by Lila Bowen
“Rock fall in the mine,” said the woman holding him, both ferocious and sorrowful at the same time. “He’ll be my sweet baby forever.” Tucking the child under her arm, she stormed from the store, skirts and beard snapping.
“He sleeps between his folks, one foot tied to the bedstead so he can’t wander,” Jasper said. “So whatever stole our other children either had trouble snatching him or didn’t want him.” Before the Captain could answer, he added, “Seven. Seven children taken between the ages of two and ten. We’re a small town, a hard people to breed, and every child is needed. Tell me you’re after whoever did this, Ranger.” His thick, hard hand clasped around Nettie’s wrist, unyielding as stone. Normally, she would’ve thrown off anyone who touched her like that, but she sensed he could break her bones with no more than a thought and a light squeeze. “Tell me you’re here to help.”
Nettie answered before the Captain could, yielding to the pressure of the man’s leaking eyes and broken heart and stone-strong fingers. “We’re after the thing that stole ’em. The Cannibal Owl. Two dozen men, chasing it. Did anyone see it? Smell it? Can you tell us anything at all?”
Jasper looked around the room, but no one stepped forward. “We sleep like rocks. No locks were busted, no horses stolen. All we found was a big brown feather. Figured it was Injuns, considering they value children. Smitty managed to shoot the last Injun who came into town, yesterday. Just in case.”
Nettie’s heart flopped over in an entirely different way than it did when she sensed a monster nearby. If Dan had headed this way, he might be just another pile of sand her boots had scuffled through and tracked into the store. But surely he wasn’t the type to just walk into a town in broad daylight, down the middle of the street, mostly nekkid? Then again, how the Sam Hill was Nettie supposed to know what sort of type he was? She’d only known him a few days, and although it irked her to admit he’d helped her more than once, he’d also been annoying as hell. She could at least understand why someone might shoot the man; Lord knows she’d wanted to.
“Where’s the body?” she asked, fearing the worst.
Jasper scratched his chin and said, “In the old stable. Dang thing’s still warm.”
“Show us,” the captain said.
Tossing his beard over his shoulder, Jasper led them down the street and into a weatherworn barn with only half a roof that reminded Nettie all too much of Pap’s farm. The covered half of the structure was being used as storage for things as needed fixing, and the broken half had only an old blanket on the ground, tossed haphazardly over a lumpy form about the size and shape of a man. Or Coyote Dan.
At least, if it was him, he wasn’t sand. Yet.
Without asking, Nettie lurched forward and whipped off the blanket.
It was Winifred.
“Goddammit, girl. Not again!” Nettie fell to her knees by Winifred’s nekkid body, her fingers prodding the edges of a smooth, round hole just over the girl’s heart.
“Didn’t I bring this girl back to life?” the Captain muttered.
Nettie slapped the girl’s cheeks, but gently. “Something like that.”
“You know her?” Jasper asked, and Nettie scanned the shed for anything useful, but all she saw were big, clumsy things, like hoes and plows and men.
“I know her. And she’s an idiot who dies a lot. You got a doctor?”
Jasper scratched his beard, which seemed to be what powered his brain. “More of a veterinarian. For the cart ponies.”
“Get him. We need… pinchy things. Maybe a sharp knife.”
“Sorry, son, but that Injun’s dead,” Jasper said.
“She really ain’t. Now fetch your damn pony doctor.” As punctuation, Nettie pointed a gun at Jasper’s chest, and he waddled off at a fast pace, scratching away.
Nettie put her face up to Winifred’s mouth, listening for breathing. Like the foot in her saddle bag, the girl seemed both dead and alive at the same time, and Nettie tried real hard not to look at the unfamiliar curves of her body, laid out for all to see. Hennessy had his back turned and seemed put out, and the Captain was busy looking bored and picking his teeth with a cedar toothpick as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
“How long’s this going to take, Rhett? I already saved that coyote once, and she hasn’t been of use to me yet. Don’t know how much we’ll need a Ranger who wastes time saving women and useless monsters when he ought to be out hunting one that’s stealing children.”
“Shit, Captain. If Rangers’ll watch a innocent girl die, don’t know if I want to be one, anyhow. This girl’s a pain, but she’s helped me. And Dan’s helped us all.”
“Damn coyotes,” Hennessy muttered at the wall.
Nettie was pressing and pinching the skin around Winifred’s wound when another squat feller from the town waddled in, a black leather bag unsnapping between his callused hands.
“Jasper tells me I’m to raise the dead,” he said with a funny accent, rolling up his sleeves and pulling out a long tweezer.
“You’d best hope she’s raisable,” Nettie said.
The feller tucked his long, white beard into his shirt and motioned Nettie out of the way. It was hard for her to see what he was doing, considering he was as broad as a buffalo, but pretty soon, he grunted and dropped a chunk of metal into the dirt by her boots.
“The bullet is out. Lodged in her lung, a finger’s width away from her heart. But removing a bullet won’t bring her back—”
Winifred sucked in a big breath and sat up, coughing blood.
The doctor-feller leaned closer and frowned. “That is not normal.”
Nettie shoved him aside and put the blanket around Winifred’s shoulders.
“She’s a dang skinwalker,” Hennessy said. “Won’t stay dead.” When he stormed out the door, Nettie couldn’t figure out why. He’d never seemed to hate Coyote Dan, but now he hated Winifred? Or was it all skinwalkers? Maybe she could ask him later, when he woke her for her watch.
“Are you okay?” Nettie asked, holding out a hand to help the girl stand.
When Winifred drew her into a hard, sudden hug, all the breath flew out of Nettie. They were all lined up across the front, the girl’s long arms around her and her chin over Nettie’s shoulder. Nettie swallowed hard and clumsily tried to return the hug, her revolver flopping, forgotten, in her hand.
“Thank you, Nettie,” Winifred whispered into her ear, and Nettie’s skin shivered all over.
“Welcome,” she said, pulling away as her mind spun with peculiar feelings that she tried and failed to shove right back down.
Her belly was flopping like mad, and her whole body went over as hot as her face. Noticing the mysterious peaks and valleys of coppery curves and the warm shine in Winifred’s eyes, Nettie turned away and feigned interest in her gun. It was a little like what she felt about Sam, but with Sam, she felt it in her heart, and with Winifred, it seemed to be a function of her body. Confusing as hell, the lot of it. The doctor gave her a knowing look and winked.
“Well, considering I have brought the dead back to life, I think I’ll go reward myself with a nap,” he said, closing his black bag and waddling away.
“And we’d best get back to the men and keep hunting. Rhett, hurry along.”
The Captain left, and Nettie was alone in the sun-dappled, broke-down building with Winifred, who was nekkid under a rat-gnawed horse blanket. The girl was very much like her brother, with the same smug calm, lean build, and long, dark hair. The bullet hole over her chest was already patching itself, and Nettie caught herself looking a little too closely in the window’s reflection. When Winifred gave a knowing laugh, Nettie spun around to face her, eyes steadily up.
“What were you thinking, walking into this one-horse town like a idjit?” she asked, all gruff-like.
Winifred shrugged a shoulder like it was a silly question. “I needed clothes and wanted to eat something that wasn’t half raw. Figured it was safe enough after dark. Who would’ve guessed an entire town
of anxious dwarves would be sitting on watch with all their guns ready? I’d always heard they were kind folk.” She shook her dark, tangled hair and pulled her blanket closer. “Next time, I’ll stay a coyote.”
“Does Dan know you’re out here?”
Winifred pursed full lips. “I’m a grown woman. My choices are my own.” She smiled, just a little. “But no, he doesn’t. He told me to go back east, toward civilization. Toward the security of white men and their walls and doctors. So like a man, to think there’s safety among yet more men.”
They shared a small laugh, and Nettie realized she could smell the girl, like flowers and honey. Accustomed as she was to the goat stink of unwashed men, it moved something in her, made her want to be closer, to have that same intimacy she’d known curled beside Hennessy, falling asleep. They were the same in plenty of ways, she and the coyote girl. But at the same time, Winifred was pesky, as annoying as a bad penny that kept showing up when you needed a nickel.
And the girl needed to get dressed right quick.
“I got some spare clothes. Boy’s clothes. They ain’t in good shape, but…” Nettie shuffled her feet and waved an awkward hand toward the door and the Rangers and her saddlebags, waiting beyond. “They’ll keep you hid well enough, I reckon.”
Winifred raised her chin and grinned. “I don’t have to hide, like you. And I don’t like the white man’s boy clothes. So confining. I’d rather be in my leathers, or at least a skirt that lets me feel the air. I’m sure one of the women in town will give me an old dress, although it’ll probably stop at my knees.”
Dang, but Nettie felt funny, her belly flip-flopping all over the place at the thought of Winifred in a dwarf’s dress. Her own clothes felt itchy and strange, and she remembered what it felt like to wear a chemise at night, the breeze swirling around her bare legs. As confusing as it had been when Hennessy tried to kiss her and when Dan had pressed up against her holding the bow, it was even more consternating to be talking to a mostly nekkid girl about being a girl when Nettie spent all her goddamn time pretending to be a boy instead.
When she’d lived with Pap and Mam, she hadn’t given much thought to the differences between boys and girls. She’d learned early on that she was ugly, for a girl, and that being ugly wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering the many ways a man could hurt a woman who talked back or didn’t move fast enough. She’d seen the whores from the saloon, a-walking down the street at night as the churchwomen said unchurchly things from the safety of their porches. She’d seen the few young women of the town kept indoors, then married at fourteen or thrown out in the street bruised or swelling with child, a door shut forever behind them. She’d heard Pap grunting and Mam crying afterward as she washed herself with brown water from the pitcher. She’d seen Mam bleed the normal way and, a few times, a horrible way that looked about like dying after she ate some plants from Gray Hawk up the street.
In Nettie’s eyes, being a woman was nothing but trouble and asking for woe, and so she modeled all her behavior on being a feller, albeit a quiet one that was the complete opposite of Pap. Pants didn’t make her feel confined. They made her feel safe. Dresses were part of the problem, and the fact that Winifred favored them brought her up in Nettie’s estimation. It was a brave thing, being a woman alone, especially when your choices were to wear the skin of an animal no one trusted, to be nekkid as the day you were born, or to be in a dress that left your nethers open to fellers who only saw you as a vessel for their use instead of a person.
“Nettie? Did you hear me?”
Nettie’s eyes jerked up to Winifred’s face, which was also peculiar to Nettie. She’d grown up around white folk, aside from Gray Hawk and a couple of quiet, dark-skinned Buffalo Soldiers who’d summered at the Double TK. Winifred’s face was a different sort of brown from Nettie’s own, and as far as Nettie reckoned, the girl was pretty, with high cheeks and eyes as dark and thick as bacon grease. But Pap had told her brown skin was ugly, that Injuns were ugly, that Nettie herself was ugly. So if Winifred was pretty in Nettie’s eyes, what did Winifred see when she looked at Nettie? It was too damn much to undertake, finding the truth among the lies.
“Nope. What’d you say, coyote girl?”
“I asked if you had a spare horse.”
Further confusion. “I’m ponying a gelding. All the fellers are.”
Winifred nodded regally. “Good. Find me a thicker blanket, and I’ll be there after I borrow a dress. I’m going with you.”
CHAPTER
19
That finally broke through the twisty fog in Nettie’s mind, and she caught Winifred by the slender wrist as the girl turned for the door.
“What? No. You can’t travel with the Rangers.”
Winifred’s glare was withering. “Why not? You are.”
Pulling her close, Nettie hissed in her ear, “They think I’m a boy.”
Hissing back, Winifred pulled away and looked Nettie up and down. “Then they’re fools. And they can’t stop me. I go where I will. You want me to get shot again and left for dead, or do you want me with you when you go for the Cannibal Owl?”
Grasping for straws, Nettie muttered, “You got a bad habit of dyin’. It’s right inconvenient.”
“It’s not my fault I’m cursed any more than it’s your fault you’re cursed. We’ve all got our burdens to bear. And you’re not my master.”
Nettie choked on her words. She wanted all the help she could get, but having the girl around would muddle the situation. She’d have to be cared for, she’d attract the attention of the men in a way that would make them duller, and she’d use up Nettie’s spare horse, right when water was getting scarce and another unwanted woman was taking up her saddle. Not to mention the fact that Winifred made Nettie feel funny, and she didn’t have the time or energy to think about that sort of nonsense. There was only one weird flip in her belly that was any use to anyone, and in between Hennessy, Dan, Winifred, and Delgado’s grub, her belly mostly felt like a jackrabbit had taken up residence. All these feelings—she didn’t want a damn one of them. It was all too complicated.
Being a person was mighty twisty, and yet she didn’t want to go back to being nothing.
Winifred stormed outside and down the street and knocked on the first door she came to. Nettie watched from the barn, stunned and disgusted by Winifred’s song and dance. The proud girl was blushing, looking down, shuffling her feet, smiling broadly, acting like she was a bother. And the dwarf woman was buying it, smiling back and chuckling behind her beard. She soon invited Winifred in, and Nettie spit in the dirt and walked toward the stable where her horse was tied. A plume of dust signaled the entrance of the herd and the rest of the Rangers, which most likely meant the Captain had decided to stay the night in the town, for whatever reason. That made her downright jumpy, the thought of being stuck amid a town of nosy people with rock eyes and floor-length beards, feeling the constant wobbles in every direction that reminded her she was surrounded by folks who weren’t human. And they needed to get back on the trail toward the Cannibal Owl.
Ragdoll whinnied and rubbed her scraggly forelock against Nettie’s chest, and Nettie scratched the mare behind the ears like she liked and led her toward the jigging herd of cowpokes and horses shoving into a rickety corral beside four fat ponies and a pair of mules caterwauling like they’d just struck gold. Hennessy hopped off when he saw her.
“You okay, Rhett?” He clapped her hard on the back, and she nodded in a manly fashion.
“’Course. It’s just a town of dwarves and a idjit coyote.”
“She sure is an idjit, ain’t she?”
“Hellfire, Sam, you can say that again.”
Hennessy gave her his brightest grin and squeezed her shoulder like he’d completely forgotten last night’s rebuff. “We’re lucky you found ’em, the way they were hiding. Every time you pull your gun, I watch your back and worry like a mother hen. When I heard that first shot…”
Nettie flushed a bit, not quite
sure how to answer to someone who preferred her alive.
“You were right beside me, Sam. And you know dwarves can’t shoot for shit.” She cleared her throat and looked away. “What’s the Captain’s plan? Bedding down in the town?”
“Yep. It’ll make the folk feel safer. And we’ll get something to eat besides roasted goat and half-starved beef. I hear they got eggs and bread. And we’ll be able to bathe and wash our clothes.”
Nettie’s stomach dropped out. “Bathe?”
Hennessy nodded and pointed to a ribbon of green on the other side of the corral. “Little river goes around the butte, clean and not too cold. Us Rangers have to keep better washed than most, as what we hunt can smell us coming. If we go too long without soapin’ off the muck, Jiddy says he can’t smell nothing but us.” He must’ve seen the concern on her face, as he rubbed her shoulder again and gave her a curling smile that made her feel all melty, like he had mischief planned and wanted her in. “Don’t worry, Rhett. We can go off from the fellers a bit. I know you’re shy.”
Nettie cleared her throat. “That’s me. Right shy. Where are we sleeping?”
Hennessy took his saddle and jerked his chin, and she gave Ragdoll a final pat and followed him. The half-finished building they stepped into must’ve been on its way to being a school, as it was bigger than a house had any right to be and had a blackboard painted on one white wall. The wood floors were still shiny and bright, and all around the Rangers were spreading their bedrolls with saddles as pillows. Compared to the ground, it was a right treat. Nettie’s bags and blanket were already in one corner, and Hennessy set up his belongings alongside with his usual fastidiousness.
