Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

  Therefore, today I had chosen to don my new attire, the clothing I had bought in Fort Worth. I wore a fitted shirtwaist tucked into tightly tailored trousers. These, in turn, were tucked into my boots. All of this was designed to present a silhouette with nothing to hold onto. For all that it exposed my figure to anyone who saw me wearing it, I had decided that was infinitely better than dying because some monster grabbed a ruffle and pinned me down with it.

  Over all of this, I currently wore a contraption of a skirt that the dressmaker had helped me design. The petticoat was sewn in, and the entire thing tied at the waist. I could drop it to the ground with a single tug of a ribbon. Over my shirt, I wore the brown leather tactical corset. Unlike fashionable corsets, designed to draw in a woman’s waist, this one did not constrict my breathing or movement in any way, though it did conform to my shape nicely. Various loops and ties were buttoned to it, and I had discarded those I would not need on this trip, leaving them with the rest of our gear in the room in Leadville.

  Now, looking at the entrance to the mine, I pulled the ties of my skirt and carefully stepped out of it. I folded it and placed it in one of my saddlebags. I gave Lakota a scratch behind his ears and murmured to him, then spoke to Mr. Carlisle. “You’ll make sure horses are well cared for if necessary?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Of course.”

  I turned to rejoin my companions, only to discover that both of the other women had made similar clothing arrangements. To my delight, Hattie Hart wore a pair of silk pantaloons that mimicked the line of a skirt when she stood straight—until, that is, she gathered the hems of the pant legs, tied a ribbon around them, and tucked them into her boots. Once again, her clothing was infinitely more fashionable than mine, and today, her eyes clear of the ill effects of laudanum, she looked like the woman of wealth I suspected she truly was.

  Annabelle Swansby had clearly sewn her own trousers, as they were made out of the same material as the calico dress she had worn the night we went to the saloon. But she had chosen to wear something very much like a cowboys’ riding leathers over her calico trousers. A woman in chaps. It was a glorious sight to see.

  All three of us wore gun belts strapped around our waists.

  The more time I spent around these women, the more I liked them. The two ladies examined my tactical corset with great interest.

  Together, the three of us marched back to the opening the silver mine, where Trip and Cole Swansby waited.

  “Merry Christmas, y’all,” Trip said with a mischievous grin. “Shall we?”

  Bidding farewell to Mr. Carlisle, we began our descent.

  Only a few yards into the silver mine, the entrance tunnel took a turn, cutting off most of the light from outside. Cole had already lit a lantern, and he held it high to illuminate the path in front of us.

  The air was dank and cold, and I shivered.

  “Cole, do you have a map of the mine? The one Mr. Carlisle gave us?” Mrs. Swansby asked.

  He fished in his pocket and pulled it out.

  We had all studied it the night before, of course, but it was reassuring to have it in front of us, to know that we would be able to find our way out again. We followed the main tunnel down, down, down.

  We left a spell on each of the various side tunnels as we passed. At every intersection, we stopped. Trip marked the tunnel with an anti-demon sigil, I closed my eyes and chanted a quick containment spell, then pressed my hand to the mark to empower it.

  Time stretched out, seeming to expand, to last longer than the time my pocket watch showed had actually passed.

  When we spoke, it was in whispers, as our voices echoed uncannily, coming back to us distorted and somehow more terrifying than any independent sound would have been.

  We had agreed to get as close to the sight of the first cave-in as we possibly could. If the demon had been there once, it might make a repeat appearance.

  As we drew closer to that site, I began to hear faint echoes of whispers. At first, I thought it was maybe my imagination, but the whispers grew louder and more pronounced.

  Eventually, Annabelle said, “Does everyone else hear that?”

  We all nodded as the voices kept up their gibbering whispers.

  And then the path we had followed opened up into a huge, echoing chamber. The cavern floor dropped away from one side of the path, leaving only darkness above and below. It was impossible to tell how deep or how high the chamber was, but the path cut across one side of it and led even farther down.

  We were halfway across when Hattie Hart gasped and cried out inarticulately.

  Chapter 9

  Almost immediately following Hattie’s cry, a harsh masculine yell echoed through the chamber. We all jumped and turned around in different directions, searching for its source.

  I concentrated, and to one side of us, the shape of Hattie’s beau appeared, pinned to the ground by the claws of something immense, but otherwise unseen, its legs leading up into the darkness of the cavern around us.

  Hattie started toward him, and I grabbed her arm. “It’s not real,” I urged her to remember. “It’s part of the spirit realm.”

  “I know,” Hattie said, her voice strained. “But it’s hurting him.”

  “I see it, too,” I said. “But you know that it is not real.” I emphasized every word.

  But then, Trip spoke. “Um, Ruby?” His voice sounded more tentative than usual. “I see it, too.”

  I spun around and stared at him. “What? You can see it?”

  “Help me,” groaned the man on the floor.

  One of the claws lifted almost delicately and pierced his upper arm. He let out a howl.

  “I see it, too,” said Cole.

  “And hear it,” his wife added. Glancing around the floor beneath my feet, I scooped up a handful of pebbles, took aim, and tossed them at the figure pinned to the ground.

  “Ouch.” The man flinched away. He clearly felt the impact of the rocks.

  “He’s corporeal,” Cole said, his voice full of awe.

  “Oh, holy hell.” Trip followed up the comment with a low whistle.

  “What are we dealing with?” Annabelle asked, her eyes wide.

  I glanced at Hattie, who had said nothing during all of this. Her face had gone as pale as Annabelle’s was by nature, the skin stretched taut over her face, her mouth pinched and tight.

  “Tell me what to do.” Her voice was husky, as if she were about to cry.

  “If he’s real, we have to save him,” Annabelle said.

  I glanced down at the demon detector in my hand. The lightbulb had not lit up as Mr. Carlisle had assured us it would in the presence of demonic energy. Trip noticed the direction of my attention.

  “Maybe some sort of golem?” he guessed.

  “I think the man is Hattie’s companion—her spirit guide.”

  Hattie nodded and whispered his name. “Grant Madsden.” Her voice grew stronger. “It is. It’s him. He disappeared from my side and reappeared there. I know it’s really him. I can feel it.”

  “But I think you might be right about the claws, Trip,” I continued. We all stared at the scaly legs that disappeared high into the dark recesses of the open cavern space above and below the trail we were on. “I believe they’re a construct of some kind.”

  “I don’t think those are real—not in the sense of being attached to an animal or a demon,” Cole said.

  Annabelle nodded. “That’s the man I saw in my dream. That’s him.”

  “Then we are going to need him,” her husband said. He and Trip glanced at one another, and each pulled out one of the weapons Mr. Carlisle had given us. In his other hand, Trip drew his normal revolver—or rather, his usual one. I had enspelled it so often that it was certainly no longer normal by any stretch of the imagination.

  “Cover your ears, ladies,” Cole said—an unnecessary reminder, as we all had already done so. We were none of us greenhorns.

  They let loose with a hail of bullets cutting across th
e creature’s claws—or the creatureless claws—in a straight line at what would have been the wrist on a human. The claws didn’t react at all, further cementing my opinion that they were some kind of animated construct rather than a living being. And when they were severed from the rest of the hand, the entire construction simply crumbled away into nothing, leaving only Hattie’s beau. She ran to him, dropping to her knees and throwing her arms around him.

  She helped the injured Marshal to his feet, his damaged arm pulled in close to him.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  “Yes. But I’m confused. What just happened?” he asked.

  “We need to bandage that arm,” Annabelle suggested, pulling a roll of fabric out of the pockets of her calico trousers.

  I explained my theory that the demon had somehow managed to transform him into a corporeal person again in order to distract us. He listened as Annabelle wrapped the bandage tightly around the wound, stanching the blood flow until we could get out of here and take better care of it later.

  Hattie kept patting him, moving her hands along his face and torso as if reassuring herself that he was real. “Is this going to last?”

  She hadn’t directed the question to anyone in particular. I answered it, anyway. “Who knows? He’s here now, and we can use his help. The demon might have given us an advantage he didn’t mean to.”

  “He needs a weapon,” Hattie said.

  I turned to Trip and pointed at the single non-P.I.-agency, non-enspelled gun in his arsenal. “I think we should give him that one to carry.”

  Trip’s eyes narrowed as if he were trying to read my mind. “Afraid to have someone with a demon-created body carry a spelled weapon?”

  “Something like that.” Really, I was concerned that Federal Marshal Grant Madsden, for all that he seemed real and on our side, might not be what he said he was.

  So we gave him a gun. But not one of the more powerful ones, just in case.

  The eight of us continued our descent into the darkness.

  Chapter 10

  Along the way, we continued to mark the tunnels leading off the main descent into the cavern.

  When we came upon the cave-in, it was sudden. It happened not inside a giant echoing chamber, as I had assumed, but in a cramped tunnel, a narrow spot in the path down, which made me wonder again about the demon’s strength. He was strong enough to pull a ghost out of the ether and make him corporeal, but not strong enough to create a monstrous dragon—he was only able to create claws.

  My guess was that without an original form to use as a pattern, such as the ghost’s former body, the demon had no way to create and animate a creature.

  Similarly, I suspected he didn’t have much ability to toss rocks around inside the cavern. He had managed only to pile up the loose ones and fill up this narrow passage.

  “I don’t think this demon is as powerful as the P.I. Agency thinks it is,” Trip said, echoing my thoughts as he so often did.

  “Let’s move back up the path, away from the cave-in, and work there,” Cole suggested.

  “Hattie, are you okay?” Trip shot me a look for using the slang word I had so despised in his own language. I ignored him. I might eventually have to admit that okay was a useful word.

  Hattie looked up at me and nodded, then turned her attention immediately back to Grant.

  Annabelle and I traded glances. I didn’t know if we would be as strong without Hattie, but I wasn’t sure we could count on her full attention and participation, either. Not as long as Grant was in pain.

  Our plan was fairly simple. We would summon the demon, force it into its own corporeal form, trap it, and kill it.

  Simple in theory, anyway. There were a lot of pieces to it, and it would take more power than I liked to consider. Still, it was a solid plan.

  I hoped.

  Chapter 11

  We moved far enough back from the cave-in that we couldn’t see it any longer, choosing a wide spot in the path to do our work and make our stand. I immediately began drawing sigils on the beams holding up the ceiling. Trip and Cole consulted over one of the manuals Cole had taken from our former employer.

  “Can I help you?” Annabelle asked, glancing at Hattie, who still hovered around the very real form of Grant Madsden.

  “Yes, please.” I showed her where to mark and how to draw the sigils I needed. Once she took over wielding the chalk, I followed along behind her, reinforcing the structural support with magic.

  “You always could twist the company-approved spells into something better,” Trip said, moving away from Cole and toward me.

  “That’s nice work,” Hattie said from directly behind me.

  I jumped a little—I hadn’t heard her move closer to me—but said, “Thanks.”

  A cold wind blew through the cavern, raising goosebumps on my arms. It was followed almost immediately by the sound of whispers echoing in the dark.

  “Anyone else feel like we’re in a Beadle’s Dime Novel?” Cole asked, but his good humor was more strained than usual. The constant darkness, the cold, the strange noises—they were getting to all of us.

  “Let’s begin,” I said.

  Grant moved to set up the recording device Mr. Carlisle had given him. It fit neatly on a tiny natural shelf in the cavern. He directed it at the spot we had chosen to contain the demon.

  Carefully, Annabelle and I used Trip’s chalk and sketched out a pentagram on the floor with enough room at its edges for a person to stand or walk by. Then we enclosed the symbol in a circle.

  From my pack of magical supplies, I pulled out a smudge stick—a bundle of sage. I lit the end, blew on it gently, then tapped out the active flame in a brass bowl I brought with me. I handed the bundle to Annabelle and pulled out a jar of sea salt. I was guessing that was something a demon up here in the Rockies didn’t encounter often. I began walking along the edge of the circle around the pentagram, pouring out salt crystals as I went. Annabelle followed behind me, waving the smudge stick up and down through the air around the circle.

  When we were done, the air in the cavern was hazy with smoke and the beginnings of magic.

  I had planned to ask everyone to join the circle, but Grant Madsden’s addition to our group had changed the magical calculus. I needed to find out what I could do with him. And more important, whether we could trust him.

  I moved to the wall where he and Hattie sat, their foreheads leaning together as they whispered. I crouched down beside them. Holding my hand out to him, I said, “Will you let me read you?”

  He glanced at Hattie, who nodded.

  They both stood, and Grant held his hands out to me.

  I took his hands in mine, and they felt perfectly normal. Perhaps a little clammy, but that could be caused by pain or anxiety.

  Closing my eyes, I drew in a deep breath and allowed my magical senses to open fully for the first time since we had entered the mine.

  All around us, I could sense the silver the miners were after. It stretched out in veins that stood out in shining lines to my inner sight. The glowing metal ran like roots through the earth. There was still plenty here to be mined.

  But at the center of the mine sat a darkness, a brooding entity, malevolent and foul.

  I didn’t know if it was the demon, or if the demon was merely connected to it. In any case, I pulled my consciousness back from the malevolence, not wanting to draw more of its attention than we already had by our mere presence. Instead, I focused on this wide spot in the downward path, this space only, with its five other people showing up as flares of self-awareness, brighter than any metal could ever be. Hattie Hart’s joy at Grant’s presence blazed from her in a bright red, shot through with streaks of gold. Annabelle Swansby’s aura was the blue of the turquoise stones I’d fallen in love with when I had come to the West. Her husband’s was the green of summer grass. They were the perfect complements for each other, and I could see the way their power drew from each other.

  Trip looked as he always
looked in my magical sight. His aura was the gold of protection, his role in the world perfectly aligned with his spirit.

  I glanced down at myself. My own aura to my eyes appeared purple, as it often did—although since I had connected with Trip, it was beginning to be shot through with gold streaks as we became more intertwined, and as I learned to continue to protect him. And if I looked closely, purple streaks were beginning to appear in his, as well.

  I turned my magical gaze to Grant. His aura, like Trip’s, had the gold of protection, but it was a rose gold, the perfect combination of the red that flared from Hattie and the gold of their protective connection.

  I drew my magical sight back inward, closing my eyes and allowing my other senses to quest outward.

  I knew what I was about to do was invasive, and under any other circumstance, I would have avoided it. But I needed to know more about Grant Madsden.

  I inhaled and pushed against him with my magic, shaping it into a spiritual spear that I drove through Grant’s chest to read him.

  As if it were coming from a distance, I heard Hattie protest, heard a scuffle as Trip and Cole held her back from interfering.

  Grant grunted but made no other noise. His hands tightened on mine, but otherwise, he simply waited as I read him.

  He was real, and he was who he said he was.

  And he loved Hattie.

  If the demon had planted anything evil inside him, it was buried deeper than I could find. I pulled the magical spirit-spear from him and dissolved it back into myself.

  Dropping his hands, I opened my eyes and said, “He’s one of us. We can begin.”

  Perhaps I should not have wasted any of my magical energy that way, but I knew we couldn’t go into creating a spell against the demon unless we had that information. And I heard several small sighs of relief from the other members of the party, too.

  We gathered in a circle around the enclosed pentagram, reaching out and taking each other’s hands. Six isn’t any kind of magical number. We didn’t have any advantage in that sense.