Mallow nodded once, snatching the covers off the last remaining weapon in their arsenal: the crank cannon. She began to turn its handle. A hum rose up around them, blue light building in the heart of the cannon, voltricity tugging at the small hairs on Aster’s arms. Then a continuous stream of lightning lashed out, Mallow swinging the cannon back and forth on its axis as she churned the crank to keep the power going. The lawmen yelped and ducked out of the way. Wood splintered as it was struck, earth was singed black, and men fell stunned to the ground as they tried to give chase. The too-bright light cast everything in an unreal blue-white wash, and thunder rolled out in a continuous roar.
“Well, I reckon this will get my uncle’s attention,” Derrick said mildly.
The voltricity had set Aster’s bones humming, and she could only nod in agreement, exhilarated by the power of the storm they had conjured.
18
By the time they reached the Scorpions’ camp it was the small hours of the morning. They’d had to leave the wagon and the crank cannon hidden in the woods and continue the rest of the way on foot, covering their tracks as they went. They’d bought themselves some time by stunning anyone who might have pursued them, but it was inevitable that the law and McClennon’s raveners would pick up their trail come morning. Aster could not risk leading them back to Red Claw—the Scorpions had only agreed to shelter her on the promise that she wouldn’t compromise their safety.
Still, it was a hero’s welcome she and the others received when they finally returned home, Sam Daniels himself waiting to greet them at the base of the mineshaft. They caught him with his flask halfway up to his lips, his bright brown eyes widening at the sight of them as his grin lit up the dark.
“By the dead! I was just about to strike out myself to try and find you fools,” he said, standing to clasp their arms each in turn. “Did everyone make it back? Violet, good to see you again! Raven, thank the dead you’re all right. And you … you must be Derrick.” Sam paused in his warm welcome, considering the McClennon boy. Derrick looked about ready to drop—he was not used to hiking through the woods, let alone in the dark, and Aster had practically had to drag him the last mile as he jumped at every sudden noise or glimpse of the vengeants. His fine suit was quite ruined, his face soiled with soot and mud, his eyelids drooping with exhaustion.
“Evening,” Derrick said wearily, holding out his hand. “Or morning. Whichever.”
Sam clasped the proffered arm uncertainly, glancing at Aster. “Are you, ah, sure you got the right man? This one looks consumptive.”
“Oh, don’t worry, he always looks like that—” Clementine piped up, before Aster jabbed her in the side with an elbow.
“Derrick here’s had a hard time,” Aster said, clearing her throat. “We all have, actually. Can we be taken to the medical ward?”
“Of course,” Sam said, turning and waving for them to follow him.
The rest of the camp was dark and sleeping, but lantern light still spilled out from the windows of the medical building like a lighthouse on the midnight sea. The place was run by self-taught volunteers—Tansy was the closest thing it had ever had to an actual doctor. There was only one volunteer working the graveyard shift tonight, and he ushered them in with a look of silent surprise.
“Yes, yes, the girls have made it back all in one piece, more or less,” Sam told him brightly. “But they’ll still need to stay here tonight to recover. Do we have enough beds?”
Inside, there were a dozen beds lined up in two rows, and three of them were occupied. One with an old man, one with a child, and one with—
“Eli,” Aster said with an exhale of relief. He was propped up in his bed by a stack of pillows, his chest wrapped with fresh bandages. He winced as he sat up straight.
“Aster,” he said, though it clearly pained him to speak. “Thank the dead. What’d I miss?”
And so Aster and the others recounted everything to Sam and Eli while their injuries were seen to: minor burns; cuts, scrapes, and bruises; ragged coughs from breathing in too much smoke. The worst injuries belonged to Zee, who had gotten his nose broken by the butt of a lawman’s gun, and Derrick, who had twisted his ankle jumping from the window. Tansy gave him some whiskey for the pain, and, in his exhaustion, he fell asleep almost immediately.
“We were able to get into the vault, take the theomite, and leave the list of demands behind without too much trouble,” Clementine explained from her own bed. “It was getting back out that was the hard part. By then, Zee and Mal had run out of voltage to give us cover fire, and there were still two raveners left we had to deal with.”
“Plus the fire had spread throughout most of the first floor by then,” Tansy said. “So we had to stay low to avoid the smoke.”
“And as soon as we made it out of the building, we had to face the swarm of lawmen that had surrounded the place. It was a near thing,” Zee admitted, wincing as he gingerly touched his swollen face. “If it weren’t for Mal, we never would have made it—she had brought her revolver along for backup, just in case.”
“Never leave home without it,” Mal said with a hoarse laugh.
“Wait, so were the voltric weapons even worth it?” Eli asked, sounding upset.
“Oh, absolutely,” Aster said immediately—and not just to reassure him. It was true. They never would have made it out of Rattlebank alive if not for the voltric weapons’ ability to subdue a ravener in one shot. That, and …
“Raven,” Aster went on. Raven was lying in the bed directly across from her and, as usual, had spent more time listening than talking. “You promised to tell me how you managed to resist the raveners. We wouldn’t’ve lasted five minutes if it weren’t for you.”
“Yeah, that was a hell of a magic trick,” Zee said, turning to her. “It’s not something you could teach us, is it?”
Aster could hear well enough what he left unspoken—he wanted to know if there was a way he and his baby sister, Emily, could learn to live with their ravener sister, Elizabeth. Maybe he still held out hope that their family could be reunited again after all this. Aster felt her heart pang in sympathy.
Raven glanced around the room, seemingly uneasy at the sudden attention. Aster gave her an encouraging nod, hoping that, after everything they’d just been through together, she’d feel safe enough to let her guard down around the others.
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Raven muttered. “I just have my suspicions.”
“That’ll do,” Violet said wearily. She was lying down with a cold compress on her forehead, an aggrieved expression on her face as if she’d been shot rather than mildly scuffed up.
Raven laughed a little, sitting up straighter. “It’s not something I was always able to do. When I was really young—five, six—they could break me with ease. But then, so could everybody else. Children, neighbors, landmasters. My parents. I was always ‘the piebald,’ because of my skin, or ‘uppity,’ because of my art, or a ‘nance,’ because of … everything else. Even when I got to the welcome house, the other girls…” She trailed off, flicking her gaze back to Aster. “But by then I had long since learned how to lock myself, my feelings, away, so they couldn’t be manipulated by others. So I couldn’t be hurt.”
“Not even by raveners?” Tansy asked skeptically.
Raven shook her head. “Not even by raveners.” Her fingers went up to the raven feathers tattooed on the side of her face. “It’s funny, you know, that word—raveners—it comes from raven, did you know that? Folks say it’s because they’re omens of death, servants of death, so loyal their own bodies don’t even decay. But it’s simpler than that, if you ask me—they’re carrion birds. They attack the weakest among us, the most vulnerable. This favor was supposed to mark me as easy prey. But instead, it’s become a reminder to me of how strong I’ve become.”
Zee furrowed his brow. “That can’t be all it is. All you girls have had to grow thick skins. Aster damn near has armor.”
“And a blade to go with it, so wat
ch your tongue,” Aster warned.
Raven chuckled and shrugged. “Well, like I said, it’s just a working theory. But if I had to guess what’s different between us … I’d say it was that you all had family and friends before the welcome house, and each other while you were there. Your armor has weak points. But I’ve never had anyone like that. So my armor…”
“That sounds like a lonely way to live,” Violet said into the silence, and Aster heard the pain in her voice. Violet had never known her family, had rejected friendship at the welcome house for the sake of power. It was not the same as what Raven had been through, but if anyone were to understand what it was like to be alone, even if half by choice, it would be her.
“It was,” Raven admitted, looking down.
“Was?” Clementine echoed in a hopeful tone.
Raven half smiled as she looked around the room. “Well, I admit, you Luckers are wearing me down.”
* * *
The next day began their wait for McClennon’s response. They’d kidnapped his nephew, burned down his gambling hall, and demanded his family close all their welcome houses. Even for a man as important as Jerrod McClennon, that wasn’t the kind of provocation he could ignore for long. The mood of the camp was taut with excitement. Sam had doubled the guards to keep watch for raveners, and scouts rode into Scarcliff to get copies of the papers to see how the incident—and, more importantly, their demands—were being reported. Aster’s skin itched with impatience for answers. All the time and resources she’d spent preparing for this, the bridges she’d burned, the lives she’d risked …
She needed this to work.
But rather than spend the day pacing alone in her room, she decided to distract herself by helping Derrick get settled in. She was less concerned about his own comfort than the possibility that he was going to get in the Scorpions’ way. He would have no servants here; he’d have to figure out how to wash his own clothes and wipe his own ass. She would see to it that he was a burden to no one but herself.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, Aster couldn’t tell yet—Eli decided to join her.
“This space is beyond anything I could have imagined,” Derrick was saying as they toured him through the underground city. He’d shucked his tailored dress suit in favor of a dirty pair of denims and a comically overlarge flannel he’d borrowed from Eli. “Truly, a modern marvel of manpower and mining technology.”
Eli, who was walking in step with him, threw an aggrieved look over his shoulder at Aster, as he did every time Derrick started talking like a politician. Eli was moving a little more slowly than normal, favoring his injury, but he still carried himself with that quiet pride Aster had come to know so well. He’d saved his best flannel for himself and had even seemed to iron it, the deep red of the fabric bringing out the rich brown of his skin, the sleeves rolled up around his thick forearms. He was not much taller than Derrick, but he was much broader-built, and Derrick hovered nervously beside him like a sparrow beside a sleeping catamount.
As for Aster, she held back from both of them. She still wasn’t at ease around either of these two—the bass of their voices, the musk of their skin—but she refused to let them see that. She wished, desperately, that Violet were here. She always felt stronger with Violet at her side.
“I’m curious, how many souls live here?” Derrick went on with forced brightness.
“That depends—do you mean just the living, or the dead as well?” Eli asked.
“Oh! Are the dead—ah—are they a persistent problem here?” Derrick threw his own nervous look back at Aster. There were bruised circles under his eyes from staying up so late, and though he had splashed some water on his face, there was still plenty of grime on his neck and under his nails. Violet was right, though, Aster realized—Derrick was not bad looking, here in the half-light, if you squinted. The shapes of his shoulder blades rose up like folded wings beneath his loose shirt, and when he was excited about something, as he was now seeing the camp, the boyish light in his eyes was bright enough to thaw some of the frost Aster felt towards all men.
“The dead are not a ‘problem,’” Eli said slowly. “The dead are our responsibility. They remain in the world of the living because it failed them, and here they’ll stay until justice is done.”
“That’s an … ah, fascinating perspective. I’ve never thought of it that way. My father sees them more as pests to be driven out. We have hallowers cleanse our properties of any new remnants once a month. And the vengeants—well—if I never get that close to them again, it’ll be too soon,” Derrick said with a forced laugh.
Eli’s jaw worked, and his walk slowed to a stop.
“Tell me, Derrick, do you fear the dead?” Eli asked, facing him squarely.
Derrick’s throat bobbed. “Do I—do I fear—I don’t understand—”
Ripping hell, Aster thought. It was time to intervene. She quickly stepped between the two of them, pushing Eli back gently.
“Leave him be, Eli,” Aster said with a sigh. “You know just as well as I do that the rich aren’t religious.”
Eli’s liquid dark eyes flickered over to her. “Neither are you, as far as I can tell, so why do you care?”
Aster’s face grew hot at the accusation. That was different. She didn’t trust the dead to save her. The rich simply didn’t need them.
“Well—”
“We’re actually incredibly pious,” Derrick argued with a light scoff. “I never missed a service growing up; my uncle made sure of it.”
“Yes, you can tell he’s a righteous man.”
Derrick laughed emptily, throwing a hand up in surrender and looking at Aster as if dealing with a difficult child. “Aster—please, I have no idea how we got on this. I meant no harm. Tell him. I just want to continue this thrilling tour. We were on our way to the kennels, I think—”
“You should fear the dead,” Eli interrupted, stepping closer. “Their blood is on your hands.”
Derrick’s smile slipped. A line formed between his brows. “I’m well aware of that, Eli. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yes, and what suffering you’re being subjected to—”
“I hardly asked for this royal treatment! You volunteered. And I’ll have you know I’ve suffered plenty. Last night I could have been killed a dozen different ways—an adventure you were conveniently absent for, I might add—”
Eli curled his lip. “You want to run that by me again, Red? Because I know I didn’t just hear you say—”
“Enough, both of you,” Aster snapped, pushing them apart. “What the hell is wrong with you? We’re on the same side.”
“Yes, thank you,” Derrick said, red-faced.
“Shut up,” Aster said wearily. “And you—” She turned to Eli. “Why don’t you just let me take it from here? Go on home and rest up.”
“What, and leave you alone with him?” Eli asked incredulously.
Aster raised a brow. “I can take care of myself just fine, thanks.”
Eli looked down at the ground, clearly biting back his words. Then he turned on his heel and left them, striding off towards the cabin he shared with Sam. Aster sighed.
“Wait here,” she ordered Derrick. She couldn’t let Eli leave like this. She ran after him, grabbing him by the shoulder. It tensed under her grasp.
“Eli,” she whispered. “Come on, just talk to me, please.”
He shook her grip off and turned to face her. He hurried to hide the hurt on his face, but Aster still caught it.
“You couldn’t bear to be alone with me for more than a minute back in the tunnels, but then when a nice little fairblood boy comes along, suddenly you can take care of yourself?” Eli asked, his voice low.
Aster took a step back, startled by his words—and, despite herself, frightened by his anger. She knew Eli would never hurt her, but her instincts ran too deep. She tried to still her heart before it could set her head spinning. Nausea swirled in her stomach.
“Eli … what the hell are
you getting at?” she asked evenly.
“I’m here for you, Aster. Because I’ve seen how uncomfortable you are around men, and I didn’t want you to have to deal with Derrick by yourself. But maybe it was actually just me you were uncomfortable with all along. Why? What is it that’s so scary about me? Please? Because I swear it feels like the whole damn world thinks dustblood boys like me are just some kind of … animals. And I’m used to it from them, I can take it from them, but you…” He gestured at her desperately. “Look, you can’t even bear to meet my eyes right now. You’re afraid of me. I can tell. What do I have to do to make it better?”
Shame warmed Aster’s skin like dry heat. She hated that Eli could see her discomfort, hated that it hurt him. It was not fair to either of them. She forced herself to look up at him, setting her jaw as she searched for the words to fix this.
“I just … I need you to be patient with me, Eli,” she said finally, so softly it was scarcely above a whisper. “You know what I’ve been through. You know how many ‘nice little fairblood boys’ were coming in and out of that welcome house. So you know, too, that I don’t for a second believe the lie that they’re somehow better people. It’s not about that.”
Eli couldn’t seem to help himself, the words spilling out. “But then, why is it, with Derrick—”
“If I seem more at ease around Derrick, it is only because I don’t care for him the way I care for you. And feeling that way … that does scare me,” Aster admitted. She reached out to hold Eli’s rough hand, her thumb sliding over the calluses of his palm, her pulse slowing as she steadied her breath. Eli’s gaze flickered down to their hands, surprise lighting up his eyes. “I know I can be a frustrating person to care about,” she said with a self-conscious half laugh. “My sister’s made that clear enough to me plenty of times before. Hell, I get exhausted just trying to love myself—”
“I didn’t say all that,” Eli said quickly.
The Sisters of Reckoning Page 19