The Angel's Fire

by Holley Trent

  “And you didn’t give them a chance for good reason,” she coaxed. She gave up her comfortable perch and approached the table.

  Lola looked up at her and somehow suppressed her immediate compulsion to wince. Her body had been exceptionally traitorous as of late. She was usually better at controlling visceral reactions. There were dark circles under the Cougar’s eyes and her coloring had faded to a dusty hue indicative of a rapidly fading tan. Rachel didn’t usually bother keeping herself fair the way some women in Maria did. She didn’t see the point and had once commented that if folks stared at her long enough, they’d figure she wasn’t “no Colonial blue blood, anyhow.” Her surname may have been English, but her mother was descended from one of Lola’s oldest lines of Cougars.

  Rachel needed rest. They all did, but there was no one else around to do the work. Just a bunch of women, trying to keep strangers from tearing apart the most stable existence any of them had ever known.

  Lola had no one to blame but herself. She should have coerced some of her Cougars to rally around and guard the town sooner. She shouldn’t have depended on Tarik, who’d been missing for months. Nearly half a year, actually.

  Even the thought of him made her chest burn and acid fill her mouth.

  He’d evidently gotten what he wanted and quit.

  Typical.

  Now it was too late. The Cougars were scattered about, either protecting their own interests or trying to get away from the chaos. She kept trying to lure in strong males from other groups, but they’d been delayed by one disaster after another.

  She’d figure out a solution. She wasn’t going to wallow in self-pity, and she refused to accept defeat just yet.

  “How much did those rabble-rousers offer you?” Rachel asked Roy. “We’ll double the amount.”

  “Doesn’t matter how much. I’m sorry.”

  “So, you will cede the property to the sheriff, then?” Lola asked, looking into her glass again. “Even knowing what he has planned?”

  “I don’t like what he’s got planned. Don’t put words in my mouth on that. We need a fancy department store here like we all need bullets to the heads, but that’s what his bride wants, and he’s gonna get his way. His thugs’ll see to it, and let me tell you something about them.” Roy leaned in close and whispered, in spite of the fact that it was six in the morning and nobody was outside to overhear. “You get rid of one group, Sheriff finds more. He’s got an endless supply of those vagrants. Trust me, I got rid of three myself, last week.”

  “Roy!” Rachel gasped.

  He harrumphed and swallowed the coffee-and-whiskey Rachel had poured for him upon his arrival. “They were at my damn house, snooping around. I guess they didn’t know there was a window open. Wife was having a fit, scared out of her mind. I sent her on upstairs and told her to plug her ears. Dragged them out to the desert when I was done and pulled my old wagon over where I’d disturbed the ground to bury them. That was a month ago. Heard the sheriff muttering to one of his deputies that the gang didn’t show up when they were supposed to, so I guess he don’t know. About ten days later, I saw a different bunch harassing the blacksmith.”

  The smithy was on an extremely desirable lot right beside the hotel the sheriff’s prissy little nuisance had wheedled for her husband to buy for her. Apparently, the big fancy house he’d built for her wasn’t enough. She’d needed the hotel as her playground, too.

  “I’m surprised Nate didn’t drop hot coals down their shirts or somethin’,” Rachel said.

  “I didn’t ask him about it, but he sure looked spitting mad.”

  “He’s getting them from jails,” Lola murmured into her glass.

  “Say what?”

  She sighed. “Jails. I—” She very nearly confessed that she’d followed the sheriff one week, taking on a new appearance every time he noticed her at all. She’d found it surprising that all the form-changing hadn’t exhausted her the way she’d was used to. She didn’t know why that was. In fact, on some days, she felt like she could carry the whole world on her back.

  If not for the heartburn.

  She straightened up in her chair and smoothed her unbrushed hair down on the sides. “I…overheard him saying to his deputy that that is where they are from. He goes to other sheriffs and negotiates for their inmates. I do not know what he tells them. Maybe he is calling it a goodwill gesture and saying he wants to help out. Taking the worst of the worst and saying he will hold them in Maria for the Marshal.”

  “Lemme guess,” Rachel said dryly. “All those lowlifes who woulda been strung up for the crimes they did got set loose to raise hell here.”

  “Promise a man like that a place to live and a chance to fade into anonymity, and he’ll repay you until he dies.”

  “Or die trying.” Roy pushed back from the table and stood. “Listen, ladies. I’ll hold out for as long as I can and make whatever excuses I can think of to buy you some time. It’d be irresponsible of me to just throw my hands up and tell you to just take the place knowing the lengths they’ll go to get it. If I were you, I’d start packing up just in case.” He grimaced. “Leave a mess behind if you want. No use making it easy for them.”

  He made his exit after muttering one more apology.

  Rachel closed and locked the door. “Sometimes, I really hate that we have to be so discreet about what we are. We could scare every one of them off if they could see us as cats.” She snorted. “Knowing how ornery Sheriff is, he’d probably just shoot at us.”

  Lola grunted.

  “What, no lecture about using magic around the humans?”

  Lola picked up her milk glass and carried it to the kitchen.

  “Lola?”

  “I heard you, pretty one.” Lola poured the remnants of the milk into the glass and tore a chunk off the last loaf of bread.

  “You don’t have anything to say?”

  “Nothing that I wish for you to hear.”

  “You can tell me, you know. It’s not good to keep so much bottled up. Not even for a goddess.”

  “Sweet of you to offer.” Grimacing, Lola rubbed her sternum and tried to will the burn away from beneath it. She wondered if Bertha had a good remedy for her or some kind of tisane. She’d try anything once. She couldn’t think straight when her body wasn’t cooperating. “I will be fine. Perhaps you should start making plans to return to the ranch. Take Elizabeth and her nephew with you if you’re able.” The boy had barely arrived before all the nonsense with the sheriff had ramped up. “We’ll sell what we can and scrounge up whatever coins we have to make sure you have enough ranch hands in the spring.”

  Rachel didn’t say anything. She tilted her head to one side and picked at the ragged end of her long braid. And she stared.

  Too prescient, that stare.

  Lola massaged the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “Fine, child. Whatever it is you want to say, go ahead and say it.”

  “If you insist. Because you had your last baby alone, you’re gonna quit on us so you can hole yourself up and have that one alone, too?”

  Lola dropped her hand from her face, and nearly spilled her milk whisking around to glare at the woman. “What are you talking about?”

  Rachel didn’t even blink. “You might have pulled the wool over my eyes for a long time about what you are, Lola, but you can’t fool me about that. I’d guess you are exactly as pregnant as the length of time Tarik has been gone.”

  She put up a hand before Lola could open her mouth or lash out or…anything.

  And for some reason, a calmness settled into Lola. A sort of resignation that she’d been figured out in some small way. She trusted Rachel—one of her favored ones.

  But what she said couldn’t be true.

  “It is not possible,” Lola said. “I…cannot conceive that way. There must be a ritual. That is how when I joined with his father, we created Yaotl. Tarik…” Lola swallowed down the bile in her throat. She didn’t even want to say his name. She hated him and didn’t wa
nt to honor him by speaking his name into the air. “We…did not do that, so it simply cannot be.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, and maybe that was true for your son, but maybe that’s not the only way a goddess can make a baby. Maybe she can do it the same way as everyone else. Elizabeth probably hasn’t noticed yet because she wouldn’t recognize the scent, but you smell like you’re growin’ one. Plus…” Her cheek twitched. “The weight. You’re eatin’ a lot.”

  “For the heartburn. It makes it better. It will go away. These discomforts are always temporary. The stress as of late has simply frustrated this body.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rachel gave her a long blink and then pointed toward her midsection. “Explain the belly, then. That’s a five, six-month belly. Nice job disguising it behind all those shawls, though.”

  “Bertha’s bread. That is all. She uses more honey than she should.”

  “Oh yeah? You ever gain weight like that before? It’s all over.” Rachel gestured coyly towards Lola’s breasts and her puffy face.

  “No, but I generally do not eat so much.”

  “You can’t be that naive.”

  Lola set down her snack so she could wring her hands.

  Rachel was right. Lola shouldn’t have been.

  Women had once called on her asking for fertile wombs. She knew how nature worked, but it wasn’t supposed to work that way for her. It didn’t dawn on her that she could be susceptible.

  “It wasn’t…like this with Yaotl,” she said with exasperation. “No one could tell I was carrying him. I was comfortable the entire time.” Up until the end, anyway. That part hadn’t been entirely pleasant. It had been messy, and it hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before. The pain had been so severe that she’d turned sand nearby into glass with every scream.

  “His father was human,” Rachel said. “Your magic probably did all the shapin’ for what the pregnancy was like. But this little one…” Cringing, Rachel pressed her hands to the sides of Lola’s hard belly. “Lord knows what you’ve made and what your body’s gonna do about it.”

  “What I’ve made…” Lola murmured contemplatively. She didn’t have the imagination to speculate on that. With Yaotl, she more or less knew what she was getting. Half human godlings weren’t so unusual, even if they’d been strongly discouraged by older Mixtec gods. And there were other mixes Lola had heard of but had never seen—blendings of cultures that no one had thought possible.

  But she’d never heard of anything like the two of them together.

  “You’re turnin’ real pale all of a sudden,” Rachel said.

  Lola tried to put on a smile for her, but immediately thought better of it. She didn’t smile. The Cougars didn’t expect her to, even if the other locals did. “I am certain everything will get sorted out fine in due time.” Her hand was shaking so tremulously that milk sloshed over her fingers and dripped down her forearm.

  Rachel took the cup from her and wrapped a towel around the soaked hand. “Just calm down. I thought I was bad off when I found out I was gonna have one, but I guess this is a whole other level of fright.” She hustled Lola out of the kitchen and back into the saloon. She pulled out a chair and plopped Lola into it. “Just sit tight for a little while. I’m gonna run down to the hotel and fetch Elizabeth. Might as well quit while we can.”

  “Quit what?”

  Rachel gestured to the room. “Well, this. It’s not worth holding onto. You’ve gotta agree now. I could hand my baby off for my sister to take care of while I got myself together, but you can’t do that. We’re not gonna let you.”

  “I—” Lola clamped down her lips on the rebuttal. Rachel was right that perhaps the fight wasn’t worth it, even if Lola still wasn’t entirely settled on the idea that there was even going to be a baby. She rested her hands atop her belly and scowled. She didn’t always understand the body she was in. While she’d certainly dwelled in it for longer than she cared to recount, she didn’t pay such close attention to the mechanisms. She didn’t need to. She didn’t get sick. Very rarely did she get injured.

  Yaotl had been perfectly planned and she’d known what would happen.

  She didn’t like surprises, and she most certainly didn’t like that feeling of terror that shot through her after something just over her bladder snapped like a struck drumhead.

  And then again.

  She gripped the underside of her belly and emitted the weakest of gasps.

  “Figured it out now, huh?” Rachel laughed. “Find something to do and you’ll ignore it. If you don’t ignore it, you’re gonna fret, and nothing good comes of all that fretting. Stay there. I’ll be right back.”

  Rachel dashed out.

  Lola breathed out a shuddering exhalation and moved her hands around the globe of her belly. “How?”

  Her increasing didn’t make sense.

  She scoffed. Somehow, he’d done it. Perhaps he’d done it on purpose, looking for a way to slow her down. He couldn’t tame her any other way, so he’d given her a baby. He’d disrupted everything in her life that made sense and left her defenseless.

  She was going to kill him when she saw him. She wouldn’t wait for him to open his lying mouth. If she had to use every bit of energy she had to turn him into a golden smudge on the ground, she was going to do it.

  She was tallying up the sum of her savings in her head when the door swung inward. She didn’t look up but called back before attempting to use her senses to identify the intruder, “We will go to the ranch. I will get you settled there and then move on to someplace isolated. I cannot—”

  “A ranch?” came the prim, clipped voice Lola hadn’t heard since their precipitous journey to a big boat months prior. “But I’ve just gotten here. Drat. I was hoping to learn all about saloons.”

  “Saloons?” Lola turned slowly toward the door, incredulous, wondering if perhaps she was hearing things.

  She had no way of knowing how carrying a fallen one’s child could be affecting her. For all she knew, that was the reason she could suddenly smell bread from a mile away.

  Or why her instinctual desire every time she saw the sheriff ambling down the street was to castrate him. She’d done it to pigs, horses, and cows as she’d learned to make her way through the non-rarified world of humans. She didn’t imagine castrating a human man would be much different. It was simple population control, as far as she was concerned. There were already far too many asses being bred.

  Lola met Sophie’s level gaze.

  The lady was overdressed. Too many layers. Too foreign-looking.

  And there was too much dust streaking her face and dirtying her fine kid gloves.

  Suddenly ashamed, apparently, her cheeks reddened. She pinched off her gloves. “My maid quit somewhere back near Baltimore.”

  “You were supposed to go to Bermuda.”

  “Yes, well, you see, I landed there, and figured, what’s a bit farther?”

  “How did you find this place?”

  Sophie tucked some of her wild hair behind her ears and reached outside for a valise and a hat trunk. “There’s…certainly a story there, but I’m exhausted. The last leg of my journey had me squashed in the back of your mail carrier’s wagon, and—”

  “The mail carrier Oscar?” Lola raised a brow.

  “Well, yes. Oscar. Interesting fellow.” Sophie crinkled her little nose. “A bit snarly, though.”

  Lola swore under her breath. She wasn’t surprised that Oscar was snarly. The full moon was nearing. He probably needed to shift into his wolf form and run. He couldn’t ignore the call of his nature for so long.

  “Do you mind if I come in?” Sophie asked with a wan grin. “I could really do with a decent cup of tea.”

  Lola pushed wearily back from the table. “We may not have tea. No one here asks for it.”

  “I hope you do. I’ll make it myself if you’ll just show me where the kettle is. I’ve had to learn to make do.”

  Lola stood and tugged her shawl tightly around he
r shoulders. As she guided Sophie to the kitchen, she asked, “Why did your maid abandon you?”

  “She said I’d taken leave of my senses.” Sophie huffed and picked up the empty kettle.

  Lola showed her the water pump out back, waited for her to fill the container, and then helped her stoke the flame beneath the stove. The coals were nearly cold, so she huffed a bit of spark onto them with her breath. No one would ever be cold if she were nearby.

  “She asked me if I was going to continue carrying on like this, and I asked her ‘like what?’ and she said, ‘all daft-like.’” Sophie snorted and folded her arms over her chest. “She had nothing at all to say when I was higher than a starling and could barely find my way to the chamber pot, but the moment I decide to strike out on an adventure involving fresh air or water, she suddenly has things to say.”

  Sophie patted down her hair again, but it was really no use. She needed a bath and strong soap to get the film of travel off her.

  “I’m sure she’s on her way back to England, even now.”

  “Did you give her a reference?” Lola asked with amusement.

  “Of course I didn’t.” Another harrumph. “What do you take me for? One can’t very well abandon her employer and expect to go away with a letter recommending her. She can go swim in the Thames for all I care.”

  “Will she hold her tongue?”

  Sophie gave her an incredulous look. “Or else risk everyone she encounters thinking she’s stark raving mad? Oh, she won’t talk, not even about what an awful employer I was, except in private. She won’t be able to get work otherwise. Word travels so quickly nowadays.”

  “But not quickly enough that we were warned of your arrival.”

  “Is there a problem with me being here?” Sophie looked absolutely put out.

  Lola sighed and listened to the initial hisses of steam building in the kettle. “It is simply not a good time. If you had asked questions back east, you might have heard that the frontier is not a safe place for unaccompanied women. In Maria, circumstances are even less certain. We have dangerous conflicts over land and the men doing the pushing are not so concerned about whether their victims are men or women. They are concerned only about themselves, and they will see you as an easy target.”