Inside the wagon it was dark and cool. The windows had been closed; there was no smell of smoke, only of herbs and tea and Adeline’s medicine. Moving quickly, Annie lit the lanterns that remained on their hooks and popped her head out the door, calling, “In you get. There’s room for everyone, if you’re willing to sit close and be friends.”
“We already are,” said Mr. Blackstone, with a broad smile, and followed Adeline inside.
The girl stood a little straighter once she was in her own space, looking around with a bright satisfaction that was almost the mirror of Annie’s own. Annie hid her smile behind her hand. Sometimes it was impossible to deny the blood between them—not that she would ever have wanted to. While she might have serious doubts as to Michael’s place in the conception of their daughters, she had carried them in her own flesh. She knew well whose they were, or whose they had been, in the beginning. Adeline was more her own with every passing day. The same must be true of Annabelle, if the girl had lived. Which she had not, could not. Surely there was no possible way.
The seamstress helped Sophia to Annie’s bed, coaxing her to sit. Martin sat beside her, and both watched as the seamstress knelt and began fussing with the dressings on her ankle.
“You did a good job, Martin,” she said. “This is tied tightly enough to help, but not so tightly as to harm her further. Thank you for bringing her back to me.”
“I told you he was a good one, Auntie,” said Sophia, practically beaming.
“You did, child, you did, and I have believed you to the best of my ability.” The seamstress bent back over the bandages.
Adeline climbed up onto her own bed and clutched theatrically at her throat. Annie nodded.
“I know, dearest,” she said. “You’re well past due for your medicine. I’m sure your throat is aching by now. How are your lungs? Good? Or bad?”
Adeline made a “so-so” gesture with one hand. Annie nodded again.
“I’ll have to boil water for your tea, then. Hal, can you please tell Mr. Blackstone what you told me in the woods? He’ll need to know the whole story.” She turned as she spoke, in time to see the surprise and dismay on Hal’s face.
“That’s no good story for women or children, ma’am,” said Hal. “I told you because I had to, not because I had any wish to befoul your innocence.”
“My daughter is a friend to beasts; Sophia was kidnapped by monsters; Soleil is of French-Canadian descent and may know more of your wendigo than you think. Any of them will be strong enough to hear your stories, and all of them have good reason to.” Annie took her kettle down from its hook. “I’ll be right outside.”
“I don’t like you leaving again so soon,” said Mr. Blackstone.
Annie shrugged. “A pity, because I must. My daughter needs her medicine. You understand, don’t you?” She looked at him, an open challenge in her eyes. If you cannot understand that she comes before everything else in this world or the next, we can go no farther than a single kiss by the bonfire’s light.
He nodded, marginally. “I do. But … leave the door open. I do not trust the shadows here.”
“I will,” said Annie, and took the kettle, and stepped outside.
There was something soothing to the process of starting a fire and beginning to boil the water for tea. It was familiar; it was the same, no matter where they were, from Oregon to the Mexican border. Some things endured through everything, even geography.
She could hear Hal inside, beginning to tell his story. She couldn’t make out the words, but she didn’t need to. They were finally on the track that would take them to morning, and hence to safety, whatever shape that safety had to take.
In the distance, back toward the bonfires, a gun spoke rolling thunder. A woman screamed, and safety was suddenly very far away.
Chapter Twenty
Annie had the presence of mind to grab her kettle before she spun and ran back into the wagon. The water sloshing inside was only half-warm, but that would have to do; even if the wendigo had returned, God forbid and keep them all, Adeline needed her medicine. The girl was doing surprisingly well for how long she had been without, barefoot and running through the trees like the chill did nothing to distress her. It wouldn’t last.
(There had been a time, brief but real, when Annie had considered abandoning Adeline’s medicine. All the girl’s troubles were a consequence of her father’s science: How could science heal science? It seemed better to let nature intervene. Nature’s intervention had consisted of Adeline’s lungs filling with fluid while her senses departed her, replaced by wild thrashing and nightmares she lacked the physical dexterity to express. The medicine Annie gave her daughter daily was a necessary treatment for the damage Michael had done. Not a cure, no—cures were the stuff of fairy tales—but a treatment that allowed the child to have the closest thing she could ever know to a normal life.)
The others were on their feet when Annie crashed back into the wagon, all save for Adeline, who was sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching the door with huge, dark eyes.
She relaxed when her mother closed the door, and signed, ‘It’s not the hungry ones.’
“What’s that?” Annie grabbed a mug with her free hand, tossing it to Adeline. “Measure your herbs.”
Adeline let the cup drop to the cover, keeping her hands free. ‘It’s not the hungry ones, or my friends. This is people.’
“What’s she saying?” asked Mr. Blackstone, moving to the wagon’s small window and twitching the curtain aside, peering out into the dark. He shook his head. “I can’t see a thing. I need to be out there. Sophia, Soleil, Annie, you stay here.”
“She’s saying that whatever is attacking is neither wolf nor wendigo, but something human.” Annie looked to Hal. “Is there another settlement near here?”
“No.” He shook his head. “The Clearing survives alone. We’ve had a few other villages try to establish themselves, but the wendigo are always waiting, and always hungry. Nothing has been able to take root in this poisoned soil.”
Martin grabbed his rifle, kissed Sophia on the temple, and started for the door. “I have to help. I didn’t defend the show against the wendigo. Whatever this is, I have to help.”
“No, you have to stay here and care for the woman who will be your wife,” said Annie. Adeline dropped a handful of herbs into the cup. Annie poured a stream of lukewarm water over them, creating a swampy goo that bubbled and smelled of bitter green. “Sophia needs you as much as the bonfire line does.”
“I’ll go,” said Hal. “Someone has to pay for these people’s sins, and it might as well be me.”
The gunfire came again, closer and louder this time, so sharp that Annie couldn’t imagine the size of the gun or the force of the bullet. It was like listening to a thunderstorm somehow brought to heel and forced to fire at man’s whim. It was terrifying.
“Drink, dearest,” she urged Adeline.
The girl must have been feeling worse than she wanted to let on, because she nodded, hands cupped tight around the mug, and drank its contents without a gesture of protest. She coughed, once, the motion accompanied by the thick, gelatinous sound of things shifting deep inside her lungs. Then she lay back, snuggling down against her pillows, and closed her eyes.
Sophia stared. “She can sleep with this happening?” she demanded, sounding like she was on the border of hysteria.
“She hasn’t a choice when she’s just been given her medicine,” said Annie.
“Maybe I should take some of that,” said Sophia.
“It would kill you,” said Annie.
Sophia stared. “What?”
“Mugwort and mercury, silk from the terrantulas and threads of stinging nettle, and a dozen things more, all mixed together,” said Annie. She gingerly lifted Adeline’s abandoned cup and set it back on its shelf, where no one else would accidentally use it. “Ground ghost rock, for the main. It’s expensive, but necessary. My daughter has specific needs. Some of them are met by things that would be
poison to anyone else.”
“My God,” breathed Soleil.
“I think we have well established that God has no place in Oregon,” said Annie coldly.
“No wonder the wolflings have no quarrel with her,” said Hal, and to that, Annie had no answer.
Martin nodded, face grim, and opened the wagon door, stepping foot outside. The night was quiet; the gunfire, loud as it was, was still infrequent. Enough so that it seemed perhaps it had been an error—some hunter, aiming for a fleeing stag, had aimed incorrectly, or some overexcited settler had opened fire on the bonfire without proper cause.
Then someone else screamed, the sound high and shrill and carrying, and the gunfire began anew. Martin leapt down from the wagon’s stairs and took off running. Hal was close behind him. Mr. Blackstone lingered long enough to turn to Annie, grabbing her forearms in his long-fingered hands.
“Stay here,” he commanded. There was no fury in his words: only fear, stripped naked and allowed into the open for all to see. “I’ve lost you once tonight. I think I would go mad with worry if I lost you a second time. Stay here, where you can be safe, and guard your daughter.”
“I will,” she promised.
He kissed her, and he was gone, running out the door after the others, vanishing into the night.
Annie hesitated, fingers going to her lips, before she took a cautious step toward the open door.
“No!” wailed Sophia. “He asked you to stay here, with us! Please stay here, with us! I’m hurt and my aunt is old—we cannot defend ourselves!”
“Hush,” whispered Annie, making a “settle” motion with her hands. “I’m going nowhere, but neither am I willing to lock myself in and make of us an easy target for the first fool who comes walking down the center of the boneyard. Stay where you are, stay quiet, and be still.”
Sophia quieted, clutching at Soleil’s hand so hard that it seemed she must break the other woman’s fingers. Soleil bore up silently, unflinching. She had been a seamstress for most of her life. Her hands were the tools of her trade, and while they might not be tender or quick anymore, they could handle any number of shocks.
Silently, Annie walked to the door and stuck her head outside. Mr. Blackstone and the others were already gone, vanishing into the barricade behind the bonfires. Someone fired a shotgun, the sound ringing through the circus. Whether it had been fired by their side or by the other was impossible to say.
There were lights on in The Clearing, bright and unyielding, chasing the shadows away. Men had lit lanterns, opened windows, doing their best to balance out the bonfires started by the circus folk. That, too, was to be expected.
Less expected were the lights around the valley’s rim, lights that matched the angle and progression of the winding road down into The Clearing. Annie counted five wagons, all of them lit up like fuel was no object, like they could afford to replace the sun if need be. The shape of them was … strange, boxy and familiar at the same time. She had seen these wagons before, or wagons very much like them. If only she could recall where, she was sure this would all start making sense. Every scrap of it, every bead of it would make sense.
A flash of light from the road punctuated another gunshot. Someone returned fire from the town line. The townsfolk and the circus people were shooting at a common enemy, she realized; someone was threatening them both. This might have started as a standoff between enemies, but it had grown into something larger and much more complicated.
Then the wagons on the roadway lit up.
She had thought them illuminated before, bedecked as they were with lanterns that must have been consuming oil and tallow at a prodigious rate. She had been right, in her way; she had also been terribly, horribly wrong. The new lights were clearly steam-powered, so bright and so clean that they were like looking at the sun, somehow taken captive and dragged down to the level of a mundane roadway. They were white and clinical, cold, and so unforgiving that they were somehow worse than the shadows, which fled before their onslaught.
Those few shadows that held fast, using some structure or person to anchor themselves, seemed to thicken in the instant that saw their fellows blown away. Annie felt them clutching at her ankles, clinging like living things. She kicked them off, and stared, the blood draining from her face, leaving her pale as paper and trembling. She did know those wagons, she did, and if there was any shame in that moment, it was that it had taken her so very long to recognize them for what they were, to understand what they meant.
It was all in the design. The filigree at their edges, the curve of their roofs, the sharp, austere elegance of their crafting. These were not workhorse wagons, like the ones the circus used, to be repaired by any tinker or wainwright to come along. No. These were show wagons, crafted to complement the households of the wealthy. Their backs bristled with steam tubes and clever attachments, all of them designed to propel the conveyances along the roads without the aid of animals or the fear of becoming mired in mud or untended trail. These wagons could roll across endless desert or through treacherous quicksand and never lose their footing or stall. They could traverse states in hours that would, for anyone else, have been days.
These wagons had been built in Deseret.
As if thinking the name of the land that had once been her home were some sort of summoning spell, cruelly cast and never intended for any loving world, a man emerged from one of the bright-lit wagons. He carried no gun. Instead, he held a long, conical tube, which he raised to his lips.
Annie was too far away to see his face, to see anything more than the slope of his shoulders and the length of his body. That was all she needed to see. She knew who it was before he spoke. After he spoke …
Had she ever needed to know what it felt like when the world fell down around her, she would have learned in that moment. She would have learned, and she would never have forgotten.
“My name is Dr. Michael Murphy,” said the man—said her husband—said the monster who had driven a good Deseret woman to steal her daughter and run away, across a continent, looking for a place where she could be safe. “I am not here to hurt you, although I will if you force my hand. I am looking for my wife. I am looking for Grace Murphy. She’s given you another name, which I will not speak, for she has no right to it, as I did not give it to her. She may have claimed to have the right to set her own course. She lied. She belongs to me.”
Annie whirled, running back to the wagon. Adeline was sleeping soundly. Sophia and Soleil were sitting on her bed, their hands still clutched together, like that alone was keeping them from flying off the face of the Earth.
“Stay where you are,” hissed Annie. “Close the windows. Open the door for no one, no matter how sweetly they ask. Protect my child.” She slammed the door, not waiting for them to reply, and turned, and ran for the wagon of oddities.
It was a strange place to seek refuge. It was full of monsters, creatures that would kill her as soon as look at her. With Tranquility gone, there was nothing there that would fight for her. She ran there all the same, fumbling with the lock, while the sound of gunfire spoke from the bonfire and her husband watched impatiently from above.
“All I am asking for is the woman,” he said, his voice magnified and bounced off every wall of the bowl surrounding The Clearing. “She is nothing to you. She is my wife, bound in the eyes of God to be my helpmeet on this Earth. She is my property, and you must return her to me.”
The wagon door was latched. Annie fumbled it open, tumbling head over heels in her haste to get inside. Her head cracked against the wagon floor, and she sprawled there for a moment, struggling to get her breath back.
In the nearest tank, the single pit wasp she had been able to keep alive after separation from its hive shifted, wings buzzing slightly, abdomen pulsing. Its stinger was wet, as always, shiny with the thin venom it secreted as easily as breathing. It would kill her if she gave it the opportunity. It would kill anyone if given the opportunity. Only Adeline had ever been able to come close to h
andling the thing, and even she could only interact with it safely when she was full of her medicine, when her blood reeked of mercury and ghost rock and silver. Any other time she came close, it would lash out, buzzing death behind a wall of glass.
It buzzed now, listless in the dark, a warning sound more than an actual threat. It had no desire to be forced into a fight, not before the sun was up.
Annie pushed herself onto her hands, fumbling at the lower shelves until she found her emergency lantern, the one she kept low, where Adeline could reach it. A few matches later and she was looking around the wagon, face lit by the lantern’s flickering light, searching for an answer to her dilemma—looking for a way out.
She had traveled the continent, collecting monsters everywhere she went, purchasing anything the natives called “unnatural” and locking it away, the way her husband had tried to lock away their daughter. She had allowed Adeline’s instincts to lead her to every terrible thing the West had to offer, and when she hadn’t been able to tame them, she had kept them anyway. She couldn’t aim a gun with more than the roughest accuracy. She couldn’t throw a knife or rope a steer. But oh, she could fill her hands with monsters, and she could use them, when no other weapons remained.
Oscar lurked at the bottom of his half-empty tank, turning in the shallow water to watch her with hopeful fishy eyes, waiting for his evening meal. The nibblers tracked her with even more intensity, their toothy jaws chewing at the water until thin lines of blood ran outward from their gums, coloring everything around them.
“You are terrible,” she informed them. “Of all the horrible things I’ve sheltered, you are the worst.”
The nibblers swam, all blind hunger and clashing jaws, and Annie knew what she had to do.
Opening the window at the far end of the wagon allowed her to clearly hear the gunfire and screaming from outside. Annie tried to shut it out as best she could, moving through the wagon, shifting exhibits from one place to another, struggling to do so without dropping anything. If she broke a jar …