by Alex Wells
Her knife was sharp and the rope holding the door shut was under a lot of tension. The blade sliced through cleanly. The Bone Collector put his shoulder against the door – somehow, she’d never envisioned him doing something like that, it seemed too physical – and shoved it.
There was a thump, a crash, and the door sprang open. Hob caught a glimpse inside, of Coyote’s compact, emaciated form sprawled out on the floor. He started scrabbling to his feet. Someone had shaved his hair, once one of his points of vanity, off while she’d been gone, probably because it was the only way to get rid of the knots. There was nothing hiding his face with its wild and inhuman expression.
An instant later, the Bone Collector was on him, pinning him to the floor with both hands and one knee. Coyote screamed, struggling. The Bone Collector might as well have been made of stone again, for all it moved him. His eyes were fixed on Coyote, lips moving. And slowly, Coyote began to quiet down, struggles ceasing and screams turning to whimpers. Hob could hear then that the Bone Collector wasn’t speaking, but singing, the song Hob knew – the song Coyote had been singing in his sleep.
The Bone Collector leaned closer and closer to him, until their cheeks were almost touching. Coyote closed his eyes tightly, and his lips moved, though she couldn’t tell what he said.
“Give me the knife,” the Bone Collector said quietly.
Hob didn’t move until he looked back at her; she’d almost missed the words because he’d gone back to singing seamlessly, like that was just another part of the song. She flipped the blade in her hand and offered him the hilt, leaning in enough so he could take it.
Still softly singing, the Bone Collector straightened enough to cut a line down his arm with the knife. He offered the freely bleeding wound to Coyote.
“Are you fuckin’ serious?” Geri whispered behind her.
Coyote latched on to the Bone Collector’s arm, lips closing around that flowing blood, hands clutching like it was a lifeline. Hob looked back at Geri, her stomach turning. “You ain’t seen nothin’,” she said.
“Sure as fuck don’t want to be seein’ this,” Geri agreed.
Hob kept looking at Geri, for once not out of hostility, but because she didn’t want to see what was going on with the off-kilter breathing and soft swallowing sounds behind her. Geri kept his eyes fixed on her, she would have bet for the same reasons. Some things, a body just didn’t need to witness.
Slowly, she became aware that the sounds stopped, difficult to notice after trying so hard to ignore them.
“You gonna look?” Geri asked.
“You gonna?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t want to steal your thunder.”
Hob snorted and turned. The two men had shifted, Coyote prone on the floor, the Bone Collector leaned over him so that their foreheads lightly touched, his hands planted firm on the floor on either side of Coyote’s head. A vivid smear of blood dragged out the corner of Coyote’s mouth. There was something about looking at that which felt so intimate, it made her feel even more uncomfortable than the whole blood-drinking thing. Seemed she was discovering some standards she’d never known she had.
The Bone Collector pushed himself up slowly to sit back on his haunches. Coyote opened his eyes and looked around, his gaze fixing on Hob. He was there again, at home in his own eyes, that quick intelligence burning brightly as he scooted back to lean against the bed frame.
The Bone Collector wiped Hob’s knife off with his handkerchief and offered it back to her. “He’s seen it.”
“Seen what?” Hob asked, stepping into the room. It was a wreck, every piece of furniture but the bed overturned.
The Bone Collector’s eyes were fixed on hers. “The deepest part of the world. The place that is not a place, from which all life and change comes.” He turned his arm over, the one he’d cut, and there was no wound there now. Not even a scar. But Hob saw the hard blue vein under his skin, a thing that had showed up after he’d once vanished for weeks and come back half-spooky. “I’ve been there in my own way. I didn’t think anyone else ever had. Or ever would.”
Hob looked over at Coyote, who was trying to wipe the worst of the blood from his mouth with his sleeve, like he was embarrassed. He offered her a crooked, uncertain grin. “What happened to you?” she asked. She really wanted to ask: was it the same thing that happened to me? Maybe that was why she suddenly didn’t want anyone else listening in.
“I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t remember so many things.”
Hob righted the room’s single chair and sat down on it, on the very edge. It wobbled alarmingly under her. Coyote was near twenty centimeters shorter than her on a good day, and she didn’t feel right looming over him while he was looking so small. “Begin at the beginning. You were in Harmony town. I know that much. They had you locked up. Your brother let you out.”
Coyote sat back, startled. “How do you… no, never mind. He told you, obviously.”
“I think he’s an asshole, if that makes ya feel any better,” Hob said dryly.
Coyote relaxed a few centimeters with a sheepish laugh. “It does, actually. What did he tell you about me?”
“Personally? Nothin’, and I didn’t ask. Give me some credit. Harmony. You were in Harmony town.”
“Right.” Coyote sketched out the details, confirming what Dambala had found out months ago about his capture and escape. Mentally putting together some kind of report seemed to steady him as well. “And then I kept walking, until I couldn’t walk any more. I thought I heard… Do you know what a real coyote sounds like? That yipping. I hallucinated one speaking to me, and I made a deal with him.” He huffed an odd little laugh. “I said I’d teach him to run with a pack, if he’d just show me water.”
Hob examined her own hands for a moment, and called up sparks to dance across her fingertips. “There are worse deals to make for survival.”
“I imagine so,” Coyote said.
“What happened after that?”
“That’s when it gets… blurry. From hallucination to incoherent. I remember walking… so long. Forever. I remember…” A shudder ran through his body. “I remember drinking. Water. But it wasn’t water. Not blood, either. But… like it, somehow. Rich. Deep down. Like a well,” Coyote finished hollowly.
“A well from which all things drink.” The Bone Collector traced the hard blue line under his skin. “From which all power flows.”
Hob could put two and two together easy enough. A “well” of some kind that was the source of the blue mineral, and therefore the source of all that witchiness. And now they knew TransRift was looking for that mineral for their own reasons, which meant they damn well better not get it. Hob took a mental step back from all the implications and the spooky half meanings and focused on the practical. That was what she was good for, point and shoot. “Where?”
“I can’t remember,” Coyote said.
The Bone Collector shook his head, voice becoming slow and thoughtful. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s fuckin’ helpful.” Hob sucked at her teeth.
The Bone Collector rubbed his face with one hand, covering his eyes. “I almost lost myself in that well before, Hob. It’s… too massive. Not a place like you understand it.”
Coyote managed a dry laugh. “I did lose myself and haven’t gotten all the bits back yet.”
“You’re stable for now,” the Bone Collector said, barely more than a whisper.
“D’ya think…” She realized that the Bone Collector’s head had drooped down even more. “Did he… Is he asleep?”
Coyote leaned forward and chuckled, a little strained. “It would seem so. I don’t think I drank that much.”
Hob huffed a laugh. Laughing was better than sorting through the million things that made her want to scream just now. “Ya mind if we stick him in your bed?”
“Then where will I go?”
“We ain’t sold your old bed yet,” Hob said. There was a flash of shame on his face, fleeting, and Hob hated
that she’d landed in a world where shit could happen that could make Coyote of all people feel ashamed. “Ya feel up to dealin’ with the others now?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You know you don’t. Ain’t that much room around here.” But she knew that feeling so intimately herself. She’d spent years re-earning her place in the Wolves after she’d fucked up titanically. Though in her case, she supposed with grim amusement, it hadn’t involved cannibalism. Old Nick might have been more forgiving of that. “And you’re gonna have to talk to Dambala eventually.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Hob raised an eyebrow. “That’ll be the fuckin’ day. You could talk the feathers off an eagle.”
“Yes, but I don’t care in the slightest what the eagle thinks of me later.” He laughed again, a more despairing sound. “Don’t tell anyone about the blood?”
“It don’t get better, exactly. But you get used to it,” she offered.
“Is it more of that witchiness, like you and Nick always pretended carefully not to have?”
“Might be,” Hob said. “But I ain’t the expert. Scat. Go get some food and bring Bala his breakfast in bed. Ought to get you on his good side.”
Geri cleared his throat from the hall. She’d almost forgotten he was there. “You think that’s a good idea?”
Hob raised an eyebrow toward Coyote. “Think you can get your ass back here, you start feelin’… thirsty again?”
“I can balance my machismo against not wanting to come back to my senses and find I’ve chewed up the face of someone I like,” Coyote said dryly, like it didn’t matter. But she saw in the dark brown of his eyes that it mattered to him, a hell of a lot.
“Go on, then.”
“Hob…” Geri said as Coyote brushed by him.
“We ain’t in a position here to be havin’ prisoners,” Hob said. She gave the Bone Collector an experimental prod, and his eyes half opened. She nudged him toward the bed, and he slowly unfolded to standing. “Coyote knows that. We gotta find out if he can keep his shit together.”
“And if he can’t?” Geri asked.
She kept a firm grip on the Bone Collector’s arm to guide him the few steps and help him sit. This was an ugly thing to be talking about, but there wasn’t much of being in charge that she’d found to be pretty yet. “Either the Bone Collector takes him, or Coyote’ll do what he’s gotta.”
“Fuck,” Geri muttered. “Don’t seem right, dyin’ twice.”
Hob snorted. “It’s what happens when it don’t take right the first time.” But she didn’t want it to be that way either. She’d killed Coyote once, sending him off on his own. She didn’t want to do it again. Hob glanced over her shoulder at Geri. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee.”
Geri’s lip curled. “Need a minute?”
Well, it had been days since Geri had been a prick to her. It was nice to know some things were still right in the world. “Yeah, I’m gonna fuck him and don’t want an audience. The fuck do you think? Get out of here.”
She wasn’t sure if he got the sarcasm or if he’d be whispering nastiness around the base in the next five minutes. And she realized, as he shut the door, that she didn’t have to give a shit either way. She wasn’t the fuckup trainee any more, and this was her goddamn base.
Hob sank down onto the edge of the narrow bed. The Bone Collector had already stretched out, his eyes closed. Fine, because he didn’t have to be awake. She pulled off her gloves and felt his forehead – seemed cool enough – then unbuttoned his waistcoat, then his shirt. Halfway done with the small, yellowed bone buttons, his hands moved to clasp over hers.
“Undressing me?” he asked, eyes opened to bare slits.
“Last time I saw, you got shot.” She continued unbuttoning his shirt, and he didn’t stop her. But it did feel powerful strange, for his hands to be over hers. She did her best to pretend that her stomach wasn’t doing a weird, slow flip, filled with emotion she did not want to acknowledge.
Under the shirt, he was pale as ever and thin, which was what she’d expected. He wasn’t the muscular sort. What strength he had flowed out of his brand of witchiness, and maybe it ate him from the inside. The bullet wound that had taken him down was still visible in his side, angry and red. It didn’t look much healed, like it really should have opened back up with all the moving around. “You shoulda been healed up by now,” she said. “If I’d been shot like that, I woulda been.”
“Time doesn’t pass the same way for me, when I’m in the ground,” he said, almost sighing out the words.
“Would you have died?”
He was silent so long, she thought he’d fallen asleep again. But then carefully, he slipped his fingers between hers. “Yes.”
“Need me to take you back?”
“No. I just need… time.” His fingers tightened slightly against hers, and she let him pull her hand away, up to rest on his chest. “Now that I’m here, I’d miss you too much.”
She swallowed thickly. “Keep talkin’ like that and I might think you like me.” She didn’t want to walk down that path again, even if there were certain parts of her that begged to differ just now. Those same parts being what made her move her fingers lightly against his, and brush her fingertips against the smooth skin of his chest.
A tired smile curved his lips. “I shouldn’t want to give you any other impression.” He tugged at her hand lightly. “Won’t you lay down with me?”
She wasn’t strong enough to say no a second time, with no one watching. Feeling a hundred kinds of foolish, she stretched out along the edge of the bed on her side. She felt the rise and fall of him breathing, even the faint beat of his heart. Both served as steady reminders that he was here, and alive, even if they couldn’t answer her anger at herself for caring about either of those things.
The Bone Collector turned his head to rest against hers. His lips were so close to hers she could almost… “No. Don’t.” She wasn’t even sure if she was saying that to him or herself.
“Don’t what?” When she didn’t answer, he squeezed her hand, his eyes slipping shut. “It feels good to have you here, is that so strange?”
Hob took a deep breath and closed her own eye for a moment, trying to sort out her thoughts. Because it wasn’t strange at all, other than maybe what would feel good would be more than just cramming onto a tiny bed with him. She could imagine all too easily kissing him, unbuttoning him down to the skin, riding him as he arched into her. She hadn’t had anything between her legs but her own goddamn hand for so long, she ached with it. But it would be one thing, if he was a way to get herself off and she wouldn’t have to worry about him again. She liked him too much in all his infuriating strangeness. Even assuming he fucked like regular men did, since he sure as hell didn’t do anything else half normal. She licked her lips. “The hell do you want from me?”
No answer. She opened her eye to find he’d fallen asleep again, a soft smile on his face. All that saved him from a punch in the throat was how damn relieved she was that she wouldn’t have to hear his answer.
Chapter Ten
69 Days
“It was an accident,” Bill Weld said. “Accidents happen. You know that, Clarence.” Behind him, the town’s security chief, Captain Longbridge, glowered over his crossed arms. The high neck of his Mariposa green uniform almost swallowed his chin. It would’ve looked funny, if the man wasn’t a chunk of solid meanness denser than any rock.
Clarence leaned forward, the table creaking beneath his elbows. Even outside, huddled up against the window so she could eavesdrop, Mag felt drawn by his intensity. Clarence kept his tone reasonable somehow. “Don’t try to bury me in shit and call it rock dust, Bill. It stops bein’ an accident when the safety crew pay dries up, and we’re goin’ too deep, and you’re drivin’ us too hard with quotas.” Bill tried to interrupt, but Clarence raised his voice and just kept talking. “I’m not gonna ask my people to risk their lives for this.”
“They are
n’t your people. They’re my employees. Just like you.” Bill sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. He was normally a good sort, as pit bosses went. Normally willing to listen to Clarence and Odalia. “We all have quotas, and I hear you folk like to eat.”
“You ain’t gonna be makin’ too many quotas without us,” Odalia said, from where she stood just behind Clarence.
“The both of you are getting a bit high and mighty,” Longbridge growled behind Bill. Something about it, the tone maybe, ran a shiver down Mag’s back. The pit boss nodded.
“If we’re not that important, you won’t mind if we take a few days off then,” Clarence said laconically. “See if you can find other people, can run the crews so smooth.”
Bill’s expression darkened. “You don’t want to go down this road, Clarence. If we miss our quotas, Corporate will want to know why. And they’ll decide they should fix the problem instead of leaving it in my hands. Do you want that?”
“What we want,” Odalia cut in, “is regular safety inspection of the mines. Like we used to have. And for safety work to be paid. I’m pretty damn sure you don’t want Corporate stickin’ their noses up your ass any more than we do.”
“What you have to worry about isn’t the noses,” Bill said. He stood. “You think about it, both of you, before you make this trouble any worse. Think about how good you have it here.”
“Is good the part where we lose another work crew in an accident?” Clarence asked.
Bill didn’t answer that, just raised his eyebrows and walked out the door. Longbridge stayed and stared at Clarence fit to shoot him.
Clarence and Odalia both ignored Longbridge as they moved toward the door. Mag slid off the windowsill, ready to scuttle away from the building. Neither of them knew she was there. But as she headed down the side street, she heard a sickeningly familiar crack, the sound of something unyielding hitting flesh, and a shout from Odalia.
