Malice of Crows

by Lila Bowen

  “Any of this buffalo ready to eat?” he asked.

  Sam selected a skewer and handed it to him, leaning close. “Don’t let Dan hurt your feelings, Rhett. You know how he gets. Real protective of his sister. Can’t much blame a feller for that.”

  “I guess you can’t,” Rhett agreed, nibbling the hot meat.

  “This is a feeling I, too, understand,” Cora said gently.

  Rhett’s eye flashed to her. She didn’t look angry or annoyed. More like a rabbit always waiting to feel a hawk’s shadow. Alert and twitchy and softer than she ought to be. The bones shone through her face, purple bags under her eyes like she hadn’t eaten or slept in weeks. Whether it was changing to the dragon or being worried about her sister and grieving her grandfather, Rhett wouldn’t have ventured to guess.

  “You ain’t mad?” he asked her, genuinely curious.

  “Oh, I am very mad.” She nibbled her own meat and chewed thoughtfully before continuing. “I am mad that Trevisan took my sister. I am mad that he held me hostage so long. I am mad that my grandfather is gone. I am mad that my sister is trapped, that she’s being used. And I am mad that we can’t go save her right now. But I see the greater plan around you, Red-Eye. You are like a bit of iron, drawn always north. Your north changes, and it does not always make sense. But when the scorpions came, I learned that to go against you would end in my death, or at least my grand discomfort. So I go with you, even though it stretches me thin and breaks my heart and fills my every moment with terror and dread.”

  “That’s right poetical,” Rhett mumbled, feeling like she had just used a whole bunch of words he’d never even heard of before. “You understand… I don’t like it. The way it all works. I like to just ride after something and kill it, dust my hands off and walk away.”

  Cora laughed her light laugh. “Oh, I know. We all know.”

  “But what you-all got to understand is that even if my way is death, like Dan says, that still serves you. Serves the world, I reckon. I didn’t ask for it. The burden or the pulling.”

  Cora cocked her head at him. “In your own way, you’re a prisoner, aren’t you?”

  Rhett stood and dropped his empty skewer in the fire. “Rightly so.”

  He looked to Sam then, whether for sympathy or a friendly grin, he didn’t know. Sam stood and held his shoulder. “You got to do what you got to do, Rhett. Nobody can blame you for that.”

  Eyes burning, Rhett nodded tightly and clapped Sam on the shoulder, then walked off to a couple of boulders out beyond the horses where he pretended to relieve himself but really just hunkered down, head in hands, to cry.

  Dan was mad. Winifred was hurt. Cora was angry. At least Sam understood.

  It wasn’t easy, having a destiny.

  And the road before them never seemed to get any shorter.

  By the time they reached potable water and untrampled grass, the horses were in real danger of falling over. Rhett’s canteens were more sand than water, and he was holding off on the tough buffalo meat, knowing it would sit in his belly like a stone. Ragdoll sensed the greenery up ahead before Rhett did and picked up the pace, her dull yellow ears pricked up in the shape of a heart and the whole herd of ponies bugling excitedly from where they were hitched to Cora’s wagon. Sam’s blue roan jigged along, and Rhett wondered when Sam would find another unreasonably leggy pony to take on, now that the palomino and black were both gone. Rhett felt more than a little lucky that he still had both Ragdoll and Puddin’, and even old Blue the one-eyed mule, who was enthusiastically braying his excitement about drinking, and pawing at the creek like he always did, muddying up the water like a fool.

  It was funny, how too long between creeks could kill them perhaps more easily than one of Trevisan’s traps. Durango was a hard place, and soft things wouldn’t last there for long. Rhett glanced back at Cora as Ragdoll tried to break into a canter. The girl was smiling like she knew a secret no one else did. He didn’t love her, and he knew that now. If the circumstances had been different – if there had been no Sam Hennessy – maybe that would’ve changed. But he could appreciate her positive, sensible attitude, especially considering Dan and Winifred had ridden together, behind the wagon, silent and accusatory – at least around the eyes. Cora was worried, but she let it wear on herself instead of taking it out on others, which was a right gift.

  A few moments later, the mounts were all lined up at the fast-running creek as if companionably sharing a trough. Rhett hopped off Ragdoll and headed for the wagon, where he carefully released Samson and the other ponies from their leathers to join the saddled horses. He held up a hand to help Cora down from the wagon, and she took it and gathered her canteens and went upstream to fill them like a smart person did on the trail.

  Surrounded again, finally, by the shrinking brush and increasingly more orange ground of his blessed Durango, Rhett realized he’d felt off ever since the incident with the buffalo. He’d heard tell of such seemingly endless herds overrunning the prairies, coming down from Montana del Norte when it got cold and icy. But he’d never seen it before, and he hadn’t understood just how many of the beasts there were, nor the damage that could be done by thousands upon thousands of trampling hooves.

  “Dan, I know you’re still mad at me, but do you know if the buffalo ruined that place we were in? Will the plants grow back? And where’d the buffalo go?”

  Dan looked up from the fire he was lighting and gave Rhett a tired glance, almost like what somebody would give a troublesome child who just couldn’t stay out from underfoot.

  “It is nature, Rhett. The herds move, and the local animals hide, and when the buffalo have moved on, the animals return. The churned ground brings up grubs and roots and bugs. They move seeds and pollen, destroy old stumps. It’s good for the earth, to be stirred up now and again. As for where the buffalo go, I suspect, much like you, they take their destruction in the direction of their destiny and don’t exactly know why.”

  “But aren’t there buffalo tribes, shifters like you?”

  The fire caught, and Dan smiled briefly at it before turning back to Rhett. “There are, but they are not so many. They have never been so many. Every day, there are fewer. The world is changing, Rhett. Can you feel it?”

  Rhett looked around, hands on his hips. He saw a world he knew and understood. Hard ground, jagged mountains, fast water, boulders that could hide a man from bullets or likewise hide the rattler that ended him.

  “Looks about the same to me as it ever did,” Rhett said, feeling like Dan was maybe setting him up for a preachin’. “I’m a damn sight better off than I was a year ago, I know that much.”

  “Did you learn nothing from the railroad? The white men are coming, and they don’t need magic to destroy our world and our people. Their treaties mean nothing. They step over every line they draw in the sand and cut the world into portions with their fences. Soon there will be no place for the buffalo to roam. No place for the people, either.”

  “And what the Sam Hill do you want me to do about it, Dan? I’m trying to go kill about the whitest white feller I’ve ever seen, right now.”

  Dan looked up steadily from where he crouched by the fire, easy in his skin. “We were taught the Shadow would be our redemption. That you would save our people.”

  Rhett bristled at that.

  “You saying I can’t do it?”

  “I’m saying no one can. We couldn’t stop the buffalo. We couldn’t turn them or kill them or fight them. All we could do was live through them. And that’s what the white men will do to Durango. Overrun it, stupidly and carelessly.” He looked at Earl and then Sam in a pitying sort of way, and Sam shrugged in apology. “Current company excluded, Sam. But they are coming, and they will destroy my way of life and yours.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Dan stood up then and dropped his britches and shucked his shirt, which was no longer shocking or strange at all. “I have been angry for a long time, Rhett. But now I grow sad. We’re bickering over
nothing. You are not enough. We are not enough. The Shadow is not enough. We are ants fighting more ants. And we are losing.” Still shaking his head, he turned into a coyote and ran away.

  “Well, that’s a chickenshit way to insult somebody,” Rhett muttered.

  “He wasn’t insulting you as much as he was insulting the world,” Winifred countered. “He’s just frustrated. There is no safety for him, for us. Where can I go and know that my child and I will never face persecution? The land we grew up on is now someone else’s ranch. We know you can’t own land, that land owns itself, but someone else has decided differently.”

  “This is not a problem only in the Federal Republic,” Cora said. “My homeland is overrun with petty dictators and wars that kill people for land. My grandfather and parents came here for a better chance. They gambled everything.” She looked down and sighed. “Now you know why I am not a betting woman.”

  “Well, hellfire. If a fire-breathing dragon can’t feel safe, I reckon we’re all doomed,” Rhett said.

  That earned one of Cora’s smiles. “There is always a bigger dragon,” she said.

  They drifted away from the fire after that. The silence grew uncomfortable, for things both said and unsaid. Cora and Winifred went to gather greens and tubers, anything to soften the taste of hard meat. Sam took his gun, muttering about prairie chicken and eggs not belonging to anybody, yet. Earl pulled a dingy bottle of Buckhead wine from somewhere in the wagon and collapsed in an angry heap by the fire. Rhett was getting ready to shed his clothes and fly away when Earl chucked the empty bottle at him. Luckily, his aim was bad, and it just tumbled over in the dust at Rhett’s feet.

  “You got a problem with me, too, donkey-boy?”

  A snort of derision. “Only since you first opened your mouth. Don’t suppose that’ll be changing anytime soon.”

  “And what would you have me do? Campaign for the rights of donkeys?”

  Earl’s head shook, his shaggy red hair now grown out into ringlets. “I’m fine with your way of doing things, lad. Kill this, kill that. Seems a handy way to deal with what ails you. But the coyote’s wrong. It’s not white men that are the problem – it’s rich men. You don’t see me going about drawing lines in the sand and planting flags. I just want what everyone wants: a little plot of land to live for, and a family to tend there. I’m as far from having it as you. Best I reckon the world holds for me now is to find a wee job in a city so full of immigrants that it won’t notice me in particular.”

  “Then why are you angry at me?”

  Earl lay back in the dirt and flapped a hand. “I’m angry. You’re just here. Easy to be angry at you, lad. You only kill things as deserve it, but you know the likes o’ me only deserve pity. And I hate you for knowing that, too.”

  Before Rhett could untangle his tongue to respond, the feller was snoring the snores of the drunk, a sound Rhett knew well from his life before the Rangers and the monsters and the destiny. Once upon a time, he had been nothing but a scared little girl named Nettie Lonesome, living among people who drank themselves near to death nightly, who hated her and used her, and she’d ever been unsure that she’d find a place in the world to call her own.

  That girl was gone, but Rhett was damned sure Winifred’s child – be it a boy or a girl, closer to brown or to white – would never feel so helpless. He’d make sure of that, even if it was the only part of his destiny that didn’t involve killing what needed to die. He owed her that much.

  It was close to midnight when Rhett was done flying. He landed on clumsy talons and stumbled forward on human feet, glutted on a young buffalo he’d found half-trampled and that hadn’t required him to make polite conversation around the campfire. The horses were accustomed to him now, showing up at strange hours, naked and smelling of death. Pulling his clothes from his saddlebag, he slipped his feet into his boots and slunk through the darkness to the creek, where he accepted the shock of chill water and scrubbed himself clean with sand. The air was cool but kind, and he spent a few shivering minutes pondering the future before he was dry enough to wind on his clean binder and step into his clothes.

  His saddle was already by the fire, a bit closer to Sam than usual, which warmed his frozen heart. He stopped to look around, hands on his skinny hips. The women were absent; in the wagon, most like, and maybe even curled together like kittens in the narrow bed. And may they find much joy in it. Hell, he had, in both their embraces. He had no yearning for that now, for losing himself in a woman’s softness by dark of night and facing her bright, hungry eyes come morning. He knew their skin but not their minds and hearts – most especially not Winifred’s. Too damn complicated by a mile. A few hours’ pleasure encumbered by… hellfire. Emotions. Expectations. It was only natural that here, alone in the nothingness, bodies would seek any comfort they could find. Cora had told him she only liked women, and Winifred, Dan had said, liked whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, especially when it got under somebody’s skin.

  What they did from here on out was none of Rhett’s goddamn business. He knew what he wanted, and that was all that mattered.

  There, by the fire, was what truly called him, body and mind. Samuel Hennessy. He’d yearned to be near that boy since he’d met him years ago at the Double TK Ranch, not that Sam remembered the dark, lanky neighbor girl named Nettie with her long pigtails, thank goodness. Nettie had watched Sam from the top rail of a white picket fence, never dreaming she’d ever actually speak to the sunny young cowhand. And then… hell, last year had happened. Nettie was Rhett, and Sam Hennessy was, somehow, Rhett’s best friend.

  And Sam had broken Rhett’s heart back at the creek near Burlesville, sure, the first time he’d seen what Rhett kept so carefully hidden under his clothes. But Sam was slowly mending that heart again, wasn’t he? The kiss in the wagon… that had been real. More real than anything. And now Rhett’s saddle and blanket were laid out by Sam’s sleeping form, Sam’s kind face turned toward the bedroll like he was waiting for the feller who’d occupy it.

  Across the fire, Dan lay on his back like a corpse, breathing steady with his face as set and stern as judgment itself. Even when he was in a mostly good mood, Dan looked angry while he was sleeping. Well, and to hell with Coyote Dan. He couldn’t lay the sins of the world on Rhett’s shoulders. Rhett was one man, and even the Shadow had limitations. His fingers crept down to the two leather bags now around his neck. The first one contained what was left of Prospera’s magic dust, which had the ability to show the world Rhett’s monster eye instead of keeping the Shadow’s identity secret. He didn’t need it anymore, but he somehow hadn’t wanted to tuck it back in the chest with the witch’s other trinkets. The second bag had been with Rhett since before he could remember, probably since he was somebody’s papoose that got stolen away. It contained four vampire teeth, Rhett’s first quarter, the bone chip that had powered Trevisan’s monster scorpion, and a variety of other remembrances from his life, then and now. He gave that one a squeeze and tucked them both back under his collar before arranging his saddle and blanket and lying down with a sigh.

  “Tried waiting up for you,” Sam murmured, his voice honey-sweet and sleepy.

  “Sorry, Sam. Sometimes I just got to fly, I guess.”

  “Don’t fret. I know that about you. I’d fly, too, if I could. Did you see Cora while you was out there? She flew off, too.”

  Sam was awake now, his head pillowed on his arm. Was that worry Rhett saw in his eyes?

  Rhett shook his head and gave Sam his fondest grin. “Nope. Only thing I found was half a buffalo. Cora doesn’t want nothing to do with me, Sam. Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Turning on his side and pillowing his own head, he scooted a little closer to Sam, close enough to whisper. “I reckon I was just something new and shiny in a drab place. A new kind of pie to try. Cold comfort in a dark world and all. She… she was, too. For me, I’m saying. Nothing wrong with her, mind, just not the flavor for me. She lost any interest as soon
as I chose my destiny over hers. Cora wants her sister more than she ever wanted me.”

  “Then she’s a damn fool.”

  A shiver went up Rhett’s spine at the earnest look in Sam’s eyes, at how Sam’s big, warm hand reached out and landed on Rhett’s own where it lay on the cooling sand between them.

  “Sam,” Rhett’s whisper got even lower, his head leaned in. “Sam, none of it meant anything. Neither of ’em. I… I always known what I wanted.”

  Sam’s voice went just as low and gravelly. “I know that, Rhett. Fellers don’t hold such things against one another. I reckon I tasted some pie in my time, too. Things change. Tastes change. It just takes some time to figure things out, I guess.”

  “Sam, I —”

  “Kiss him already!” Earl yelled in annoyance, but this time, Rhett didn’t curse him and blush. This time, Rhett followed the donkey boy’s direction. He leaned over, slow and gentle, and kissed Sam Hennessy on the goddamn mouth.

  And that was all, but that was everything.

  They fell asleep side by side, staring into each other’s eyes and smiling like fools.

  The next morning was quiet and pleasant and normal, or as normal as things could be in such abnormal circumstances. There was enough water and food, at least, plus some grain mush the girls had put together with some honey. Rhett discovered it tasted like horse feed and went to saddle up, figuring that the more ground they could cover, the better life would get. Dawdling only made his posse grouchy, and as he’d become the de facto leader, that meant they were grouchy with him in particular, and Coyote Dan wasn’t the only one.

  As a gesture of goodwill, Rhett got Kachina brushed and saddled. Forcing himself not to frown, he picked out her hooves and walked her and Samson over to where Winifred and Cora talked by the wagon, their smiles warm and genuine. Until he got near, at least. Then they both closed up like angry turtles.

  “I got your horses ready,” Rhett said, trying to sound casual.