An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1)

by Charlaine Harris

  “It seemed like a good idea,” I said, and struggled to sit up. Paulina reached down to help me, and it didn’t feel like a good idea to refuse to take her hand. I looked to my right. Somehow Eli had already resumed his seat by the fire. I’d lost a minute or two.

  “When I signed on to do this, I didn’t realize I’d be so damn busy,” I said, trying to reenter the world as I knew it. “Out in the middle of this nothing, that thing pops up acting all I’m so sexy. How?”

  “Look,” Paulina said, pointing at the body. Though I didn’t want to, I followed her finger. A woman in her eighties stared at me sightlessly. It was the same woman. She was still dressed in a white (but red-stained) blouse and a blue skirt. My stomach gave a lurch.

  “Is that the way she really looked, or did she wither when you sucked her soul out?”

  My question startled Paulina, and Eli, too. They both stared at me. Shit. I’d said something interesting again. “You could see that,” Paulina said thoughtfully.

  If there was anything I didn’t want, it was for Paulina to think about me.

  “I saw a cloudy something,” I said. “I’m not going any farther than saying that.” I’d already said too much.

  “When one of us is dying,” Eli said, “we can take the power.”

  “Like I take the gun,” I said.

  “Just so,” Paulina said approvingly. “The gun is your weapon and your livelihood. Magic is ours.”

  Well, I just loved being like Paulina. I was so glad she’d noticed.

  “How’d she find us?” That was the most important thing we had to settle. I walked a few steps to the rock I’d been sitting on before the witch had shown up. I sat down a little harder than I’d planned on.

  “In the morning Eli and I will find out.”

  After I’d become sure I was in the here and now, the witch was dead, and Paulina and Eli were unharmed and in their right minds, I lay down on my blanket and wrapped it around me. I’d folded up my jacket to be a pillow. Shortly, the other two did the same. The fire was dying out, but when I turned on my side, I could see Eli was looking at me.

  I looked back.

  He’d landed on me when the witch had made him horny. Not Paulina. He’d gone where he had thought about going. I couldn’t unthink that. I didn’t want to.

  Then I willed myself to close my eyes. After a few minutes I slept.

  “How come Lizbeth didn’t fall under the spell?” Paulina was saying, very low, when I woke up. “She has no power. She should have been out of the action completely. The witch took you under in a few moments.”

  “Maybe she’s a null.” He didn’t appreciate being ranked just above me, his voice said.

  “Maybe. But the witch slowed me for a few seconds, and I’m very strong.” Paulina wasn’t bragging. She was stating a fact.

  “Don’t tell me Gunnie has any magical blood,” Eli said. He meant it—he doubted it—but he wasn’t entirely certain.

  Shit.

  I should never have agreed to come with these two grigoris. It had seemed like a good idea, tracking down my maybe-sister, finding out why my father’s half of my blood was so interesting to these people. Now I wondered if I’d set my own death in motion. I imagined Paulina hovering over me, her mouth open. It made me wanted to throw up. Or kill her.

  “No,” Paulina said, but after a pause. “Of course she doesn’t. How could she? We saw her mother. That man who looks like a bulldog is her father. No magic there.”

  They did not know Jackson was my stepfather. A huge wave of relief rolled over me. I felt better all of a sudden. My smoke screen was still up. I would find out what I needed to know. Then I would go home to Segundo Mexia, and the wizards would return to the Holy Russian Empire, and all this craziness would vanish from my life.

  The relief was so great that I did go back to sleep for a very short while, enough to make it credible when I yawned and stretched and told them how sorry I was for oversleeping.

  I was lying through my teeth, especially when I saw that Eli had started breakfast preparations, and the witch’s body had been dragged several yards away, two things I wouldn’t have to deal with.

  Eli had some oats and some dried apples. We had enough water—assuming we could find another source later today, and there were towns on the map—to boil the oats and apples together in a metal pot, one I hadn’t even known Paulina had. We each had a bowl of sweetish cereal that would fill your belly and make you feel strong. I felt able to face today, and face Paulina, after I’d eaten.

  There were some questions we had to answer.

  “Where did she come from?” I kind of talked to the air between the two wizards, because I didn’t want to favor either one. “And how did she find us?”

  “We don’t know,” Eli said. “But we’re going to find out. We’re going to search the car.”

  “Tell me what you want me to do.” Assuming guns would not be involved, I stacked Montes’s rifle and my gun belt with the Colts neatly by the rock I’d been sitting on last night.

  “We’ll start going over the car inch by inch,” Paulina said. “It would have been easier to put something on the car than on our bodies. I’ll take the front seat, Eli will take the back seat, you take the trunk. Then we’ll all examine the outside.”

  The day was getting hot by the time we’d peered at every inch of that car. We went over the seats, the cavities behind the seats, the trunk, the floorboards, under the seats, in the glove compartment, under the engine, in the wheel wells. I’m no mechanic, but I’d spent enough time watching Tarken and Martin to at least recognize I was looking at the normal innards of a car.

  We found nothing. The grigoris tried with their own eyes, and they tried magic. Paulina took a pinch of this and that from pockets in her vest, and said a few power words and tossed the stuff from her pockets over the car. I was really hoping to see something happen, but nothing did. So the car search was a bust.

  Next we all emptied our bags, though since those had been under our eyes continuously, I couldn’t see how they’d have been tainted. Then we searched the icebox Jim Comstock had sent with us

  After another hour we’d come up with nothing. If we wanted to reach anywhere by noon to refill our canteens and check the car, we had to be on our way. I gathered Jackhammer, my pistols, and the rifle I’d gleaned from the hired killer.

  “Wait,” said Eli. I stopped. I’d been about to toss the rifle into the leather bag I’d brought with me. “That’s a new thing. The dead man’s rifle.”

  I handed it to him as quick as I could. I hadn’t had a chance to clean it, as I would have if we’d been in a hotel last night. “It’s a good rifle,” I said. “A bolt-action Winchester, like Jackhammer, but newer.”

  Eli looked blank, but he nodded to show he accepted my opinion. “Is it loaded?” he asked.

  Good to be cautious. “Yes,” I said.

  “Then while I’m holding it out, you look at it, and tell me if you see anything odd about it.”

  I’d never thought of checking the rifle, a tool of my trade and one I was glad to have, for . . . well, I didn’t know what they were looking for. Some extra item added to something familiar, something magic could stick on to. A map we couldn’t see, one that led right to us.

  Now that Eli had suggested the rifle might be the bearer of the homing device, I found it right away. “On the stock,” I said. After I glanced up at the grigoris, I pointed. “This here is the stock. The shiny wood. Mine is walnut. This Winchester is stained darker. You see this little pimplelike thing? This bump?”

  They bent over to look at it. There was a bump in the wood, close to the bolt action—not something so big you’d notice it, if you weren’t a gun person, if you weren’t looking, if you weren’t in the bright sunlight.

  “Better unload it,” Eli said.

  I did. “Look down the bore,”
I said, just so he’d be reassured, and he peered down the barrel.

  Eli nodded. The rifle was unloaded. I laid the weapon on the hood of the Tourer.

  With the point of his knife, Eli gently nudged the rough spot while Paulina squatted down to get very close to the rifle. Eli dislodged some crumbly brown stuff, almost the same color as the wood but not the same texture. This dab amount of brown, whatever it was, had covered a tiny piece of metal, thin as a shaving, sticking it to the rifle.

  “That’s a piece of tinfoil like you wrap food in,” I said. You couldn’t get anything by me. Except a sabotaged rifle.

  The tinfoil came out, too, very delicately. We all peered at the shallowest scrape in the wood. My eyes were sharper than theirs.

  “There’s hair in there,” I said. “From when you had that shave in Mil Flores, I bet you.”

  “But you killed the man who had this rifle very soon after Eli left the barbershop,” Paulina said.

  “If he had this little hole prepared, he could have nipped in, gotten the whiskers, stuck them in place, and pressed this brown stuff over it to hold it all still.”

  “How could he know that we would end up with the rifle?”

  “I got a reputation,” I said, trying to hit the middle between boasting and being overmodest.

  “But still.”

  I had another idea. I was sharing them right and left. I might have kept my mouth shut, but I wanted to live through this plagued expedition. “So . . . you two would know if you were with another wizard, right? You’d put out your magic feelers and know what they were?”

  I looked off in another direction while I waited for an answer. I didn’t want to know if their eyes were on me.

  “You think the person who put the hairs in the rifle was Belinda Trotter,” Eli said. “Not the gunman.”

  I shrugged. “Her or the traveling salesman. My money’s on Trotter. She had a wagon handy. She had no reason to be there. She was way too helpful.”

  “You think she hired Josip. He failed. Then she hired the ones who ambushed us,” Paulina said, thinking as she spoke. “And when that missed, her gunman was waiting in Mil Flores for her directions. But by then she knew your reputation, so she stepped into the barbershop to get some of Eli’s whiskers. I’m not sure how she knew Eli’d go in. Maybe she was simply waiting for any opportunity to get something off one of us, and that was a golden one. Then—she’d have to be prepared for this part—she stuck the whiskers, as she might have fixed any other tiny thing, on the rifle. She went up to the rooftop where Montes waited and gave it to him. So that if he missed, and you killed him, we’d take the rifle with the find-them spell.” Paulina did not sound angry at herself—or at me, which surprised me. She sounded very, very thoughtful. “So was that creature last night the real Belinda? Or was it another hired hand?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Eli asked.

  “If someone else tries to kill us, we’ll know Belinda Trotter is alive.”

  “Maybe there’s more than her in this conspiracy,” Paulina said.

  I took the rifle over to the body of the witch, which was drying out into a mummy real quick. Of course that wasn’t normal, but was anything with these two, in their world? I used Eli’s knife to scrape out every tiny whisker. Then I spat on the knife blade to make sure anything on it would be wiped off, and I rubbed the blade of the knife against the witch’s blouse. I was leaving a message . . . if anyone came to read it.

  My whole life I had hated the magic world. I knew grigoris were unreliable and dangerous, if not outright evil. Now I was surrounded by the very thing I hated. But I’d gotten myself into this fix. I had to get myself out.

  And I also had to do everything I could to protect the lives of Paulina and Eli, because that’s what I’d contracted to do. You don’t have to sign a paper to have a contract. I might be a crew of one right now, but I was still bound.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We loaded up the bags and started driving after that. It was going to be another long, jolting day. It was hot, it was windy, and we needed water and gasoline. According to the map, we would pass close to Dalton in the afternoon. If we turned west, the town would be only a mile out of the way. Also according to the map, Dalton was larger than Mil Flores. It was our best chance. Clear choice.

  Except outside of Dalton there was a roadblock. There were two men and one woman standing guard. They were professionals, or at least they looked like they were. I said, “You two stay in here, and don’t do anything hinky.” Paulina and Eli looked a little offended, but screw ’em.

  I slid out of the car and advanced to the wooden barricade. I held my hands out, empty.

  “Can we come into town and get water?” I said.

  “Who you guarding, gunnie?” The woman was older than me, her blond hair in a long braid running down her back. The two men were grizzled and bearded, hard to tell one from another except one was shorter and his hair was darker.

  “Two strangers from Holy Russia,” I said.

  “They grigoris?”

  Thanks to Paulina’s face tattoos, there was no way to lie about it. “The woman is,” I said.

  “Nope. We don’t let none of them in,” the shorter man said.

  The barricade was weathered. This had not been set up to stop us specially. This crew was paid to stop grigoris and other suspicious strangers from entering Dalton. No point arguing.

  “I understand,” I said. “You got any water we could have? We’ll just go back to the main road, with or without. Peaceful. But I’m asking.”

  They looked at one another, had a silent palaver. The woman said, “We can spare some. Bring us your canteens.”

  Keeping my hands up, I went back to the car to fetch ’em. Eli and Paulina looked at me, questions all over their faces, but I shook my head. “We ain’t welcome,” I said. My invisible mother gave me a poke in the head. “We aren’t welcome. They’re giving us some water, though. Smile and nod.” I gathered up our canteens, including our spare.

  Though Paulina’s face made it clear she would rather have done something painful to the guards, she inclined her head like a queen, and Eli produced a passable smile. It was clear these two had never been told they weren’t welcome somewhere, so I guessed they hadn’t been out of the HRE real often.

  I walked back, my arms still extended, two canteens hanging from each hand. If I’d stuck a pistol in my back waistband, I could have dropped the canteens, pulled the gun, and shot the three of them. They hadn’t been challenged by a professional in a while.

  It was like the shorter man read my mind. “Stop!” he called, and I obeyed instantly. “Turn in a circle!” he told me. I did, keeping my hands out far. “Okay,” he said when he’d had a good look. “You can come on.”

  They had a big barrel of water. I saw it when I got close enough to hand over the canteens. The taller man turned on the spigot and filled ’em, all four. The tall man handed the canteens back to me over the barricade. He wasn’t going to come out. Maybe something about me spooked ’em. Maybe they were always this cautious.

  I offered them six bullets, as goodwill for the water. The blond woman accepted, with thanks. So we were square with them.

  We didn’t linger. No point, and discourteous. Paulina made an efficient U-turn and we returned to the main road . . . though calling it a road was a big compliment.

  At least we could take a drink, and if the car overheated, we had some water to put in it.

  We jolted along. I am used to tough living, but I was getting worn down. The movement, the heat, and the long day—after a night that hadn’t been exactly restful—made me dull. But maybe the biggest lack, as keen as that of water, was that I had no one to talk to . . . at least, no one I could trust.

  No friend.

  It wasn’t that the two grigoris were killers t
hat bothered me—Tarken, Martin, and Galilee had all been killers in the line of work. I hated the idea that people could be not what they looked like. The witch the night before, she had been both a beautiful woman and an ancient crone, and I didn’t know which was her real face. The not knowing, it made me queasy.

  Not only that, but the grigoris could take life in weird and horrible ways. Removing the blood. Sucking away the soul. In comparison, gunshots seemed honest and straightforward. I knew that wasn’t fair. Dead was dead.

  Anyone who’d been gutshot would be glad of having his blood extracted instead of writhing in agony for terrible minutes. Someone whose wound had become infected, whose blood was being poisoned, might be glad to have her soul removed rather than suffer a slow death. It would be an easy death. Well, an easier death. I’d seen this, and my head knew it to be true. But I couldn’t change how I felt, even though I knew it didn’t make sense. At least, not now.

  While we headed southwest, I studied the map some more. We might be able to reach Paloma. We were going up and down hills again, and the road was winding and sometimes steep; but the paving was a bit better, and if our gas lasted, we’d be fine.

  For once, we were fine.

  The road was suddenly a real road instead of a suggestion of one; it had been built well and patched, and we were able to go faster. The ride was smoother. Before it fell dark, we saw Paloma. After Mil Flores, it looked like a city, though it was only a couple of streets of stores around a courthouse, surrounded by a few more streets of smallish homes. But there was a choice of hotels, there were restaurants, and there was running water and electricity.

  Best of all, there wasn’t anyone standing guard to tell us we couldn’t come in.

  We stopped at the first hotel, one of the new kind, one story with parking spots in front of each door. It looked pretty busy. Since I looked more like a regular person, I went into the lobby to ask about rooms. There was only one available, with one bed.

  I went back out to the Tourer to consult with my bosses.