Mr. Blackstone would care for Adeline, of that much she was sure. Assuming Michael didn’t burn this circus to the ground for the crime of sheltering her when she ran away from him.
The shots outside were getting more frequent, and closer. The screams were coming closer together. She didn’t recognize any of the screamers—all people sound essentially alike when in pain—but she could hear the pain in their voices, and she ached for them. This wasn’t their fault. None of this, from the beginning, had been their fault.
“It is not your fault!” declared Michael, his words eerily mirroring her thoughts. It made the skin on her arms rise in goosebumps, hairs standing on end. How dare he? She hadn’t seen him in the better part of a decade. He had no right to know her way of thinking. “My wife is a cunning temptress! She is skilled at lying to men, and she has tricked you! Only return her to me, and I promise you, all of this will go away!”
A confused murmur rose from the wagons around her. Annie realized two things in the same terrible moment. First, that much of the boneyard was undefended: the bonfire ring could keep some attackers away, but it would have holes, spans of unwatched ground. There were only so many bodies. There were only so many guns. Even if each able-bodied adult in the circus had gone to watch the border of the boneyard, there would still be places where a clever person could slip through.
They had thought themselves fighting against settlers and monsters, not madmen from Deseret, equipped with whatever new and terrible weapons had been devised in Hellstromme’s laboratory.
Second, and perhaps worse, was the realization that Michael had not yet told them who his wife was. The people around her, her friends and colleagues and companions on the road, they didn’t know Grace Murphy. They had never met Grace Murphy, because by the time she had reached them, she had already been calling herself by her daughters’ names, Annie in honor of lost Annabelle, Pearl in honor of the child she couldn’t save, with Adeline heavy in her arms and her sins weighing heavy on her heart. She was Annie Pearl to them, had always been Annie Pearl, and Michael might as well have been demanding they hand him the moon.
They weren’t leaving her to prepare for the onslaught because they believed in her ability to defend herself. They were doing it because they didn’t realize, yet, that she was the key to making this new problem go away. They let her work because they didn’t know they had an alternative.
Once they did know—and they would know; Michael would tell them, sooner or later, once he realized why no one was leaping to obey him—would they still be willing to protect her? Would she still be one of them, part of the family, once they understood what she’d done? That she was a fallen woman, unfaithful, a kidnapper and a deserter of children in the same action? She didn’t deserve this good place. She never had.
The door was heavy, designed to stay in place even when the wagon hit bad spots on the road. Annie put her shoulder to it, shoving it into the position she needed. She left it propped just enough to form an angle between itself and the frame. When she was sure that it was good, she grabbed a bucket and went back to work.
Outside, the gunfire, and Michael’s cold narration, went on.
“You may not know my wife by name. She may have lied to you. If that is the case, there is no need to feel ashamed, and I will not hold her deceit against you. She was always an excellent liar. A better liar than I had any idea. She may have given you a false name, a false history. She may have told you that she was the daughter of a robber baron or a banker, or the sister of some wanted criminal. But she is none of those things. She is Grace Murphy of Deseret, and she is my wife, and I would have her back again. Return her to me, or know that you have made an enemy.”
The night was loud enough to cover almost any sound. Annie was sure that the people who had come to The Clearing with Michael were counting on that. She knew her husband; knew how he thought and how he planned. A frontal assault, such as the one she could hear through the open window, was contrary to his nature. He wouldn’t want to endanger himself if there were any possible way to avoid it.
So: Assume that he had come to The Clearing expecting to find a sleepy little forest settlement, the sort of place that greeted visitors with open hands and open doors, putting up no resistance. The sort of place, more, where no one would hear the residents screaming if he allowed his goons to do what goons did best.
There was no way he was traveling without goons. Even if he had wanted to, Hellstromme would never have allowed it. In a way, Annie thought she had more in common with Hellstromme than she would ever have wanted to admit. They both kept dangerous pets. It was just that, in his case, the dangerous pets were human, while hers at least had the decency to reveal themselves openly as the monsters they were.
Moreover, there was no way Michael was here without Hellstromme’s blessing. Her husband never did anything without the full consent of the man he called master, the man who had lifted a brilliant but brittle boy out of the Holy City and elevated him to the position of scientist, untouchable, irrefutable. She knew little about her husband’s past, but she knew that he had no family; that his family name was, in fact, worth little to nothing in the temple, where bloodline and social position were everything. Their marriage had been predicated largely on what she brought to the table: her name, her position in society, and the legitimacy it endowed. Without her, he would have been nothing but another flunky as far as most of Deseret was concerned.
When Hellstromme told him to jump, he replied by asking how high he should aim. Hellstromme had approved this. Hellstromme had dispatched him, to bring back something he believed should be the property of Deseret.
Had Michael sent men to retrieve her, Annie would have had no trouble believing that she was the target. Now, however … he was calling her name, he was speaking of her betrayal, but he was doing it himself. Even her husband’s science couldn’t be so advanced as to allow him to duplicate himself so perfectly well. This was him. This was the man himself. And that meant that he had been sent to bring back something so precious that Hellstromme would risk his right-hand man for the sake of having it.
He was here for Adeline.
Annie moved the tank containing her largest, most aggressive snakes into position on the floor, feeling a strange serenity steal over her. There was nothing else that made sense. Michael was here to reclaim their daughter, whom he had always considered to be his property. Perhaps Annabelle had finally died, and he felt compelled to prove to Hellstromme that he could produce an heir. Perhaps Deseret was running low on the hearts of little girls. It didn’t matter. Michael was here for her daughter. Michael was here for her child.
Michael wasn’t going to have her.
Annie looked around the wagon, now reduced to a maze of dangers and potential booby-traps. Anyone who wasn’t her would have a hard time walking from one end to the other in full daylight without releasing an oddity and possibly killing themselves in the process. It wasn’t enough.
It would have to do.
Calmly, she hung her lantern in the window, marking the wagon as open, and occupied. Then she took a step back, until her calves hit the chair she kept for the long afternoons, when the sun was hot and the wagon was full, and it felt like she might die if she didn’t have the chance to sit down. She sat, spine as straight as it had been when she was a girl, learning the ways of etiquette and Deseret womanhood from the nursemaids and instructors her parents hired. She folded her hands in her lap, eyes fixed on the partially-open door.
Annie took a deep breath and settled in to wait for her husband’s people to come and try to take her home.
Chapter Twenty-one
The first iteration of The Clearing had been built by people who didn’t understand the land, not yet: who didn’t know what it would hit them with, or how it would struggle to destroy them. They had looked at the shallow bowl in the earth and seen, not a killing jar, not a place for rain to pool and snow to gather, but fertile soil that wouldn’t need to be cleared before i
t could be built upon. They’d believed the strange fingerprints driven into the ground by some unseen hand were a blessing to them, and when the wendigo had come, there had been nowhere for them to run.
The sensible thing would have been to leave Oregon with the first thaw—or, if that was somehow not possible, to build their new settlement on high ground, someplace where the advantage would always be theirs to claim, where they could see the dark coming and turn it aside. The survivors of the first settlement had not been sensible. Or maybe Hal was right when he said that they were already wendigo in their hearts, already hungry and planning for the future when they would be tall and strong and vicious. They had constructed their second home in mirror to the first, and when Dr. Michael Murphy had moved his wagons into place along the line of the road that circled the bowl, they had had no chance to run.
Seven wagons, six of them filled with armed men who wanted nothing more than to impress him, and through him, Hellstromme: that was all it had taken for Dr. Murphy to take the town. There were still people below him with guns, people who thought that they could fight their way out of this, but they were all behind the bright glare of the firelight, and from what his scouts had said, they were members of the circus to a man. The townsfolk were outside their houses, watching, some with weapons in their hands. That didn’t mean that they had fired a single shot.
Indeed, there was something almost eerie about the way the townsfolk stood there, not hiding, not shouting, and not leveling their guns. It was a standoff that made no sense, and it might have concerned him, had he not had other dangers on his mind. Like those damned circus folk, who huddled behind their fires—as if fire had protected anyone from anything since humanity crawled out of the caves—and aimed their rifles, and tried to keep him from what was his.
There was a flicker of motion at his elbow. Michael turned, lowering the cone he was using to amplify his voice for the edification of the fools below. Laura looked at him calmly, waiting for his attention to be devoted solely to her.
It burned him, how this woman assumed she had any authority, any right to command his actions. She’d been like this all the way across the country, calm as a rattlesnake coiled in the sun, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. She was his babysitter, assigned by Hellstromme to make sure he came back, and that burned, too, because it spoke of a world where he would have considered doing differently. He was loyal. He had always been loyal. He would be loyal until the day he died. To suggest anything else was not just inaccurate, it was cruel.
That others might consider him cruel—might consider what he was doing in this very moment to be nothing short of monstrous—had never crossed his mind.
“What?” he demanded.
Laura smirked. She had put her hat aside when the sun went down. Somehow, that little change had made her more difficult to see. She was darkly tanned, dressed in brown leathers, with hair only a few shades lighter than her skin. In the shadows that clung to The Clearing, she stood just to the side of invisibility.
“It’s the right circus,” she said. “One of my boys made it down and back while we were drawing their fire, and he saw the sign on their big tent, clear as anything. These people don’t know how to hide.”
“That’s not my concern,” he said. “Did your man see my wife?” Did he see my daughter? Adeline would not be perfectly identical to her sister, not after all her years of running in the sun and scraping her knees on wagon floors. Grace had been unforgivably negligent, risking his property in such a manner.
“No,” said Laura. “But then, how would he have known if he had? It’s not as if you’ve provided any pictures. I need your permission to descend.” The corner of her mouth curved into a hooked smile, reminiscent of the curve of a rattlesnake’s tail.
Everything about the woman was reptilian and terrible, repugnant in the extreme. How she hid her nature behind smooth skin and a woman’s curves was beyond even his genius to explain. Had she revealed that she was born in Hellstromme’s labs, crafted from the flesh of a hundred such snakes, he would almost have been relieved. At least then she would have made sense.
(Her origin was nowhere near so flashy, or so fabulous: Laura was a daughter of Junkyard, shaped by her environment, refined by her own fight to survive, until she was a killing blow walking in the shape of a gunslinger, selling her services to the highest bidder to keep her belly full and her shelter secure. Michael Murphy was an essentially immoral man. Laura was something different. Like the snake she so reminded him of, she was essentially amoral, willing to do whatever was required to keep herself alive.)
“I thought my permission was not required for your mission,” he said stiffly.
“Hellstromme told me to get you here safely, and then to afford you any assistance you required,” she said. “I don’t leave without you, but while we’re here, I’m to do what I can to aid you. I assumed you wanted the woman.”
“I do,” he said. “But I want the girl more.”
Laura tilted her head slightly to the side, so that a lock of hair fell across her cheek in a disarmingly feminine manner. It made his flesh crawl. Nothing as terrible as she should have been permitted to feign womanhood in a believable fashion.
“So the woman,” she said. “If she resists, you don’t mind my killing her?”
Michael paused. He and Grace were still married in the eyes of God: he had loved her as much as he was able when she had been faithful, and once she had proven false, he had been unable to entertain remarriage. Not with Annabelle still needing him so direly; not with the city ready to forgive him for losing one wife, but poised to judge him if he lost two. It had been too great a risk to take.
“Only if you must,” he said finally. “You can damage her as much as you like. She can be repaired. Women are like wagons. Break a few wheels, splinter a few axles, but you’ll still be able to find a way to put them back together if necessary.”
Laura nodded. “So may I descend?”
“You may.”
Her smile was swift and sharp, making his heart clench with the sudden conviction that he had given her the wrong instruction: that he had somehow condemned himself and his daughter both with his words.
“As you like,” she said, and turned, placing two fingers in her mouth and giving one short, sharp whistle. Two of the men hired to accompany their caravan separated themselves from the shadows and moved to stand beside her, flanking her. They were both so much taller than she that it should have made her look small, even comic. It didn’t. Instead, she seemed all the more dangerous for being so obviously overpowered. If she weren’t dangerous, how else could she have survived?
Michael watched as Laura and the two men walked to the edge of the road, where the land dropped off and rejoined the gentle slope of the basin’s walls. She looked back once, winked, and vanished into the gloom, leaving Michael standing on the road, the amplifier in his hands.
After a long moment’s hesitation, he raised it to his lips and began speaking again. “You have stolen something that belongs to me. The rules of the sovereign nation of Deseret state that a man may do as he likes with his wife. I would like to have my wife returned. If you do not—”
His words faded into so much background nonsense as Laura and her men slid down the curve of the hill, using the sides of their feet to control their rate of descent. Dust and pebbles spilled in their wake, the small, scuffling sound covered by the gunfire and shouting. Michael Murphy might be a useless rotter of a man, Laura observed, but he sure could kick up a distraction when he needed to.
In a matter of seconds, they were on level ground, stepping away from the hill and onto the territory claimed by the settlers. Laura motioned her men to silence as she looked around, waiting for some sign that they had been seen. She’d seen better killers than her taken down when they failed to account for some local kid sending up the alarm. Better to go slow, and be sure that they went unseen.
Nothing moved. They were secure.
When th
e settlers had chosen the location of their new home, they had probably celebrated finding something as perfect for their needs as a natural bowl in the earth, surrounded on all sides by gently sloping hillside, keeping them safe from surprise attack. They wouldn’t have thought about situations like this one, where they would need to defend themselves against a smaller force with better weapons and higher ground. That was the trouble with some people. They set themselves up to feel like the world couldn’t touch them, and then they didn’t know what to do when it touched them anyway.
Maybe. The townsfolk didn’t seem to be doing much. They were just standing there, slack-jawed and staring, while Murphy’s men fired on the circus, and the circus fired back. A few of the circus folk had already gone down, swallowing dirt like the corpses they had always been destined to become, and still the townsfolk were standing in silent witness, rather than moving to defend their homes. It was unsettling.
It was none of her concern. She was here for the brat, and for the woman, if she could get her without compromising herself. The spot she’d chosen for their descent was well behind the line of bonfires—and that, too, was a sign of the shortsightedness of the average person. The circus had created a barricade in fire and light, drawing it between itself and the settlers, but hadn’t thought to protect its rear flank. Anyone could slide down the side of the hill and take them from behind.
A few slit throats would have been educational for them. Let her ghost up to their fires, grab their sentries by the hair, and show them what it was to smile from ear to ear. The survivors would thank her. Well, the survivors would curse her name, if they ever learned it. But they would go on to build better walls, to draw circles with no weak spots, to protect themselves properly. Really, it was almost a shame that she didn’t have the time to teach them how to do that.