Revenge and the Wild

by Michelle Modesto

  The onlookers gasped. It was an astonishing thing to ask. The consumption of vampire blood by humans and creatures alike was illegal. It certainly had its healing qualities, but it could give a powerful deadly creature even more strength. It could give humans an unnaturally long life span, or it could give them a horrible death and even turn them into the Undying, if someone were to consume too much. It was poison, after all. Only a vampire knew the right dosage, and vampires couldn’t be trusted.

  Nigel whipped his head to face Costin and answered with an enthusiastic “No!”

  He leaned into Westie’s ear so only she could hear his words. “Stop this at once,” he demanded.

  Slobber frothed from her lips. “They’ll pay for what they did,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “I’m not releasing you until you calm down.”

  Clay stuck to her cheeks, turning tears to mud. “But it’s them,” she said, hating how meek she sounded.

  Nigel’s expression battled between anger and sorrow. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know? Where’s your proof?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “I don’t have any.”

  Nigel pinched her face between his fingers and forced her to look at the woman in red and the family walking toward them. “Look at them,” he said. Westie blinked the dust from her eyes. “Those are people of society with a fortune in their pockets. Money means power. Do you honestly think anyone will believe they are cannibals? And do you think the sheriff will just take your word for it like he did the last time?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I assure you he will not. If you go off spouting accusations and the Fairfields catch wind of it, they will get spooked and leave.”

  No, that wasn’t at all what she wanted. She hadn’t thought of it that way. If the sheriff didn’t believe her, the Fairfields would be gone, and by the looks of it they had enough money to take themselves far out of her reach.

  “You need to forget about this, at least until we can get home and discuss it rationally,” Nigel said. He let go of her face. “Now, pull yourself together.”

  She wanted to curl into a ball and hide from everyone watching her. “I don’t think I can.”

  “You must try.” He glanced to his side. “And be quick about it.”

  The faces of the mayor and the woman in red appeared above her like air balloons hiding the sun.

  “Is everything all right?” the mayor asked with less concern than curiosity.

  Costin climbed off Westie and helped her to stand. Her dress was filthy and the hem was ripped. She dusted the clay off the best she could and smoothed her unruly hair. Alistair stood several feet away covered in dirt, steam blasting from his mechanical mask as he struggled to catch his breath. She was glad to see she hadn’t hurt him too badly.

  Clearing the dirt from her throat, she said, “I have these spells. An affliction from a sickly childhood.”

  “Oh, you poor dear,” the red huntress told her.

  Her voice, Westie noticed, was the same as she remembered. Kind, like when the woman had welcomed her family to sup with them. She remembered, too, how quickly that voice had turned to shrieks as Westie ran through the cabin trying to escape.

  When the woman touched her, the stump of Westie’s arm began to throb beneath her machine, and her skin prickled as though it were trying to shrivel away from her.

  The mayor sighed. “If we’re done with this, I’d like to introduce my guests.”

  A pig. That’s what the mayor reminded her of, with his sun-tender skin and the curly wisps of hair on his head. So why hadn’t the cannibals turned him into bacon already? Unless he’s one of them, she thought.

  “Nigel, my good man, I’d like you to meet Mrs. Lavina Fairfield,” the mayor said.

  Lavina Fairfield. Was that her real name? They had never mentioned their names in the cabin. Westie needed something definitive. Something that made her certain, that she could put in Nigel’s face and say I told you so.

  “This here is Hubbard, the head of the Fairfield clan and a fine cook, I might add.” Westie put a fist in front of her mouth, silently belched acidic fumes, and hoped she wouldn’t vomit. “This strapping young lad is their son, Cain.” Cain’s rat eyes studied Westie’s mechanical arm, his mouth puckered in disgust. “Of course you already met their nephew, James Lovett Junior.”

  And then there was James. Westie was unsure where he played into the whole picture. He hadn’t been with the family at the cabin. His presence stirred more doubt within her, a feeling she wasn’t too fond of.

  “And here is the youngest of the clan,” the mayor said.

  The little girl lifted her face. She wore a pink ruffled dress, with her flaxen ringlets sticking out of her bonnet. When she smiled, Westie felt unease wrap around her like a smothering embrace.

  “This little spitfire is Miss Olivia, but folks call her Olive.”

  All the names swirled around in Westie’s head like too much whiskey. She would never remember them all. She could hardly remember seconds after they were announced.

  Olive looked at her mother, who was staring curiously at Westie. The little girl frowned and strangled her doll. It was handmade, similar to the dolls Westie’s mother used to make her, and had a pink dress with a crisscross pattern all over it. The girl twisted its head until it popped off.

  “Oh no, Olive, look what you’ve done,” her mother scolded. “How many times must I sew this head back on?”

  “Don’t worry about that ragged old thing. We’ll get you a proper doll. I hear the general store here has a collection of lovely dolls made of porcelain with eyes that blink,” the mayor said.

  Olive threw the toy to the ground. “I don’t want a proper doll. I want you to fix this one!”

  The girl’s voice grated at Westie’s ears. It was all too much to handle. She needed to escape. She turned to Alistair, who had already recovered.

  “Fetch my horse, Alley. I’m not feeling so good.”

  Only when Alistair returned with her gelding and his mare did her stomach settle. Just as she was about to mount her horse, she felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. When she turned, she came face-to-face with Lavina Fairfield.

  Westie took a deep breath and tried to keep the fear raging inside her from showing on her face.

  White powder settled into the crow’s-feet around Lavina’s eyes and the frown lines of her mouth. The powder was meant to make her look young and fresh but had the opposite effect. The scent of rose water coming off her skin reminded Westie of old people.

  “I hope this isn’t terribly intrusive, but may I ask how you lost your arm?” Lavina said.

  Westie hadn’t expected such a blunt question. It was rude of Lavina to ask. It would’ve been even ruder for Westie not to answer. Everyone around them watched, waiting for the answer.

  “It was a steamboat accident,” Nigel answered for her. The tendon in Westie’s jaw relaxed. Nigel stood behind Bena, holding her shoulders. Whether it was for comfort or to hold her back, Westie wasn’t sure. “A sad story, really. You see, during my travels back East years ago, I was on a barge heading down the Mississippi when my crew and I came upon a sinking vessel. Westie was drowning, her arm caught in the spinning paddle. I couldn’t save her family, who’d also been aboard, so I took the child into my charge.”

  Lavina’s shifty eyes settled, seeming convinced of the story. After all, Nigel’s word was as good as gold in Rogue City and its surrounding sister towns. The rest of the onlookers believed him as well.

  Only Nigel, Alistair, the Wintu, and the old sheriff—who was dead now—knew how she’d really lost her arm. All everyone else knew was that one day Nigel went into the woods with Bena and came back weeks later with an armless white child. A great mystery had been solved. Some looked disappointed that it hadn’t been a more thrilling tale.

  “How very generous of you,” Lavina said to Nigel.

  Nigel smiled and bowed his head. “If you’ll excuse us,” h
e said, “I must get Westie home for her treatment.”

  Seven

  When they got back to the mansion, Westie went straight to her room and locked her door. Nigel’s muffled words came from the other side. “Westie, we need to talk about this.”

  Ignoring him, she went to her desk, crushing several pieces of graphite between her metal fingers before she finally managed to scribble a note for Bena. She attached it to a telegraph bird and sent it on its way.

  Nigel continued. “James and the Fairfields are staying at the Roaming Inn. I told them you weren’t up for guests after your episode at the docks. They were very understanding.” There was a long pause. “Please, Westie. Talk to me.”

  She shut him out until he finally gave up. Beneath her bed was a loose floorboard with a groove just big enough to get her fingernail into. Inside the nook was a silver flask. It was empty, of course. Having booze so close would’ve been far too tempting. Instead she kept it as a reminder of all she could lose. But on that day it reminded her of what she was missing.

  She sat against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, twisting it in her hand until the sun went down. Her eyes and cheeks had gone raw from wiping them.

  “I need a drink,” she said to the empty room.

  She knew if she drank again she’d regret it the next morning—and possibly all the mornings that came after—but she found it difficult to care about that at the moment.

  Changing out of her ruined dress, she put on a lace blouse beneath a striped vest, brown knee trousers, white spats over her boots, a leather holster that went over her shoulders and crossed her back to carry her parasol, as well as a leg holster for her knife. She’d learned long ago to pack heavy and never wear a dress in the Tight Ship saloon.

  The saloon was anything but the tight ship it claimed to be. The floors, made from the rotted hulls of wrecked steamboats, were stained with blood and vomit. Bullet holes peppered the walls and pointed dirty fingers of light at the tables from the lamps outisde. It was a stinking tomb made worse by the sweat and bad breath that thickened the air during the last week of summer.

  Westie took a seat at the table with the fewest gamblers and placed her bet, her gaze sweeping the room. A pack of werewolves in human form sat at the table beside her. They took turns pissing on chairs, marking their territory each time one would get up to buy a drink. A banshee cancanned on top of the bar, giggling as a drunken goblin sang off-key and an old sprite sitting on a rickety stool looked up her skirt. It was a rowdy bunch of patrons that evening.

  Westie held a tumbler of whiskey in her copper hand. The amber pool sparkled in the muted light as she swirled it in the glass. It seemed the pact she’d made with Nigel two years ago to stop drinking was void now that the cannibals she’d been hunting were down the road staying at the inn. She no longer needed Nigel’s training, money, or weapons.

  But the thought of disappointing Nigel made her hesitate. She’d given him her word, and that was supposed to mean something. With her elbow on the table, she put her head in her flesh hand and tried talking herself into leaving, thinking about all the horrible—and downright stupid—things she’d done while drinking. Like how she’d earned the nickname Wrong Way Westie, because after a few drinks she couldn’t find her way home.

  Only the memories of her drinking days weren’t all bad: the burn, the courage, and eventually feeling nothing at all. She wanted to feel nothing again. History told her that particular feeling was addictive, that she’d need to drink more and more each time to sustain it. Stepping off that wagon was easy, but getting back on was nearly impossible.

  She stared into her glass, eyes burning. She’d love nothing more than to throw the tumbler across the room, but the idea of taking her pain home with her, sitting with it the rest of the evening, was too much.

  Putting her lips to the glass, she tossed her head back, the whiskey warming her all over like a hug. She winced, shook her head, and stuck her tongue out.

  Several hours, and tumblers, later Westie blinked. Hazy light flashed before her as if she were watching the landscape through the spokes of a moving wagon wheel. Two gamblers sat at the table with her. Both were leprechauns. The T scars on their wrists were thievery brandings, letting honest folk know they were fugitives.

  Another gambler put his coins on the table to join the game. Westie looked up, spit whiskey all over her cards, and nearly fell off her seat when she saw James.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as she coughed.

  “I’m fine,” she said in a strangled voice, throat feeling like she’d swallowed a wasps’ nest.

  He sat beside her with a drink in hand. He had an educated thirst, sipping bourbon from the top shelf. She snuck glances at him as he smiled at the dealer and placed his bet. He didn’t look like a monster—he didn’t look anything like the Fairfields at all. With full lips, a straight nose, and a spattering of light freckles across his cheeks, he was downright handsome. She couldn’t imagine him being a killer like his family.

  Westie tried to put the Fairfields out of her head. She’d come to the saloon to forget about them, after all.

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” James said to her.

  She picked the cards in front of her up off the table and fanned them in her mechanical hand. “I do now.”

  Westie tossed her coins onto the pile in the middle of the table.

  One of the leprechauns, an old buzzard with jaundiced eyes, watched her. He ran a filthy hand through his yellow beard, his face more hair than flesh with the exception of a knobby potato of a nose and plump red lips.

  “What?” Westie said, crushing her face into a glower. “Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?”

  He looked back down at his cards, sitting so long in silence that Westie feared he’d gone and died until he piped up, voice loud enough to belong behind a Sunday pulpit.

  “Aye,” he said in a charred voice, “too rich for this old bag o’ bones,” and tossed his tobacco-smeared cards facedown on the table.

  The other leprechaun was much younger than his companion. He continued to glance between his cards and Westie’s mechanical arm. His sour stench reached across the table and rustled the hot whiskey stewing in her guts. He pointed at her arm.

  “How do you move that thing?” he asked.

  Westie’s vision twinned. She wasn’t sure which one of him to look at. “Wintu magic.”

  Both leprechauns bristled at the mention of the natives.

  It wasn’t true. Her machine was just a prosthetic attached to bone and nerves.

  “The tart’s trying to distract you, fool. She’s taking all your money,” the old leprechaun said to the young one with amusement in his voice.

  Westie looked at James through tricky eyes and a blue curtain of smoke. “You fixing to play or not?” she said.

  He smiled, tossing his offering to the table.

  The smoke in the room, the smell of piss, and the drink that had gone to her head made Westie’s eyes water. The pungent sweetness of cigar smoke and the earthy smell of spittoons made her tongue feel thick and brought a salty taste to the back of her throat.

  She yawned to keep back the vomit and moved her cards into her flesh hand, balling her mechanical one into a fist. The brass gears turned without sound, and clusters of thick copper wire moved like tendons.

  The young leprechaun pulled at his flaking bottom lip, took a deep breath, and eased it out before laying his cards on the table and sliding his chair back in defeat. Westie fumbled with the coins, her clockwork fingers not as agile as the flesh and bone of her left hand.

  “Hold on one moment, please,” James said. There was something about the way he talked, a slight drawl lingering behind certain vowels, that made Westie think all the prim talk was just an act. “You haven’t won yet.”

  He splayed his cards on the table for her to see: queens.

  Westie tossed her sevens onto the table and wiped at her eyes.

  “Sevens?” James said with a skewe
d grin. There was a little white scar across his bottom lip, only visible when he smiled. “That’s brilliant. I was almost ready to fold. You have an excellent poker face.”

  “Wait one blamed minute,” the young leprechaun said. He climbed onto his chair but even then couldn’t match James’s sitting height. He took hold of the starched lapels of the boy’s coat. “You been cheatin’, boy?”

  “Certainly not,” James said with a stubborn incline of his chin. “I play at the gentlemen’s club in the city.” He pulled his expensive coat out of the young leprechaun’s grip, smoothing the wrinkled fabric. “I have had adequate practice.”

  Westie tapped a copper finger against the table. Another drink and another game were what the doctor ordered. She wasn’t drunk enough to feel nothing yet, and there was more coin to lose.

  “Stop your bitching and play the damn game,” she said.

  The young leprechaun snarled, revealing crumbling teeth and fiery gum disease beneath his pointed nose.

  Westie rolled her eyes.

  “Take off that fine coat and show me the cards you been hiding up them sleeves,” the young leprechaun said, tugging at James’s cuff.

  “I don’t cheat,” James said, tugging back. “You’re just a shit card player.”

  The leprechaun’s nostrils flared. “What did you say to me?”

  “You heard me,” James said.

  The music stopped as the young leprechaun slid a trapper knife from his boot. A crowd gathered. James froze in place. The dancing banshee shrieked as banshees often did, and ran from the room. Westie was on her feet and around the table before anyone had the chance to notice. The creature thrust his knife toward James’s face, but Westie was faster despite her drunkenness. She reached out, gripping the blade with her machine and twisting it until it snapped. The leprechaun dropped what was left of his weapon and tried to flee, but she grabbed his wrist and hugged it in her copper grip. Her innards growled and she had to piss something fierce, but she held on. She stared at him a long stretch, noticed the muscles of his face twitch.