The Arrivals (15 page)

She took it, looked at the Verrot, and made a decision that she probably should have made years ago. She stared at the noxious stuff and said, “I trust you more than I’ve trusted anyone in my life. More than Jack.” She looked up to find Edgar staring at her. “It’s different for me. When I drink it, I don’t have the same . . . reactions.”

Edgar waited. His expression gave nothing away, but she knew him well enough to tell that he was caught between hurt and angry.

“Every time I drink I can hear Garuda in my head, talking to me like we’re in the same room,” she continued. “He can see through me like he sees through the members of his pack. That’s why I stay away from everyone when I’ve had to drink it . . . or when I pretend I’ve drunk it.” She held the mug, neither drinking it nor setting it down. “Jack doesn’t know.”

“How long?”

Kitty didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She wished she could; she hadn’t told Edgar at first because she was embarrassed by her reaction to Verrot, hated the idea that she was
wrong
somehow. Later, she didn’t tell him because she had hidden it already. She forced herself to hold Edgar’s gaze as she admitted, “Always.”

“You lied to me.”

“Not really. I just didn’t t—”

“You
lied,
Kit.” Edgar pressed his lips together as if he were trying to keep from speaking.

When she said nothing, Edgar asked, “How long have I loved you?”

The rush of pleasure she felt at hearing the words from him again made her voice softer than she liked, but all she said was, “A while.”

“Half of your life,” he corrected. “If you can’t trust me—”

“I
do
trust you.” She paced away from him, not wanting to see his injured expression. She never wanted to hurt him, even though she often had. She sat on the edge of his bed. It was foolish, but being there made her relax a little. She lifted her gaze to look up at him. “I don’t want to be different from everyone else. The magic thing is already enough. Melody is scared of me; Francis acts like I’m a saint because of it.”

“Melody’s an imbecile. So’s Francis, for that matter.” Edgar pulled out one of the chairs at the table on which the other mug of Verrot was sitting, pointedly not coming to her. “Do I treat you special because of it?”

When she shook her head, he asked, “Then why would I this time?”

He stretched his legs out in front of him, folded his hands together, and watched her. “I killed back home, kill here. I die and wake back up. I’m going to drink this”—he tilted his head toward the Verrot—“because it’ll make me a better killer. At home, I’m not sure my bosses knew I could speak. They ordered; I did.” He fixed his attention on her. “Everyone who gets pulled into the Wasteland is just like me. Maybe they killed for money or a cause or something else, but at the core, they’re no different than you and me. You use magic. Hector throws his little knives. A monster or Wastelander is the same amount of dead either way.”

Outside of the tent, Kitty could hear voices and knew that the others were getting ready to go into Gallows. She glanced at the closed tent flap. “I do trust you. I know I should’ve told you, but then I didn’t, and then I couldn’t.” She kept her gaze away from him as she admitted, “I still love you. Just because we’re not . . . what we were, that part hasn’t changed.”

“I know.” He waited until she looked at him before continuing. “But you’re still not going into Gallows unless you drink the Verrot.”

“We could let Jack think I had,” she suggested. “There’s no way he’d know.”

Edgar didn’t even acknowledge that idea with words. He simply frowned and waited.

Resigned, Kitty sighed. “I don’t want to tell Jack what it does to me.” It was embarrassing, but there it was: she still hated that she was aberrant. “Please?”

Edgar gave her an assessing look before saying, “I’ll keep your secret unless it endangers you or Jack.” He retrieved the second mug and carried it to her. “Does it make you stronger like it does us?”

She nodded.

“Then drink with me, Kit. Jack and I will fight better knowing you’re stronger.” He stood in front of her, lifted his mug to his lips, and waited.

Mutely, she matched his movement, and together they drank.

Chapter 18

J
ack saw the calculated slowness in Edgar’s steps as he and Katherine approached, and he knew that Edgar had drunk the Verrot—which also meant he’d convinced Katherine to drink it. Jack was glad that he’d figured out that the first bottle was more potent before he gave it to them. Katherine hated the Verrot enough that her temper would’ve been even worse if she’d had the extra-strong dose that Jack and Chloe had consumed.

“All’s good?” Jack asked.

Edgar nodded.

Now that Edgar and Katherine had joined the rest of the group, everyone stepped outside the threshold of the camp, and Katherine said whatever words she needed to speak to lock their camp. Jack watched the impact of the spell hit her, and he hated that she had to do it. Eventually, they’d build a gate, as he’d had done with a couple of their sites. Until they had the funds to do that, Katherine worked her spells. Most creatures knew better than to try to cross that threshold, but there were scavengers aplenty in the Gallows Desert, so locking up was necessary.

The rest of the Arrivals waited while she spoke the spell. The tension in several of them made clear how difficult stillness was with Verrot in their systems.

Once Katherine was done, she simply began walking into the desert toward Gallows. The rest of the Arrivals fell into step. Edgar was at her side. Francis, Melody, and Hector walked behind them. That left Chloe beside Jack. They’d all accepted her into their ranks at his word, and much as they had done every other time the team added a replacement, they settled in to the new dynamic because they had to do so. When Mary was alive, she walked with Katherine or with Francis. Edgar and Jack would’ve still been either first or last, but sometimes Mary was the soothing presence that Katherine needed to keep her from feeling like she had to be frontmost. No one but his sister typically walked at Jack’s side. Strangely, though, he found that he liked having Chloe beside him.

“Guns at the ready,” Jack reminded them as they moved farther away from the camp. “Cyns jumped us earlier.”

“This close to camp?” Francis asked.

Despite Melody’s absurd attention to what she considered “ladylike” attire—knee-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse—she made an unladylike sound and said, “Jack had Verrot before us,
Starshine
. He wasn’t too close to camp.”

“Told you ‘Francis’ is just fine,” Francis muttered. He’d been increasingly prickly over the use of the bizarre name he’d used when he’d arrived in the Wasteland—not that Jack blamed him. Starshine
was
an odd name. Sometimes he wondered how the world he’d once known evolved into both Francis’ “hippies” and Edgar’s Prohibition. Maybe once they weren’t in Ajani’s sights, he’d ask Chloe about the world as she knew it.

The Wasteland didn’t seem to change as rapidly as the world they’d all known as their home. Jack wasn’t entirely sure why change came so slowly here, but in conversation with Garuda, he had come to believe that it was tied to the average life span of a Wastelander. Most of the nonhumans lived far longer than humans, though, and they outnumbered the human populations.

The Arrivals completed the major portion of the walk into Gallows without incident or real conversation. Chloe remarked on the cyns she saw, the homesteader shacks, the cacti that were like those at home as well as those that weren’t. Seeing the Wasteland through her eyes reminded Jack of how beautiful and alien he’d found all of it in his first years. The rest of the group was caught up in the intensity of the Verrot in their systems—or their fear of Katherine’s temper—so no actual conversation followed Chloe’s stray remarks. Instead, the Arrivals were silent and quick as they passed across the stark landscape.

Once they were close enough to town that the buildings of Gallows had come into focus, Chloe muttered softly, “We are definitely not in Kansas.”

In a sort of daze, she walked toward the front of the group. At a gesture from Jack, the rest of the group let her do so. This time, he smiled at her awe—and at her words. That particular phrase had been spoken by Hector and Melody at various points not long after their arrival here. It was a small thing, but it reaffirmed his belief that the Arrivals did all come from the same place. Photographs were a relatively new phenomenon in the world Jack had known. They’d replaced daguerreotypes, and he’d heard that there were people back east who had seen realistic-looking color photos. Since he’d been in the Wasteland, he’d learned from various Arrivals that photographs had evolved into
moving
photographs that, eventually, had sound. Movies didn’t exist here, but it was interesting to think that the world back home had created such miracles.

They’d all had a few moments of awe when they’d discovered different parts of the Wasteland. Chloe wasn’t going to have as much time to pause and adjust as the others had. She’d already had Verrot, been attacked by cynanthropes, met a bloedzuiger, and would soon know about Ajani. They could let her have a moment to wonder at the first town she’d seen in her new world.

Gallows was a little rough, but Jack and Katherine tended to like it because it felt like the world they’d left behind. The buildings were mostly a beige adobe and a sort of pink clay brick that was unique to the Wasteland. There were some wooden structures or wooden flourishes—signs of wealth out here—but the number of lindwurm farms made wood less than practical for everyday folks.

“There are places here that aren’t so different from where you come from,” Jack assured Chloe.

Melody snorted. “Doubt it.”

“That
is
a dragon,” Chloe murmured before glancing at Jack and asking, “Are there monsters you don’t have here?”

“It’s a lindwurm. There are a lot of farms out here.” Jack paused. “But, yes, there are monsters that aren’t here, and yes, it does resemble the fairy-tale dragons from home.”

Someone inhaled sharply behind him.

Jack looked over his shoulder. “What?”

“Fairy tales?” Katherine repeated with a barely concealed laugh.

Jack scowled to hide his flare of embarrassment. “I read them to you often enough when you were a girl, so yes, Katherine,
fairy tales
.”

His sister held her hands up in a placating gesture, and he noticed with relief that she was fighting a smile. He forced himself to keep scowling, though. Her softening toward him when she was in a temper wasn’t the same as her being all right with him noticing it. He turned his attention back to Chloe. “We lack princes and princesses, if that helps.”

Chloe smiled and said, “That’s not what I think of when I think monsters.”

He shrugged, but he didn’t know what to
say
. He wanted to say something clever; he wanted to hear what she said next, what she thought, but he didn’t want to say so with the rest of the Arrivals watching them. It was an unusual feeling to want to simply listen to a woman talk, and it left him feeling foolish.

Before the silence grew too uncomfortable, Katherine launched into a recounting of the other day’s lindwurm wrestling. Her words were a tumble of sounds that Jack might’ve struggled to follow if not for the Verrot in his system. He wondered idly if he had sounded so breathless when he first drank it; he knew he certainly felt that harried. Still, she seemed almost like she was rushing unnaturally. He forced himself to concentrate on his sister’s words as he watched for threats from the surrounding desert.

He didn’t think he was nearly as reckless or obnoxious as his sister made him sound, but he’d grown used to her less than flattering assessments of him. Still, even in the midst of her recounting, he noticed that her voice was filled with pride. He glanced at Chloe, and she smiled at him.

“ . . . fool thought he was back home on a horse instead of a lindwurm,” Katherine finished.

“I could’ve let you handle it yourself,” he interjected.

Katherine ignored him, and the others started throwing in their own lindwurm stories. Their words didn’t sound to Jack’s ears quite as harried as Katherine’s did, or maybe he didn’t know their cadences as well. Chloe listened to them with rapt attention, although he did catch her glancing at him a few times.

As they entered the town proper, Jack took a moment to adjust. Sometimes the transition between the natural rhythms of the desert and the discordant energy of Gallows set his nerves on edge. The others had stopped talking as they walked farther into town. Jack couldn’t rightly call the Gallows Desert safer, but the wide-open spaces often made it easier to locate threats—at least the sort of threats on the group members’ minds of late. Gray-robed monks and the always ostentatious Ajani would stand out from the desert landscape, but in town, they could blend a bit more easily with the locals. More important, they had more cover in town. The maze of buildings and carefully cultivated landscape of plants that really shouldn’t thrive in the desert—and wouldn’t if not for the stubborn efforts of the locals—provided ample places for monk or man to hide.

They’d only gotten as far as the less expensive stores on the periphery of the town proper when a bloedzuiger pushed away from a shadowed doorway of a milliner’s shop. It didn’t completely step into the light, but it moved close enough that it began burning. The smell of cooking meat was disturbingly appealing. Bloedzuigers might look nearly dead, but they were healthy, living creatures—merely ones with a different sort of biology.

Jack looked to the brand on its forearm, and after ascertaining that it was, in fact, one of Garuda’s local pack, he stepped onto the planked porch. Chloe stayed with Katherine and Edgar, but Hector, Melody, and Francis accompanied Jack.

“Ajani was in town,” Garuda said through the bloedzuiger. “I entered this one to speak to you, but would rather not feel the sizzle of such young flesh. Others of mine are waiting in the shadows to keep watch for you.”