Which leads me to the little girl. I don’t recollect her name—it’s possible I never knew it in the first place. All I remember is that she was one of the children that belonged to an immigrant sodbuster who lived on a farm just outside of town. Every now and then the Reverend would ride out there on his mule and try to convert the half-dozen or so families scattered about the countryside from Catholicism, but with little success. Most of them barely spoke enough English to buy seed and sell their eggs and butter, much less understand the gospel according to Deuteronomy Near.
The little girl disappeared one evening around suppertime. Apparently a rather boisterous child by nature, she had talked out of turn at the dinner table, incurring the wrath of her parents. Her punishment was to stand on the front porch until the rest of the family had finished eating. When the mother got up to tell the little girl she could come back in, she was nowhere to be found.
At first they thought she was playing a trick on them, but when several hours passed and the little girl still hadn’t returned, the father rode into town and reported her disappearance to Marshal Harkin. Gent rounded up a search party. I asked the Reverend if I could help look for the missing child, but he refused to grant me permission.
When the first day of searching did not turn up any sign of the missing girl, Gent became convinced that one of two things had happened—that either she had been kidnapped by wild Indians or carried off by wolves, possibly a bear. When the farmer translated the Marshal’s suspicions to his wife, the poor woman became hysterical.
They found the little girl on the second day. After searching the surrounding gullies and washes, it turned out she was in her very own front yard—in the well. She had a burlap bag over her head and she was missing her knickers. The Marshal arrested the hired hand, who was a touch feebleminded and had gotten into trouble the previous season for fucking some of the livestock where the neighbors could see it. After a trial of sorts, they hung him. They never did find the little girl’s knickers.
The Reverend, being the only man of the cloth in the county, officiated at the burial, even though the dirt farmers couldn’t speak a lick of English and were Catholic to boot. I was there to help, although all I did was stand to one side of the Reverend and pretend to look sad. Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I studied the grieving family.
The mother was a stout, round-faced woman who probably wasn’t as old as she looked, her eyes red and swollen from crying. The father’s face was unreadable as he tried to comfort his wife. His eyes remained fixed on his daughter’s coffin, suspended over the open grave by a couple of planks. There were five other children, some older and some younger than the dead girl. One or two of them cried, but the others simply looked uncomfortable in their Sunday best, squirming and pulling at their starched collars. After rambling on about innocence, sinners, lambs, Jesus and a better world beyond, the Reverend at last shut up. The grave diggers removed the planks, lowering the small coffin into the ground with looped ropes.
A week later, I found the little girl’s missing knickers wadded up and stuffed behind one of the loft rafters. They were stiff with dried blood and semen. I didn’t know what to do about what I’d found, but I knew what it meant. But it did make it easy for me to decide to break with the Reverend. The only reason I’d put up with his madness in the first place was the belief that he might have the wisdom to teach me how to control the killing wildness inside me. But now I knew for certain that the Reverend lacked the ability to curb even his own bestial tendencies, much less mine.
That night, while he was passed out, I packed what few belongings I could call my own and trudged over to the Spread Eagle. Gent was playing solitaire in the saloon, a bottle of rotgut at his elbow and a foul-smelling hand-rolled dangling from his lower lip.
“You get enough Jesus, son?”
“Yes, sir. I come to see you about that job.”
Gent grunted as he lay down another card. “Figgered you’d be comin’ round sooner or later. Like I said, I pay a dollar a week, plus what you can roll off the drunks.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Now get to work! I got slop jars that need scrubbin’!”
I must have scrubbed every slop jar in Vermilion that evening, and considering that most folks crapped in tin cans instead of porcelain chamber pots back then, that was probably a fair bet. After I finished with the thunder mugs, I had to clean and polish the spittoons, then sweep and mop the front saloon. By the time midnight rolled around, I was so tired I couldn’t raise my arms over my head to take my shirt off.
The bartender showed me my room—little more than a storage closet next to the backdoor, but at least there was a mattress on the floor. I’d been sleeping on nothing but dirty straw in the Reverend’s half-loft, so it looked fairly ritzy. I collapsed into a sleep so deep I didn’t even dream.
The next thing I knew, there was a crashing sound coming from outside, and a familiar voice raised in anger. “Where is he?”
A growl slipped from between my clenched teeth, and I had to fight to keep my fur from rising to the surface in self-defense.
“Where is that thankless heathen bastard?!?”
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” yelled the bartender. “Somebody go fetch Gent! The Reverend’s gone loco!”
The storage room door flew open and Reverend Near’s frame filled the threshold. The stink of Mug-Wump Specific and madness radiated from him like heat from a flat rock. I scrambled to my feet to avoid being kicked in the ribs.
“There you are, you ungrateful piece of shit!” he growled. “I go to sleep for a few hours, and what do you do—? You turn on me and embrace mine enemies!” He shook his head sadly, and for a moment it looked as if he was about to cry. “I thought I could save you, Billy. I really believed that God had a plan for you. But I was wrong—horribly wrong! You’re just another sinner, given over to base fornication and intoxication!”
Sweat began to pour off my brow. Being so close to the Reverend’s insane rage was making me twitch. If I didn’t get out in the open soon, I would shapeshift involuntarily. I tried to move past the Reverend, but he surged forward, grabbing me by the shirt, lifting my heels off the ground as he slammed me into the shelves lining the tiny room. His face was inches from my own, and I could see that one of the lenses in his smoked spectacles was cracked.
“Honor thy father!” he bellowed. “Honor thy father, you little shit!”
I lost control then for a second. But it was enough. For the first time in months I let the fur bristle and fangs sprout. And the Reverend Near suddenly found himself nose-to-muzzle with a snarling wolf.
He promptly screamed in terror and let me drop. As my butt came into rough contact with the floor, I was shocked back to my senses and I quickly reverted to my human self.
The Reverend staggered backward, clutching his heart, his skin suddenly the color of tallow. “Demon!” he gasped. “Foul demon of Hell!”
Gent, looking bloodshot and none too happy to be ousted from bed at such an ungodly hour, shouldered his way into the already cramped room. He clamped a big, calloused hand on the Reverend collar and yanked him out the door. “What in tarnation is goin’ on here? Jesus on the cross, Reverend—didn’t I tell you to keep outta my saloon?”
“You’re harboring a fiend from the very Pit itself!” The Reverend warned, waving an arm in my direction as Gent frog-marched him out of the saloon. “That boy is a murdering beast!”
“What the hell are you goin’ on about now?” Gent snapped.
“The boy is a minion of the Devil! I have seen him turn into a wild beast before my very eyes!”
“Go sleep it off, Reverend,” the marshal growled, delivering a swift kick to the raving minister’s pants that propelled him through the saloon’s swinging doors.
Near fell into the thick muck that comprised Vermilion’s main street, floundering and flailing like a drowning man. A couple of the whores had come out to see what the to-do was abou
t and were having themselves a good laugh at the Reverend’s expense.
“Trollops! Harlots! You shall not escape the Lord’s judgment!” sputtered the Reverend, wiping the mire from his smoked glasses with as much dignity as he could bring to bear.
“Come along, boy,” Gent grumbled, leading me back into the dim interior of the Spread Eagle. “It’s over.”
I cast one last glance over my shoulder at the Reverend, struggling to extricate himself from the mud, and followed him inside.
Later that same day, Gent arrested me for the murder of the little girl. I was sweeping up the front saloon when he walked up and, without any warning, pulled out his six-shooter and pressed its barrel right between my eyes.
“Hate to do this to you, son, but your under arrest.”
Turns out the Reverend went home, got himself cleaned off, and returned with the pair of knickers I’d found up in the loft. They’d disappeared soon after I first discovered them, so I assumed the Reverend had burned them in the potbelly stove. Turns out he just moved them to a better hiding place. Near turned over the missing knickers to the Marshal, complete with a story about how he’d found them in my belongings the day after the little girl’s funeral. Obviously, I had been hopelessly tainted by years amongst the Comanche—I was no more than a murdering savage, inflamed by the sight of womanly flesh to the most horrific acts of rapine.
Gent hadn’t been too thrilled about this key bit of evidence suddenly making its appearance—after all, he’d already hung a man for the crime—but the Reverend wasn’t about to let it drop. So off to the pokey I went, manacled hand and foot.
Vermilion’s “jail” was an airless adobe hut divided into two rooms. The front room, theoretically, was Gent’s office, although he preferred lounging outside the Spread Eagle to spending time in that sweat-box. The second room was a tiny closet of a cell, with a wooden plank set on sawhorses for a bed, and a rusty coffee can for a slop jar. The door to the cell was made out of iron, with a trap at the bottom for meals to be pushed through, and there was a single, narrow barred window set above the makeshift bed. The cell itself stank of tobacco juice, vomit and old shit, since Gent rarely had occasion to use it for anything but keeping rowdy cowboys in check until their trail bosses came to round them up.
As I sat on the plank bed, studying the heavy manacles that hung from my wrists and ankles, I realized my time as a citizen of Vermilion had reached its end. I knew what I had to do, and there was no joy in that knowledge. I had come to this place in hopes of learning how to tame the darkness in my heart, only to be forced farther from the light than before.
Around dusk, Gent pushed a dented tin plate of red beans, cornbread and a cup of cold coffee through the trap. He did not say anything, but I could feel him looking at me through the observation slit as I ate what was to be my last meal in custody. I pushed the empty plate back through the slot and remained crouched by the door, listening to the clock-clock-clock of his boots as he walked away, locking the front door behind him. I then waited until it was well and truly dark before shapeshifting.
Although my kind are stronger than a dozen men, our natural state is deceptively slight, with long, narrow hands and crooked legs that would make us seem ill-equipped for running at high speeds and bringing down prey with nothing but our claws and fangs. The heavy manacles dropped from my transformed wrists with a shake of my hands. I stepped out of my leg shackles, my paws scuffing the floor in ritual dismissal. I could have made a symbolic show of force by literally snapping the chains that bound me, but I had neither the time nor interest in such foolishness.
Once transformed, it was relatively simple for me to yank the bars out of the window in my cell, leaving behind only empty manacles and my discarded clothes. The night was dark and windy, with lightning dancing on the far horizon. My pelt prickled, and my nostrils twitched as I caught the scent of distant rain.
I slid through the shadows towards the edge of town, careful not to be seen during the brief stutters of lightning. I needn’t have worried—most of Vermilion’s citizens were already sound asleep, and the few that were still awake were busy whoring, gambling and drinking themselves insensate at the Spread Eagle.
The front door of the church was unlocked—as usual—and I found the Reverend passed out, face down, at the kitchen table, an empty bottle of Mug-Wump Specific at his elbow. Next to the patent medicine was an open Bible and a pair of children’s drawers. Judging from the stains, this pair of knickers was considerably older than the ones he’d taken off the little girl.
The Reverend made a slurred, grunting noise when I tickled his left ear with the point of my claws, then screamed like a woman when I tore it from his head. He sat up with a violent spasm that almost sent his chair toppling backward. Without his left ear to support them, his smoked spectacles dropped away, revealing eyes that bulged from their sockets like hardboiled eggs. He grabbed the Bible with a trembling, bloodied hand and held it as if he meant to swat me across the muzzle with it.
“Child of evil! I command thee! Get back, Satan!”
I snarled and knocked the book from his hand, grabbing him by the throat. I pulled him out of his chair and slowly crushed his windpipe. The Reverend opened his mouth wide and issued a muffled shout, his body bowing upward, as I shoved the pair of knickers down his throat. He thrashed under my grip for several seconds, and even though he was a very strong man, there was never a chance of him breaking free. And he knew it. I left him there for the others to find—his mouth filled with a dead girl’s underpants. I doubted the whores down at the saloon would be surprised.
I crept from the Reverend’s shack, pausing to warily eye the approaching storm. Weather on the plains has a tendency to be sudden and violent, quickly metamorphosing into the fierce devil-winds the Mexicans called tornado. And something told me that was exactly what was brewing out on the prairie.
I stood there for a second, studying the sorry cluster of buildings that comprised Vermilion. Pricking my ears forward, I could make out the Spread Eagle’s piano in the distance, along with the occasional shriek of whore laughter. Maybe they knew there was a storm coming. Maybe not.
Buffalo-Face had been right. Whites were crazy, although some seemed crazier than others. Wherever the knowledge I needed to understand and contain my beast-nature might be, it certainly did not lie in Vermilion, Texas. I turned my back on the town and headed into the surrounding night.
Less than an hour later, the storm caught up with me, pummeling me with hail the size of a child’s fist. The wind was so fierce it knocked me down and kept me there, as if a giant hand was pressing me to the ground. I knew that if I remained in the open, I ran the risk of being sucked into the storm—I’d seen a buffalo shoot into the sky like a stone from a sling the season before. There was so much dust and dirt kicked up by the storm, it was impossible to see more than a foot in front of me, but I had the impression that the air above me was alive and angry, seething with raw power.
Using all my strength, I crawled on my belly until I came to a dry riverbed and rolled down the bank, pressing myself against the overhang for shelter. By this time, the rain was coming down with such force it stung like nettles, and jagged fingers of lightning tore at the night sky. There was a distant rumbling that seemed to be growing closer, and at first I thought it was thunder—until I realized I wasn’t hearing it, but feeling it through my feet.
I looked up just in time to see a six-foot-high wall of churning water, mud and other detritus come rushing down the riverbed in my direction. Even given my superior strength and speed, there was nothing I could do. The flash flood hit me with the force of a full-throttle steam engine, pulling me under and dragging me along as it raced towards nowhere. I surfaced once, long enough to glimpse a sliver of moon peeking through the heavy clouds, then the branch from an uprooted tree crashed into the side of my head and everything went dark.
Chapter Five
“You dead, son?”
I peeled one eye open—whi
ch was quite a feat, seeing how it was caked with dried river mud—and looked up at a clear blue sky. I opened my mouth to answer but coughed up a lung full of dirty water instead.
“I reckon you ain’t dead, then,” the owner of the voice said as a pair of hands grabbed me under the armpits and levered me into a sitting position. Staring down at my mud-caked belly and genitals, I realized I was wearing my human body. Before I could gather my wits, a bottle was pressed to my lips. “Here, boy. Take a swig of this—it’s good for what ails you.”
I took a swallow. The liquid tasted like a cross between turpentine and gin, and burned my throat something fierce. Coughing violently, I pushed the bottle away and vomited a mixture of river water and stomach acid.
“See? What’d I tell you?” My benefactor chuckled in amusement.
Wiping the grime and mud from my eyes, I saw a short White man with muscular, slightly bowed legs and long, wavy brown hair that hung past his shoulders. He was dressed in a badly stained and frayed white linen suit, with a stovepipe hat perched atop his head. He peered down at me through thick spectacles that made his eyes look grotesquely large. Even with my limited experience dealing with White society, I realized this man was not normal.
“W-who are you?” I managed to stammer.
The man in the once-white suit smiled and extended his hand. I took his hand and allowed him to pump my aching arm vigorously. “The name’s Praetorius! Professor Praetorius! And who might you be, young sir?”
“Billy Skillet.”
I slowly got to my feet, looking around at my surroundings. I found myself standing on the bank of what was now a small river. Nearby was a tangle of driftwood, a dead cow swollen from drowning, and other flotsam and jetsam left behind when the flood waters receded.
“I was scouting to see where the best place to ford the river might be,” Praetorius explained, jerking a thumb at the covered wagon situated near the river bank a few dozen yards away. “That’s when I found you. Weren’t sure you was alive or not, seeing how you was completely coated in mud.”
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