Malice of Crows

by Lila Bowen

  Not sure what to say to that, Rhett whistled for Ragdoll and waited to hear hoofbeats, hoping the mare had regained her wits and not ventured too far into a night that could contain worse things than a passel of oversized lizards. Sure enough, the scraggly appaloosa appeared shortly at full gallop, several of the other horses in her wake. She’d become the lead mare of their regular herd, and Samson, Kachina, Blue the mule, Blue the horse, two chestnuts, and Sam’s new curly were with her. BB thundered after them, and with him, most of the small herd following behind like baby ducks. Rhett rubbed Ragdoll’s forehead the way she liked, scratched her withers, and tried to stay standing when Blue nudged into him with his long, hard mule nose, begging for the same affection.

  Yep, Rhett understood horses. And he was starting to understand people pretty good, too. For all Dan’s preaching and occasional bellyaching, he was a stand-up sort of feller, and he was trying to help Rhett find the right path. It wasn’t easy. And Rhett owed him something in return.

  “I guess I’ve had to get used to change, too,” he said slowly. “I do tend to shoot first and ask questions later, but I think that’s because I often know what I want from the start, and I’m willing to do anything to get it. Even wait. Even if it means I have to throw a little hissy fit first. A long time ago, somebody smart told me you had to let horses get used to you before you tried to ride ’em. I reckon it was good advice. Smart horses don’t take to dumb people. Smart horses, they test you first. Make sure you can be trusted.”

  “Wise critters, horses,” Dan said as they slipped halters over noses and scratched favorite spots and brought the herd back to the wagon.

  “Well. You’re pretty wise yourself,” Rhett said. “For a coyote.”

  Dan gave his old, tricksy grin. “Let’s go back and see if the killer nun can save Sam. I think you and him have a lot to talk about.”

  When Rhett and Dan had tied up all the horses, they found Cora waiting, leaning against the door to the mission.

  “We think we found something,” she said. “For Sam. We moved him inside.”

  That’s what her mouth said, at least. Her eyes danced in a mischievous sort of way that raised Rhett’s hopes.

  “Guess we should go on in, then,” he answered.

  They followed Cora into the mission, which felt right homey now that nobody and nothing inside it was trying to kill them. It was getting late, and Rhett couldn’t stifle his yawn as he stumbled into the kitchen. The long table was cleared from supper and covered in dry old books and tall, leaning candles, which looked downright precarious to Rhett but wasn’t his problem. Right down the middle was Sam. Rhett startled and hurried over, but Sam was still breathing, for all that he looked to be laid out like a corpse.

  “What’d you find?” he asked, thumbs tucked into his gun belt.

  Inés walked over carrying a mortar and pestle, grinding something in the old stone that smelled of spices and grave dirt, the most putrid sort of medicine. “This is a counter to magical poisoning,” she said. “Most such things, like venom and contagion, reach the heart and kill the victim. But Cora tells me you had some magic of your own —”

  “A god’s wine,” Rhett supplied.

  Inés bowed her head. “Yes. So perhaps it was enough to keep him from dying, and yet his fragile mortal body can’t get rid of the poison within. It’s trapped inside like liquor behind a cork. And this will… let’s say, get rid of the cork.”

  “Sounds messy,” Rhett said, but he bounced on his toes. He didn’t care if it was messy. He just wanted Sam.

  Inés stopped by Sam’s head and put the pestle on the table. “Before I give him this potion, you must consent for him. I don’t know what it will do. It could cure him. Or it could kill him. Do you think he would wish to take this chance?”

  “Yes,” Rhett said. “Hell yeah, he would. Do it.”

  Dan shifted and made a little noise that suggested his quick answer was more about what Rhett wanted than what Sam wanted, and Rhett turned to him, one hand unintentionally on his pistol.

  “You got something to say, Dan, you’d best go on and say it.”

  “I can’t tell if you call the shots or if the Shadow does, but I’ve always known Sam to be a fighter. So I agree with you, but I still think your reaction is rooted in selfishness.”

  “Most people wouldn’t choose to keep dying if they could maybe live.”

  Dan nodded to concede the point.

  “Well, then.” Inés scooped the thick, black mixture up with a spoon and stirred it into a waiting cup of water. “Help him sit up.”

  Rhett and Dan moved, one on either side of Sam’s still body, and helped him to sit up. He felt floppy and too thin in Rhett’s arms, light as a feather. No wonder the womenfolk had been able to wrestle him out of the wagon and onto the table. Rhett was forced to recognize how much the boy had wasted away in the past days. Sam’s cheeks were gaunt, his temples sunken in. All his sunshine was gone.

  “Hurry,” Rhett urged.

  Inés tipped Sam’s head back and dribbled the liquid into his mouth. Sam sputtered and coughed some up, but Inés shook her head and kept pouring it down. It foamed black around Sam’s lips, and his eyes flew open as he choked and spat.

  “Hold his nose,” Inés said. “He will fight it, but he must drink it, or it’s all for nothing.”

  “Sorry, Sam,” Rhett said. He pinched Sam’s nose and forced his head back.

  Dan held Sam’s chin so he couldn’t close his mouth, and Inés kept pouring the foul brew down, no matter how much of it came back up. Sam’s blue eyes rolled to Rhett, pleaded as he weakly struggled.

  “You got to drink it down, Sam. You’re dying. You’re dying, and I can’t lose you.”

  Sam gave the tiniest nod and tried to swallow, but the stuff was fighting its way back out. Finally, the cup was empty, and Inés set it down and gestured for Rhett and Dan to close Sam’s mouth.

  “Keep it closed,” she said. “Let the magic work.”

  Sam shook and flailed between them, eyes wide and panicky and bloodshot, trying to escape them or the medicine. Cora stepped close to watch with the detached sort of look she got when she was doctoring. Winifred hovered a way back, a few ragged towels in her arms. The waiting seemed to go on forever, and then Sam jerked and fell back, unconscious again. Rhett shrugged at Dan, and they helped ease Sam’s body back down flat on the table.

  “What now?” Rhett asked.

  “We wait. We wait, and we watch.” Inés stepped back, arms crossed.

  For the longest time, nothing happened. And then Sam moaned, his head falling to the left and then the right. His shoulders hunched up around his ears, and his belly gave an evil gurgle. His body convulsed, and Rhett recognized what was happening.

  “Sit him up quick,” he shouted. “He’s gonna —”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Sam’s moan turned into a goddamn geyser of vomit. Blacker and thicker than the medicine, it splattered all down’s Sam shirt, burning through the fabric and turning his skin red. Rhett brushed it away, feeling the sting of ichor, and flopped Sam over on his belly with the boy’s face over the floor as he kept on retching and retching and retching.

  “Goodness,” Inés murmured.

  Because the sum total of everything that was coming out of Sam was more than his whole body could’ve held, much more than a stomach’s worth and much more than he’d eaten in weeks. The floor was covered in black, syrupy tar, the white walls splattered with it as flecks ate through the years of whitewashing. Winifred tried to clean some away with her towel, but it just ate through the fabric. Rhett kept his hand on Sam’s back, hoping the black stuff wasn’t burning up the poor man’s innards as it came out.

  “Is that supposed to happen?” he asked Inés.

  She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  As time wore on, Sam came up dry heaving, and Rhett took another towel from Winifred and dabbed the black stains away from Sam’s lips.

 
“A salve,” he muttered. “Get me some kind of salve. It’s burning him. It’s burning him, goddammit!”

  Inés hurried away and came back with a little pot of grease, which Rhett smeared over Sam’s lips and chin and chest, anywhere the black poison had burned him and left angry red stains behind.

  “Rhett?”

  Rhett looked up, every part of his being focused on the man who had finally spoken again.

  “I’m here, Sam.”

  “There were spiders.”

  “I know.”

  “They were trying to get you, Rhett. I tried to stop ’em, but I wasn’t… wasn’t strong enough.”

  “It’s okay, Sam.” Rhett helped Sam sit back up and their eyes locked. “We can fight the spiders together.”

  And then Sam smiled, and it was like the first time seeing the sun in weeks.

  Rhett smiled back.

  They moved Sam to one of the old cots in the monks’ sleeping chambers. Rhett collected what moldering cushions he could to make his friend more comfortable, but it wasn’t an easy task. For his part, Sam seemed happy to be alive for all that he was weak as a kitten and could barely lift his arms.

  “What’s wrong with me? Why am I so thin?”

  “You got bit by one of Trevisan’s spiders, and you took it badly. Tried to shoot everybody, fought us, screamed about it. Then we couldn’t get you to wake up.”

  “Tried to shoot you?” Sam said, eyebrows going up like he was already feeling guilty.

  Rhett poked a finger through the hole in his pants. “Not your fault. No harm done. Barely tickled a little.”

  “Oh, lord, Rhett. I couldn’t be more sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Sam. You got Dan, too. It was fun, watching him holler.”

  He didn’t want Sam to feel bad about what he’d done under the influence of poison, but he wasn’t going to start lying now, not when things had been going so well for them.

  For the rest of the night, Sam wandered in and out of sleep, but it wasn’t the sleep of the venom. He didn’t lie like a dead man and then rise up, screaming at things that weren’t there. He just slept like a normal feller who was recovering from an awful illness, something that had come within a hairsbreadth of ending him. Whatever the rest of the posse did, Rhett didn’t care. He settled in on the next cot over, content with his own thoughts. It was enough, for Rhett, that Sam was alive.

  Some time later, whether hours or days, Rhett couldn’t say, he woke up right as Dan showed up in the door with the old sparkle in his eyes.

  “How’s Sam?” he asked.

  Rhett nodded to show he appreciated the politeness. “Better. Sleeping easy. Says he’s going to be fine.”

  “When do you think he’ll be able to travel?”

  Rhett stood, stretching, considering. “As soon as we can carry him out to the wagon, I reckon, although he won’t like not being in the saddle.”

  “Good. Because we found something.”

  “Well, what the Sam Hill is it?”

  Dan grinned. “A book on necromancy. It’s written in Italian —”

  “Which is very similar to Aztecan,” Inés finished, coming up behind him. “I can’t translate entirely, and I’m sure some sensitivity is lost, but there are spells here. You said this Trevisan has a familiar?”

  “A what?”

  “An animal he keeps with him.”

  Rhett looked up into the rafters, just to make sure there weren’t any black-feathered birds staring down at him, hungry for secrets to take back to their master. “Ravens,” he said. “Or crows. Ravens and crows. Hell, I don’t know. If it’s black and beady-eyed and full of malice and feathers, I reckon he’s fond of it. He kept one in his train car beside Meimei.”

  “In identical cages.” When Cora said it, smoke curled from her nose. She was so silent that Rhett didn’t know when she’d arrived, but she was in the doorway just the same.

  “And when he jumped bodies, what happened to this bird?” Inés asked. She curled a finger at Rhett and headed back to the kitchen, everybody falling in behind them.

  Rhett frowned as he walked and tried to remember. “It died. Went all dry-like, its feet curled up. But he can also make ’em out of wax and gold and bone.” Even through her veil, he could feel Inés staring, waiting, so he added, “I can’t tell which ones are real and which ones are made up anymore.”

  “Ha!” Inés spat a vicious little laugh and pointed at a huge black book on the table where Sam had been. Someone had cleaned up all the black spatters. “The book agrees. The life force of the familiar is used up, drained by the transfer. Jumping to a new vessel takes more life than one body can hold. Without the familiar, without an animal of some sort nearby to use as kindling, the alchemist will fail.”

  That perked Rhett up. “By fail, do you mean die? Really die?”

  Inés nodded. “But the necromancer need not be picky. A rat, a pigeon, a squirrel. Just enough for a spark. He will have to be isolated.”

  “What about lizards? Bugs?”

  Inés shook her head. “Bigger than that, I think. If the spark is too small, the fire sputters and dies.”

  “So that’s how to keep him from jumping to somebody else, but how do we get him out of Meimei in the first place?”

  Inés hummed and held up the book. The thing had to be as thick as Rhett’s forearm, and he knew personally just how heavy it was because he’d huffed and puffed helping deliver it up from the basement.

  “It will take me time to unravel that,” she answered.

  Rhett shook his head. “But we got to go! We got no time to sit around reading. Trevisan is holding still right now, but he could go anywhere.”

  Cora nodded. “And he could jump again. My sister’s body is not ideal for his purposes.”

  “We can bring the book,” Dan said. “I can read a little Aztecan —”

  “It ain’t good enough to read that and you know it,” Rhett said, cocking his head at the book. “We need an expert. So what do you say, Inés? You want to take this show on the road with us?”

  The nun looked around the kitchen. With her veil down, and not knowing her particularly well, anyway, Rhett couldn’t begin to guess what she was thinking. Would she go? Would she stay?

  “You don’t want to stay here,” he said, not quite pleading. Yet. “With us, you can go out in the world. You can help us right this wrong. Do some good.” He looked right at her veil, right at where her eyes had to be. “Save another little girl’s life.”

  They waited, each person staring at Inés, willing her to join them.

  “We got a wagon,” Rhett said. “If you don’t like to ride. You can bring all your books. Well, some of your books. We got some books, too. You can tell us which ones might be useful, and you can have whatever of ’em you want for your own library. They’re from the Las Moras Ranger Outpost. I reckon the Captain would’ve wanted you to have them. He told me to find you, you know. He wanted you to help me. And once we kill Trevisan, we’ll bring you right back here or take you to the nearest city, as you like.”

  There was a low chuckle from under the veil. “Stop trying to convince me, Rhett. I have already made my choice.”

  She paused for a maddening goddamn amount of time, and Rhett had to bite his tongue to keep from begging harder. Good thing his tongue started to heal the moment he withdrew his teeth.

  Finally, Inés said, “I will go. Perhaps I have hidden from the world for too long.”

  Rhett exhaled a huge sigh of relief and felt a hand fall on his shoulder. When he turned around, he was amazed to find Sam standing there, one hand on the wall for support. The feller was shaking from exertion and as white as milk but still staring at Rhett like he’d hung the moon. He grinned back.

  “But I don’t know what we’ll do with my cow and donkey,” Inés said.

  Rhett grinned. At least that question he could answer. “Easy. Eat one, bring the other.”

  When Rhett had helped an exhausted Sam back to his bed and stayed nearby
to doze while the cowpoke slept, Inés settled down at the table, poring through her necromancy book. When he woke up and lumbered back into the kitchen, she didn’t look like she’d moved an inch. She’d merely asked Rhett to milk the cow before killing it so they’d have fresh milk, and he enjoyed the hell out of it, not having tasted milk in years. Together, he and Dan slaughtered the scrawny critter in the mission’s dusty yard.

  For all that Dan was a fine hand around a ranch, Rhett missed the hell out of Sam. Even butchering a cow was fun with Sam. Up to their elbows in gore, each silent and steady in his work, Rhett kept looking up, expecting to see blond hair and blue eyes and finding serious, frowning Dan instead. He briefly remembered when he’d butchered a cow with a boy named Chuck who’d later become a chupacabra and tried to kill Rhett’s mentor, Monty, but Rhett pushed that right back out of his mind. What was past was past, and the present had its own trials and tribulations. For one, Inés had promised to make a great feast before they left the mission and her clay oven, and Rhett would be glad for softer beef tonight and freedom from hunting and carving until the cow’s meat and parts ran out on the trail. San Anton wasn’t so far now, just a day’s ride, Inés said. And even that was how long it took her on her donkey, a shaggy thing that screeched at them indignantly the entire time they wrestled with what was left of the cow, like they’d murdered his best friend right in front of him. Which, Rhett realized with a chill, they basically had.

  “You might want to shut your pie hole. We already lost one donkey,” Rhett told it, knowing full well he sounded unnecessarily peevish. “And we don’t got room for another. So unless you’re gonna become a rude Irishman and help build fires, I don’t need another donkey’s thoughts and I don’t want to hear it.”

  The donkey eventually shut up, and it didn’t become a person, so Rhett figured it wouldn’t be half as much trouble as Earl had been.