by Lila Bowen
Winifred would probably do that, too, but Nettie still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the girl, and it made her twitchy.
“This seat taken?”
Nettie just about jumped out of her boots and ended up spilling half her remaining coffee. The Captain had appeared from nowhere to sit beside her, his eyes crinkling up as if to say that even old dogs had their tricks.
“I reckon you can sit anywhere you goddamn please, Captain.” She took a sip of the coffee, just to show him she could, and he settled back and spit a stream of tobacco juice at a fractious grasshopper.
Just when Nettie thought maybe they were going to sit and enjoy the sunrise together as men, the Captain said the last thing she’d ever expected him to say:
“I’m sorry, Rhett.”
Nettie coughed up some coffee, and he whacked her helpfully on the back until she had enough breath to say, “What the Sam Hill for, Captain?”
The Captain exhaled, a long and sad sound. “You did something brave last night, son. You sacrificed yourself for the Rangers, and I’m just damned sorry at what almost happened to you.” He paused and cocked his head sideways. “It was almost, wasn’t it? Boy?”
After clearing her throat and pitching her voice lower, she nodded. “Yessir. I reckon that was about as almost as you can get.”
“The Rangers—well, it ain’t easy to be one of us. Plenty of people think we’re the bad guys, just because they don’t know which war we’re truly fighting. Durango territory is a place wilder still than most, and by the time news reaches a town, all that’s left of the monsters is sand and ashes. We keep folks safe, and they villainize us for it. That’s a word, ain’t it, Rhett? Villainize?”
“I don’t rightly, Captain.”
“Well, it is now, I reckon. Thing is, most folks don’t know what we give up, much less what we lose with every fight. And nobody but me and Sam know precisely what you almost sacrificed for us last night. If them werewolves had got what they wanted before Hennessy and the boys showed up…” He trailed off, shook his head. “I’d just feel mighty bad. I had a daughter once, you know. Got stole away by chupacabras while I was waging the wrong war. Maybe that’s why I fight so hard. Never know who you might be able to save, if you just kick your horse a little harder and have enough bullets in your pocket.”
His worn hand reached out, patted her knee so quick she was almost sure she’d missed it.
Nettie’s heart was beating like a rabbit in a snare, sure he was gonna send her home and trap her in petticoats, maybe even pack her back to Pap’s house. Because he’d all but admitted he knew what she was, hadn’t he?
“Captain?”
The old man stood and looked her up and down. His eyes didn’t linger over her lips, her chest, nor even her watering eyes. Flicking her badge, he said, “Don’t you ever try that play again, boy. Might get more than a mouthful of sand. But on behalf of the Rangers, I thank you kindly. Never did want to die at the hands of a wolf, myself.”
The sun chose that exact moment to escape the horizon, spilling cherry-red light over the prairie like a river of blood and throwing the old man’s bones into sharp relief. Nettie could barely breathe, recognizing that she was about to say something that couldn’t be unsaid. “So I’m still a Ranger?”
The Captain snorted and spit a stream of brown juice at the sun. “Why the hellfire wouldn’t you be? You do your duty, you’ll always be welcome with us.” He took a few steps, spurs clinking, then turned around to wink at her. “Unless you break Hennessy’s heart. That would be a right damn shame.”
Hardly believing that he would let a girl mess up his company, Nettie almost forget the most important question she’d wanted to ask him.
“What about Winifred?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her since the shoot-out.”
“She ran off last night on your paint pony. Ain’t seen her since. But her brother’s down there with the horses, and he’s waiting for you. Don’t break his heart, neither.”
Nettie hopped up and put the empty coffee cup in the Captain’s hands before walking down the trail.
“I ain’t here to break hearts, Captain. I’m a Durango Ranger. And I’m here to kill what needs to die.”
Ragdoll’s whinny was a welcome distraction from dealing with the tangled-up trouble of a confused cowpoke named Hennessy who still wore her knuckle prints on his jaw. At least her skin hid her bruises. He gave her something like his old smile and kept at his work, and she blushed and went to her mare.
Nettie didn’t know how to go about apologizing to a horse, but she scratched Ragdoll in all the places she figured a creature without fingers might itch and fetched an extra handful of grain from Delgado’s packs. Dan sat on a rock, doing nothing in particular as he stared into the sky. Sam was half ignoring her and half being anxious on her behalf, hovering just out of her range and staring with his eyebrows all rumpled up. That was what finally made her talk—the way he was looking at her like she might suddenly shatter like a tea cup.
“Lord, Hennessy. You look like a church woman watching fellers jingle into the saloon on Saturday night, like my soul might fall out and roll down the street if you don’t pray hard enough. If you’re so concerned, you might as well wish me good morning.”
Sam shook his head and tugged on his bandanna. “Morning, Rhett.”
“Morning, other Hennessy. You and Dan been jawin’, I reckon.”
Sam snorted, a welcome sound, as it wasn’t focused on her. “Shit, no. Can’t get two words out of the fool. Just sits there, muttering.” He flapped a hand at Dan and headed up the path toward what Nettie suspected was whatever was left of the beans. “Good luck not shooting him.”
As soon as Hennessy was out of range, Dan rose from where he sat, his face solemn and his body tense. Without a word, he picked up his bundle, turned his back, and walked right past Nettie, close enough to stir the air on her sleeve.
“Come. There’s something you need to see.”
Nettie looked at the horses, then watched Dan head toward a gathering of tall rock formations. She’d noticed the hard line of his mouth and the fact that his eyes weren’t dancing like usual, not one damn bit. Dan’s back was straight, his feet dusty, his hair desperately tangled. And she knew that even if it was against the Captain’s orders and even if she didn’t want to go, she had to follow the damn fool.
Coyote Dan moved like a cloud, brushing through the land like he could dissolve and re-form and disappear, if he needed to. Obstacles didn’t seem like obstacles to him, and the underbrush bowed to let him pass. When he started up a deer path into a rock face that had looked mostly solid, Nettie tied on her bandanna and did her best to keep up, although it took her a lot more damn effort. Little lizards startled out of her way where they waited for the sun’s morning breath, and a few sleepy snakes still curled in dark crevices, enjoying the last of the night’s cool caress. The slivered moon hung like a cat’s claw caught in the clouds. Nettie felt tangled between the real world and dreaming, between night and dawn, between yesterday and tomorrow. And most definitely between a rock and a hard place, as she had to clamber up and over all sorts of deadfalls and stones and clattering scorpions. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a pleasant walk.
And still Dan didn’t speak.
Finally, he disappeared behind a scrub-covered outcrop, and Nettie followed him through and pushed out onto the top of a butte, higher up than she’d ever been in her life. The whole thing was about the size of Gloomy Bluebird, almost long enough across to get in four beats of a canter before the horse would fall to its death, if it was stupid enough to oblige. Strangely, she didn’t feel a bit of fear at the height; it felt right homey. There was something sweet about being so far up, above the petty misdeeds of the world. Satisfying, that’s what it was.
Dan didn’t look back at her, didn’t say a goddamn thing. He just walked over to a pile of rocks, sat down on a weathered piece of cowhide, and started banging stones together like a goddamn fool.
“You planning for war, Dan?” Nettie pulled down Monty’s bandanna, settled down on her haunches, and reached out a hand like she might touch one of the arrowheads, then realized he might take offense and jerked her arm back, all casual-like.
“A wise man doesn’t plan war. He spends every day of his life preparing for the war that he knows will find him.”
“Looks like you’re plannin’ harder than usual,” she observed.
With a hard snort, Dan sorted through the slivers of stone and held up a serrated triangle that looked like a giant cat’s tooth. “I like to know the monster I’m hunting. I like to study it, know how hard I’ll have to cut to find its heart. This time I don’t.” A ghost of his old smile flittered across his face like the last butterfly of summer. “Means I need lots of sharp things, just in case.”
“You worried about the Cannibal Owl?”
Dan looked up, his usual calm utterly departed. “Pia Mupitsi took my sister last night, Nettie. At the very least, Winifred went after it herself and was captured. So, yes, you could say I’m worried.”
A chill skittered down Nettie’s spine.
“How do you know the Cannibal Owl’s got Winifred? Maybe she’s lost. Maybe she went to the next town over for a bath with rose-stinkin’ soap. Maybe she’s hunting down another dress off some old lady’s clothesline.”
Without a word, Dan reached behind him, to the bundle he always carried. Long fingers shook as he unwrapped the coyote-tooth-marked, water-stained, beat-all-to-hell leather. The object revealed was almost the same warm brown as the tanned doeskin but smoother, softer, altogether more familiar.
It was a foot.
Winifred’s foot.
CHAPTER
24
Nettie flat out didn’t know what to say. Sorry your sister’s foot got cut off didn’t really cover the depth of terror she was feeling and that his face was showing. She couldn’t help thinking about the child’s foot she’d once held, once watched dissolve into so much shifting sand, or what it’d felt like to watch the light fade from Monty’s eyes. As if sensing her sudden fear and sharing the same concern, Dan twitched the leather back over the foot and placed it gently on the ground. Maybe, so long as they weren’t looking at it, it wouldn’t dissolve.
“And the woman you left in Burlesville…” He sighed and shook his head.
“Regina?”
“She had her baby. And it was taken from her arms in the night. She was alone when the Cannibal Owl came. She was distraught. Hanged herself the next morning.”
Nettie waited for more, but Dan simply picked up his stones and made more blades.
“At least Winifred’s still alive” was all Nettie could manage, and it left her so dry-mouthed that she would’ve chewed a chunk of cactus just to swallow again. “She has to be.”
“For now.”
“But we’re close, right? Don’t that mean we’re awful close?”
Dan stood, slow as an old man with aching bones, walked to the butte’s dark edge, and gestured to the shadowy west, where the peaks left long swaths of purple prairie untouched by the rising sun. “Look for yourself. This is why I brought you up here: to see what lies in your path.”
Nettie held up a hand to shield her eyes and squinted. The area got right strange, on the other side of the butte. The stacked rocks made hallways of stone leading up to the mountains, jagged and dark. In a thicket of gray thorns, a familiar shadowed figure sat on a wet, black horse, finger pointing up and still farther west. Following the Injun woman’s bone claw, Nettie saw only stark trees clustered around caves carved into the mountainside. One big tree sprawled menacingly like the mountains’ gate, skeletal and sharp. At first, Nettie thought the lumpy shapes among the branches were dead leaves gone brittle and gray. But when they shifted unnaturally and sparked, she recoiled with a hiss.
“More goddamn harpies.”
Dan’s laugh was short and sharp. “Did you know a group of vultures is called a wake? As if they waited for a funeral instead of causing one. A normal person walking past would see only useful scavengers waiting to pick off the weak and old or to feast after a battle.”
But Nettie saw cruel, blue-eyed bird-women with hanging dugs, sharpening their beaks against the bark and preening. As the sun topped the rise, their razor-sharp feathers shone like blades and screeched like steel as they shifted and stretched.
Like they were getting ready for war.
Like they were hungry.
“Do the buzzard-women work for the Cannibal Owl?”
“I already told you. They are scavengers. They go where blood and meat are easy to find. Don’t you see the valley below their perch? They’ve been here a long time. Feeding.”
When Nettie looked down, she almost lost her coffee.
It was bones.
All bones.
Small bones.
Piled under the trees, scattered among the rocks, lining the little creek like they were barreling up to the bar for a drink. Years and years of bones, some washed clean by sun and rain and others still mucky with patches of skin that the harpies hadn’t yet picked away. All the size of children, their skulls heaped under the trees and tangled in the roots.
“Dan?”
“Yes?”
“Why hasn’t anybody killed this goddamn Cannibal Owl yet?”
They stood, side by side, staring down at the valley of death.
“Because no one could find it. Or catch it.”
Nettie took a deep breath, felt her stomach wobble as she honed in on a cave half hidden by the rocks. “That’s a lie, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the truth?”
“You know the truth, Nettie. You know why the Ghost Mother draws you here.”
On any other day, she would’ve laid into him for being shifty, but today, she just nodded. “Because nobody knows how to kill it, do they? Because nobody else can.”
Dan nodded. “People fear monsters. Monsters fear the Cannibal Owl.”
Nettie reached for Dan’s hand and took the arrow point from him.
“And the Cannibal Owl’s going to fear me,” she said.
They spent the morning practicing different ways to kill the unkillable.
Nettie took to it like a possum to water.
It was too late for her to master arrows, so Dan taught her the ways to hold a knife, the ways to strike. Overhand, underhand, slashing for the eyes, plunging deep for the heart. He showed her where even the sharpest blade would skitter over ribs, where it would sink into soft spots like a broom straw into biscuits. Again and again, she rose from a crouch with a sparkling blade of quartz or the silver knife yanked from her boot. Again and again, she slashed for the man’s tender parts, pulling back at the last second, knowing that the Cannibal Owl would be in no way tender.
No one had ever seen it, not really.
Pia Mupitsi was a nightmare, a hole in the starlight holding a silver spike.
Pia Mupitsi was the absence of the wind, the sound of no sound, a feather left in an empty cradle, nothing like an apology.
Pia Mupitsi, Nettie Lonesome told herself, would be dead by the next day’s dawn.
She didn’t know what it was that made her special, made her the Shadow, but she could feel the rightness of
it in her bones, lighting her from within like the spark of a fire catching tinder.
She had a crystal point to Dan’s neck now, her knife tip pressing over his heart. He shoved her arm aside and stood as if she weighed nothing, holding out his hand to help her up.
“Again,” she muttered, muscles aching.
“No. You need rest and food.”
“What about Winifred? What about the Javelina children?”
“You can’t save them if you can’t fight.”
“I want to fight now, Dan.”
He shook his head and reached for Nettie’s hand, unclenching her fingers from the white quartz blade he’d wrapped in leather when her blood had rendered it too slippery for her to hold. Her knuckles were grazed, her palms laced with weeping blisters that kept reopening.
“Pia Mupitsi is a creature of the night. Enjoy this day, for it might be your last.”
Nettie stretched her fingers and laughed, a sad sound stolen by the wind.
“Bullshit, Dan. Either I kill the owl, or I die and join the Injun woman on the back of a black horse and watch it steal more children. I got plenty of folks to haunt. Whatever happens tonight, I ain’t done. And tomorrow’s the new moon. So it has to be tonight.”
The smile Dan gave her made it clear a fanged trickster lurked always under his skin. “I didn’t say anything about enjoying the night. I said to enjoy the day. If you fail, you’ll never see sunlight again, but you’ll get more than enough moon.”
She slid the knife back into her boot and wiped her hands off on her pants. “Remind me again of why this is my fight. Ain’t you and the Rangers gonna be there, too? With two dozen guns and every chunk of sharp stone you can muster?”
Dan wagged his head at her like she was a dumb dog that just wouldn’t learn, but she still followed him as he gathered up his blades and leather bundle and took off for the trail. Vexed as she was, she knew goddamn well that she’d never find her way off the high butte without him. And she also figured he had an answer that would be equal parts truth and fury. She forgot, sometimes, that they were little more than children. She, Dan, Winifred, Sam—none of them were even twenty-five, and yet Dan acted like he was wiser than the Captain himself, the uppity son of a bitch.
