by Lila Bowen
“Goddammit, Win —”
The cat wiggled its tail and sprang right for Rhett, and time seemed to slow as it flew through the air, paws outstretched, black claws curled and murderous. Rhett grabbed his Bowie knife and slashed right up with it as the beast hit him, knocking him onto his back and slamming the air from his lungs. Perhaps it couldn’t be shot, but the creature’s weight was real, as was its rancid death breath. Its claws sunk into Rhett’s shoulders, its mouth open and teeth angling for his throat. He caught its face in his hands, digging his fingers into the soft fur and slashing for its eyes with his thumbs. It growled and spat and tucked its head against him.
“A little help?” Rhett sputtered.
“No weapons can touch it,” Dan shouted from very near. “It’s like smoke.”
“It’s nothing goddamn like smoke at all. It weighs more than a cow. I can feel its fur!”
His knife, though, felt like it was playing with the breeze. It wasn’t lodged in muscle or bone or skin. Maybe Dan was onto something. Maybe…
“Try to grab it,” he shouted, and the cat growled as Dan and Winifred tried to wrestle it off him. The huge thing resisted, grappling and writhing.
“Yank out its whiskers,” Rhett shouted. He didn’t have an arm to spare, since his hands were the only thing holding the cat back from ripping out his throat with its impossible teeth.
With his eye closed and his hands fighting for purchase, he couldn’t see what was happening, but he sure as hell heard the cat scream and felt it shake its head, loosening its claws to bat at something, probably whichever of Rhett’s friends had managed to mangle it. Rhett peeked out his eye just in time to see the pissed-off cat’s mouth open in a hiss, and he figured he’d go ahead and do something dumb as hell that just might work.
He stuck his arm down the cat’s mouth and punched it in the back of the throat, although its wetness burned like acid.
Well, to be more clear, he reached as far down as he could, felt his knuckles scrape innards, grabbed a handful of whatever he could, and yanked.
Teeth bit into his shoulder, and claws sank into his ribs, but he scrabbled his fingers in deep, pushing his arm as far into the critter as it would go, feeling his skin tear against fangs as it went. The cat was spitting and fighting, and he shouted “Hold it down!” to his friends and reached in farther. If this didn’t work, or if he didn’t do it quick enough, he was liable to lose the whole damn arm, and from what he knew, it wasn’t going to grow back. That just made him ram his fingers down all the harder.
His fingertips scraped something hard – something that didn’t feel like it belonged in any sort of cat’s guts. It felt like… a ball of wax, maybe. Rhett knew what to do with that, so he wrapped it up in burning fingers and dug his bitten nails into whatever it was and crushed it. He felt the exact moment it happened, the wax crumbling and the cat exploding to silvery black dust around him. He exhaled, his lungs finally free to expand without the weight of the cat, and let his head fall back to the ground. Dan and Winifred nearly fell on him without the cat there, but they managed to get untangled and roll away.
Rhett held up his torn, bleeding, burned arm and uncurled his wet, bloody fingers to show exactly what he goddamn expected: a black ball of wax tangled with a whisker, a tiny flake of gold, and a bitty chip of bone.
“We got to hurry,” he said, once he caught his breath. “This shit is getting old.”
And then he passed out.
Rhett didn’t fall into dark dreams – his sleep was deep and quiet, like being lost. When he woke up, Cora was tending to his wounds. Thankfully, they were in the privacy of her wagon, which meant no one else would be forced to look at his chest unwound and covered in salve. Seemed like she’d been at it for a while, seeing as how there were ugly, waxed black stitches holding flaps of his brown skin together. When she noticed he was awake, she sat back on her heels and tried to smile. The pain of her looking at him like that, with pity, was almost worse than what the ghost cat’s claws and teeth had done to his body.
“If you were human, these cuts would go putrid and kill you,” Cora said, almost like she was scolding him.
“If I was human, none of us would be here in the first place,” he muttered, flushing and looking down as she rubbed her ointment into the ticklish skin over his ribs, where her hands had once roved in a far more entertaining manner.
Neither of them said anything about how much uglier he was now, pieced together like an old pair of long johns.
“It is fascinating to see what finds you,” she observed. “The way your destiny unfolds like a flower, every petal in its place, the bees called by some strange perfume.”
“Are you calling me a flower?”
“Perhaps. You have much in common with the lotus. Born of mud, floating toward greatness. But of course, it is a flower of purity…”
As she went for more salve, her fingers brushed over his nipple, and he gasped and huddled away. “Don’t.”
Her chuckle was soft and not cruel. “You are very conflicted. I am also conflicted. You frustrate me. Sometimes you anger me. Sometimes I feel my heart soften toward you. But still I follow you. Still, when you tell me to run, I do. I am not accustomed to such encumbrances. Winifred feels much the same. We are free women in a world that wishes to bind us, and it is odd to find ourselves already bound to something we did not choose. We can’t seem to quit you, either of us.”
She turned away and handed him his binder, and he gladly wound it tight around his chest. The skin itched as it knitted back together, leaving yet more scars. “I didn’t choose it, either. At least you two got each other now.”
“In some ways,” she said mysteriously. But most of the things Cora said sounded mysterious.
“I’m happy for you, then. You’re both… real good folks. You deserve comfort.” It was as close as he could come to giving his blessing for whatever stood between them, and Cora smiled and dipped her head.
“I do not need your permission, Rhett. Bees go from flower to flower. It is their nature. We are both, perhaps, bees, in that way.”
“You still mad we’re not after Meimei?”
She was behind him, and when her hand landed on his gored shoulder, she had her dragon claws out. Bigger than the ghost cat’s had been, they pricked into his skin. It was a warning, and he went still to show her he understood.
“I can be patient. I do not like being patient. But Winifred assures me that when you do not do the Shadow’s bidding, life becomes uncomfortable for everyone. I’m uncomfortable enough as it is. We will see Las Moras soon, she says, and I believe her. You will do your business there, and then you will lead us to Trevisan, and together, we will end him. One way or another, he will not wear my sister’s body. Yes?”
“Yes.”
She dug in her talons a little more, just to show him she could, before releasing him. He gasped – he hadn’t even realized he was holding his breath – and the pain rushed back in. The warmth of her human hand replaced the claws, rubbing the slightly numbing salve into the fresh punctures.
“One day, you will be made of nothing but scars,” Cora observed.
“Already am,” Rhett answered, glad they were finally on the same page.
For days, they pushed hard, dawn to dusk. They ate in the saddle, killed more meat on the road, and set the meat to dry in strings off the wagon, brown ribbons twisting in the wind. If Rhett felt a minor wobble here or there, they didn’t turn off their course. They even saw a column of smoke rising up from a small town at one point, but when Rhett turned that way, he felt nothing.
“We keep on to Las Moras,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Whatever troubles that town is being done by the hands of man, and he can clean up his own goddamn mess.”
Dan’s second-to-last chestnut stumbled over a rattler, which they killed and ate over that night’s fire. The horse barely escaped a nasty bite, and it was a near miss that made everyone cranky. Earl muttered under his breath about the use of giv
ing away ponies when they had none left to spare, and Rhett told him that when he could capture, tame, and ride a mustang himself, he could complain about it, and Earl shut right up and went back to being a donkey.
By the time they stopped each night, everyone was beyond exhausted. They fell to their duties, fell to their dinner, and fell to bed without much to say. Rhett, strangely enough, was happy this way. It reminded him of life on a ranch or of his time hunting the Cannibal Owl with the Rangers. It was a hard life but a simple one, and each person knew their place. There was no time to shirk, no time to fret, no time to look at the patchwork of ugliness that was his arm and feel like he’d lost something, like he had one more thing to keep hidden. No time to quarrel. Just calm and steady pacing toward a goal.
His only concern, besides Earl’s hatefulness and Cora’s miserable jitters, was old Blue, his one-eyed mule. The critter was hardy and just about made of gristle, but the punishing pace was taking its toll. Blue had to be thirty if he was a day, and his nose had started to go white before Rhett had left Pap’s farm. Each morning when Blue welcomed Rhett with a bugle and pulled his skinny bones up to standing, Rhett was grateful. One morning, he knew the old critter would stay down, and he knew that Blue would get left behind – although no matter how hungry they were at the time, Rhett outright refused to eat him or let anyone else do so. He’d have shot ’em first.
Rhett’s world was not one in which life stopped to accommodate a loyal old mule.
One night, Rhett was up late rolling a piece of gold between his fingers as he stared into the fire, too consternated to sleep. The girls were gone to their wagon, and Earl and Sam had already succumbed. Rhett was thinking about how the gold reminded him of Sam’s hair, grown long on the trip and curling at the ends in a way that made Rhett’s chest feel funny.
“What is that?” Dan asked.
“The gold I pulled from the cat.”
Dan was around the fire in seconds, snatching the gold from Rhett’s dirt-stained fingers. “You kept it? Are you truly that stupid?”
Rhett hopped up to his feet, as he hated to be on a lower level than a feller who already thought him there. “Far as I know, collecting gold is smart.” He reached to take it back, but Dan winged it off into the darkness.
“What the hell, Dan? You think money grows on trees? Because if so, I got bad news for you about the desert.”
“Rhett. Think about it. Trevisan is sending creatures after you. How do you think they’re finding you?” He stepped closer in a menacing sort of way. “Wait. Now I remember. You keep the gold from the scorpion, too?”
Rhett’s eye shifted away, and he hunched his shoulders. “Earl did.”
They both looked to Earl, who was clearly pretending their argument hadn’t woken him. His red eyelashes quivered around squinched eyes. Dan stood over him, looming.
“Give it.”
When that didn’t work, Dan nudged Earl with his boot and stuck his palm out, and Earl glared sullenly for as long as he was able, up until Dan’s hand crept to his knife. Earl winced and withdrew the tiny chunk of gold from his pocket, putting it into Dan’s hand. Dan tossed it out into the night.
“You got anything else from Trevisan?”
Poking around in his pouch, Rhett pulled out the two tiny bone fragments he’d kept, and Dan chucked them out, too, in different directions.
“Anything else in there? One of Trevisan’s eyelashes, maybe?”
Rhett grumbled unpleasant things about Dan under his breath. Coming up with nothing, he stuffed the pouch back down his shirt and said, “No, I don’t got anything else from Trevisan, save all these scars. You want to pat me down to make sure? He’s got my own toe-bone, don’t forget, and I can’t do nothing about that.”
Dan rolled his eyes. “I just want to be sure you’re not carrying a beacon that allows our enemy to find us. The scorpions made sense; that was a trap. But if he can send creatures after us, if he can find you wherever you go, then we’re never safe. We’ll have to start sleeping in turns, and when we get to Las Moras, we’ll bring Trevisan’s wrath to the Rangers’ doorstep.”
“Well, if anybody’s up for fighting him, it’s them.”
Dan gave Rhett the don’t-be-dumb look. “Oh, because more guns would’ve ended that ghost cat?”
At the memory, the healing white scars up and down Rhett’s shoulders and ribs seemed to itch and beat in time with his heart. “What do you want from me? You-all can leave anytime you please, if my company is proving unpleasant. I didn’t ask for this.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true, Dan! You said yourself that I can’t escape it.”
“Did you ever consider that we didn’t ask for our roles, either, but that still we will play them? You forget that I was drawn to you by strange means. And then my sister showed up after years away in Nueva Orleans, found us out in the middle of thousands of miles of prairie. And then Earl found you when both of you were lost. Your own mother and brother appeared as if from nowhere. We are all just as captive to your destiny as you are. And we can complain about it just as often, if we like.”
They were nearly toe to toe, then, whisper-shouting by the fire. Sam rolled over, and Rhett looked at him with a ping of guilt.
“Sorry to wake you, Sam.”
“You-all should sleep,” Sam muttered. “We got miles to go yet.”
“That’s right, Sam,” Rhett said gently. “That’s right.”
He nodded at Dan and resettled into his bedroll, into the warmth under his buffalo-skin coat. He and Sam slept mighty close these nights, close enough to touch, if a moment allowed it. Sam’s hand landed on Rhett’s fingers, soft as a dove’s call. When Rhett looked up, Sam blinked at him like a baby owl and squeezed his fingers.
“We can’t quit you, Rhett. Lord, I know I can’t.” And then he was asleep again.
It took a long time for Rhett to calm his heart down enough to join him.
Maybe Dan had been right about the bits of bone and gold, much as Rhett hated to admit it. There were no more attacks, although they slept in shifts and the crows gathered in increasingly large, dreary parties to watch them pass. At first, Rhett took small pleasure in scaring them off with his guns, but then he realized they were getting low on bullets and took to throwing rocks and shouting obscenities. Even this close to the Rangers, it wouldn’t do to be out of bullets when only bullets would work, especially the silver ones.
It rained, hard and cold, and that night they all bundled up together in the tiny wagon, breathing in one another’s breath and funk and farts. Every movement meant touching someone else, and they were all skitty as cats and just as grouchy, although Rhett secretly felt like he caught on fire every time Sam’s body twitched against his. He woke up with his head on Sam’s shoulder and feigned sleep a little longer just to enjoy the sensation.
When they ventured out in the morning, everything had turned brown and wet, a dreary land of mud. Winter had arrived. Earl had slept under the wagon in donkey form and spent the next day miserable and looking like he was caked in cow shit. The wagon wheels constantly caught and spun in the mud, and by the end of the day, Rhett was pretty sure he had a wagon-shaped bruise on his shoulder from shoving it free. The weather got dry again for a spell after that, thank goodness.
A few days later, Rhett began to recognize the terrain. They crossed a river that looked familiar and tasted sweet. The bulky rock formations and mountains seemed like arms held out to embrace him. The wobble in his belly felt like a hunger that was about to be slaked, and he urged Ragdoll on. She could sense it, too, could maybe even smell the Captain’s good grain on the air, and soon they were cantering up a well-trod road toward a familiar cabin with smoke merrily tooting out the chimney and a whole passel of horses bugling their welcome.
A line of figures emerged to stand along the porch, weapons held casually but on the ready. There were fewer Rangers than Rhett expected, but it had been months since he’d been here, and there co
uld already be another posse out on a job. One figure was more than familiar, causing a monster ripple in Rhett’s belly, along with a lurch of abject dislike.
Jiddy stepped down off the porch, grinning with tobacco-stained teeth. His bear-like beard was longer than ever, and he moseyed up to where Rhett’s horse stood.
“You almost missed it,” Jiddy said.
“Missed what?” Rhett asked, voice low and growling.
Jiddy spit on Rhett’s boot. “The Captain’s dying breath.”
Rhett was off Ragdoll and up those stairs before Jiddy could say anything else. Hands reached out to stop him, and more than one gun cocked, but Rhett threw out his bony elbows and skittered in the door and down the long hall to what he knew was the Captain’s private room. Once inside, he slammed and bolted the door against Jiddy and anybody else who’d think to come between him and the closest thing he currently had to a father. He’d never actually been in the Captain’s room before – nobody had, according to Sam – but he wasn’t about to ask permission if things were as dire as Jiddy said. With his back against the door that rattled with fists, Rhett let out a cry of dismay at what he found within. For all the dread and fear that had dogged his steps, for every foe he’d imagined facing down, he’d never reckoned that he might be racing death itself to the Captain’s door.
The Captain’s bed was a simple affair, just a straw tick mattress on a low wood platform, and the Captain was a sickly shape barely taking up room in it. His skin was nearly gray, his closed eyes sunk back in his balding skull and his lips dry and chapped. A town-looking feller frowned at Rhett’s interruption as he pinched the Captain’s spindly wrist.
“What’s wrong, doc?” Rhett asked.
“Same thing I tell you boys every time you ask. The wound’s gone putrid. I’ve tried vinegar and salt and mud and poultices and every goddamn receipt I know, but the creature that bit him didn’t much want him alive.” The doctor gently placed the Captain’s wrist on the mattress, and the old man flinched like even that small movement hurt.
Rhett stepped closer, his hand hovering near the Captain’s forehead. He’d never have touched the man otherwise, but he had to make some connection. Hell, maybe the Shadow would have some instinct on how to help, since the Shadow had driven him here. His palm touched sweaty skin so hot Rhett was surprised the man’s head wasn’t letting off visible steam.