Lightfall One: Clock, Cloak, Candle (Lightfall, Book 1)

by Jordan Taylor

  “Six dollars?” Ivy almost screams the words. “You are speaking of the most devastating disease to strike in the history of the world. You ask us to risk our lives, our health, our horses, our souls on this venture for that? There is nothing in this country more dangerous than a riser. You, sir, do not, cannot understand. I do not blame you for it. But you must have the sense and decency to listen to someone who knows. Without action being taken, now, there will be bloodthirsty, soulless, dead creatures roaming the streets of this city, consuming the living, before you have a chance to stir up a hunting party—which, even if you could, would fail because there is no one else in New Mexico Territory who knows how to hunt them.”

  Ivy backs away, past Melchior. “It is an insult to us, sir. To this city, these people. If that is what this battle is worth to you, you might as well ask the townspeople to look after themselves.”

  She walks out, sweeping past Grip, onto the dirt road. She must run, ride away, get away, hit something, scream, rip her hair. No matter what one does, what one says—

  Damn this city and damn these people and damn the steamcoach and its more than ten thousand. She can climb on Luck and leave. She rode to the border. She can ride to Boston if she must.

  Instead, she sees the dark saloon door of El Rio and turns inside. Maybe taking up whiskey drinking is how people survive out here.

  Ruth, the saloon girl who works mornings at El Rio, is the only figure behind the bar. Ivy asks for a lemon soda pop, remaining near the door as men at the far end of the bar glance at her.

  Can’t they have barstools? Ivy cannot turn for a table or she will be sitting alone, so she stands, leaning into the bar, both hands on the warm bottle, mind racing with possible routes home without meeting too many government blockades. What happens to one if caught? It is not as if she would be executed. Even if she was, it would be better than living another day in New Mexico Territory.

  Sam steps up beside her. She did not hear batwing doors swing. Ivy goes on staring at her bottle. Melchior moves up by Sam, flicking his fingers at Ruth, who grabs shot glasses. Grip arrives at Ivy’s left.

  No one says anything while Ruth brings three whiskey shots, along with flour tortillas, salsa, pickles, onions, and some type of heavily salted smoked fish. All to get one to drink more, Ivy realizes for the first time.

  She takes another sip of the soda as Ruth moves away. “No one understands.” Once more, not what she meant to say. Childish words. She bites her lip.

  The three men look at her.

  “Yet you expect understanding?” Grip asks. “Miss Jerinson, until yesterday, I had never seen the likeness of a riser. This Plague.... Out here, it is remote. A trouble in the States.”

  “If they cannot be persuaded of the truth, they will die. All of them. If a horde strikes the city, even a pack slipping in without much notice, all of Santa Fé will be wiped out in an hour.”

  “Ignorance may be surmounted by education,” Grip says. “There is nothing a body can do about outright stupid. Those we’ve left in Santa Fé now....”

  “I wish Sheriff Thurman was one of the ignorant rather than one of the stupid.” Ivy glances at him. She looks at Sam, who turns his glass in his fingertips.

  Melchior spears pickles on a knife—why is it difficult to find a good fork out here?—and she looks away.

  “Someone must do something. And I....” Ivy trails off, thinking again of her journey, taking her chances. “I need to get home,” she finishes very softly, feeling her throat tight, wishing they would all go away.

  “Stopping Plague-sick can aid that,” Melchior says, tipping the salsa bowl over a tortilla.

  “Of course. At six dollars a head.”

  “How about thirty?”

  “What?” Ivy looks up. “He went up?”

  Grip scowls. “Was that not the intention of your censure?”

  “I ... no. The intention was to explain the unexplainable, educate the asinine.”

  “He, like us, thought it a negotiation tactic,” Sam says. “Mel suggested one hundred. He came up to thirty.”

  “No chicken fixings, but touched an edge,” Melchior says through a mouthful. “Get your contraption drifting with enough sunups and save our skins into the bargain.” He gulps, glances past Sam to her. “Or’s all’s too down for you to shake?”

  Ivy stares at him. “Is that ... a question? If you can condescend to rephrase yourself in English I will attempt to answer.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Saying, can you not stand work to take a spell, while all adds up, and did you mean to fetch outlaw prices for them? All that philanthropy just smoke?”

  Ivy does not want any of this to “take a spell.” She wants to kick her cousin. But her mother began telling her from earliest memories that one does not always get what one wants. And not to kick people.

  She looks at Grip. “Will you work with us? We are not giving you fifty percent on this. We have the advantage now. Perhaps, if we have another human bounty hunt, we can renegotiate. On these I should think seventy-thirty is more than fair.”

  “You intent to hunt more humans? It takes skill and brains and experience to trail outlaws, Miss Jerinson. Not attributes I have learned to associate with your outfit.”

  “Could you at least give us the brains?” Ivy frowns. “I believe we do all right with circumstances we have been dealt.”

  “I shall give you two halves. At best.”

  “Although....” Ivy again gazes at her bottle. “Should we have more assistants? It is little reward to split.... Would Rosalía wish to help?”

  Grip’s shoulders stiffen. “Her place is with her family.”

  “You two not really relations, are you?” Melchior asks around a bite of fish and pickle.

  “You don’t think she would be interested to know what we are doing?” Ivy asks.

  “I dare say she might.” Grip frowns. “She is generally interested in anything as long as it is none of her affair.”

  “An admirable trait in a bounty hunter,” Sam says softly.

  Grip looks past Ivy at him. “You think it proper for a woman to ride bounty, Mr. Samuelson?”

  “No. But what I think is proper has so little standing in this country, it is not worth repeating. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to do so.”

  Ivy looks around him to Melchior. “She can shoot. What do you think?”

  “Think he looks Anglo.”

  “My parents were Irish,” Grip snaps. “Hers raised me.”

  “Melchior—” Ivy glares at him.

  “Reckon one female riding a shindy is one too many,” Melchior says. “By a shooting star. Why not bring the whole family? Babes in arms, pet chicken?”

  “Thank you for your support,” Ivy says.

  Grip is almost smirking.

  She shifts to face him. “You agree? So you concern yourself with the words of a brainless man?”

  He throws back his shot and steps away from the bar. With the tip of his forefinger, he touches the brim of his hat to her, left eyebrow raised, then walks out.

  Ivy and Sam glance at one another. It feels strangely good to know one has no worse measure than halfwit to such a man. As if a contest has been won.

  “That’s how come he hates you,” Melchior says to Sam, idly lifting a rolled tortilla. “Irishman. Can’t hear it on him.”

  “I should rather be hated on national grounds than personal ones, old man,” Sam says.

  Melchior chuckles. “For me, like to think I’d done something to deserve it.”

  “Then you should be in clover.” Taking her half-full bottle, Ivy follows Grip into morning sunlight.

  Seventeenth

  Darkness Rising

  Ivy lies on her stomach, sungoggles over her eyes, hat shading her face, gazing across a prairie of buffalo grass and Russian thistle. The butte she rests upon looms above this expanse, making distant hills and mountains, even the valley of the Rio Grande, clear from the height.

  Beside her, Es Feroz watch
es the same horizon, sitting motionless, ears pricked, stiff as a rifle barrel.

  Ivy holds her breath, both to avoid any sound and to listen. She feels grit across her teeth and in her nose, struggling not to sneeze.

  She waits, listens, staring the way her fox does. Heart pounding, lungs burning from lack of air, soaked in sweat below a blazing desert sun and inside the yellow dress.

  It is the middle of June. They have been on the trail of risers three days. Without one sighting. This, however, does nothing to soothe her nerves.

  Ivy rolls her eyes to glance at Es Feroz.

  The vixen does not move. Does not blink.

  Ivy looks to the distance.

  A tumbleweed bounces. The same breeze whips up a dust devil which twists, swirls, fades. Nothing, either living or formerly living, moves besides vegetation. She must breathe or faint.

  Es Feroz stands, turns slowly, stretching as she goes, extending each hind leg, one at a time, to push the stretch to toes, then walks away.

  Ivy sits up, gasping, almost choking, gulping down dusty air until she coughs.

  “Don’t do that to me,” she hisses as the vixen stalks away, moving higher up the bluff. “I thought—arhh.”

  The fox is clearly not listening. She will not even flick back an ear.

  She has remained in Ivy’s company a good deal for the past day, as long as Grip’s dog stays at a distance. Ivy feels grateful for her. Still, she could do without false alarms.

  She starts back around a narrow ledge, across the butte to the north side, following a gentle slope which allowed her up here in the first place. Es Feroz darts past to leap upward, ears back, eyes bright.

  Ivy, knocked off her stride by the vixen, clutches the rock wall, then grabs for the holster at her hip. She looks up just in time to see a bizarre little creature—smaller than Es Feroz, gray, black, and white, masked like a raccoon, with an absurdly long striped tail—that whisks out of sight as she blinks.

  Ivy relaxes her fingers on the gun. One reaches so instinctively for such an object out here. Even if she does not like it, does not want it, has scarcely fired the thing, and that only in a few hasty lessons with Melchior.

  He bought it with race winnings from the wedding’s events, all of what did not go to the maker. A Colt Lightning: bird’s head grip, four-inch barrel, a fraction of the size of his Colt .45 with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel and sharp-cornered grip. Even so, it seemed tremendously heavy, larger than she expected when she said she wanted a small revolver, but Melchior assured her Colts were the best and it was exactly what she needed.

  Then he got the price from Mr. Abegglen, the only gunsmith still operating in town: forty dollars—no holster, no belt, no bullets, just the six-shooter for forty. Melchior laughed.

  “I ain’t joshing you, son,” Mr. Abegglen said, looking up from the case as he placed the gun back inside. “These things don’t grow on sagebrush. And that tinker don’t make ’em. Trains are stopped, stages stopped. We’re lucky to still have food. Forget steel and gunpowder. That’s the best I can do.”

  He got her the gun, yet having to listen to him complain about Abegglen to Sam, to her, to Grip, to himself, made her wish he had not.

  Es Feroz jumps, scrabbles, and both animals disappear.

  Ivy waits, but catches no sound of a struggle. She has heard her fox in scrapes before and Es Feroz is not one for stoicism, exhibiting a sometimes terrifying vocal repertoire when threatened.

  “Sun’s setting!” Melchior’s voice below, out of sight, making her want to sit down up here for an hour or two.

  The dry desert wind reaches her, gusting in like smoke, throwing dust in her face. At least she had the wherewithal to purchase a pair of sungoggles from Oliver before coming out here. Avoiding use of her left arm, though it hardly troubles her now, she slides along the rock face to the narrow groove she follows down.

  “Anything?” Melchior calls from below as he catches sight of her.

  “Just a peculiar creature,” Ivy says, shaking her head as she picks her way toward him and their horses.

  Luck tries to eat a Russian thistle while Melchior keeps yanking her head away by the reins. Chucklehead, with Melchior on his back, stands with his ears pinned, flicking his tail against flies.

  “In a not breathing, flesh-eating way peculiar?”

  “In a cute, fuzzy way. It had a mask like a raccoon and a long tail.”

  “Ringtail cat,” Melchior says. “Half-tame. Folks south call them miner’s cats. That it?”

  “That is it.”

  “Snails. What’s happened to them?”

  “They will be in. Wouldn’t we have heard gunshots if there was trouble?”

  “Should’ve been here hours ago.” He gives Luck’s head a particularly savage yank and she throws it high, trying to step away from him. “You’re slow as they are. Bejesus, girl. I could have gone up there myself and been back six times.”

  “Strap on a skirt and go for it. I will be delighted to hold the horses for you.” Ivy slows to a crawl, inching down the slope as if held back by ropes.

  “Thunderation, you find this amusing?”

  “Only if it bothers you.”

  “Bothered! Bothered to Hell and back in a hearse. Square? Can we shift now?”

  Melchior, of course, would have left her with the horses and climbed the butte himself to watch for Sam and Grip—and risers—but he cannot walk at the moment.

  “If you are going to behave like this every time we split up, what good is it?” she asks, placing both hands on a sun-hot rock to slide down. “In case you haven’t noticed, it is a touch difficult to be punctual out here.”

  “’Specially when you’ve been eaten.”

  “I’m sure they would be touched by your concern, but I cannot envision a scenario in which Grip was ambushed so suddenly he could not get a shot off. How is your ankle?”

  “What do you care?” he snaps, sounding so much like a child she almost laughs. He is only three years older than the “infant.” Refreshing to be reminded of it.

  A final slip downward. Ivy reaches them, catching Luck’s rein, trying to stroke her neck while the mare balks as if she has never seen Ivy before.

  Ivy sighs. She looks back up the butte. The fox remains out of sight.

  “Es Feroz alerted to something south, but settled down. I wonder if we shouldn’t go that way....”

  Melchior shifts in his saddle, looking in all clear directions. “Can’t go anywhere. Bound to wait.”

  “We could go out, just to see, then come back here. If they turn up, they will wait like we have.”

  Melchior shakes his head.

  Perhaps there is something touching in him being so worried for his friend, but she wishes he did not express the worry in hostility. She would have much rather ridden the southeast loop with Sam herself and sent Grip with Melchior, but that is the taboo pairing. Not for personal reasons, but because Grip and Melchior are the best shots. If any splitting up to cover more ground is to be done, the two of them must be apart.

  Now she wonders if they should have split at all as she maneuvers Luck against the rocks, held by Melchior, and lowers herself backward onto the saddle. Between the angles and the difficult animal, it takes them ten minutes just to get her in the sidesaddle.

  As soon as Ivy has her left foot in the stirrup and her right leg in the brace, Melchior releases Luck and the mare swings her head around in an effort to bite Ivy’s left leg. Ivy pulls up the right rein.

  “Why does she despise me?” Ivy asks, kneeing the mare forward so she will walk in a circle and stop snapping.

  “I’ll ride south. You stay here in case they come back.” His feet dangle out of stirrups and she wonders how he really is.

  “No,” Ivy says slowly as Melchior starts Chucklehead south. “I don’t think that is a good idea. We should stay together.”

  “Then come along.” He is riding away.

  “I thought you wished us both to remain?”


  He goes on, not answering.

  Likely the ankle is still highly painful. And, pushing Luck to follow, Ivy feels a deep conviction that it serves him right.

  She never imagined it possible he could be thrown from a horse. Perhaps not, in normal circumstances. But he grew bored with their trail all morning, only her, the fox, and the two horses for company. To liven up a dull, hot, riser-less day, he imitated her: both legs dangling over the left side of his saddle, asking when she was going to learn to ride properly.

  Ivy also never thought she would be glad to see a rattlesnake. Yet the way that diamondback’s buzz sent Chucklehead straight up into the air—while Luck, a good distance away, only shied—did her heart good. Melchior was left entirely behind as the stallion jumped like a bronco, then streaked out from under him in best fandango race fashion. Melchior already had his gun in his hand when he hit the ground on his ankle. He shot the rattler’s head off, which made Luck shy again, then lay there, clutching his boot and cursing.

  Es Feroz bounced around the thrashing snake body with great interest after dust cleared and the sound of the shot had long echoed to nothing. Ivy chuckled when she saw her snapping at the rattle. Her smile faded when she realized Melchior could not stand.

  She rode Luck up beside him, unbuckled her gun belt, and held it down for him to grab. By looping this across the leg brace of her sidesaddle in lieu of saddle horn, she was able to pull him upright. He hopped on his right leg, gritting his teeth, staring off after his vanished horse.

  He would live. Ivy again smiled. She felt sure Chucklehead would return. Melchior had said he always came back. Besides, there was his insistent courtship of Luck to resume.

  A minute passed, two, five with no sign.

  At last, the real difficulty of the situation began to set in. Melchior could not walk and had no horse. Ivy could walk and had a horse.

  Curse him.

  She slid down, lengthened the single stirrup, then held tight to Luck’s head. She did not say a word to Melchior, who treated her with equal silence, hostility running between them like heat lightning.