched Hero’s hands flutter into her field of vision, watched a hat—her hat?—land in front of her. The world slid sideways, and then she was looking at the saddlebag that rested on the ground between Hero’s boots, and then she closed her eyes and slid into blessedly still darkness.

  * * *

  Adelia woke up drowning.

  She sputtered, her arms spasming. She reached out and grasped at the first soft thing she found. Her fingers were weak, sore as hell from gripping the window, but she tightened her grip with a will when the subject of her grasp let out a high-pitched noise. With her other hand, she pushed her hair out of her stinging eyes, blinking away water mixed with what must have been either her own sweat or her own blood. She sat up as she did it, ignoring how the movement made her head spin.

  “Let—go—”

  Adelia blinked a few more times and a dark face came into focus, barely visible by the thin light of the clouded-over moon.

  “Hero?” she asked, and then she realized with horror that her weak fingers were clutching at Hero’s throat. She pulled her hand away—god, no, for the second time in a day she’d almost—

  “Lo siento,” she rasped, her voice hoarse. She felt as though she’d swallowed a bolt of burlap. Hero was coughing, tears streaming down their face, and Adelia felt a flush of shame fighting her urge to shiver. “Why am I wet? What happened?”

  Hero was too busy gasping to answer, so Adelia looked around. She was sitting in reddish clay, in a puddle. There was an ewer knocked over next to Hero, and a puddle.

  Not drowning, then. Revived.

  Adelia pressed her hands to her face, ignoring the feeling of cool clay slipping between her fingers and her cheeks. She was exhausted, felt as though she’d just ridden Zahra a thousand miles overland while carrying Stasia on her shoulders. She took a deep, slow breath, and realized that she could smell her own sweat over the rich decomposition smell of clay.

  A groan and a splash sounded from behind her, not close but not far either. She startled, looked—and there, nosing at the edge of the paddock, was Hero’s old hippo, Abigail.

  “Hero,” Adelia breathed. “Hero—Hero!” She slapped at Hero’s arm, and they glared at her, rubbing their throat.

  “Yeah, welcome back to life,” they snapped. “Carried your ass all the damn way here, and I don’t mind telling you that you haven’t hardly lost that baby weight enough for my scrawny self to—”

  “Shut up,” Adelia said, grabbing Hero by the chin before they could flinch away. “Tell me later. Look.”

  She directed Hero’s chin, and their features clenched with the unmistakable air of patience about to reach a breaking point—but then they saw Abigail, and their face went slack.

  “It can’t be,” Hero breathed. They scrambled up, slipping in the wet clay, and ran to the edge of the paddock. They reached right through the half-rotted wood at the edge of the water and pressed both hands to the nose of the little Standard Grey hippo that was huffing bubbles into the water there.

  “It had better be,” Adelia said, “or else you just grabbed a strange hippo by the face.”

  But Hero didn’t hear her. They were weeping, their face pressed between Abigail’s nostrils. They hadn’t seen her since the night the Harriet fell, the night they had nearly died, two months before—a night that suddenly felt so, so far away.

  While Hero sobbed all over Abigail, Adelia rested her head in her hands and tried to piece the night together. Her thoughts were disjointed and slow, and her left breast throbbed with a steady pain, as though a hot coal had been inserted behind her nipple by someone with a steady hand and an eye for detail.

  It hadn’t hurt this badly when she’d expressed her milk back at the inn, while Hero was downstairs at the bar—but her breast had been hot and red, swollen-looking. Infection, she thought, remembering the sickly smell of the milk she’d washed out of her shirt when they’d first arrived at Port Rouge. It had hurt then, and the pain was even worse now.

  She remembered going to sleep at Hero’s behest.

  She remembered waking up to a pounding on the door, and the sound of Hero talking to the mousy little innkeeper. She remembered the murmured exchange, catching the words “U.S. marshal” in the instant before Hero tore the blankets from her and pulled her out of bed.

  She remembered Hero urging her out the window as footsteps hammered down the hall outside their door. She remembered the sounds of the door being broken down.

  So, Adelia thought. This was it. He’d found her. Gran Carter had tracked her down—and he wasn’t alone.

  “Hero,” she said abruptly. “Hero, we need to talk.”

  “In a minute,” Hero said.

  “It’s important.”

  Hero didn’t answer. Adelia looked up and saw that they were staring across the water at a patch of reeds that swayed gently in the cool night air. They were saying something that almost sounded like “Ruby.”

  “Hero?” Adelia hauled herself upright and walked over to the paddock to stand next to Hero as they held up a hand for silence. Abigail huffed warm air over Adelia’s fingers, then dismissed her as having nothing to offer and returned her attention to Hero, who patted her nose absently. “What is it?” Adelia asked.

  “I thought I saw something,” Hero murmured. Their eyes were fixed on the reeds, which had gone still. Across the water, a hippo muttered to itself or someone else, then let out a long bleating groan. Hero shook their head, then looked at Adelia. “You look better,” they said. “We should ride while your fever is down. I think it broke while I was carrying you here. At least, you were sweating like it had broken.” They grimaced, and Adelia gave them a sympathetic frown.

  “Thank you,” Adelia finally managed, feeling awkward as she said it. “For saving me.”

  Hero shrugged uncomfortably and began performing an unnecessarily thorough inspection of Abigail’s ears. “Wasn’t anything you wouldn’t have done for me,” they muttered, and Adelia felt tears spring to her eyes. That wasn’t something anyone had ever said about her before.

  “Hero,” she began—but then Hero straightened, wiping their hands on their pants, and shook their head.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” they said. “For now, we need to go. We can’t stay he
re.” They started walking toward the locked tack shed next to the paddock, and Abigail began hauling herself out of the water, following her hopper. The hippo lumbered over to Adelia, water streaming from her belly, and nosed at her shoulder.

  “Hola, Abi,” Adelia whispered, wiping at her eyes. She gave the hippo’s shoulder a pat as Hero swore at the lock on the tack shed. They had their eyes right up next to it, straining to manipulate their lockpicks by moonlight. “Your Hero over there is something else, eh? What do you think—would you trust them?” Abigail gave no reply, but continued to drip as Adelia rubbed her side. “I thought so,” Adelia murmured. “I thought you would say that.”

  Hero returned a few minutes later, carrying Abigail’s riding saddle in their arms.

  “I don’t know who found her,” they said, “but they’ve been taking good care of her. I thought this whole time that maybe—when the Harriet—” Their voice broke, and they didn’t continue. After a moment, they shook their head and made a noise like they were swallowing a piece of glass. “Never mind,” they muttered, and they saddled Abigail in silence.

  The hippo entered the water with no great urgency, pausing frequently to flip her ears and duck her head. “No point rushing her,” Hero shrugged after Adelia’s third sidelong glance at them. “She likes to move at her own pace, Abigail does. Meantime, we should figure out where it is you want to go. Somewhere Carter won’t be able to find us, I should think.”

  “Where I want to go is to a house in the country with a bathtub and a soft bed,” Adelia said. Abigail finished blowing bubbles in the water, and presented herself at the water’s edge. “Where I’m going to go? That should be obvious.”

  “Where we’re going to go. Enlighten me,” Hero drawled, swinging themself into the saddle and holding out a hand to Adelia. There was just enough room on the saddle for both of them. Adelia gripped the webbing on Abigail’s harness and adjusted the grip of her thighs on the sides of the saddle.

  “We’re going to visit Whelan Parrish,” Adelia replied. “We’re going to find out what the hell it is that he wants. And then we’re going to get Ysabel back.”