by N. D. Wilson
All six horses leapt away. Manuelito picked up his rifle with his good hand. After a moment, he whispered a quiet blessing after Sam and Glory, and then turned to face the cave.
At the bottom of the slope between the hills, piercing through the clatter of iron-shod hooves on stone and rising above the snorting of the spotted stallion beneath him, Sam heard the high rolling echo of gunfire behind him.
9
Strangers in Town
SAM LEANED HIS BRUISED BARE BACK AGAINST A ROCK AND shut his eyes. The sun was down and even the dusky afterglow had almost faded. If Glory wanted a campfire, she could build one. He was sore from riding, but he was much sorer from being thrown off his stupid spotted horse and crashing down through the spiky tufts and branches of a Joshua tree.
And it was all Cindy’s fault. Speck had been fine the whole time, but after a couple of hours of boredom, Cindy had started to rattle and had slammed Sam’s left hand into the back of the horse’s neck and the horse had spooked and spun and bucked and Sam had gone flying.
The stallion had taken off.
The other four horses had been trailing not too far behind, and an old ragged pinto had let Sam up on her back. At least until Cindy had started rattling again. The mare had reared and Sam had somersaulted backward over her rump. The other horses had scattered.
The day had ended with Sam perched behind Glory on the palomino, riding slowly beside an empty and arrow-straight railway through the desert.
Sam dozed until the smell of smoke woke him. When he opened his eyes, his left hand was perched in the air in front of his face and yellow-eyed Cindy was staring at him from above his dangling fingers.
“Oh, stop,” Sam said. He didn’t even have the energy to be angry at the snake. He shoved his hand under his thigh and looked at Glory. She had started a small fire and was on her knees, rooting through the saddlebags. She was holding what looked like a striped wool blanket as she pulled out three apples, a flask, and a stack of jerky wrapped in a handkerchief.
“I really need a shirt,” Sam said. The air was getting cool fast. “Are there any shirts?”
Glory took aim and threw the blanket at him. “Guess what that is.”
Sam moaned. “I’m not guessing anything.”
“Oh, come on. It’s Tisto’s. You might not be famous yet, but there’s a hole for your head in the middle.” She grinned at Sam. “Put it on. It’s a poncho for Poncho.” She turned back to the saddlebags. “I really wish we hadn’t let the other horses go. There’s no money here and we’ll need some if we’re going to get food and clothes and train tickets in Tombstone.”
Sam examined the poncho and then exhaled hard. “I wish Father Tiempo was here. Is it weird to miss someone you barely knew?” He kicked a rock away with his heel. “This all feels . . . hopeless . . . without him.”
Glory shook her head. “Don’t say that. Please.” She wished the same thing. She felt the same way. But hopelessness was poison. They had to hope. She slipped the priest’s hourglass out of her pack. The thick blown glass had a gently rippling surface like water barely thinking about a breeze. It was cold against her fingertips, and she could just feel the bumps where tiny bubbles had been trapped inside and stretched into daggers.
“So Tisto gives me his poncho and says he wishes he was me. Why?” Sam asked. Glory didn’t look at him. “It can’t be the snake arms. My sister is being held by outlaws somewhere in San Francisco and rescuing her means I have to find someone who has killed me more times than I’ll ever remember. What do I have that anyone would want?”
Glory didn’t say anything. She set the hourglass on a flat stone like the priest had done beside the railroad, and she stared at it. There were so many incomprehensible things about the last few days—and the last couple of years that Sam had been at SADDYR—that what Tisto may or may not envy about Sam simply wasn’t interesting to her. Even though she knew the answer.
The Navajo boy was strong and well trained. Obviously he’d be attracted to adventure. Sam had arrived weak and broken but with a great destiny—more attractive to Tisto because it was likely tragic. But worst of all, Sam had Glory. And Tisto knew that better than Sam did. She had tended him every day he’d been asleep and healing in the cave. She’d been the one wringing out rags in his dry mouth, keeping him hydrated. Manuelito had given her balm to apply to the seams between the snake skin and Sam’s arms, and she had done it twice a day, while Tisto had held Sam’s hands down. And, of course, she was risking her whole life to help a boy she barely knew rescue his sister and stop a legendary villain.
Only, she didn’t feel like she barely knew Sam. She had loved his Poncho character with the kind of loyalty that went well beyond a normal readerly commitment. Which was why she’d wanted him to die at the end of the book. Because Poncho had not just betrayed his sister, he had betrayed Glory. He had failed to be the character he was so clearly supposed to be. He had lost his way and forgotten his purpose.
Millie had practically raised him! She had kept him safe. She had been the strong and perfect sister as the two orphans had been tossed through their wild western adventures. The kind of sister that Glory would want to be. And Poncho had loved his sister back. Millie had meant more to him than anything else in the world.
And he’d let her die. Just like that. Revenge wasn’t good enough. He should have rescued her.
Siblings should never abandon each other. Glory knew this, because she had been abandoned. She couldn’t change what had happened to her, but she could help change the end of a book that had made her just as angry. She and Sam would find Millie. El Buitre would die and Millie would live. Sam would be the brother and hero he ought to be. Just with snake arms . . .
Glory could finally stop hating Poncho. Maybe. Then again, maybe Millie would die and Sam would die horribly, and she would die last of all, knowing that she’d made the whole story worse.
“Water?” Sam asked. He leaned forward and pulled the poncho over his head. Itchy wool tumbled down his sweat-sticky back.
“No water,” Glory said. Her voice was cold, but she tried to correct it quickly. She sniffed at the flask. “Just whisky or paint thinner or something worse.”
Behind Glory, a young cactus, tall and armless, striped the darkening blue sky. From the low spot where she and Sam were sitting, the level line of the railway carved a hard black horizon. The silhouette of the cactus was as straight as a ship’s mast, but the rail was much straighter than any deck.
Sam leaned his head back and looked straight up. Glory followed his look with her own. There were stars. There were always stars. But tonight, out in the desert, in the past, with a boy with snake scales shifting and rippling on his arms, with hands that could see in the dark, the stars seemed more dangerous, like a vast army invading the sky.
“What was it like?” Sam asked. “When he put the snakes in?”
Glory set the saddlebags down and moved closer to the fire, staring at the small flames.
“You were a mess,” she said. “A total nightmare. He got your arms all straightened out and cleaned. I had to help him.” Glory looked at Sam, feeling her stomach roll a little as she remembered the gore, the shattered bone. There was no point in describing it all for him. “Manuelito sang and he whispered and the bleeding stopped. His fingers and his voice change things. The real problem was the bones. The joints. He said that he could have healed it all with enough time—a year or more—but that you would have hands slower than a ninety-year-old.”
Sam rolled his shoulders under the wool poncho and extended his arms straight out from his sides. Glory shivered. The cool night air tingled on her human skin, and she wondered how it felt on scales. Sam rolled both serpentine arms over and looked at the marks where the bullets had torn through him. The scars could have been years old, and even in the low light, they were crisscrossed with a cobweb weave. Glory had traced all of it with a fingernail while Sam and the snakes had still been unconscious.
Glory watched Sam study t
he memorials of his wounds.
“Manuelito sealed up the holes with his fingertips,” Glory said. “Like stitches without string, he traced the pattern slower than a snail, breathed on it, and the skin grew back together. He did the same thing once the snakes were in—between your skin and theirs.”
Sam lowered both his hands to the ground and looked back up at the stars. Both of his hands shifted slightly, twisting in place, but he didn’t seem to notice. At first, Glory thought he was forgetting, that his mind was wandering again, that she would need to remember for him. She slid closer in the darkness, close enough to see that his eyes weren’t empty and unfocused. They were full of pain and weariness.
“Do your arms hurt?” Glory asked. “I mean, I’m sure they must.”
Sam nodded. “Bones ache a lot where I was shot. And my skin tickles all along the scales. Always. Trying not to think about it.”
“So what are you thinking about?”
Sam sniffed and blinked slowly. His eyes were wet.
“My sister,” he said. “Millie. Just remembering things. It hurts worse than the bone.”
“The pain helps you remember,” Glory said. She nudged a burning stick further into the fire with her toe.
“Remembering hurts worse than any pain,” Sam said. “If Millie is hurt . . . if she dies . . .”
“Don’t,” Glory said. “We’ll get there. You’ll save her. It’s different this time.”
“How?” Sam asked, and he shut his eyes.
Glory watched him drift away, his lips parting, his jaw going slowly slack, his hands and arms freely crawling over and around him.
“You have me,” Glory said quietly. “And those things.”
As Sam began to snore, Glory unzipped the backpack and pulled out her beat-up copy of Poncho. Leaning closer to the fire, she flipped to the end.
THE VULTURE DABBED BROTH FROM HIS FRESHLY OILED mustache. The large dining room was alive with laughter and the assault of silver on china. The ceiling was thirty feet high, intricately carved and painted with gold. A garden of floral iron rails lined the walkways high above the room. Palm trees stood guard in every corner, growing in stolen Greek urns, thousands of years old. At one end of the room, on a dais of polished Egyptian granite taken from the grave of a pharaoh, in front of a row of carved lion-headed gods, El Buitre was alone at a table big enough for eight, sipping clear soup from a gold spoon.
Long before he had earned his outlaw name, when plain-old William Sharon had stopped gunslinging in Nevada and begun his real work in San Francisco, the wealthy diners in the city’s lavish restaurants had still owned their own successes. Now . . . those who were still living at all worked for one man. And it was an honor to do so and keep breathing. William Sharon was a prophet, a mogul, a devil, a god of certain knowledge and deadly strength. More than a vulture. The Vulture. The one and only.
Before the Gold Rush, William Sharon had walked the California hills and had somehow staked all of the most profitable gold claims simply by the smell of the air. William Sharon had started every boom business on the bay. His fishing boats knew where the fish would be. His pearl divers returned with chests from Spanish shipwrecks. He sold shares in businesses before unexpected fires. He took out insurance on ships one day before they sank, and on his business partners hours before their suicides. His newspaper announced national and international truths before telegrams could even carry across the continent.
Not one person in the city would bet against William Sharon no matter the contest—boxing, dogs, horses, or even turtle races. William Sharon knew things. He knew what men planned to do before they had bothered to think about it themselves. And he was never wrong. At least, that’s what people thought. The truth was both simpler and more complicated. In the early years, William Sharon had been wrong quite often. But with assistance and instruction from Mrs. Dervish, he had always doubled back and gotten things right. Now, the only opportunities that slipped through his fingers were too small to even bother with.
Only one thing remained for him to get finally, permanently, and emphatically right. And if he did, if Sam Miracle was stopped, if the boy’s heart was taken and his soul was prevented from yet another retreat through time, William Sharon’s alter ego, El Buitre, could spread his wings over the next century, and truly put his abilities to the test. There would be world wars, he knew that already. And he was eager to taste them. To tame them.
Where men find death and decay, a vulture finds wealth.
But he did have a weak stomach, especially in the evenings. Clear soup was all he could manage.
William Sharon set down his napkin and drew out the largest of his gold pocket watches. He set it on the table, faceup, although it floated centimeters above the tablecloth. Then he drew out a second, slightly larger watch and placed it beside the first. They clinked quietly against each other as they drifted. Both watch chains stretched back into his vest above his heart. He continued until all seven watches were arranged in a triangle. He admired each one with a twist or two, and then waited. All seven ticked differently. But they weren’t just out of sync. It was like each one was counting something different, something longer, something shorter, something slower, something faster. The sevenfold ticking was chaos—like seven very different dogs barking.
And then it wasn’t.
Mr. Sharon shut his eyes. The ticks became one long swirl—like the arcing blade of a windmill, slow in the center, but falcon-fast at the tip. He heard the diners scream and plates crash, but it was all faraway and muffled, something happening inside a building across the street. And then he opened his eyes, and looked up at the man pointing the gun.
Time hadn’t slowed down. The Vulture had sped up.
The man with the gun was named Lloyd Batchcraft. He had a massive mustache, a large belly, and his fat cheeks and throat were covered with shaving cream. He had knocked into a table as he rushed into the restaurant and he was already pointing his gun straight at William Sharon’s heart.
To El Buitre’s eyes, Lloyd Batchcraft was barely faster than a statue. A dollop of shaving cream was wobbling in the air beside his face, only just beginning to think about falling. Instead of flipping over, the table Lloyd had collided with perched up on a single leg. Instead of shattering against the floor, plates slowly grew cracks and crumbled no faster than stones in the desert.
William Sharon smiled. If he hadn’t moved to San Francisco, Lloyd Batchcraft would have been a mining tycoon worth many millions of dollars and the owner of an entire fleet of steamboats. Instead, he was a barber. At least he had been until thirty minutes previously. And then Mr. Sharon’s bank had seized his barbershop, thanks to a contract that poor Lloyd Batchcraft had absolutely no memory of signing.
Lloyd’s finger finished pulling the trigger on his gun. The hammer swung down like a tree branch swaying in the breeze. Flame grew out of the barrel’s mouth as slowly as a summer sunrise. The bullet nosed out of the flame like a mushroom in autumn leaves.
El Buitre drew his gun, checked the chamber, took casual aim, stifled a yawn, and then fired six times. While his own swarm of slugs inched through the air toward Lloyd, he reloaded his gun and holstered it. Then, leaning sharply to one side, he rearranged his watches.
The ticking tangled differently. Time flew. Plates shattered. A table tumbled. Gunshots bellowed. Lloyd Batchcraft’s bullet smacked into a statue above William Sharon’s shoulder. All six of El Buitre’s bullets smacked into poor Lloyd Batchcraft, tumbling him onto his back.
The clatter and the echoes and Lloyd Batchcraft all died. William Sharon snapped his fingers and began pocketing his watches. While diners stared, amazed at how fast, how practically invisible the great William Sharon’s movements had been, two waiters hurried to clean up the mess while a third waiter jumped forward to see what the great Vulture needed.
“Take the body to the kitchen and put him in the crab tank. Then tell Mrs. Dervish to bring me the Miracle girl.” The Vulture tucked away his final watch
and smoothed his vest. “It’s time we had words.”
GLORY WAS SITTING UP, HUDDLING BENEATH A SCRATCHY blanket. The hourglass was perched on a stone beside her, The Legend of Poncho was on her lap, and the fire was sleeping in quiet coals at her feet. The horse was tethered to a cactus behind her. She had found men’s long johns in the saddlebags along with the blanket, and both had disgusted her. But she was wearing the long johns now—over her denim and shirt—and she had the blanket tucked tight around her. It made her feel like a flea farm.
Glory was trying hard not to think. She didn’t want to think about the choice she had made, about what came next, about whether or not Father Tiempo was completely and totally dead, about Sam’s arms shattered and sticky, and now scaly, bendy, and alert.
But not thinking was harder than having a mouthful of gum and not chewing.
Reading the end of the book hadn’t helped. Why had she signed up for this, really? It wasn’t just to have an adventure, although that had sounded fun. At least until everything got so very real. She had come because people should never leave other people to do hard things alone. She believed that. She had been let down in her life, and she never, ever, ever wanted to let down anyone around her. Especially not the hero of her favorite book.
And now, the last few days of her life had been wilder than anything that had come before. But she had been able to simply move through the moments, making crazy decisions as easily as if she had been in a dream. Yet seeing her name in The Legend of Poncho changed things. Strangely, it made her danger seem more real. She might die. If the latest version of the book was the final version, she would die—wounded in a gunfight and then trampled by horses. Poncho had carried her body to a graveyard and had stood above her in wordless sorrow. A nice scene, so long as it was imaginary.
