by Ivanna Roze
Still, it felt wrong that she was sitting here in her chair, her hair being brushed out and braided by the women who she would soon be married to. Was that how it worked? She wasn't sure, but she didn't think that anyone meant for her to be married to them in the same sense that she would be married to Enoch.
Perhaps she was wrong, though. Perhaps she would be spending quality time with them as well. The thought rang a little bit strange to her, but who was she to complain? After all, they'd taken her in, and shown her so much affection. It was only natural that she should show a bit of trust.
Delilah was humming softly behind her as the older woman brushed out her hair. A thousand brushes, and it would shine like the sun reflecting off the ocean, she said. It wasn't the first time that Cora had heard the idea. A thousand brush-strokes sounded right. The ocean comparison, though…
"Have you seen the ocean?"
"Where did that come from?"
"I was just thinking about what you said."
Delilah continued brushing. "Oh, that. Well, I suppose, to answer your question—yes. I'm from California, and I lived right by the ocean for most of my life. I came here a few years ago, but up until then, the ocean was just part of life."
"That sounds… strange."
"Why? Haven't you seen it?"
"I'm from Michigan. My family has enough money, but I guess I just never thought about it."
"No? Not even a little bit?"
"I guess not."
"Well, if you ask, Enoch might take you to see it. He can get around quickly if need be, you know."
"I know."
"It's going to be so lovely. Oh, there's so many people here. They're waiting for us. For you, Cora, and your beautiful hair, your beautiful dress. It's going to be…" She sucked in a breath. "Oh, it's going to be wonderful."
Cora smiled sheepishly. She hoped it would be. She hadn't dreamed about marriage for a long time, but there had been a time once where it was all she thought of. Where it was all that she wanted to, all she could think of. She had thought those days were gone, but now it all seemed possible. Like she'd been given a new lease on life.
Part of her worried about Ash. He had left on a bit of a disagreement, sure enough. But that didn't mean that he should be leaving her here entirely. She was thankful that he had, to an extent. It gave her the opportunity to save Harriett's life, after all.
But leaving things the way that she had… she had wanted him so badly, and now he wasn't going to be a part of her life any more. He couldn't be, not any more. That didn't mean, though, that she could just turn off her thoughts. She wasn't like that, no matter how much she might try to do just that.
Cora let out a long breath and let them continue brushing her hair out. It didn't matter. The fact was, Ashton wasn't there, and he wasn't going to be there. He wasn't coming back. The fact that he'd taken more than a week since she sent him out was enough proof of that. He was probably back in Cincinnati already, telling her brother some story. Ash didn't seem like the kind to lie.
Maybe the story he told would be pretty much what happened. She doubted that he would tell anyone about what had happened between them. Whether that was to protect his own hide or to protect her reputation, she couldn't say. But she knew what she wanted it to be, because she didn't want to remember Ashton in a bad way.
She didn't want to remember anything that had happened badly. If her mother was going to be alright, then the only little tinge of doubt that she had could be dealt with. That was the only thing that still hurt, maybe a little more than it should have.
The sound of footsteps approaching from down the hall surprised her. Who would come here now? Who, wearing boots? She already knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. But that wasn't one set of footsteps.
Cora's eyes shot wide open. "Delilah, you and the ladies need to get behind me, okay?"
"What's wrong?"
"Just do what I say, alright?"
The handle on the door turned while she watched it. Then it came open, and Ashton was standing there pointing a gun right between her breasts.
"Cora! Jesus!" He dropped the barrel of the gun until it was pointing at the floor, but he didn't holster it again. "Are you alright?"
One of the men behind Ash asked "That's her?"
"That's her."
"What do we do with her? Do we take her with us, or do we leave her?"
Ashton stared at her. "What are you wearing?"
"Ashton, I—you need to leave. I'm sorry. I can't explain right now, but you need to put that away, and you need to leave."
"I can't do that, Cora."
"God damn you, Ashton, can't you just listen to me for once in your life?"
"I'm sorry. I would if I could, but I can't, alright?"
"Get the hell out of here! Can't you see you're scaring these women?"
She looked over her shoulder at them, pointing with her chin. They had crowded together in a huddle, like she'd asked, and they looked every bit as scared as she thought they would. Who wouldn't be scared? A man comes around with a gun, pointing it at you, who wouldn't be afraid?
She supposed that Ashton might not be. He seemed too stubborn for that. But about anyone else would be crying their eyes out with terror.
"Cora—"
The third man, the eldest of the three by a few years, spoke after a moment. "Girl, there ain't nobody here but the four of us. You want to tell us what's going on?"
Even if Ashton wouldn't, the third man looked over his shoulder a moment before holstering his pistol. The second, the dark-haired man who looked about Ashton's age, kept his eyes and his pistol pointed out the door.
"There's nobody here? You're serious." She tilted her head in sarcastic disapproval. "Are you blind, or just stupid? There's seven women in this room, and three men who should not be here, now get out before I—"
Cora closed her hand into an exaggerated fist. "I will wallop you one good."
Ashton pulled her in close. "Cora, honey, no. There ain't."
Whatever was around his neck, the strange wooden toggle, stung when it touched her, and then as he held her against him, it started burning hard. She pulled away, but he was stronger than her. The rest of her body was getting cold. She could feel the goosebumps rising on her arms, could feel her nipples hardening to painfully unpleasant tightness.
God, it was so cold. She thought she'd gotten past it. She thought it had gone away. But it hadn't gone away. She'd felt it for days now. A constant chill that never went away and never got better.
The room shrunk around her, and the cold bit into her bones and wouldn't let go, and then she was standing alone in a room with three men, and her future husband rounding the corner at the top of the steps.
Thirty-Five
Ashton heard the shot go off before he knew why it was happening. He let Cora go and turned hard, bringing his gun up. Sam wasn't going to shoot without a damned good reason, and though none of them were known to miss, he would be a fool to ignore whatever was happening behind them.
Ashton heard Cora fall back into her chair behind him, heard the legs scrape against the wooden floor, but he wasn't paying attention to her any more. Whatever Samson had shot at, it hadn't done anything to the man walking toward them.
Ash didn't recognize him at first. He seemed quiet and gentle-mannered. He looked every bit like any normal man might, and that made it that much worse when Ashton finally realized who he was looking at. Hewitt spoke first.
"You sick son of a bitch."
"Boys! You're alive!"
Ashton's teeth grit together. No way was this happening. Not the way that the thing was hoping they'd think it was happening, anyways. Whatever was going on, it was bad and he didn't want to be a part of it. But that wasn't a choice he had to make any more. He was already in it.
"Do you know Enoch?" The question came from behind Ashton, and he answered it without looking back at Cora.
"No. But that's not who that is."
The thing wearing King Peters's face smiled at them, brought his arms wide open. Even now, part of Ashton wanted to believe. Wanted to know that everything was alright again, that he hadn't been responsible for his teacher's death.
But he'd already carried that cross for a long time.
"You get out of that body, and maybe we're so appreciative we let you live," Sam growled. He had a tension in his shoulders that told Ashton why he'd missed. His joints were aching with the cold, but he forced to keep his gun up, trained right at King Peters's face, so the bullet would force a hole in between his teeth.
They should have shot by now, he knew. They all should have. But there was something stopping them. Not something magical—the amulets were protection against that, and they all knew how to feel a Devil rooting around in their heads.
It wasn't like that, though. It was the question that it raised. He walked like Peters. Talked like him. Smiled like him. Sure, he went by a different name, now, or so it seemed. Sure, there was Devil-sign all around them.
But what if they were wrong?
If anyone could survive somehow, it would have been Peters. If anyone could have come back from the dead, anyone in the whole world, it would have been Peters. If they couldn't figure how he'd done it, then that was only because they hadn't had the good sense yet.
"Come on, Hewitt. I know you don't trust me. I know. I told you never to trust anyone comes back from the dead, didn't I?"
"Let's say you did."
"But it's me. I can prove it. I had to fake it. Had to. It had to look real, or they'd have come after me. They'd have stopped me."
"Who'd have stopped you."
Peters made a grimacing face. "The Devils. The one who took my Harriett."
Ashton wanted to pull the trigger right then. This lying had gone on for long enough, and it was getting insulting. Nobody was allowed to play-act like they were King Peters, and they sure as hell weren't allowed to use his wife's memory against them.
Still, Ashton waited. He knew the reason that the others weren't shooting, and it was the same reason he wasn't. Not because it could have been him. It couldn't. There was no way. None that Ash could think of, not really. There would always be the question, the what-if that they could never be sure of.
But that was part of the lesson, too. The question, what if—it's meaningless. It's easy to get yourself killed asking what if they're my buddy. That's exactly why, if you see someone you saw go down, you put them down again.
It wasn't because their training was lax, it wasn't because they thought it might be Peters. They wanted it to be true. Every one of them was prepared to wait as long as it took to be convinced that it wasn't Peters, and so far, it had played a dangerous game very well.
"So why now? Why you takin' girls?"
"Cora, you mean? I knew her mother. Trained her, even."
"Cora—that true?"
She made a sound that indicated she didn't know.
"So that means you take her out of an overturned stagecoach? Why not come out and show yourself to me?"
"I needed her."
"For what?"
"To get my revenge, Ashton. I have the thing downstairs. In the basement. You'll see."
Ashton took in a breath.
"You wanna tell me how the Devil you have locked up in the basement has been chasing Cora and I all over tarnation? And just when it stops chasing me, you happen to show up, take Cora, and now you're keepin' her here?"
Peters's smile widened. "Cora, tell him."
"She's sick. Harriett is. So I need to—but wait. Enoch. Why—my head feels fuzzy. I saw… the room, the girls were all there, but now they're gone. And they were right behind me. Enoch?"
He had been slow about it, step by step, but Ashton couldn't pull the trigger. Hewitt hadn't even pulled his gun yet, but he had his hand sitting on the handle like he was thinkin' about it.
"Cora, you poor thing. I'm so sorry that you had that happen to you. But it'll never happen again, okay?"
She smiled up at him, a smile that Ashton didn't like.
"Cora, I don't want to upset you, darlin'. But Harriett's dead. She's been dead for twelve years now. King Peters, the man you're supposedly lookin' at, he's been dead ten. And dead things—they don't come back to life."
He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger. King Peters stumbled, even looked hurt for a moment, but then he turned and Ashton could see that the only thing hurting was his pride. He fired another ball, this one lower, into the chest.
There were only so many places a Devil could be, if they were taking over a human body.
Once the shots started, it was over in an instant. The room filled with smoke and stank of the acrid gunpowder smell. Ashton forced himself to check the body.
It wasn't moving. Between the three of them, they'd pulled most of the head clean off the body, and his chest looked like swiss cheese painted red.
"Cora, are you alright?"
She didn't answer right away. He turned, grabbed her, and walked her out of the room.
"You're not hurt, are you?"
"You shot him."
"I knew that man better than anyone in the world, short of the four boys he's trained before me, and I want you to trust me when I say that he would have wanted it that way."
"Ashton, he was going to bring my mother back—"
Tears welled up in Cora's eyes, but Ashton shook his head sadly.
"No, baby doll. Let me show you. This might not be too pleasant, but you need to see. You need to understand."
He walked her down the stairs, his hands on her shoulders the whole time. She seemed like she was seeing everything for the first time. Like it was all completely foreign to her, even after he'd left her here more than a week.
Ashton opened one of the bedroom doors. Cora's eyes went wide, and her crying got harder. He walked her into the next one. She wasn't surprised this time, but he showed her the next one anyways. And the next one. All the way down to her mother's room, where the body was still growing colder on the bed. The cold was beginning to fade, and for that at least, Ashton was thankful.
"Do you understand now?"
Cora leaned her head into his chest and cried. He didn't need another answer than that.
It took an hour to dig the grave, even with all three of them rotating in shifts whenever someone got too tired. The prayers were easy, but getting over it was harder.
Cora didn't talk much. Whatever had happened, it had rattled her. Ashton figured that was the right response. It wasn't right to be handling it as well as he and the boys did. People shouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit.
But they did.
They made it all the way back to Salt Lake City before Cora spoke again.
"Ashton, have you ever seen the ocean?" Her voice was soft, even weak.
"Once, why?"
"I've never seen it. I've never been that far out. This is the furthest I've ever been from home."
"Then let's get going. I can take you, easy as can be."
"I have to go home, and you have to take me home. Arthur's—"
"Arthur nothing," he said softly. "I'm not worried about your brother. He'll find out you're okay, eventually. I'm worried about you, darlin'."
"I want to see the ocean."
"Then we'll go to the ocean."
He stepped up to the ticket seller. No need to go home just yet. There were more important places to be right now.
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