Aster swallowed back a sick feeling rising in her gullet. They’d planned to lay a trap for Sullivan, and instead, he had laid a trap for them. She tried to think. Her friends were making their way here in the woods now; all she had to do was signal them. But they weren’t expecting her signal until tomorrow at the earliest—what if they were still too far away to help? What if they didn’t even see it?
Lizzy started towards them with unhurried steps, drawing the revolver from her belt.
“Eli,” Aster said in a harsh whisper. “Grab the flare gun from the back of the wagon—”
“But—”
“Just do it!”
Eli turned and ran for the wagon, and as soon as he did so, Lizzy hit them both with a crushing wave of despair. Aster let out a cry of pain as she fell to her hands and knees, fresh tears springing to her eyes. Eli collapsed against the side of the wagon, barely remaining upright. Lizzy’s mouth curved in a grin, her orange eyes bright as the sun above.
“McClennon’ll pay me double if I bring you in alive, so do me a favor and don’t make any sudden moves,” she said. It was the first time Aster had ever heard her speak, and her voice was so much like Zee’s, it startled her. Like his, it sounded like it was always on the edge of laughter—but where Zee’s laughter was kind, hers was cruel.
Aster fought to regain her feet. “Elizabeth,” she choked out. “Lizzy, please, you don’t have to do this. Come with us. We can take you to your brother—”
Lizzy’s grin shifted to a snarl. “My brother is a traitor and a fool. I have nothing to say to him.”
“You’re angry. I understand that. I know how it feels—”
“I don’t feel anything, Lucker.”
Aster tried to remember what Raven had taught them about resisting raveners, tried to close her heart to her own feelings. But they were already too near the surface. Guilt for letting her parents die on her behalf. Anguish at the sudden loss of them. And the old, bone-deep betrayal at the thought that they had never loved her and Clementine enough to save them from the welcome house. Lizzy raised her hand to hit her with another heavy psychic blow, and Aster’s rib cage seemed to cave in on itself. She fell back to her knees.
“Aster!” Clementine cried out, and Aster heard her struggling against Sullivan’s grip, only to be silenced with a cuff to the face. Aster’s wrath flared up once again, but the frost Lizzy had enveloped her in quickly snuffed it out. Lizzy was almost upon her now, grinning down at her with relish. She raised her boot and kicked Aster square in the chest. Aster fell on her back in the dusty road, the wind knocked out of her, Lizzy’s silhouette blocking out the sun.
“Thank you kindly for making this easy for me,” Lizzy said, holstering her gun and reaching for the lasso at her belt. She knelt to bind Aster’s hands and feet—
And then a gunshot split the air.
Lizzy swore and stumbled backwards, clutching her shoulder where she’d been shot. Raveners didn’t feel pain, but that didn’t stop her right arm from going dead at her side. Aster scrambled back, looking around quickly to see who’d fired the gun. Eli? No, he was still reeling from the ravening, only just recovering now that Lizzy’s concentration had snapped. Then who—?
“You there! Get back inside!” Sullivan shouted hoarsely.
Aster followed his gaze to the old woman who had told her about her parents.
“No, I don’t think so,” the woman shouted back. She stood defiantly in the road, walking towards them, her gun steady in her liver-spotted hand. And she wasn’t alone. More of the people they’d just armed were stepping outside their homes, weapons raised. They were not the people Aster had planned to use those weapons, not the young men who were currently working down in the mines. These were women, elders, men who were sick and injured. And yet they formed a line between Aster and the raveners. Aster’s heart hitched with sudden hope. She climbed to her feet.
“You all best turn the rip around!” Sullivan shouted again at the growing crowd. “I’m not gonna warn you again!”
The two raveners flanking him advanced toward the crowd, drawing their own weapons. Lizzy, still clutching her shoulder to stanch her bleeding, sent out a pulse of fear. But there were too many of them now for her to concentrate her power on any one of them.
“Go on and do as he says. I don’t want you all hurt on my behalf,” Aster warned.
Another woman shook her head. “We’re not doing this for you. We’re doing this for us,” she said grimly.
“Been breaking my back for that bastard for over sixty years,” an old man agreed. “And now he wants to sell my granddaughter to a welcome house? I don’t think so.”
Aster heard a hiss and a pop from behind her. She whirled around.
Eli had fired the flare gun.
A look of panic crossed Sullivan’s face. He pushed his raveners forward. “Beat them down!” he roared.
The other two raveners rushed forward on their hellhorses towards the crowd, billy clubs raised, while Sullivan threw Clementine over the back of his horse and took off in the opposite direction. Aster panicked. She couldn’t abandon her sister, but she couldn’t abandon these people, either. She would not let anyone else die because of her.
And then Eli was at her side, revolver already in hand. “Go,” he said. “I’ll protect them.”
Aster looked at him and, with no time to express her gratitude, swallowed and nodded, sprinting after the landmaster. Scattered shouts and gunshots rang out behind her as the crowd clashed with the raveners, but she forced herself to push forward. Elizabeth’s hellhorse was still standing in the middle of the road, and Aster would need it to have any hope of catching Sullivan. He was no doubt on his way to rally reinforcements of his own, and she couldn’t let him. If the law came in and surrounded the camp, they were done.
The hellhorse let out a wet snort in warning the moment Aster grabbed its reins.
“Easy,” Aster murmured nervously. It stood head and shoulders higher than a mortal horse, its cordlike muscles rippling beneath its chestnut coat, its rust-colored eyes gleaming like a bird of prey’s. Hellhorses were beasts that had been corrupted by the same black magic as raveners. They felt no fear or pain, and they had a predator’s instincts. They were not intended to be ridden by normal people.
But Aster had no choice.
Steeling herself, she stepped into the too-high stirrup and swung her other leg up over the saddle. The hellhorse let out a screech, rearing up on its hind legs. Aster’s stomach dropped as she almost fell back to earth, the reins tangling around her wrists with a painful bite.
“Whoa!” she shouted, pulling back on the reins sharply. The hellhorse landed so heavily it set Aster’s bones shuddering, and she barely had time to recover before it took off at a gallop—first, towards the crowd, and then, only after desperately muscling it around, down the road and after Sullivan.
Aster’s hallower’s outfit didn’t come with spurs, but she didn’t even need them. The hellhorse was faster than any other steed she’d ever ridden. The wind tore at her skin. The beat of the hooves threatened to shake her apart. It was like riding a thunderstorm. Soon the little dirt path joined up with the Bone Road, and Aster tore her eyes away from the trees and the cages hanging heavily from their branches. She did not want to see what was left of her parents.
She wanted to avenge them.
It didn’t take her long to begin catching up to Sullivan, who threw a desperate glance over his shoulder at her, Clementine still slung over the back of his horse like a sack of grain. Aster drew her revolver to fire at him, but it was impossible to aim while keeping control of the beast below her. Her first shot went wide, and the second nearly clipped Clementine’s temple. A punch of fear slammed through her, and she holstered the gun.
“You shoot at me again and I’ll drag your sister behind this horse until she’s worn to the bone!” Sullivan shouted back at her, his face red with effort.
Clementine began to struggle at the threat, but Sullivan just c
uffed her with the butt of his gun. Aster snarled, pushing the hellhorse faster. Sullivan fired back three shots of his own, and Aster ducked to avoid them. But the fourth struck her hellhorse in the chest, causing it to stumble. Aster’s stomach dropped as the beast came to a sudden stop, almost throwing her. Then, before she could even begin to calm it, it let out a screech of rage, tossing its head and pawing at the ground like a bull, and charged for Sullivan at full speed.
Ripping hell! Aster thought, terror whirling through her, skull rattling with every pounding step. She struggled for control as they closed the remaining distance to Sullivan and Clem in seconds. Then the hellhorse lunged for them, knocking Sullivan’s horse over on its side with a savage kick to the ribs. Sullivan cursed as his leg was crushed beneath the weight of the thrashing animal.
“Clem!” Aster shouted, her voice raw with panic. But Clementine being slung over the back of the horse rather than stuck in its saddle seemed to have saved her—she had been thrown off the horse rather than trapped underneath it, and she was already stirring. The horse itself finally regained its feet and bolted, leaving Sullivan crumpled on the ground. Clementine was wriggling away from him as fast as she could. But Aster’s hellhorse seemed determined to trample them both, rearing up to crush them beneath its hooves.
“ENOUGH!” Aster shouted, yanking back on the reins with all her strength. She managed to pull it back at the last moment, twisting the hellhorse away from her sister. It squealed in protest, but Aster grappled with it until at last it relented. Exhausted, her face slick with sweat and her arms shaking with the effort, Aster dismounted and tied the hellhorse up to the trunk of an evergreen before it could renew its anger. For all she knew, it would be strong enough to pull the whole damn tree down—but not before she finished her business here.
Breathing hard, Aster drew her knife.
“Sullivan,” she growled, approaching the fallen landmaster. He was sitting up now, but he couldn’t seem to stand, his left leg twisted at an unnatural angle, his fine pants dark with blood. His gun lay in the dirt, well out of reach. He watched Aster approach with eyes wide as a trapped animal’s. But Aster knelt next to Clementine first, freeing her from her bonds.
“By the Veil, are you all right?” Clementine whispered as Aster helped her up.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“Nothing that won’t buff out. I’m more shaken up than anything,” Clementine said. “But Sullivan, he—”
“You stay back, now,” Sullivan threatened. His confidence had clearly cracked, but it didn’t keep the commanding tone from his voice. “If you know what’s good for you you’ll just walk away. You’re already in enough trouble with the law without adding the murder of a landmaster to your crimes.”
“Who said I’m here to murder you?” Aster asked calmly.
“It’s what you promised in your little declaration of war in the papers, isn’t it?” He wet his lips. “You Luckers want revenge.”
“We want justice,” Aster corrected, kneeling down to hold the knife to his throat. “But I’ll settle for revenge if I have to.”
“And what about mercy?” His face was reddening, with anger or shame, Aster couldn’t tell. “You think you’re so much better than us? You think you’re more than the animals we all know you to be? Prove it.”
Aster curled her lip and pressed the tip of the blade deeper into his skin. “I do not forgive you.”
Sullivan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. His beady black eyes flickered down to the knife, then back up to meet Aster’s glare.
“Here’s what happens next,” she went on softly. “You’ll be coming with us, somewhere none of your lawman friends will find you, and we’ll keep you prisoner until our demands are met. No one’s gonna hurt you—we’ll even see to your leg, make sure you’re comfortable—but if you ever want to see the sun again, you better hope your puppet authoritant and whoever else is left in the government are willing to change the way things are done.”
“And how do I know you won’t just kill me as soon as you’re out of danger?” he spat.
Clementine knelt next to Aster. “Because unlike you, we don’t just throw lives away.”
Sullivan shifted his gaze to Clementine. “No,” he said slowly. “I think it’s because you need me alive. What good am I to you dead? You have nothing to negotiate with.”
“So then we’re agreed,” Aster said with a grim smile. “It’s in everyone’s best interest for you to come quietly. Clem.” She nodded at her sister to grab the ropes on the ground and tie Sullivan up. Sullivan’s breathing quickened.
“No…” he said, a strange look coming over him. “No, I will never be your prisoner.”
And then he thrust himself forward onto Aster’s knife, the point of the blade piercing the hollow of his throat. Aster swore, shock and disgust ripping through her as his warm blood rushed forth until her hand was hot and sticky with it. Clementine let out a shriek and fell backwards.
“The dead protect us, what are we supposed to do now?” she sobbed.
“I—I don’t know.” Aster dropped her knife, her heart thumping erratically, bile rising in her throat. She struggled to keep her mind from tearing away completely. If they left his body here, the law was sure to blame them for his murder—which was, no doubt, exactly what he’d wanted. Not just to deny them a valuable hostage, but to make them look like bloodthirsty killers in the eyes of the public.
But if they took his body with them, made it disappear …
“We have to take him back to Red Claw,” Aster said, already moving to pick him up and drag him over to the hellhorse. “We won’t take credit for his disappearance. Let the law make of it what they will. They won’t be able to prove anything.”
Clementine looked sick. “And then what? We just … leave his body down there forever?”
Aster felt a twinge of uncertainty, but she thought of her parents, and the other people of Shade Hollow, and all the young men and boys Sullivan had sent to suffer underground and the girls he had allowed to be stolen away, and she closed her heart to it.
“He’ll have the vengeants to keep him company.”
23
When Aster and Clementine returned to Shade Hollow with Sullivan’s body in tow, they found the rest of their group waiting for them: the others had rushed to Eli’s side at the sight of his flare, and together they’d taken out almost all the raveners in the camp—not just the pair Sullivan had brought with him, but the ones overseeing the mines as well. Now the miners and their families alike were celebrating in the streets.
“And Lizzy?” Aster asked her friends, unable to let herself share in their celebration. Zee’s sister was not among the fallen raveners. Perhaps she, like Sullivan, had escaped their grasp.
“She tailed it as soon as she realized backup was coming,” Eli explained, wiping at his bloodied knuckles with a whiskey-soaked rag. “Just disappeared into the woods. I guess she figured she wasn’t in any fit condition to fight, not with her good arm injured like that.”
Like Aster, Zee was the only other one who didn’t seem to feel like celebrating. “I wanted to go after her,” he started, his voice thick, “but…” Zee looked over his shoulder to the people now dancing, laughing, firing shots into the sky. “I was needed here.”
“You could still follow her, Zee, now that it’s over,” Eli said. “I know these woods well enough. I can get everybody back.”
Zee shook his head. “No, it’s too dangerous. She’s too dangerous, even now—she could still make me see terrible things, feel terrible things. I probably just need to … let her go. At least McClennon won’t want to send her after us again for some time, not until she’s back in fighting form.” Zee smiled weakly, looking up at Aster. “And at least we’re free of Sullivan, right?”
Aster returned the smile, but inside she felt hollowed out, brittle, like a field after a fire. She’d lost something precious today. The people of Shade Hollow had promised to give her parents a proper buria
l, but still … they should never have been killed at all. It wasn’t enough that Sullivan himself was dead now, too. Justice had not been done.
But she didn’t want to let her own misgivings take this victory away from her friends, and she couldn’t blame them for their high spirits—they didn’t think there had been much love lost between Aster and Clementine and their parents. Hell, neither had Aster, for that matter. Even Clementine, who had certainly taken it harder than her, had now turned all her attention to comforting Zee, and they both seemed to be lifted temporarily by the happiness of those around them, as they so easily were. And so Aster kept forcing a smile as they made their way back to Red Claw through the gold-painted forest, covering their tracks as they went in case the law—or Elizabeth—tried to follow them.
“I still can’t believe the old man died for his pride! Saves us the trouble of killing him, at least,” Mallow was saying. The woods hummed with the drone of insects, and the late afternoon sun baked the rugged earth below the horses’ hooves. Zee took point, riding with Clem, while Eli carried Sullivan’s body and Raven rode the hellhorse. Aster rode with Violet, who had offered to take the reins once she’d heard about everything Aster had been through. It was an unspeakable relief, to let someone else take control in this moment, and she couldn’t help leaning forward wearily against Violet, the steady rise and fall of her breathing lulling Aster into a half sleep. This close, she could smell traces of lavender perfume on Violet’s neck—because of course Violet had worn perfume to an uprising.
The Sisters of Reckoning Page 24