His hat brushed the wasp’s wing, knocking it off-balance. It spun in the air, soft buzz becoming a loud whine as it beat its wings even faster, struggling to stay aloft. He swung at it again. This time, it wasn’t there to hit. It had already moved, darting toward his face at an impossible speed, stinger curved around so that it was the first thing to impact with the surface of his left eye.
The man screamed, clawing the wasp off his face and beginning to stagger around the wagon, howling. Unlike the unfortunate Noah, he didn’t kick a tank: he stuck his foot straight through the lid of the tank containing the terrantulas.
The skull-backed spiders swarmed up his leg, biting as they went, and he fell, howling, to join his friend on the floor.
Annie stood.
It was only a few feet to the back door. She crossed them quickly, pausing to look into the corn stalker’s cage. It looked back at her, orange eyes solemn in its impassive pumpkin face. She smiled.
“Go, then, monster,” she murmured, and undid the latch. “Do what you like to them. They’ve earned you.”
She didn’t wait to see whether the little manikin climbed out to find its way to fertile soil. It was no longer her concern. Instead, she walked on, reaching the door in seconds, and let herself out into the night.
The shouts and gunfire continued, and the voice of her husband droned over it all. How had she ever taken him for anything other than a distraction? He was keeping the roustabouts and acrobats focused on the bonfire line, on the threat of a frontal assault. Maybe he had even killed a few of them. The soldiers allowed outside of Deseret were among the best she had ever known, because they had to be. Anything less would have dishonored the Holy City and, by extension, Hellstromme. They could shoot a man at that distance, if they had time to lay their aim and be sure of what they were doing.
There were no more screams from inside the wagon of oddities. She hoped the man hadn’t crushed all her spiders when he fell. They were terrible beasts, and they would die quickly in these cold woods, but the people of The Clearing deserved a few monsters not of their own making. They were too accustomed to the wendigo. They didn’t fear them anymore.
They needed to be reminded that some monsters were worth fearing.
Annie hurried back toward her own wagon, feet light on the uneven ground. Every boneyard was different. In some respects, every boneyard was the same. This was her home territory, and if Michael wanted to face her here, he could learn the error of his ways.
She was almost there when she heard an unfamiliar woman’s scream. She broke into a run.
Stupid, stupid, she thought. Michael wouldn’t stop with two goons. He would send a battalion, an army, to take back what he thought of as his own. He would have her, and he would have Adeline, and he would keep coming until he felt her slights against him had been avenged. Yes, she had drawn some number of his goons to her, but so what? It hadn’t been everything. It hadn’t been enough.
The door to her wagon was open. She grabbed the poker from the fire she had built around her kettle stand and all but leapt up the stairs, ready to beat in the brains of whoever was intruding on her home. Then she froze, eyes going wide at the sight before her.
Soleil sprawled in Annie’s bed, a bullet hole between her eyes, no longer of this world. Sophia was beside her, feet kicking ripples into the duvet as she struggled to press herself against the wall, away from the battle now being played out on the wagon floor.
The strange woman—the woman who had screamed before—was there, dressed all in brown, face a mask of blood. Her teeth were bared in a hateful grimace, and she held one arm up, across her face and neck, blocking the furious lynx that had her pinned to the floor from ripping her throat out.
Tranquility looked to be in worse shape than the woman she was attacking. There were deep gouges cut into her sides, so wide that the blood and shocking whiteness of bone showed even through the thick fur. No human hands had made those cuts. They were too widely-set, too deep, the work of a bear—or of a wendigo. If there was any question of whether the loyal cat had saved her mistress and Martin in the woods, her wounds answered it. Anything that could have done that to Tranquility would have had a human in pieces in an instant.
Adeline was still asleep, despite the screams and the snarls and the hot smell of gunpowder hanging in the air, left over from the bullet that had killed Soleil. Her medicine was strong.
The woman’s gun was on the floor. Annie lunged for it, trusting Tranquility not to hurt her. Her faith was not misplaced: the lynx snarled, biting down on the woman’s raised arm, and continued in her attack until Annie had the gun in her hands and had backed up against the wagon door, aiming it as carefully as she could.
“Tranquility,” she said in a clear, carrying voice, “release.”
Tranquility snarled.
“Release.”
Tranquility let go. She snarled one last time, saliva dripping from her blunted fangs and onto the woman’s face, before she retreated to press herself against Annie’s leg, panting. Blood coated her muzzle. Most of it wasn’t hers, but too much was; her wounds were deep.
“Good girl,” murmured Annie, looking down the barrel of her stolen gun at the stranger. “Brave girl.” More loudly, she demanded, “Who are you, and why am I not shooting you where you lie?”
“She killed Auntie, and said she was going to take Adeline away,” wailed Sophia. She made no move to uncurl from her position against the wall. She was starting to shake. Shock was setting in, and soon she would be no use at all.
That wouldn’t do. “Stop your weeping,” snapped Annie. “Get the rope from my chest and tie her hands. I know you can tie a knot. You wouldn’t have been apprenticed to your aunt if you couldn’t.” Invoking Soleil was a calculated risk. With the woman’s body still cooling on the bed, saying her name could make Sophia freeze.
Or it could enrage her. Sophia’s expression went dead. Slowly, she pushed herself to the edge of the bed and crossed the wagon to the chest, opening it and beginning to rummage.
Tranquility growled, the sound seeming to vibrate all the way up through Annie’s leg. She snapped her attention back to the stranger, who had been pushing herself into a sitting position.
“Don’t do that,” said Annie. It was marvelous, how calm she could sound. That, and not her private menagerie of monsters, should have been the show’s star attraction. “Stay still, and maybe I don’t put a bullet through your throat.”
“I’m bleeding and beat,” said the woman. She had a Deseret accent. No surprise there. Michael might be willing to go to the gutter for the people he hired to help him, but he would never look outside the Holy City. Not while he still cared for his reputation. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”
“You broke into my wagon, shot my friend, and threatened my daughter,” said Annie, voice cool. “It doesn’t matter what I think you’re going to do to me. What you have done already is more than sufficient to earn you your current treatment.”
To her surprise, the stranger smiled. The gesture pulled at the claw marks gashing down the left side of her face, making them weep blood. “You must be Grace Murphy.”
“What makes you say that?”
“If the brat’s your daughter, there’s no one else you could be. Children are not transitive. But beyond that, you still stink of the Holy City. Ghost rock in your skin, mercury in your blood—the things that don’t wash away so easy.”
“Annie?” asked Sophia.
“I knew you’d change your name, but you can’t change who you are, or where you came from.” The stranger kept smiling. “They call me Laura. Your husband sent me to bring you home. You’ve been a very naughty girl, Grace. You’ve run out on your holy duty to house and husband. Dr. Murphy will probably be forgiving, though, if I tell him you came willingly. Will you come willingly?”
“If you’re stalling because you’re hoping the men who accompanied you will come to your rescue, I’m afraid I’ve some terrible news for you,??
? said Annie. She crouched, putting herself more on a level with Laura, the gun still aimed square at the other woman’s face. “They’re dead.”
Something flashed in Laura’s eyes. Something dark and dangerous. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. You see, being married to Michael Murphy left me equipped for little in the world outside Deseret—but I am, it seems, a wonderful mistress of monsters. Your men came after me in my wagon. One of them met his death at the teeth of my nibblers, terrible river fish that can reduce an adult to skeletal form in a matter of seconds. He didn’t suffer much. He enraged my pit wasp, and it handled the rest. As for the other, he seemed very concerned for your first worker—Noah, I believe he called him—and he didn’t look where he was stepping. He found my terrantulas. Nasty things. I never could teach them not to bite the hand that fed them.”
Tranquility continued growling. The cat looked like something out of a nightmare, all blood and bone and anger. That, more than anything, seemed to make Annie’s words believable. Laura’s eyes widened again, and this time there was no doubt in her expression at all.
“You killed them.”
“My creatures killed them. Or perhaps they killed themselves, by forcing their way into a place where they had no business. It doesn’t matter. Splitting hairs will make them no less dead. Sophia?”
“I’m getting it.” Sophia pulled the rope from the chest and moved to kneel next to Laura, reaching for her hands.
“No,” said Annie sharply. Sophia froze. Laura scowled. “Put them behind her back. We want to take her captive, not allow her to lull us into believing her subdued.”
“Bitch,” Laura said pleasantly.
“Such language,” said Annie. “I’m surprised they allow you to remain in Deseret.”
“I have my uses,” said Laura. “More than you do. You couldn’t even stay and honor your marriage vows.”
“I pledged myself to a man, not a monster.” Annie stood, keeping the gun on Laura the whole time. “Why are you here?”
“Because your husband needed a guide. He’s a soft man. Scientists always are. They think of themselves as hard because they can take things apart in their safe little labs, but you put them out in the world and they’re as lost as the next fool. He wants his daughter back. He wants what rightfully belongs to him. Who was I to refuse such an earnest, well-paying request?”
Annie’s eyes narrowed. “Michael hired you? Don’t lie to me. Lie, and it’s a bullet in your gut.”
“What, so I can bleed out a little faster? Your damned cat already has me split open and leaking.” Laura scowled. “If you want me to survive, you’ll worry more about patching me up and less about tying me down.”
“That’s an interesting assumption,” said Annie.
“That you’d want me alive? If you wanted me dead, you’d have pulled the trigger. You don’t seem to care that you’ve killed two of my men, which tells me you’re not sparing me out of soft-heartedness or some concern for human life. You want something from me. Whatever it is, I assure you that I’ll be less good at doing it once I’m dead.” Laura moved her glare to Tranquility, who was leaning more and more against Annie’s leg. “A goddamned lynx. Who keeps a lynx in a wagon with a small child?”
“The lucky and the blessed,” said Annie. “You’re right that if I wanted you to die quickly, I would pull the trigger. You’re wrong about why I haven’t done it. You threatened my child. You are here at the bidding of a man I never wanted to see again. I haven’t shot you because that would be too kind. I don’t care if you bleed to death. You deserve it for what you’ve done.”
“Big words from a woman who kidnapped her own daughter and left her other child behind.”
Sophia gasped softly.
Laura smiled. “She didn’t tell you, did she? Adeline isn’t an only child. Never was. She has a sister.”
Annie froze. “Has?”
“Oh, did you think she was dead? That by running away, you’d killed the child you didn’t want? Dr. Murphy was a better parent than you could ever hope to be. While you were running around with circus performers and animals, he was nursing your sick daughter through the worst of her illness. He was keeping her alive. You couldn’t even do that. You should never have been allowed to be a mother. You don’t deserve your children. You don’t—”
Laura yelped, stopping midsentence as Sophia drew the rope tight around her wrists. Annie stood frozen, staring.
“That’s enough of that,” said Sophia primly. She looped the rope around Laura’s wrists again. “You went too far. Miss Pearl is not a bad mother. She could never be a bad mother. If she left a little girl behind when she left Deseret, she had good reason.”
“You don’t know that,” Laura said through gritted teeth.
“Maybe not, but I’m not believing the things you say about her.” Sophia looked up. “Shall I tie her feet?”
“Please,” said Annie. “As for my good reason, my bastard of a husband planned to chop Adeline up for spare parts. I ran because I had no choice.”
“She wasn’t yours to steal,” said Laura.
“She wasn’t his to keep,” replied Annie. She lowered the gun, finally shifting her attention to Tranquility. “Oh, my poor girl. My poor darling girl. What have they done to you?”
Tranquility made a deep chuffing noise in the back of her throat, bowing her head. Annie knelt.
The lynx had been grievously wounded, that much was clear: the damage Annie had seen upon entering was not the whole of it. Her fur was thick enough to have stuck together when she bled, forming seals over the wounds, stopping her from bleeding out entirely. It wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough. Even as Annie got her hands under the big cat’s head, the light in Tranquility’s eyes was going dim, flickering on the verge of going out.
Tranquility attempted to purr. The sound turned into a wheeze.
“Oh, my poor girl,” said Annie again. She leaned forward and kissed Tranquility on the nose, ignoring the blood clotted there. Tranquility closed her eyes. “You did so well. You were so brave. You saved us both, you did. You saved your people. You can rest now.”
“It’s just an animal,” said Laura, and was rewarded with a cuff upside the head from Sophia.
“Be quiet,” she snapped. “That animal saved me from you. You don’t get to talk to her.”
“My poor girl,” said Annie, for the third time. She lowered Tranquility’s head slowly toward the floor. The rest of the cat’s body followed, until Tranquility was lying on her side, chest moving shallowly up and down.
The lynx wheezed again, cracking her eyes open just enough to be sure that Annie was still there, watching over her. Then, with no fanfare or thrashing, she closed her eyes, and stopped breathing.
“Ah,” said Annie. “My girl.” She stroked Tranquility one last time. The big cat’s fur was still warm.
Annie stood.
“Watch my daughter, Sophia,” she said. “I have to go see my husband.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Bullets had been peppering the bonfire line for quite some time, most passing through the fires before they could reach their targets. It was a small thing, but enough to throw some of the shots ever so slightly to the left of true, leaving them to whiz harmlessly by.
Or perhaps the people shooting at them from above were not truly interested in killing them all, just in pinning them down. Nathanial had to allow that this was possible, even probable, especially since the screams had come from the circus behind him, where the children and the people who weren’t equipped to handle a fight like this were hiding in their wagons, waiting to be saved. Counting on him to do the saving.
There wasn’t a single person in this show who didn’t trust him to keep them safe. That was what it meant to sign on with a circus with no patron, no backing, no powerful ties to some permanent place: it meant accepting that the ringleader would be the one to protect you. But he was the one who had decided that they should come to Oregon, fo
llowing tales of prosperity and plenty that bore no resemblance to this green and dangerous land. He was the one who had told them he would protect them if they followed him into the woods.
He had to keep them safe. He had to keep all of them safe. If he failed to do that, he might as well sell his wagon and settle in the first town they passed, because he was no longer equipped to serve the circus.
Martin stood, firing at the men on the ridge before dropping back down into the shelter of the fire. “I’m running low on bullets, Mr. Blackstone,” he said, with an anxious glance at the only man who had ever been willing to tell him he had value. “I think we all are. What should we do?”
They couldn’t run; the lit-up wagons were blocking the road, effectively pinning circus and settlers alike inside The Clearing. Whatever would have possessed people to make it all the way to Oregon before building their homes inside a pit where anyone who came along could turn them into targets? It didn’t make sense. It was like the settlers had been trying to get themselves slaughtered.
They couldn’t take the fight to the ridge. There was no cover there. Even if they could manage to climb the soft walls of the bowl without sliding back down to level ground, they’d be picked off one by one as they walked.
They couldn’t surrender. Those people …
Most of the circus didn’t know that Annie had changed her name upon joining the show, or that she had worked for years to strip the Deseret influence from her voice, shaping and flattening her vowels for the sake of sounding like she came from the same amorphous West as everyone else. There was a circus accent, a mashed-up mix of a dozen territories, and she had learned it one careful word at a time, gradually erasing the woman she had been. But when she was tired or under stress, she sometimes slipped, and the Deseret would come out, written clear as anything in every word she said.
Nathanial had never known her as “Grace,” but there was no question of who the madman on the hill was demanding be returned to him. He was here for Annie. If it was her or the circus …