An Easy Death

by Charlaine Harris

  I should have had a clear conscience. But I did not.

  I looked around me very carefully when I got to the edge of the large paved plaza outside the station. And immediately the situation got complicated again. In the middle, right out in the open, I spotted my niece—or my sister, or the unrelated girl child. Felicia was looking from side to side, and she was very nervous, her hands clenched into tiny fists, her shoulders rigid.

  Now that I was getting a look at the child in the daylight, she was short and grubby—like just about everyone I could see, really—and her black hair was dusty and needed washing and trimming. Felicia was darker skinned than I was, and wearing worn sandals, and was painfully skinny. I watched her from the shadow of an awning for a minute or two. The girl might as well have hung a sign around her neck that said she was waiting for someone, someone she thought might not come.

  Very reluctantly I stepped into her line of sight, and her whole face came alive with relief. She hurried directly to me. I watched behind her, and no one else turned in my direction. Felicia threw her arms around me, pinning my skirt to my hips, and said “Sister!” in a loud voice.

  “Hello, squirt!” I tried to sound teasing, happy, like I’d heard other adults sound with kids.

  “They’re coming after you,” she said, very quietly, in English.

  “I’ve already met a couple of ’em,” I said. “Others here?”

  “This awful old woman and your boyfriend, they’re one street away.”

  “I think they won’t hurt us. Others?”

  “Yeah. Two grigoris, men, both grown up. They’re following the old woman and the boyfriend.”

  “You did good, finding me to tell me.” Felicia let go and looked up at me, beaming. “You are my sister,” I said, “aren’t you?” For no sure reason, I felt it was true.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is Sergei?”

  “Dead,” she said, her face an awful blank. “That thing killed him.”

  “Paulina? The zombie woman?”

  “Yes. When he went to pull her body out of the house, her hand grabbed his leg, and she bit him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I cut off her head with a shovel, and Uncle Sergei, he told me to leave before he changed into one of them.”

  “And he turned?”

  “I don’t know. I got out of there. I locked the door behind me, like he said.”

  She could follow instructions, which was a good thing.

  “All right,” I said, though it absolutely wasn’t. “Felicia, we’re going to see how far we can get on the train. How long until it leaves going east?”

  Felicia glanced up at the sun. “In less than an hour,” she said.

  “Here we go, then.” I took her hand. “Let’s pretend we’re good sisters now,” I said. “I’m letting you buy the tickets because you’re so little and cute.”

  Felicia smiled up at me like I was a vision of the Virgin Mary. “Come on, then . . . wait. What’s your name?”

  I laughed a little then, because my sister didn’t know my name. “I’m Lizbeth Rose,” I said. I eyed her closely, but she hadn’t heard of me.

  “So here we go,” she said, trying to keep the smile on her face.

  “Here we go,” I agreed. “How old are you, Felicia?”

  “I’m ten,” she said. “I think.”

  “Did you know your mom?”

  “I kind of remember her. She was half Mexican, half Holy Russian.”

  “Was she a grigori?”

  “Not like Oleg or Sergei,” Felicia said. “Like your boyfriend.”

  This “boyfriend” thing grated on me, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. “So she had power?”

  “She did,” Felicia said. “She was incredible.”

  I wondered if the girl had any real memories of her mother. “How did she pass away?”

  “She caught the fever. He wouldn’t take her to the hospital. She died.”

  “Not much doctors can do for the flu.”

  “No. But they didn’t get to try.”

  She was old for ten. “So you just stayed on?”

  “He was my dad. One of them was. And there were women. Some of them were nice.”

  And some weren’t. Well, hell. “Listen to me now. Whatever I say, go along with it. I don’t have time to explain everything ahead of time. I want you to be safe. You do the talking for us,” I whispered as we stepped up to the ticket window.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, staying more on the subject than I was.

  “To Sweetwater. That’s in Texoma. See how much it is for four tickets.”

  Felicia put on a perky smile that almost made her cute. She began talking to the older man behind the grille in rapid Spanish, tossing her head back at me, laughing. She asked a question. He looked behind him at the train schedule, gave her a price.

  She turned to me. Very slowly, in Spanish, she said, “It’s fifty pesos for the four of us.”

  I felt in my pocket and withdrew the money. I’d put it in separate rolls of bills, so it was easy to count out fifty. I had very little left. I nodded at the ticket seller, who gave me a serious bow back. I gave the money to Felicia, who handed it in to the older man. He passed over four tickets. We turned away.

  And here came damned Klementina and Eli. I did my best to look surprised and pleased, which startled both of them. Quite a bit.

  “Auntie!” I said, and embraced the old grigori. She hated every second of my touching her. I enjoyed that. “I took out two teenagers over by the stockades,” I said into her ear. “There are more following you, two grown men. Felicia and I bought four tickets for the train going east.”

  “Who the hell is this child?”

  “Someone you should treat with great care,” I said, making sure Felicia and Eli could hear me. “She is the daughter of the late Oleg Karkarov.”

  That hit home. Felicia looked up at me, her little face unreadable. I returned her eye contact with some force. I wanted her to stay alive. Klementina and Eli could protect her. If they believed she was the key to saving Alexei’s life, they would do anything to get her to the Holy Russian Empire in safety.

  Eli said, “Is this the truth? She was lying to us yesterday?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She was afraid of being taken from her home.”

  “How has that changed?” He was definitely suspicious.

  “Sergei was murdered after we left.”

  “By whom?”

  “Paulina.” I had been hoping he wouldn’t ask, but of course that was stupid.

  Eli was staring at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. “We killed her,” he said finally.

  “Not enough,” I told him. “Just . . . not enough.” And there really wasn’t time to talk about this.

  The departing train left with a great deal of noise, and the next train came into the station, shrieking and spreading gusts of hot air and dust in every direction.

  “You have to get on this train,” I told Klementina. “As soon as you can.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to hold them off until the train leaves.”

  “Are you trying to be noble, like Ilya? These are trained wizards, and they will kill you.”

  “They haven’t yet. Could be I’ll get them before they get me.”

  “Very well,” the old woman said. “I want a crack at them first.”

  “Be my guest.” I smiled at her.

  Eli was about to protest—he’d been listening to us with increasing fury. “I can fight,” he said.

  “Of course you can,” I said. And I meant it. “But I can’t get this girl to the HRE. That’s why you hired me, so you could do this for . . . your cause.”

  As I looked up at Eli, his face hardened. He let out a deep breath. “Easy death, Lizbeth,” he said, stretching out a hand to Felicia. She dropped mine and took his without hesitation. Twisty little thing. I thought about giving her a kiss, but that was silly.
And her forehead was dirty.

  “They are letting passengers on now,” Klementina said, her voice harsh. “Go, then.”

  “They’ll be here,” Felicia said urgently, and tugged on Eli. She glanced over at me. With her free hand she pointed at an alleyway.

  At that moment I didn’t doubt she was my half sister. She had some magic in her, more than me. I believed her mother had had the power. The grigoris weren’t in sight, but she knew they were about to come out of a side street onto the station plaza.

  I handed Eli two tickets, stuck one in my own skirt pocket, handed one to Klementina, who glanced at it and stuffed it into her blouse. “Just in case,” I said to her. I turned to Eli and Felicia. “Go,” I said, jerking my head toward the train. “Now. Don’t make me waste this.”

  I dropped my bag on the platform, pulled out the Winchester. I liberated the Colt strapped to my leg, and pulled out the other one. I put on my little-boy gun belt so I could draw them fast. Every other firearm in the bag was ready.

  I could hear people begin to exclaim, but I paid no attention.

  I didn’t look after Eli and Felicia. They’d get on the train. That was the point, the point of this whole damn trip, though I hadn’t known that when I’d signed on for it.

  Klementina strode a few yards to stand in the exact center of the paved area. She looked tiny and aged, but hardly frail. She looked exactly like an old witch, and she looked scary as hell. The plaza had been busy, with the shops all around and customers and train passengers walking rapidly with purpose. Now that began to change.

  No one exactly shrieked and ran when Klementina took her position, but the people crossing the plaza gave her a wide berth, and the ordinary foot traffic began to slow and hesitate. After observing Klementina’s Alamo-like stand and my guns, those boarding the train hurried to get on. Anyone with business they could postpone began to move away from the train plaza and head back into the neighborhood. It was easy for the most ignorant passerby to see that trouble was coming, coming real fast.

  The train made its long hoot. It was ready to pull out.

  “Alternate,” Klementina called.

  “Me first,” I said, because I knew it would irritate her. And then the first wizard stepped out of the alley, and I shot him in the head, worked the lever. I put another one in his body to make sure.

  The next one, a short, stumpy woman, ran out of a shop on the other side of the plaza, and Klementina got her with a terrible spell that almost decapitated the woman. I had fired at the woman twice, to distract her.

  There was running and screaming. I like to work quietly, but this had never been a quiet job and it would not have a quiet ending. Where was the second man? Felicia had said two men were following Eli and Klementina.

  The train was moving, with that chuffing noise. But not as fast as I wanted it to move. I fired a shot into the opening of the alley, just to slow down whoever was coming. I hit some stonework, and the chips flew, prompting a yell of anger.

  Got a woman next, a fortyish redhead, who dashed out of the alley with blood on her cheek. She was furious and tough as nails until she went down with a bullet to the left shoulder. Worked the lever. Her right shoulder would have been better, but she turned.

  Klementina paralyzed the man who leaped out at her (finally, the second man), but he got a partial hit, I could see out of the corner of my eye. Could not spare a moment for Klementina, who was on the ground but not dead.

  Another man went down, and the Winchester was out. I dropped it and raised my Colts. Two-handed firing. Didn’t do it often, but this time I had to keep up a barrage and it had to hit the target more often than not.

  Finally, running at me with her hands outstretched, that damn Belinda Trotter, and I fired at her with all I had. Suddenly realized it was not really her, because there was no shadow. The real Belinda was directly behind her illusion, and when I saw that shadow, I hit her center mass three times. She went down hard, sprawled on the hot paving stones, and there was an abrupt silence.

  I wheeled in a circle, looking for someone else to shoot. But there was no one standing.

  The train had gone.

  The police would be here any second.

  Klementina was not yet dead. As I looked, her hand twitched. I went over to her, knelt. I realized I wasn’t sure I could get up again. Tired.

  “Here,” she said, and made a hand motion and uttered some words.

  “What?” I felt gray suddenly, gray and thin.

  “No one can . . . ,” and she died.

  Well. All right. I stood—it seemed to take a terrible amount of effort—and looked around me. There were other bodies strewn around, including a civilian or two. At least three of the bodies had died in ways I could never explain. Klementina had been creative.

  Shit, shit, shit. I hadn’t planned on living through this, and now I had to try to get out of it, when all I wanted was to sit down in the middle of the plaza and just . . . rest. In the sun. With no shadows on me. Yet here I was, a shadow myself.

  Standing around being shadowy wasn’t doing me a damn bit of good. I gathered all my arms and my bags and I went west.

  For maybe twenty minutes I struggled to get away from the area. The gunfire and the screaming had motivated a number of Juárez citizens to seek the possible safety of their homes, but others were beginning to come out of them, creeping in the direction of the plaza to see what had happened.

  Though I could barely drag one foot from behind and place it in front of the other, I kept moving, trying to walk steadily, to look like I was simply making my slow way home, or to work, or someplace else equally boring. I’d been hurt, not too bad. I could feel the place on my middle that seemed to be burned. Burns are lots more unpleasant when they get hot and sweated on.

  I leaned against a wall for a minute, outside a cantina. The proprietor was standing against the wall, looking toward the plaza. His hands were folded. He looked right through me.

  I expected him to gasp at the sight of me, or yell at me to step away from his wall, but he did nothing. And finally I realized that he actually could not see me. Klementina had given me one last present. I had felt invisible because she had made me invisible, so I could escape.

  The front of my skirt had a scorch mark on it. Well, best solution for that was to take off the damn skirt. I would find out for sure whether or not anyone could see me, right here, right now. With no ceremony, I stripped it off and pulled on my jeans, changed the blouse for one of my shirts, folded the shawl and put on the hat, all in the space of seconds.

  The man didn’t so much as blink. I watched a bead of sweat creep down his forehead, wondered what he’d do if I blotted it with my discarded blouse. I didn’t do that. I figured he’d been messed with enough for today, even if he didn’t know it.

  I felt somehow lighter in my real clothes. I was able to move more quietly, even with the bag of guns, which occasionally clicked against one another despite the skirt and blouse wadded in there.

  When I came to a public pump, I was still invisible, and I filled my canteen after the child custodian looked away. No point in screwing him over, too. I took a long swallow before I resumed walking.

  People would look around in confusion as I passed them, thinking they heard something but unable to detect what it was.

  While I walked, just to keep myself alert, I wondered what would happen if the spell never wore off. After all, my mother wouldn’t like it if I were invisible forever. When I thought that, I began laughing, and it wasn’t the kind of laugh I liked to hear coming from my own throat. It sounded kind of crazy. I was really tired.

  I kept on walking. No one called the police. No one pointed and screamed She’s the one! or Look at that blood! And I began to realize I really wasn’t going to get caught, thanks to Klementina’s gift.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I was going to have to work out a way to get home. I could not return to the train station to board a train. I would be recognized and arrested. I
didn’t know when the spell would wear off. I didn’t see how I could board a train while I was invisible. I took up space, and the trains were crowded, I’d heard.

  And I had almost no money, due to my foresight and planning in buying tickets for all my good buddies, who were on their way to safety now. Or dead. While I . . . And then I realized I was saying Klementina was better off than me, so I shut myself up. Although it was true that Felicia was probably on her way to a life of ease, if she could get used to being bled occasionally, she was also heading off to a life among grigoris, and that would be an almost intolerable condition, as far as I was concerned. I’d never used that word in my head before, because people in Texoma have a lot to endure, and they do it. Calling something intolerable is drastic.

  I had to make some kind of plan. What did I need right now?

  I needed ointment for the burn over my ribs. I needed to wash. I needed clean clothes. I needed to dump the damn skirt. I’d lost track of how many I had in the bag. I needed to eat and drink and sleep.

  Even if I could have afforded a hotel room, I was too bloody to rent one, assuming I could be seen. Now that I was calmer, I could see my skin was spattered. I like guns because they ensure your enemies die far from you, but the enemies had gotten really close today, and Klementina had killed some in messy ways.

  Okay, that was the first thing to do. Find water and bathe. If possible, wash my bloody clothes.

  I found a horse trough. It was in a stable in a suburb, and there were actual horses, who thought my behavior really odd. Maybe they didn’t care for the smell of blood, or maybe they couldn’t see me. How would I know, with horses? They backed off from the trough, and though a man walked by, I was able to see him in time to hold absolutely still while he was within sight. It would have been very uncomfortable if he’d noticed the water in the trough moving and investigated how that could be.

  I wasn’t sure how well I was doing with the tiny sliver of soap I was carrying in my bag, but I got myself as clean as I could. I cleaned the burn very carefully, trying to keep my fingers light over the painful surface. I washed the blood out of the skirts and the blouses I’d accumulated. I wanted to throw them away, but I might need to sell or trade them. I air-dried in three minutes, and then I resumed my jeans. Luckily, the burn was above the waistline. I felt much more like myself after that, and I collected all my things and found a spot in the corner of the barn. I would wait until my things were all dry, repack, and start out again.