In The Service Of The Queen
( The Gunsmith Series Book 1 )
C.K. Crigger
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
A Look at Black Crossing by C.K. Crigger
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About the Author
In The Service Of The Queen
(The Gunsmith Series Book 1)
by
C.K. Crigger
Kindle Edition
© Copyright 2016 C.K. Crigger (as revised)
City Lights Press
P.O. Box 620427
Las Vegas, NV 89162
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.
ISBN: 978-1-62918-561-3
To my husband, who has put up with me all these years.
And to Counting Crows, whose song “Rain King” could take me instantly into the story.
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Chapter 1
The strange, dark spell didn’t give much warning before it dropped over me—not that they ever do. I tried to resist as a force, stronger than my meager powers, swept me out of the here-and-now of the gun shop and carried me into the past. The workroom blurred around me, as if I’d turned my head faster than my eyes could track, flickered, then faded to black.
It was night here, with a darkness almost suffocating in its density. I stood side-by-side with a woman whose name I knew to be Miranda; a woman distraught to the edge of madness and oblivious of my presence.
We sheltered behind a building—a barn, I think—or perhaps a chicken coop, judging from the animal smell surrounding it. She waited—I waited—so close beside her that I shared the warmth of her oversized woolen coat. Somehow I knew she had grabbed the coat off a hook beside the back door as she ran out of the house to take refuge in the night.
I heard words, an echo explaining her rage, playing again and again inside her head until the meaning spilled over into my brain.
“You can’t,” Miranda had said to the man. They had just finished a hurried supper. Hurried because he said he had an appointment. “You won’t! If you want her then pack your things and leave. I won’t have you for my husband. Just don’t expect me to take you back when you crawl home come morning. I won’t take you back this time. Not this time—or ever again.”
And I heard his laughter, felt her cringe at the insulting way he clucked her under the chin and said, “Sure you will, darlin’ You love me, remember? And you’re too damn ugly to get a man without paying for his services. Well, my dear, you don’t pay me enough to have exclusive rights. You’ll have to learn to share.”
He laughed all the way up the stairs when he went to change his clothes. He was going to her and didn’t care if his lawful wife knew it.
His derision followed Miranda outdoors even as she hid from his scorn.
Hid from him.
But then she discovered the pistol in the pocket of the coat. His coat, carrying his scent, cocooning her in a false warmth. The pistol was the .44 caliber Colt Hartford Dragoon she’d bought him for their first wedding anniversary, back when she still believed he loved her.
Before she learned he coveted the pistol only because it was rare and expensive, and because it had been designed as an exclusive presentation piece for the Czar of Russia.
He carried the gun around in his pocket, another trophy to show off to his cronies. Carried it fully loaded, as Miranda discovered when she felt the nipples around cylinder were capped.
The wind whistled around the corner of the shed, spinning a maelstrom of dying leaves from the trees. Leaves as dry and shattered as her dreams. And she waited, one black-gloved hand clenched upon the pistol she had given him, while her heart swelled and beat into a crescendo of rage.
I waited with her, watching, my own pulse accelerating as I felt what was in the other woman’s mind.
He whistled as he came down the path toward the barn. The saddle horse tied in there pricked his ears and stamped his feet, recognizing the sound as a call to run.
Miranda went still. The blood pounded in her ears, dilating the capillaries in her head and filling her eyes with a red haze. The gun was in her hand when she stepped into the path in front of him.
I stood at her shoulder when she said, her voice trembling, “Don’t go. Please don’t go. I don’t want to have to do this.”
“You?” The smile in his voice told her he didn’t believe her threat.
“You won’t shoot me, Miranda. Go in and go to bed. I’m late already.”
He went to brush her aside and the first bullet, when she pulled the trigger, plunged first through his hand, then into his greedy black heart.
The second bullet went in her own open mouth, and out through the back of her head.
The gun she’d used dropped from my slack fingers and clattered onto the wooden workroom floor.
“Boothenay!” My dad, Samuel N. Irons, looked around from his work and spoke in an aggravated tone. He walked over to retrieve the pistol and check whether the fall had damaged anything. “Watch what you’re doing, child. Mr. Frye is paying a lot of money to restore this weapon for him. We can do without you making the job any harder.”
“I wonder if Mr. Frye knows someone was murdered with this gun?” My heart was pounding. Then, with the aftermath of rage still inside of me, I cried.
Sometimes I get the feeling I’m in the wrong profession.
I was thirteen when this strange voyage of discovery all began. Oh, not with the Frye affair. That came later, when I already had some experience with this magic-carpet-ride thing I do. No. I started out a little less dramatically.
I remember I was helping my dad in the shop just as I did every day after school. Only on this day, between one minute and the next, my whole life changed. There I was, minding my own business and doing my regular chores, when I awoke—or came to—or something—to find myself standing stock-still in the middle of the workshop with my eyes bugged out and my mouth hanging open. Or so they told me.
“Hello,” my dad said, hovering like an old mother hen and sounding worried. “Are you back with us now? Where have you been?”
I know I stood there, feeling space and the eternity of time whirl madly around me. A combination of amusement park, virtual reality ride, and immersion in an interactive computer game. Fun, in a different kind of way.
“Whoa!” I surfaced slowly, awed by the strange sensation I’d just had. Where had I been? Good question, though not complete. It had another part, like for instance, who had I been? “Golly, Dad. For a minute there I thought I was someone else. And I felt as if I got zapped somewhere, I’m not sure where, in some other time. It was like totally bizarre, man! We’re talking really spooky.”
All of which did not answer the question of where I’d been. Yet how was I to explain that, for a moment,
I’d seen a middle-aged woman with fierce golden eyes staring down the barrel of the same 1862
Henrys Patent Repeating rifle I now held in my own hands? She’d been tracking the advance of a…what? The vision faded before I learned the answer.
Only later did I wonder how my dad knew about the feeling of displacement when I had yet to say a word. I had no chance to dwell on that question, because my brother Scott blinked three or four times in rapid succession as if he couldn’t believe his eyes and said, “Jeez, Boothenay, what happened to you just now? Do you know you almost faded away while we were watching? How’d you do that?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, not at all sure myself. Oh, I saw the twin looks of horrified dismay on Dad’s and Scott’s faces. And in Scott, I fancied, a little pure wonder. “Faded?”
“Yeah! Hey, that was weird, you know? At first you looked like you were off in lala land, having a fit, then whoosh. I think you’ve been sniffing too much gun cleaning solvent.”
Gun shops are always redolent with the odor of oils, cleaning fluids and chemicals. Scott and I took the smell for granted, since it had been with us all of our lives. Usually we didn’t even notice there was a an odor. I suppose Scott’s class at school had been doing drug awareness studies or something, so my strange behavior put the words in his mouth. No matter why he said it, I took instant umbrage.
“I never,” I said, at once on the defensive. “I always use my respirator. You’re the one who goes around giving everything the smell test. You didn’t even turn on the exhaust fan when you used acetone to clean that Navy Colt .36 revolver we got in last week. I’ll bet you’re the one who’s stoned half the time.”
Scott turned a furious red. “Well, at least I’ve never had a fit . And I didn’t really clean the Colt. I just wiped the cylinder down so I could look at the engraving. Nobody needs the exhaust for that.” He cast an alarmed glance at Dad, but since Dad ignored the part about sniffing solvent, it was obvious he hadn’t heard a word either of us said. Which was probably just as well, I expect, though rather uncharacteristic of Sam Irons.
Dad was studying his tools as if he’d never seen them before, as though fascinated by the way they were scattered in a random pattern on his workbench. He selected first one and then another, before setting them all back down without changing the arrangement in any way. I knew from the intense expression on his face that he was thinking—
hard.
“That’s enough,” he said finally, though I don’t believe he was aware of more than the tone of our voices. “Shag on out of here, Scott.
I want to talk to your sister.”
Scott, of course, shagged, with a triumphant smirk at me.
“Bring that Henry over here and set it down,” Dad said. He swept all the tools on his bench to one end and pointed at the spot he’d cleared.
I’d been holding onto the old rifle all this time feeling a strange reluctance to put it aside, as if I’d betray a trust if I let it go. And sure enough, the moment I loosened my hold on the gun, the odd, surreal dreams still drifting in my head dissipated. Everything jolted back to normal.
I didn’t understand how, but my father almost instantly recognized a connection between my strange spell and the gun. He also realized the connection might not always be pleasant. Maybe, I decided, this wasn’t going to be so much fun after all.
“Where were you?” Dad asked again. He tipped my chin up with one finger, and looked into my eyes, pressing for an answer I didn’t have. The stern way he spoke worried me.
“Nowhere, Dad,” I said, starting to snivel. “I’m right here.” Where else? He sounded mad, and while I didn’t know if I’d done anything wrong, it’s always wise to cover your ass. Any thirteen-year-old can swear to that.
I sniffed tears, just to make sure he knew I felt badly. It may be okay to mess up by accident. It is not okay to be crazy or subject to fits.
He brushed my affectations aside, so I knew I might as well not bother squeezing out any tears.
“Then tell me what you saw, Boothenay. I know you didn’t have a seizure.”
Seizure sounds a much nicer word than fit.
By that time, I didn’t remember much of the dizzying spell. If I’d felt euphoric, that had faded very quickly. If I’d been scared, that had passed, too.
“I don’t know,” I said, giving up on trying to fool him. There didn’t seem much point, so I thought I might as well be honest and save the fancy excuses for a day when I needed them more. “Only…for a minute I could have sworn I heard this—” I nodded toward the rifle I’d set on his workbench. “—talking to me. Well, a lady talking actually.
But I heard her through the Henry and I saw her, too. She had the rifle cocked, ready to shoot. Something, or someone, was after her. More than one, I think. I didn’t get to hear—see—the entire story. I’m so confused, and besides, it’s—they’re all gone now.”
Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to confess I actually thought I was her.
Dad picked up the old gun, turning the stock over and over in his hands before he started breaking it down for repair. He shook his head in disapproval, acting as if he’d vote for a ban on all of the guns in the world if given half a chance. A silly thought for a gunsmith.
“So. It is to be guns, is it?” he muttered. “Figures, I guess, given your background. And what am I supposed to do about that?”
“Huh?” I didn’t know what he was talking about, nor did he explain. Not then. That was something he had to work his way up to, little by little, day by day. It is not the easiest thing in the world, after all, to have a magician in the family.
My father enjoys his reputation as the premier gunsmith in Spokane, Washington. Make that in the Inland Northwest—and farther.
He learned his profession at his father’s elbow, just as my grandfather learned from his father. He’d never been reticent about his hope of passing his knowledge on to his own son. In this he was lucky because, early on, my brother Scott showed a desire to walk in his footsteps.
What Dad didn’t expect was that his daughter would have the same propensity.
Being the man he is, he made room for me in the old brick shop at the same time as he expanded for Scott. Another piece of luck—Scott’s and my interests diverged after a while, which is not always a bad thing when siblings have to work together.
Dad specialized in customizing firearms to suit a shooter’s criteria.
Shooters like their guns fine-tuned. They like the trigger pull just so, and maybe they want the barrel crowned, with the piece fitted to their precise specifications. As we all got older, Scott began taking that side of the business over from him.
My own preference is with antiques, and since that is where my expertise lay, I slipped into dealing with the collectors who came to our shop. I grew a reputation as a pretty fair historian given I had an uncanny ability to judge the authenticity of a piece to a nicety. No one ever caught me out in an error when it came to the age, the type, or the provenance of an antique gun. You might even call me a teenage prodigy since that is when I began building my reputation. Only I built it with guns, instead of music or math or something truly elegant.
My peculiar knack of judging a piece always awed our customers. I knew better than to be too proud, though. With the old guns practically shouting their stories at me, I’d damned well better not make any mistakes.
The spell I had when I was thirteen turned out to be only the first in a series that became more frequent as I got older. Dad didn’t gloss over the fact he hoped the first spell would also be the last. He was disappointed in this desire for they came whenever I worked on the old guns. Well, not every old gun. Just the ones with something to say.
Several years passed before the event I dubbed the Mr. and Mrs.
Frye affair showed how close I’d come to losing myself in one of those spells. Showed me, too, a dark side of myself I didn’t know existed.
Dad finally broke down a few days afte
r I witnessed the hundred-year-old murder/suicide and told me a little about my peculiar background. Not before time either, if you ask me Even then he could only tell me as much as he understood himself, which wasn’t nearly as much as I’d have liked. Sometimes I think he’d have preferred me to flounder in the dark forever, never speaking of what I saw, hoping the phenomenon would go away. Except by now I’d discovered it was possible to lose myself in a trance. I’d found my visions were more than the lark I’d always thought them.
“Witches,” he said, his breath coming short and raspy. He hadn’t been feeling well lately, and today he sat in the shop’s rickety rocking chair with a woolen throw spread over his legs, hand-rubbing a burled walnut stock until it shone with a silken finish. Gabe, the old coonhound, lay beside his master with his nose resting on his forepaws while he snoozed.
“Witches? Did you say which or witch?” I asked, not certain I’d heard him correctly.
“Your mother,” he said. “I loved her dearly, right up until the day she died, and never cared one iota about her being a witch.”
I hadn’t thought of Dad as being senile until this moment, although both he and mother had been middle-aged when they had Scott and me.
With the two of us in our twenties, that made dad old. At least I thought so, and in truth, his health had plummeted in the last year—as soon as he’d taken an overdue retirement, in fact.
“Dad,” I began, intending to tell him…I don’t know what. He certainly had me flummoxed with his off-the-wall statement.
He cut in before I could formulate a complete sentence. “I’m not trying to be mean, Boothenay,” he said. “I’m telling you the literal truth. Jenace would tell you the same if she could.”
“That she was a witch?” I smiled at the thought of my gentle mother as a follower of the occult.
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