by Cynthia Hand
“Many Horses sent me,” Annie said. “Walks Looking, I presume.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “You presume right. But why are you here?”
“Because Many Horses asked me to help you?” Hadn’t that been clear?
“I know, but why did you come?”
“Because you need help. Obviously.” Annie glanced at Frank. “Should we try the wolfsbane?”
“Why?”
“Do you think she’s enthralled?”
“She’s chained up,” Frank said. “I don’t think she’s enthralled.”
“I’m definitely not enthralled,” Walks Looking said. “It didn’t work on me. Hence the chains.”
“Oh. Right. That makes sense.” Annie hesitated, then pulled a hairpin from her hair and went to work on the locks.
“When did you learn how to pick locks?” Frank asked.
“I’m the best at picking locks in my whole family,” Annie said.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Annie smiled and pulled the first cuff off Walks Looking. “I’m going to get you back to your sister. I promise.” A knot of missing her own sisters welled up in Annie’s throat, but she pushed the feeling aside.
Walks Looking rubbed at her wrists as the cuffs fell away. “Thank you.”
“So Swearengen did this to you?” Frank asked.
“Yes.” She pointed across the room, where a long table held glass vials and measuring cups and other alchemical tools. “That’s where she makes the serum that enthralls the garou. But like I said, the serum doesn’t work on me.”
“She?” Annie asked. “Swearengen is a woman?”
“Oh, did I forget to tell you?” Frank said. “I already knew that,” he said smugly to Walks Looking.
“Well that would have been helpful information to have. But how did you resist the serum?” she asked Walks Looking as the last cuff clattered to the floor.
Walks Looking climbed to her feet. “Just stubborn, I suppose. I’d seen what happened to the others ahead of me—how she gave them the injection and they changed. They became passive and followed any order she gave them, even when she told them to shift between human and wolf. I decided I would not be like that. I held on to my hatred even when I could feel the serum pulling at me, and it didn’t work.”
“So she locked you down here?” Annie said.
Walks Looking nodded. “She was trying to decide what to do with me.”
Frank edged away from the worktable. “How strange that she has two serums to give out,” he said in the sort of tone that meant he knew he was wrong but didn’t want to be. “One to cure, and one to enthrall.”
“No.” Walks Looking’s expression went hard. “She has one serum.”
Frank closed his eyes. “One to enthrall.”
“That’s right. The only reason the ‘cure’ appears to work is because she tells them to change into their human forms.” Walks Looking studied the worktable a long moment, then heaved it up and over. All the vials and tools crashed to the floor, and liquid ran in shiny puddles. “She calls it a cure, but it is the opposite. Now”—she looked at Annie—“take me to my sister.”
“You need a disguise first,” Annie said, motioning for Frank to give up his hat and coat. “It’s not safe for your people to be seen in town right now.” She pressed her mouth into a line. If Walks Looking didn’t know about the Battle of the Little Bighorn (what Many Horses had called the Battle of the Greasy Grass) and the murders following, Annie wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. Many Horses could explain.
Walks Looking scowled. “What about the other Lakota wolves?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said softly. “I’ll keep an eye out for them, after we take you to Many Horses.”
“You can get back there on your own, right?” Frank asked, removing his hat and coat.
Annie nodded, enviously watching Walks Looking put on Frank’s clothes. Not only because it would have covered every part of Annie’s body and then some, but because it was Frank’s and probably smelled like him.
“Good. You should go back to our hotel first and change into something a little less comfortable.”
“This isn’t comfortable at all,” Annie said.
“I know.” He gave her a tight smile.
“What are you going to do?”
Worry flashed across Frank’s face. “I have to find Jane.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Jane
“I’ve been here since the very beginning of this town,” the woman who called herself Al Swearengen said as Jane chowed down on a huge plate of steak and potatoes at the Shaggy Dog Saloon, which her mother claimed had the very best food in Deadwood. “I knew this was the place where I would make a name for myself.”
Jane wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “For coming up with the cure?”
Al smiled and patted Jane’s hand across the table. “The cure, of course, my dear, and other things. This is a town of opportunity.”
It was a town of surprises, too, but good ones, Jane reckoned. She couldn’t stop gawking at her mother. All these years, she’d thought Charlotte Canary was dead and buried, but she’d changed, was all, as Jane herself had changed. A new name. A new life.
“By the end of my first week here I had a dance hall up and running,” Al was boasting now in that new, more-refined voice, too, different from the Missouri country talk that Jane had known. “By the end of the first month, I’d built a tavern—so small I called it the Cricket. I held prizefights there for the miners. And now I have the Gem. The papers described my theater as being ‘as neat and tastefully arranged as any place of its kind in the west.’”
“It sure is nice,” Jane said, remembering all the polished wood and velvet seat cushions. “You’ve done right well for yourself, Ma.”
At Jane calling her “Ma,” Al’s expression shifted, almost a wince, and Jane thought she knew why.
“I understand,” Jane said, a lump springing up in her throat. “I’ll keep our family connection to myself.”
“Oh, no, my darling, you misunderstand,” Al said, laughing. “I want people to know that you’re my daughter.” She squeezed Jane’s hand. “I’m simply emotional. This is all I’ve ever wanted, you know. A piece of this world to make my own. My precious daughter, by my side, sharing in my legacy.”
Jane’s chest filled with something like relief. Her mother hadn’t been nearly so affectionate when Jane was a child, but now her ma seemed (gulp) proud of her.
“Not to overlook that you have your own legacy,” Al said. “My daughter, Calamity Jane, the Heroine of the Plains. Everybody’s heard of you. You’re a legend.”
Jane coughed and muttered that she had something in her eye. “Well, I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one.”
Al beamed at her. “Quite right. Take the world by the horns.” Her eyes focused on Jane’s tangled hair that was half loose from its ponytail, the dirty work shirt and worn buckskin vest. “We should get you cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?” Jane didn’t know if she liked the sound of that.
“You may be a legend, but you look like you’ve been dragged through a pigpen.”
That was more like the Ma Jane remembered. And that’s how, ten minutes later, Jane found herself in a private room at the Gem that Al said would be hers, now, buck nekked, staring down at a steaming bathtub. She took a tentative step into it, lowered herself into the water, and then shot up again.
“Ah!” she screamed. “I just burnt my butt!”
“Well, wait a bit,” her mother advised from the other side of the room, where she was laying out what looked to be a dress. “It’ll cool.”
Jane had never been good at waiting. She slipped down into the water again, wincing at the blistering heat, but she forced herself to stay this time, crossing her arms over her breasts because her ma had never seen those before and it didn’t seem proper. She stayed that way for several minutes, steeping like tea
as the layers of dirt floated off her.
(At this very moment, dear reader, Frank and Annie were breaking into the cellar of the Gem. If Jane had known about the kissing she would probably have laughed herself sick. But she didn’t know. At this point Jane didn’t know a lot of things that would have been useful.)
After a while Al came over, poured some of the water over Jane’s head, and started to scrub her hair with a bar of castile soap.
“I’ll rinse it with a wash of vinegar and rosemary,” she said. “You’ll shine up like a pretty penny.”
But Jane knew deep down that her being pretty was not a matter of being clean.
They were quiet for a while, Jane holding still while Al scrubbed at her. Then Jane worked up the courage to ask the question that’d been on her mind all day.
“Ma,” she said, because they were alone now, so she was pretty sure it was safe. “What happened?”
“What happened when, sweetheart?”
“When you died.”
“Oh.” Al stopped scrubbing. “Did your father tell you I died?”
“He told me . . .” Jane swallowed. “He told me you went to be with the angels.”
Al laughed, a hard, tough-sounding noise. “The angels. How droll. No, I went to be with the wolves. My pack. I suppose I can understand why your father lied about it. You were a headstrong thing. You would have come after me, I think.”
“Yeah, I guess I would have. I thought he killed you.”
“Your father wasn’t a killer. Ironically, that’s what killed him.”
Jane gazed at her feet in the water. She knew there was no happy, surprise resurrection of her father in store. She’d seen Robert Canary laid out in his coffin, stiff and gray. She’d put flowers on his grave.
“I killed Pa,” she whispered. “It was me.”
Her mother stopped scrubbing her hair. “What’s this nonsense? Your father was killed by a garou hunter.”
“I know. But I was the one who outed him. I told the sheriff he was a garou.”
Al stared down at her thoughtfully. “Now you listen,” she said after a minute. “It wasn’t the sheriff who killed your father.”
“I know, but—”
“You don’t know,” Al said sharply. “I know, because I was there that night. I saw it happen.”
“You.” Jane’s breath whooshed out of her. “You was there.”
“Were there, my darling. Yes. I came back. It had been a year since I bit him.” Al smiled with a touch of bitterness. “I thought maybe he would be thinking differently now that he was also a wolf. I hoped he might change his mind about how things should be.”
“And did he?”
“No,” Al said sadly. “But that hardly mattered, in the end. As soon as I left town, I was hunted and made to fear for my life for simply being what I was. There was one particular garou hunter who was relentless in his pursuit of me, this man who would not stop in his determination to destroy me and my kind. I thought I’d lost him, but that night he tracked me down again. Your father took the silver bullet meant for me. I myself barely escaped.”
Jane hadn’t known about any of that. She’d come back to the house that night to find herself an orphan. “But why didn’t you come for us, after? We could have been with you. This whole time, I could have—”
But Al was shaking her head. “It wasn’t safe. The hunter was always two steps behind me, until I was finally able to lose his trail, years later. I changed my name, changed my life, and became so powerful he could not touch me. But until now I’ve had to stay away. To keep you safe.”
Jane shivered. The bath had gone cold. Her mother helped her out and slung a robe around her, then toweled off her hair. She made Jane put on silk undergarments, a petticoat, and a corset with whale bones in it.
“This ain’t my style,” Jane tried to protest. “I like to . . . you know . . . move a bit.”
Al sniffed. “No daughter of mine is going to be walking around in Deadwood dressed like one of those filthy miners.”
Jane didn’t see how she was going to be walking around in this getup, period.
“You’re Calamity Jane, ‘a lovely, spirited waif,’ the heroine of this story,” Al said. “You should look the part.”
Hero-eene, Jane thought. “What’s a waif?”
“Never mind.” Al helped her into the dress she’d picked out. It was a rich forest green with a lacy white collar at the top and a neat line of pearl buttons down the front. Then the fabric of the skirt swooped around to the back, where there was a large bustle.
“Doesn’t this make my butt look big?” Jane asked doubtfully.
“It gives you a shape,” Al pronounced. “And it makes you look female, which is a vast improvement.”
She made Jane sit (which was difficult, what with the bustle), and brushed out her hair until it did indeed shine, and then she pinned it up in a simple, loose chignon at the nape of Jane’s neck. By then Jane felt like a china doll, and she didn’t much like it, and she certainly didn’t feel like herself, but Al stepped back and smiled approvingly.
“There. That’s so much better. You’ll never be the beauty that I was when I was your age, but you’re presentable.” She pressed a finger to the side of her chin, thinking, then spritzed Jane with perfume. Lemon verbena, she said it was, and it reminded Jane of someone.
Edwina Harris. Winnie. She had worn this same perfume.
Al took a hat box off the bed. Out of it she drew a tall straw hat with silk flowers on it. “Here’s the finishing touch.”
Jane stood up and backed away. “Now, see here. Nobody said nothing about no flowered hat.”
“Come here,” her mother ordered. “Martha. Come to me, baby.”
Jane felt a jolt of panic, enough to bring the wolf to the surface for the briefest of moments. A growl vibrated in the back of her throat. Her eyes flashed golden.
Al tilted her head to one side, smiling, unafraid. “Ah. So. There is a wolf in there. I wondered when I would see it.”
Jane fought the urge to grab her flask from her things and drink the wolf down. The corset choked her. “You knew? You knew I was bit?”
“Of course. Why else would you come to see if the cure really worked?” Al said.
“Yeah, about that . . .” Jane was still eying the hat warily. “When can we do it?”
“Do it?”
“I want the cure,” Jane said hoarsely. She cleared her throat. “I don’t have no hundred dollars, but maybe you could spot me, seeing as I’m your daughter and you’re proud of me and all?”
Al walked over and held Jane by the shoulders. “The cure is not for you,” she said. “There are those who benefit from the injection, no doubt, those for whom the blood of the wolf is more than they can handle. But not you, my darling. You are strong. You’ve always been strong.”
“But I’m becoming a . . . beast,” Jane said.
Al scoffed. “You are perfect. You should be proud of the wolf, as I am. Instead of searching for some cure to fix you, you should be thinking of all the ways in which the wolf part of you can help shape your future. You could be unstoppable. You could change the world. We could, together.”
“I’ll think on it,” Jane said, “but the cure still sounds awfully nice.”
Al’s hands dropped from Jane’s shoulders. “The cure is not for you,” she said again matter-of-factly. “It would break my heart to give it to you.” She picked up the flowered hat again. “Now, no more talk of that. Hold still.”
The cure is not for you. The words rattled around in Jane’s brain as she came down the stairs a few minutes later with Al, who once again wore the accessorized top hat and the bearing of the benevolent ruler of the Gem. Al announced in front of the entire place that this was her long-lost daughter, the one and only Calamity Jane, and everyone clapped and cheered. A few men even asked Jane to dance, but she told them to get lost. She wanted to be alone, to sort out the events of the past few hours.
She wished Bill w
ere here. He’d always been good at talking things out, making her see the situation clearly without making her feel like he was telling her what to do. She bit her lip, then blinked as she saw a boy who looked remarkably like Frank (good teeth and all) slipping out from a back room, escorting a prostitute who was the spitting image of Annie. But it couldn’t be them. Jane knew darn well that Annie wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, wearing a dress like that. It was wishful thinking, wanting these people to be Frank and Annie, who were surely back in Ohio, performing the show.
Would she ever get back there, now that her ma was alive and wanted her? Jane supposed that was the hundred-dollar question. She sighed and swiveled to look for her mother but couldn’t locate her, either, so Jane took a seat at the bar and ordered a drink. Brandy, because ladies in fancy dresses drank brandy.
“What do I owe you?” she asked when the barkeep put the glass in front of her.
“Your money’s no good here, Miss Swearengen,” he said. “Everything’s on the house.”
“Is that right? Huh.”
You could change the world, her mother had said earlier. Jane had never given much thought to changing the world. She’d been too busy trying to survive it.
From the stage, one of the painted ladies drew out a violin and began to play a lonesome tune. Jane sipped her drink, because ladies in fancy dresses sipped.
“Hello, miss,” said a random gentleman, sidling in next to her. “May I—?”
“You may not,” Jane said. “Go on, now.”
A few minutes later another one tried. “Pardon me, miss.”
“Git,” was all she said.
He got.
And there was still one more. “Hello, Jane,” this latest fellow said.
She glanced up, half expecting it to be Jack McCall. It struck her as odd that Jack McCall hadn’t popped up in a while. (Wait. Or had he?)
But this time it was Ned Buntline, that no-good, stinking writer.
“Oh, rocks,” she grumbled. “Not you again.”
“I must say I am surprised to find you here, Miss Calamity. You’re looking . . .” He looked her up and down, smirking. “Well-rounded.”
