He just couldn’t shoot, and sometimes that was what you had to do.
I felt a strong urge to become somebody else. I stopped at a secondhand clothes stall and bought a different skirt and blouse, and when I ate a light lunch in a restaurant, I changed in its ladies’ room, transferring everything in the pockets. I wadded up the hat and shawl and stuffed them into my bag, and I resumed the kerchief over my hair. When I came out, I looked different, but I did look like most of the young women I’d seen in this area. Paler, for sure, and my hair was still too short under the kerchief, but otherwise I blended.
They found me anyway.
I’d counted my money in the bathroom, out of sight of prying eyes, and I was sure I had enough to get to Sweetwater in Texoma. From there I could walk home. It would take me several days, but that seemed like nothing compared with the vision of my relief when I was out of this mess, a prospect so golden that it lured me forward.
I set out for the train station at a brisk pace. I had about a mile to go when I realized I’d picked up a follower. When I got a look at her, I saw a girl, younger than me, no visible tattoos, but wearing a city-type dress and low-heeled shoes. I wondered if we’d killed off all the mature grigoris, the strongest ones. I hoped so.
Since she was blond and dressed like a foreigner, the girl attracted a lot of attention on the street. A couple of men were trailing her, and they weren’t being subtle about it. I didn’t want her to get raped, and I didn’t want to kill her . . . but I would if I had to.
I changed my course, took every dodge I could think of, switched back and forth between the hat and the shawl, and I simply could not shake the bitch. I didn’t know how good a wizard she was going to be, but she was a skilled tracker. Then, after ten more minutes of walking in the wrong direction, of getting tired and hot, I realized Blond Girl was only the lightning rod. There was another follower, a boy who could pass for Mexican. He was wearing the right clothes. He was as young as she was.
He had a gun, too. I could see the outline of it under his shirt.
Time to work. I set about it with a grim resolve. I was so tired of this city and its crowds. Everywhere someone was watching. And surely, one of those people would be law-abiding enough, or angry enough, to call the police. I couldn’t have that. Jail would kill me. Galilee had been in once, and she’d described it to me in a lot of detail. Jailers didn’t like gunnies at all, and I could be sure that was true here in Mexico as well as in Texoma. Walking faster, I headed for a place in the distance, an open space with no roofs. I hoped that meant no witnesses.
When I got there, still ahead of the trackers by only a little, I discovered I’d worked my way into a section of the city that held the stockyards. And that was by the railroad, naturally. The fear of the animals was as heavy in the air as the odor of shit. There was lots of bellowing from the cattle, combined with the sounds of trains being shunted from one track to the next. Men shouted in the distance, but I couldn’t see a living soul.
Perfect.
I went around the corner of one pen, ducked behind a bin of hay, and waited.
Sure enough, the girl reached me first. I had her before she could get her hands up, and she gasped behind my hand. “Don’t bite,” I said, in case she’d thought of it. I showed her my gun. “If you do, I’ll tap your skull.”
Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. I know what that looks like. I turned just in time to see the boy coming up behind me, his gun raised to give me the skull tap I’d promised her. I swung her around, the gun descended, and she was out. He jumped back with a cry of outrage, and I had my knife out, ready for a fight. Instead he turned to run. I tackled him and held the knife to his throat.
“Who do you work for?” I stuck him with the point of the knife, just enough for him to feel the prick of the steel and feel the blood trickle.
“I—I—no one! I’m just a thief!” The Russian accent told me that was a lie, even if I hadn’t known the truth already.
“How did you find me?”
“You looked like you had a bit of money on you,” he said, insulting me by hanging on to the story.
I jabbed him with more force, and he yelped. “This is the last time I’m asking you. Who do you work for?”
“Klementina,” he said.
“Liar.” He’d given that up too easy. Klementina was way scarier than me. Of course, she wasn’t here with a knife..
“How did you know?” He believed I could tell he was lying, maybe by magic.
“Who?” I said, making him bleed a third time. I hated being this close, smelling his fear just like the animals’, watching the trickle of red.
“Our prince,” he said, and I killed him.
I got out of there fast. The girl was still unconscious, and I did not know whether or not she would live. But I could hardly stay there with her. She’d have to wizard her way out of her situation.
I walked quickly, glancing down to make sure I was not bloodstained. I was clear of blotches, though I was dusty from lying on top of the boy in the dirt. That wasn’t critical. There were plenty of people who needed to wash, in these streets. I shook my skirt.
I figured out my route to the station. I could actually hear the noise of an incoming train. I was so close. I was leaving Eli (Prince Ilya, I reminded myself) with his new champion, Klementina, so I should have had a clear conscience. I had done my job, all the way down the line. I could simply buy a ticket and get on the train—which I’d only once done—and go in the right direction. Sooner or later I’d be back to the life I knew and understood.
I should have had a clear conscience. But I did not.
I looked around me very carefully when I got to the edge of the large paved plaza outside the station. And immediately the situation got complicated again. In the middle, right out in the open, I spotted my niece—or my sister, or the unrelated girl child. Felicia was looking from side to side, and she was very nervous, her hands clenched into tiny fists, her shoulders rigid.
Now that I was getting a look at the child in the daylight, she was short and grubby—like just about everyone I could see, really—and her black hair was dusty and needed washing and trimming. Felicia was darker skinned than I was, and wearing worn sandals, and was painfully skinny. I watched her from the shadow of an awning for a minute or two. The girl might as well have hung a sign around her neck that said she was waiting for someone, someone she thought might not come.
Very reluctantly I stepped into her line of sight, and her whole face came alive with relief. She hurried directly to me. I watched behind her, and no one else turned in my direction. Felicia threw her arms around me, pinning my skirt to my hips, and said “Sister!” in a loud voice.
“Hello, squirt!” I tried to sound teasing, happy, like I’d heard other adults sound with kids.
“They’re coming after you,” she said, very quietly, in English.
“I’ve already met a couple of ’em,” I said. “Others here?”
“This awful old woman and your boyfriend, they’re one street away.”
“I think they won’t hurt us. Others?”
“Yeah. Two grigoris, men, both grown-up. They’re following the old woman and the boyfriend.”
“You did good, finding me to tell me.” Felicia let go and looked up at me, beaming. “You are my sister,” I said, “aren’t you?” For no sure reason, I felt it was true.
“I don’t know.”
“Where is Sergei?”
“Dead,” she said, her face an awful blank. “That thing killed him.”
“Paulina? The zombie woman?”
“Yes. When he went to pull her body out of the house, her hand grabbed his leg, and she bit him.”
“What did you do?”
“I cut off her head with a shovel, and Uncle Sergei, he told me to leave before he changed into one of them.”
�
�And he turned?”
“I don’t know. I got out of there. I locked the door behind me, like he said.”
She could follow instructions, which was a good thing.
“All right,” I said, though it absolutely wasn’t. “Felicia, we’re going to see how far we can get on the train. How long until it leaves going east?”
Felicia glanced up at the sun. “In less than an hour,” she said.
“Here we go, then.” I took her hand. “Let’s pretend we’re good sisters now,” I said. “I’m letting you buy the tickets because you’re so little and cute.”
Felicia smiled up at me like I was a vision of the Virgin Mary. “Come on, then . . . wait. What’s your name?”
I laughed a little then, because my sister didn’t know my name. “I’m Lizbeth Rose,” I said. I eyed her closely, but she hadn’t heard of me.
“So here we go,” she said, trying to keep the smile on her face.
“Here we go,” I agreed. “How old are you, Felicia?”
“I’m ten,” she said. “I think.”
“Did you know your mom?”
“I kind of remember her. She was half Mexican, half Holy Russian.”
“Was she a grigori?”
“Not like Oleg or Sergei,” Felicia said. “Like your boyfriend.”
This “boyfriend” thing grated on me, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. “So she had power?”
“She did,” Felicia said. “She was incredible.”
I wondered if the girl had any real memories of her mother. “How did she pass away?”
“She caught the fever. He wouldn’t take her to the hospital. She died.”
“Not much doctors can do for the flu.”
“No. But they didn’t get to try.”
She was old for ten. “So you just stayed on?”
“He was my dad. One of them was. And there were women. Some of them were nice.”
And some weren’t. Well, hell. “Listen to me now. Whatever I say, go along with it. I don’t have time to explain everything ahead of time. I want you to be safe. You do the talking for us,” I whispered as we stepped up to the ticket window.
“Where are we going?” she asked, staying more on the subject than I was.
“To Sweetwater. That’s in Texoma. See how much it is for four tickets.”
Felicia put on a perky smile that almost made her cute. She began talking to the older man behind the grille in rapid Spanish, tossing her head back at me, laughing. She asked a question. He looked behind him at the train schedule, gave her a price.
She turned to me. Very slowly, in Spanish, she said, “It’s fifty pesos for the four of us.”
I felt in my pocket and withdrew the money. I’d put it in separate rolls of bills, so it was easy to count out fifty. I had very little left. I nodded at the ticket seller, who gave me a serious bow back. I gave the money to Felicia, who handed it in to the older man. He passed over four tickets. We turned away.
And here came damned Klementina and Eli. I did my best to look surprised and pleased, which startled both of them. Quite a bit.
“Auntie!” I said, and embraced the old grigori. She hated every second of my touching her. I enjoyed that. “I took out two teenagers over by the stockades,” I said into her ear. “There are more following you, two grown men. Felicia and I bought four tickets for the train going east.”
“Who the hell is this child?”
“Someone you should treat with great care,” I said, making sure Felicia and Eli could hear me. “She is the daughter of the late Oleg Karkarov.”
That hit home. Felicia looked up at me, her little face unreadable. I returned her eye contact with some force. I wanted her to stay alive. Klementina and Eli could protect her. If they believed she was the key to saving Alexei’s life, they would do anything to get her to the Holy Russian Empire in safety.
Eli said, “Is this the truth? She was lying to us yesterday?”
“Yes,” I said. “She was afraid of being taken from her home.”
“How has that changed?” He was definitely suspicious.
“Sergei was murdered after we left.”
“By whom?”
“Paulina.” I had been hoping he wouldn’t ask, but of course that was stupid.
Eli was staring at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. “We killed her,” he said finally.
“Not enough,” I told him. “Just . . . not enough.” And there really wasn’t time to talk about this.
The departing train left with a great deal of noise, and the next train came into the station, shrieking and spreading gusts of hot air and dust in every direction.
“You have to get on this train,” I told Klementina. “As soon as you can.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to hold them off until the train leaves.”
“Are you trying to be noble, like Ilya? These are trained wizards, and they will kill you.”
“They haven’t yet. Could be I’ll get them before they get me.”
“Very well,” the old woman said. “I want a crack at them first.”
“Be my guest.” I smiled at her.
Eli was about to protest—he’d been listening to us with increasing fury. “I can fight,” he said.
“Of course you can,” I said. And I meant it. “But I can’t get this girl to the HRE. That’s why you hired me, so you could do this for . . . your cause.”
As I looked up at Eli, his face hardened. He let out a deep breath. “Easy death, Lizbeth,” he said, stretching out a hand to Felicia. She dropped mine and took his without hesitation. Twisty little thing. I thought about giving her a kiss, but that was silly. And her forehead was dirty.
“They are letting passengers on now,” Klementina said, her voice harsh. “Go, then.”
“They’ll be here,” Felicia said urgently, and tugged on Eli. She glanced over at me. With her free hand she pointed at an alleyway.
At that moment I didn’t doubt she was my half sister. She had some magic in her, more than me. I believed her mother had had the power. The grigoris weren’t in sight, but she knew they were about to come out of a side street onto the station plaza.
I handed Eli two tickets, stuck one in my own skirt pocket, handed one to Klementina, who glanced at it and stuffed it into her blouse. “Just in case,” I said to her. I turned to Eli and Felicia. “Go,” I said, jerking my head toward the train. “Now. Don’t make me waste this.”
I dropped my bag on the platform, pulled out the Winchester. I liberated the Colt strapped to my leg, and pulled out the other one. I put on my little-boy gun belt so I could draw them fast. Every other firearm in the bag was ready.
I could hear people begin to exclaim, but I paid no attention.
I didn’t look after Eli and Felicia. They’d get on the train. That was the point, the point of this whole damn trip, though I hadn’t known that when I’d signed on for it.
Klementina strode a few yards to stand in the exact center of the paved area. She looked tiny and aged, but hardly frail. She looked exactly like an old witch, and she looked scary as hell. The plaza had been busy, with the shops all around and customers and train passengers walking rapidly with purpose. Now that began to change.
No one exactly shrieked and ran when Klementina took her position, but the people crossing the plaza gave her a wide berth, and the ordinary foot traffic began to slow and hesitate. After observing Klementina’s Alamo-like stand and my guns, those boarding the train hurried to get on. Anyone with business they could postpone began to move away from the train plaza and head back into the neighborhood. It was easy for the most ignorant passerby to see that trouble was coming, coming real fast.
The train made its long hoot. It was ready to pull out.
“Alternate,” Klementina called.
“Me first,” I said, because I knew it would irritate her. And then the first wizard stepped out of the alley, and I shot him in the head, worked the lever. I put another one in his body to make sure.
The next one, a short, stumpy woman, ran out of a shop on the other side of the plaza, and Klementina got her with a terrible spell that almost decapitated the woman. I had fired at the woman twice, to distract her.
There was running and screaming. I like to work quietly, but this had never been a quiet job and it would not have a quiet ending. Where was the second man? Felicia had said two men were following Eli and Klementina
The train was moving, with that chuffing noise. But not as fast as I wanted it to move. I fired a shot into the opening of the alley, just to slow down whoever was coming. I hit some stonework, and the chips flew, prompting a yell of anger.
Got a woman next, a fortyish redhead, who dashed out of the alley with blood on her cheek. She was furious and tough as nails until she went down with a bullet to the left shoulder. Worked the lever. Her right shoulder would have been better, but she turned.
Klementina paralyzed the man who leaped out at her (finally, the second man), but he got a partial hit, I could see out of the corner of my eye. Could not spare a moment for Klementina, who was on the ground but not dead.
Another man went down,, and the Winchester was out. I dropped it and raised my Colts. Two-handed firing. Didn’t do it often, but this time I had to keep up a barrage and it had to hit the target more often than not.
Finally, running at me with her hands outstretched, that damn Belinda Trotter, and I fired at her with all I had. Suddenly realized it was not really her, because there was no shadow. The real Belinda was directly behind her illusion, and when I saw that shadow, I hit her center mass three times. She went down hard, sprawled on the hot paving stones, and there was an abrupt silence.
I wheeled in a circle, looking for someone else to shoot. But there was no one standing.
The train had gone.
The police would be here any second.
Klementina was not yet dead. As I looked, her hand twitched. I went over to her, knelt. I realized I wasn’t sure I could get up again. Tired.
An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) Page 25