Authors: Melissa Marr
Kitty felt a wash of worry at the thought of Francis’ injury. They got hurt often enough in their line of work, but frequency didn’t negate pain. Francis was the most sensitive of the group, the one who helped her tend the others when they were hurt; it seemed unfair that he was the one most often injured. Guilt and anger tangled into her worry: guilt that she was only now able to check on him, and anger at Ajani for coming around when she had more important matters to tend.
Edgar tapped lightly on the door to Francis’ room. Kitty followed, calling out, “It’s us,” as they entered the room. Like every room she’d seen at the inns in Gallows, this was a small, worn-looking space. It was illuminated by bright light from a small, uncovered window across from the door. On a narrow cot barely long enough for him was Francis. His arms were folded under his head; his legs were extended and crossed at the ankles. At first glance it looked like he was staring at the ceiling, but his eyes were closed.
“I’m not healing right.”
“What?” Kitty went over to the bed and sat down beside him. She peered down at his face. Blood and tears seeped out from one of his closed eyes and trailed down his cheek onto a rag that had been folded and tucked against his face. “Maybe it feels a little slower than usual, but—”
“I can’t see much more than I did when it first happened,” Francis interrupted. He winced a little as he opened both eyes. “You’re a hazy shape, Kitty. Eyes heal faster than this.”
“But Hector said . . .” Kitty started to object, but her words dwindled as the blood started to flow faster.
Francis closed his eyes again and then lifted the rag to swipe away the blood, smearing it across his face in the process.
Edgar went to the doorway, opened it, and told Hector, “We need a washbasin.”
After Edgar closed the door, Kitty said quietly, “You lied to Hector?”
At that, Francis smiled. “This from the woman who lied to me to get out of camp just yesterday?” He reached out a hand, which Kitty caught and squeezed, and then he said, “If things don’t make sense, I tell you or Jack first. Those are the rules, Kitty.”
Mutely, she nodded, and then realized that Francis’ eyes were closed. “You’re right,” she said quietly.
She looked up at Edgar. “Maybe we can get more Verrot. Francis didn’t take much.” She tried to reach out for Garuda in her mind, like searching for a thought or memory that was at the edge of clarity. When she felt him, as if he were opening his eyes and looking back at her, she said to both Garuda and Francis, “If Verrot doesn’t work, we can see if there’s a native remedy or something. This should be healing. We need to find out why it isn’t.”
“It has to be some sort of poison,”
Garuda said.
“Further proof that the monks are working with Ajani.”
Now that she was concentrating on reaching out to the bloedzuiger, she wondered whether the doorway he seemed to have into her mind, which he seemed to be able to enter or exit at will, worked both ways, and she could enter into or exit his mind just as easily. Today was one of the few times that the existence of this mental doorway wasn’t completely unwelcome. She told Garuda as much, and although she couldn’t see him, she knew he was happy to hear it. Now that she wasn’t resisting him so much, their mental connection seemed even more powerful.
“I have been experimenting with toxins of late. I will look for those that would create his symptoms, as well as those that the monks are known to have used in the past,”
Garuda offered.
Kitty didn’t want to refuse the help he offered, but she had to ask,
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Because you are unusual, Katherine. When one lives for centuries, the unusual is intriguing as nothing else can be.”
He paused, and she felt like she could feel him smile.
“And because you want to kill Ajani almost as badly as I want him dead. It makes us allies.”
At that, Kitty couldn’t help but smile. She still didn’t particularly like the bloedzuiger’s presence inside her mind, but this time, unlike the times they’d communicated this way in the past, she felt like Garuda’s being there was an asset.
Once she felt Garuda slip out of her mind, she told Francis, “I have a few ideas. We’ll figure it out. Maybe not today, but if your body doesn’t heal from this naturally, we will find other options. I can try spellwork too, if necessary.”
Eyes still closed, Francis nodded.
“I promise I’ll do everything possible.” Kitty brushed his hair away from his face with her fingertips and then took the rag up again to wipe the blood from his cheek. As she did so, she glanced at Edgar.
Without her needing to say anything, Edgar understood. “I’ll find Jack,” he said. “He was still outside with the new woman.”
“Tell Hector to stay with Melody if you see them,” Kitty added as Edgar went to the door. She wasn’t going to break down sobbing; that wasn’t a luxury she allowed herself very often. Instead, she sat beside her friend, wiping the blood from his face and thinking of solutions—and a few stray thoughts on exactly how much she wanted to hurt any of the people who were responsible for Francis’ injuries.
F
rom the moment that Edgar and Kitty left her alone outside with Jack, Chloe had heard that wiser inner voice reminding her that getting involved with Jack was a superbly bad idea.
You know nothing about him. He already said that
all
of them are killers.
What did it say about him that he was the one in charge of a group of murderers? Being with him would not only be a violation of the very rational edict against sleeping with the boss, but in these circumstances, it was also a whole new level of wrong: she wasn’t clearheaded, wasn’t even sure when she decided that she was on board with this he’s-the-boss plan. She’d never been particularly renowned for having good sense.
They’d walked through the dusty desert town for a few moments, but when Chloe saw Jack wince and rotate his arm, she felt a flare of guilt. “You were shot. How did I forget that?”
He shrugged with his uninjured shoulder. “It’s mostly healed, just tender.”
Chloe stopped. “Do you—I mean, do
we
usually heal that fast?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“I have no idea.” Jack smiled at her, and her stomach felt like the Blight was swarming inside her, as if hundreds of tiny wings were taking flight at once.
For a few moments they walked in silence, and then she said, “If you want to go back . . .”
“Because of the bullet? Or because you’re feeling a touch less skittish?” Jack asked.
In some way, his bluntness was a refreshing change from most of the people Chloe had known back home. When she hesitated, trying to find a way to be forthright in return, he prompted, “Chloe?”
“Right. I’m not saying I trust you,
any
of you really, but if you had intentions, I don’t think you’re trying to . . .” She looked away, feeling the uncharacteristic urge to blush. “I mean, you seem like a gentleman, despite everything. You were the one who stopped the two of us earlier.”
Jack gave her what she was coming to think of as his serious stare. It was the look that came over his face when he was weighing out his words, as if the act of speaking were something that merited more consideration than most people these days ever used. After a pause he said, “I have decidedly
un
gentlemanly hopes, but there are places aplenty to hire satisfaction if I wanted to.” He motioned to an intersection of streets in the distance. “There are creatures of all sorts who work in the flesh trade here. It’s not so different from when I was in California . . . except in the variety. There’s things here a far sight stranger than anything I could’ve imagined as a younger man.”
With a start, Chloe realized that the cowboy attitude toward brothels was a bit more casual than the one she’d known during her time. At home, there was often a wink-and-nudge behavior that implied that there was something dirty about sex. Using the services of a prostitute wasn’t something most men would even admit to considering, much less doing. In the West, in the world Jack had known, however, women would’ve been scarce, and brothels were simply places that provided a service for a fee. She suspected that it was much the same here.
But even as she was thinking that, Jack said, “I haven’t been to them in a while. There was a woman in my bed until recently, but she died.”
“Your ‘dead packmate’ that the bloedzuiger mentioned?” Chloe prompted.
He nodded. After a moment he said, “Mary. Her name was Mary. She was from 1989, but she’d been here for a few years. This wasn’t the first time she’d died here, but this time she didn’t wake up.”
“The bloedzuiger called me a replacement.” Chloe didn’t quite phrase it as a question, but it was one all the same.
“When one of us stays dead, someone else arrives.” Jack’s expression grew clouded. “There’s no telling when it’ll happen, why it happens, how to stop it. We were watching for you. That’s how we found you so fast. I get a sense of when I should be expecting a new Arrival.”
“So Mary died, and then . . . I arrived.” She realized that they’d stopped walking and were standing in front of a store. Inside the store, three people who looked like the extra-thin sort-of-humans who had been at the tavern watched them with open curiosity. Chloe smiled at them politely, but their stares made her uncomfortable, so she turned back toward the Gulch House.
Jack kept pace with her. After several steps, she asked, “And Ajani?”
“I don’t know if he gets a sense of Arrivals or if he just has spies. We don’t know much about his doings until a few years before we arrived here. No one knows how old he is, how he got his money, what he wants. All I can say is that he makes the same offer to everyone—work for him, and he’ll keep you alive and wealthy. Some people say yes.” Jack didn’t look at her as he spoke: his gaze was fixed on the street in front of him. “Melody went with him briefly a while back, but after a few months, she returned to us. I’ll admit to wondering if she told him you were here, but it doesn’t much matter. He always finds out.”
Chloe let all of this settle into the increasing clarity she was finding about her new situation. It wasn’t clarity of the oh-that’s-logical variety, but it was information that fit together to help her start to make better sense of the situation. “So she—Mary—was in your bed, and I’m the replacement for her there too? Do all the new women—”
“No.” He gave her a hard look. “Mary and I were friends of a sort. After a time, we got so that we enjoyed a bit of comfort together. I hadn’t planned for what happened earlier. It
did
happen, though, and . . .”
They’d reached the Gulch House. She stopped and prompted him, “And . . . ?”
“And I’m not sorry it did. Mary and I . . . we were friends who enjoyed each other, but I don’t see the sense in much else. You interest me, and I like the look of you.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, as if he could wipe away the weariness and the stress.
She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t looking for anything either. “I just got out of a relationship,” she said carefully, “and I’ve got a long list of bad ones before that.”
Jack nodded.
“That murder bit?” she continued. “It was a man I’d been seeing . . . Jason. He did some things, hurt me. One night I was drunk, and I decided to stop him from hurting me again . . .” She let the words fade away. For years, talking about
that
hadn’t been wise. Even though she was in an entirely new world now, the long-held habit of silence was still hard to shake. She could’ve avoided that last night with Jason; she decided to kill him instead, to put an end to it before a night came when she
couldn’t
escape. She hadn’t ever once said that aloud. Her testimony in court wasn’t a full lie, but there were some omissions and a bit of careful shading of the facts. The whole truth would only have made sense to someone who’d understood what Jason was capable of doing. The well-dressed men and women in the court weren’t going to be able to fathom what a man like Jason was like. She’d known that—just as surely as she knew that Jack might know it too. After the cyns in the desert and the monks and everything else in Gallows, she knew that Jack hadn’t ever led a sheltered life. He was a realist, so she told him what she wouldn’t tell Melody in the tavern. “Some men don’t let go. I made sure Jason wasn’t going to hunt me down some night.”
Jack held her gaze for a moment, but there was no judgment in his eyes. All he said was, “If you want to keep walking, we can. If you want someone else to keep you company right now, I can get one of the others.”
“No.” She shook her head. “But being inside an actual room would be nice.”
She waited for him to ask her to clarify, but he didn’t. He nodded and opened the door for her.
Once her eyes adjusted from the bright sun to the shadowed room, she realized that none of the others were in the tavern. Jack asked a few questions of people, and then he led her farther into the building and out another door into a small, enclosed yard where they found the proprietor. The fenced-in space reminded her of a beer garden, a space where people could enjoy the sunlight or smoke. So many places at home were all no smoking now that some bars seemed to have bigger crowds outside than in. Here, smoking was apparently
not
banned. The garden seemed mostly to be a space for customers to play some sort of games, none of which she recognized. On various tables, faded game boards were painted. The man Jack sought came toward them, and in a few moments they had directions to the location of their rooms.
Once they were inside again, Jack pointed out, “I don’t know what the others are doing. They could be out, or in the rooms.” He paused, motioning her to what appeared to be a wood-and-mud staircase. “I can knock, find Katherine or Melody, and you can—”
“I trust you, Jack,” she said softly. “I’d like to come to your room.”
He was silent as they walked up to the third floor.
On the third floor, he pointed to an empty chair in the hall. “Edgar and Katherine are up here, or Hector would be on guard still.”