“Funny.”
It wasn’t, and the ragged edges of Kellen’s reply weren’t either. But a weird stiff discomfort had been wedged between them since the day before the Shawnee had arrived, when Ger had taken issue over Kellen siding with Vincent, and Kellen had pretty much told Ger to fuck off.
With those few stupid, unfunny words, that wedge seemed to shift into something less formidable.
“What did you hear?” Just to be safe, Kellen stuck with the direct approach. “Just before Ackermann started shooting.”
Ger shot an uncertain glance toward Kellen. “Colley’s Crow. It was moving its wings.”
Kellen nodded. “Just Colley’s Crow? Nothing else?”
“Yes.” Ger hesitated, and his tone changed as he added, “What did you hear?”
Ger was picking up on things Kellen hadn’t said yet, just like she’d known he would. Like she’d counted on him doing.
“I heard wings, too.” Kellen chose her words with more precision. This part was important. “I thought I did. But not just Colley’s. More than one set.”
“No other Crows were moving.” Goodson spoke from Kellen’s left shoulder, with his usual slow-moving and matter-of-fact cadence.
Goodson’s horse still walked a pace behind Kellen’s. She turned her head and looked into his placid face. Without hesitation or faltering, he met her gaze.
So maybe he doesn’t hate me after all. A small thing, but Kellen felt a little better for it, anyhow.
“I didn’t think so,” Kellen replied. “So I keep going back over it in my head. And maybe I just thought it was wings. Maybe it was something else. What about you? Did you hear… anything else?”
Goodson took his sweet time but finally answered with one word. “Whispering.”
“Shit.” Ger murmured it like a prayer.
Goodson glanced toward Ger. “You heard it before.”
“We all did.” Kellen faced forward again, so she could watch Ger’s reaction. “During the White River ferry crossing.”
The depth of furrowing to Ger’s brow indicated it was more about thinking than about frowning.
Goodson answered first. “Yes. But no. You both said you heard it before that. In Philadelphia.”
“Ripley,” Ger said.
Kellen had been mostly caught up in thinking about wings and whispering, water and ghostly voices. Ger speaking that one name, though, that was like the sound of a latch turning and a door being thrown wide. Kellen’s eyes rounded.
“Ripley,” Kellen repeated, and this time she was the one saying it like a prayer. “The voices, Em’s water ghosts—they were loudest whenever Ripley was around.”
“There was a story Colley read out of the paper once,” Ger said, although mostly like he was talking to himself. “People in New York rioting and tearing things up. Em said it was the water ghosts. Getting people all riled up. None of us took him seriously.”
“It was Em, for God’s sake. He lived for fairy tales. Of course we didn’t.” But Kellen spoke the words with a tender fondness and an inevitable welling of regret in her chest.
None of them said anything for a few heartbeats. The shuffle of horses’ hooves and brush of swaying tails filled the silence.
“What if he was onto something,” Ger finally said. “What if those whispers we heard didn’t just come around when Ripley showed up? What if they somehow goaded him into killing people?”
“In that alley.” The memory swept over Kellen as she spoke. She leaned forward over her saddle horn. “In Philadelphia. When we caught Ripley with that boy and interrupted him before he could cut the kid open. Ripley was acting so weird.”
“Like he was talking to someone we couldn’t see.” Ger didn’t turn around, but in profile his brow had un-furrowed. “At the Widow’s house, too, when Ripley trapped us in the fire.”
Slow, ponderous thinking time was over. Now, realizations flew like scattered birds, thrashing wings against the inside of Kellen’s skull. Kellen ended Ger’s thought before he could. “Like he was answering voices we couldn’t hear.”
“Dale.” Goodson dropped the name like a stone into an already-agitated pool. “It was like he wasn’t even there, not even inside his own head. Like he couldn’t hear me at all.”
“Ackermann wasn’t himself after the ferry crossing.” Ger reined in his horse, so that all three of them, Ger and Kellen and Goodson, walked abreast of each other. “What if they did the same thing to Ackermann?”
“What if what did something to him?” A rare tremor of frustration underscored Goodson’s words. “What are we even talking about?”
More silence, broken only by hooves and swishing tails.
“I don’t know.” Ger spoke more slowly. His forehead furrow had returned. “Colley said it felt like his Crow was pulling away from him. But there were no Crows back in Philadelphia. No Crowmakers. I don’t see how what happened there could be connected to whatever this is.”
The rush of what had felt like understanding leeched from Kellen. Even so, she couldn’t quite tear herself away from her memories of Philadelphia, of Widow Howland’s house and the sewing room wreathed in flames, of kneeling beside Ger while Ripley’s fallen body sizzled and popped. The air around them had whispered with flames and heat-generated drafts but also with wordless voices too loud to be anything other than wrong. Unnatural. So much about that spring had been unnatural.
In her mind’s eye, Kellen stared again into that moment. On the floor beside Ripley’s body, an oddly round stone shivered from side to side, as though the flames engulfing it had brought it to life. Pale gray in the ghastly dark of the burning house, the stone had suddenly glowed, heated from whatever its normal color to a scarlet as intense as the fire itself.
And the gurgling, whispering voices had screamed.
“Kellen?” Ger’s voice, as if from a distance. “Something else?”
Blinking, Kellen looked up and straight into Ger’s eyes. Brown and deep and right then, more importantly, understanding. A friend’s eyes.
Kellen shook her head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
Ger’s answering laugh was short and brittle. “Like anything else does.”
Kellen took a breath, then another, trying to formulate what she’d remembered into words that could convey the odd little niggle of importance it had generated.
But the horses in front of Ger and Kellen had slowed, Kellen suddenly realized. Slowed and now stopped. She drew back on her own reins and craned her neck to see what was going on ahead of them.
7
The road the Crowmakers had taken north from Grouseland shouldn’t, when compared even to the rough expanded buffalo trail they’d followed in from the east, have been called a road at all. Kellen wasn’t sure it had ever even qualified as a trace. The two wagons in the middle of the informal column of Crowmakers went single file and with agonizing slowness.
They’d have traveled faster without the wagons, and Kellen wondered at Ellis’s decision to include them in the trek toward Tecumseh’s Town. She allowed, though, that even if the Crowmakers could surely get by without the supplies the first wagon carried, they maybe couldn’t get by without the second wagon.
The second wagon carried Ackermann’s and Rawle’s maker-less Crows. Samuel James and his daughter Annie rode with those Crows, their riderless horses tied to the wagon’s tailgate. Kellen couldn’t make out exactly what James and Annie were up to, but they sat on the wagon’s floor with a Crow between them, heads bowed over the motionless black bulk.
When the wagons stopped, and the riders coming from behind along with them, Annie lifted her head. She glanced toward Ellis, who’d ridden from the front and drawn alongside the halting wagons, and then toward Vincent as he clambered over the side of the wagon and stood atop the lowest of the ammunition crates stacked at its front.
And then Annie looked backward, toward the Crowmakers and their horses crowding up near the wagon as they stopped to hear whatever Ellis had t
o say this time.
Annie’s gaze met Kellen’s, and Kellen realized she’d been staring at the girl. She’s got guts, Kellen caught herself thinking. And it wasn’t just about how Annie stared right back at Kellen at that very moment. It was also about the whole fact that a fourteen-year-old girl managed not only to travel with a bunch of raw, foul-mouthed soldiers, their self-important leader, and the brilliant scientist who’d figured out how to make the Crows to begin with—Annie James held her own, with every last one of them.
Then Annie quirked a tiny, hesitant hint of a smile at Kellen, and she looked like a little girl all over again—lost and lonely and constantly struggling for notice by her cold fish of a father.
“… ammunition pouches.” Vincent was droning on about something, Kellen realized.
Annie’s gaze shifted from Kellen to Vincent, who straddled a now-open ammunition crate with an ammo pouch in one hand and motioned toward the nearest still-mounted Crowmaker with his other.
Annie’s hesitant smile faltered. Then, more forcibly, she scowled and lowered her eyes again toward the metal husk of a Crow on the wagon’s floor.
Kellen shifted her gaze toward Vincent, too. Yeah. I don’t know how to feel about the son of a bitch, either.
She focused on what Vincent was saying, instead.
“But do not load those Crows.” Vincent pronounced that last word with a deadly disgust that Kellen suspected was healthily laced with fear.
She also suspected that everyone without earshot of Vincent would have said the same word exactly the same way, except most of them had been avoiding the need to say it at all. Don’t say the word, don’t look at the Crows. Don’t think about Ackermann.
It was Jennett who accepted the first ammunition pouch Vincent proffered. Jennett snorted as he hefted the pouch onto the back of his saddle.
“You think?” Jennett said, and then turned his horse aside before Vincent could add anything else.
Don’t load the Crows. Except we’ll have to eventually. Won’t we? The Shawnee up at Tecumseh’s Town, they won’t go down any other way.
“We’ll stop at Easton, a settlement along the river, to resupply.” Vincent distributed the next ammunition pouch to a grim-faced Kalvis as he spoke.
There was more Vincent didn’t say but Kellen sensed maybe he was thinking it—because she was sure thinking it.
Try not to kill anyone else while we’re getting there.
8
Laughing Girl paced outside Tenskwatawa’s lodge. The soles of her bare feet took little notice of the heated earth beneath them. Midday sunlight warmed the crown of her head.
Outside her father’s lodge. Always outside. As if he believed her capable of nothing more than quilling fanciful designs for his garish clothing or tying herbs for his rituals into perfectly-measured bundles.
She could do more than he believed. Knew more than he realized.
If he would only trust me.
And Wind Man—her husband was no better. Was she not the one who had convinced him of Tenskwatawa’s right beliefs? But now it was Wind Man holed up with Tenskwatawa all through the night and well into this new day. Wind Man with whom Tenskwatawa had alternately chanted in prayer and dwelled with in silent meditations.
All through the night. Into this day.
If they had not come out by the time the sun tipped past its highest point and trekked into the afternoon, she would go in. She would push through the blanket covering the lodge’s door, and she would—
Behind Laughing Girl, shouts went up. First only one, accompanied by the yip of dogs. Then more, growing into a murmur like the constant flow of the nearby river.
Laughing Girl’s feet ceased their pacing. She turned, pulling an errant strand of black hair from her face, and peered toward the edge of the village.
The runner who’d set off the hubbub did not stop for the villagers who angled toward him, questions in the tilts of their heads and their outstretched hands. His feet beat a steady rhythm between houses and tanning frames, the still-barking dogs sprinting alongside in the dust that puffed in his wake.
The boy’s face held nothing but tense lines. His dazed eyes did not so much as glance toward Laughing Girl. He paused long enough at Tenskwatawa’s door to call out for entry, and then he ducked through.
Laughing Girl remained where she was, body frozen in stillness while her mind raced.
The boy belonged to Tecumseh’s contingent. The one which had gone to meet with the long knife leader Harrison.
Inside the lodge, silence erupted into raised voices. Laughing Girl could make out no words, not from where she stood.
She would go in. Not when the sun moved into some arbitrary position. Not when Tenskwatawa or Wind Man beckoned to her.
Now.
The door covering pressed rough against her palms. She shoved through it, into the lodge’s stuffy and sage-scented interior.
Tenskwatawa stood less than a pace before her, his hands extended toward the doorway through which Laughing Girl had just come. Fury and perhaps something darker snarled his unhandsome features into a horrible mask.
Beyond Tenskwatawa, Wind Man stood facing away from the door. His shoulders hunched, and his hands clenched against his sides.
“What has happened?” Laughing Girl stopped where she stood but held her ground.
Tenskwatawa stopped mere inches from her. If Laughing Girl’s actions disturbed him, his face held too much anger already for her to notice anything new.
For a second, Tenskwatawa only stood there, breathing heavily.
“They have killed my brother.” His voice held as much ugliness as his face.
Laughing Girl inhaled sharply. Her lungs refused to release the breath.
“Go and gather my people.” Tenskwatawa lifted his hand toward Laughing Girl. “Bring them to the river.”
“What—” Laughing Girl began.
“No more questions!” Tenskwatawa’s face reddened. “The time for questions is past. Today…”
Tenskwatawa lowered his voice. His lip uncurled, from rage into a grim determination.
“Today, there is a thing we must do.”
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Monsters of Our Own Making (Crowmakers: Book 2): A Science Fiction Western Adventure Page 19