by Sam Witt
He must’ve meant it that time.
The adversary screamed, and her anguish echoed through the room. It was a banshee’s cry of rage and a promise of vengeance. He was so stunned that Frank had actually done what he was told that Joe almost missed his chance.
The thread binding Frank to the adversary was coming loose. Joe pounced on Frank and pushed his badge against his forehead. He latched the power of the Night Marshal’s office onto the glistening thread of Itsike’s power and held on tight.
Itsike tried to pull away but didn’t have the strength to resist him without a mortal to anchor her connection to the world of men. Joe wound the thread around his badge, and Itsike’s power flowed into Joe along with a vertiginous euphoria.
He’d done it. He’d stolen the connection between Frank and Itsike, taking some of the old god’s occult strength for his own.
Then the hammer fell.
30
Something else had come into to Joe along with Itsike’s power. Something he hadn’t expected.
He grabbed Frank and lifted him off the floor by the front of his shirt. “What did you do to me?”
Frank wailed through his tears. “My life for you! There are no others before you!”
The words echoed through Joe. He could feel them in his bones, a desperate plea for mercy. He hadn’t merely stolen Itsike’s power from Frank; he’d stolen her connection to him.
He could feel Frank’s terror throbbing in his head like the ache of a rotting tooth. But he could also feel something else. Frank’s naked adulation of a power great than his. It made Joe sick. He took a deep breath and tried to push the feelings away. They moved to the back of his mind, but they were still there. If Zeke was right, those feelings would always be there. Until he or Frank died.
The implications were horrifying, but Joe pushed them away before he was paralyzed by the consequences of his action. Once he’d dealt with Itsike, once Pitchfork was safe again, he’d take a closer look at this. But not until then.
He clenched his shotgun in his right fist and left Frank weeping on the floor of Elsa’s room.
His family had gathered outside the door and watched him now with frightened eyes. Joe wanted to explain to them that he was all right, but he didn’t have it in him to come up with a convincing lie. Instead, he reached past Al and cupped the back of his wife’s head in his left hand. He pulled her forward and kissed her gently, tasting her breath, memorizing the feel of her lips against his. He tried to put years of lost love into that gesture, tried to press everything Stevie deserved into it.
Joe closed his eyes as he let Stevie go. He didn’t want to see the fear on her face.
Then he knelt and hugged Elsa. Her wild hair tickled his nose, and her wiry arms and legs wrapped around his torso with fierce strength. She whispered in his ear, “You ain’t what you was, but I don’t care. I love you, Daddy. Please please please come back.”
Joe pried his daughter off and turned his attention to Al. His son was no longer a child, not even just a teenager. Something had changed in him in the past few months, and the transformation was more profound than Joe had recognized. Al had become a man, strong and good down to his core. Joe clasped his hand on Al’s shoulder and stared into his eyes. “Take care of them until I get back. If the Laralaine or Frank get squirrelly, do whatever you have to do to keep them safe.”
Joe didn’t wait for his family to respond. What he had to do next was going to change everything they thought about him, and might change everything Joe thought he knew about himself. He needed to get it over with. This was the piece of his plan he hadn’t explained to them because he knew they wouldn’t be able to understand it. He hoped they wouldn’t hate him for what he was about to do.
He took on Zeke first. The words tasted like ash on his tongue. “Swear to me, Zeke. Swear to me above all others.”
Zeke held his eyes for a moment then had to look away. “Or what? Ya gonna shoot me like ya shot Frank?”
Joe didn’t want it to be this way, but he didn’t have a choice. He let the killing mask fall over his face. He felt his eyes grow cold and dead. He told himself he had to do this. He told himself that it was the only way. They had to believe, or they were all going to die. “Yeah. I reckon you either do this, or you’re dead one way or the other. You’ll probably thank me if I do it. At the least I ain’t gonna eat your guts.”
“I won’t do it. Whatever the hell ya think yer doing, ya know it’s wrong. I ain’t feeding into that.”
“Okay then.” Joe pressed the shotgun’s barrels against Zeke’s forehead. He was shaking so bad as he did it, he was afraid he might squeeze the trigger on accident and paint the back half of the living room with the inside of the old man’s head. He could taste vomit against the back of his throat and longed for a slug of Gentleman Jack to wash it away. He could see the stubborn core in Zeke’s eyes and was suddenly afraid he was going to have to carry out his threat. If he didn’t convince the old man to swear to him, he’d have to do it. “You have to give it up, old man. You have to pick a side. And you have to do it right fucking now.”
They stared at one another along the length of the shotgun. Joe had known the old man for his entire life, and while they’d only recently become friends, there were decades of respect between them. They’d had hard jobs to do, and they’d done them as best they could. Joe’s finger tightened on the shotgun’s trigger.
Zeke spoke at last. “Ya don’t know what yer dealing with. Ya don’t know what this is going to change.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t give a damn, either. This is the only shot we’ve got, and I have to take it. Make the call, Zeke.”
The light went out of the old man’s eyes. He seemed to shrink, and all the years caught up with him at once. Joe would swear, later, that he’d seen new wrinkles form on Zeke’s face in that one moment. When the old man spoke, he enunciated his words with care, and his accent vanished. “I swear to you. I forsake all other oaths and bonds, and I swear to you. There will be no other before you, and none will come after.”
Joe pressed his badge to Zeke’s forehead. The thread binding Zeke to the spider goddess snapped clean in two. Joe’s supernatural sight was flooded by a sparking haze of power. Itsike had invested much more in Zeke’s family than she’d wasted on the Blackbriars. In that moment, Joe realized that all of the yarb doctor’s power had come from the spider goddess, and a deep sadness settled over his heart. He’d never really known the old man at all.
Joe wound the flailing end of Itsike’s thread around his badge. A blast of power flooded into him and left him gasping. He steeled himself against the emotions he felt roiling through the connection he had to Zeke. It was harder than he’d thought it would be.
The Night Marshal took a deep breath and turned to the Woodhawks. As he headed toward the couch holding the three of them, their fear rose like a violet cloud in his supernatural vision.
Only Trevor bore Itsike’s mark, which was easy for Joe to see now that he knew what to look for, but the three of them were already scrambling to give up their allegiance to the adversary. Their words tumbled over one another in an avalanche of disjointed syllables. He could feel their belief; the sudden switch of allegiance from the adversary to him hit with a rush like a vein load of heroin.
He was stronger now and had no trouble snatching the loose end of the connection from Trevor. It snapped into place and fed him strength. It was as if this was Joe’s right, as if the power itself had always belonged to him.
A tiny voice in the back of Joe’s head warned him that this was how it started. He hung in the balance between what he had been and what he was becoming, and his decisions over the next few hours would decide his ultimate fate. He was changing, but it was up to him how he would change.
He could feel the spider goddess out there, weakened but enraged. He had to find her; he had to finish this. Now. “I have to go,” he croaked.
Elsa slipped out from around her mama with a gun be
lt hanging over her shoulder. The pistols of Joe’s father were snug in their holsters. She handed the weapons to Joe. When he took hold of the belt, she pulled it to bring him closer. “They say you ain’ done yet, Daddy. You gotta fortify your position afore you go into battle. You gotta raise your banners.”
“Who told you that, little bit?”
She smiled, and a flicker of blue lit her eyes from within. “The dead. They want you to win, Daddy. But you gotta do what they say, all right?”
Joe nodded and tried to make sense of his daughter’s words. He didn’t have any banners to fly. He strapped the guns around his hips, patted his daughter on the head.
Stevie held his gaze, her eyes brimming with tears she was too proud to shed. His heart ached for her. He’d never loved anyone like he’d loved his wife and knew he never would. “I’ll be home soon,” he said, voice choked with emotions he could no longer contain. “Be safe.”
Joe staggered from the house, trying to come to grips with his newfound strength and all that it entailed. As he left, he could feel the weight of his friends and family staring at his back. He could feel their confusion and fear and hoped, in time, that he could undo the damage he’d just caused.
Joe hoped he’d live to have that chance.
But he didn’t believe he would.
31
Joe left the Ranchero parked on the side of the road and trudged up the hill toward a lightning-blasted tree at its summit. The crooked old walnut tree stood like a lone sentinel in the moonlight. After all these years, Joe was surprised it was still standing. He caught his breath in its shadow and ran his fingers along the black scars that adorned its trunk. He’d killed his first monster right there. He’d chased the devil cat up the hill and around the tree. He’d wounded it with his hunting rifle, but he’d run out of bullets by the time they were face to face. It’d come down to his knife and its claws, and, in the end, Joe’d been just a little faster and a little less willing to die. He still carried that knife in his satchel and its foot-long blade was never dull. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d drawn it in anger. He hoped he still had the skill to use it without lopping off one of his fingers.
Joe dug through the snow and soil at the walnut tree’s roots with his hands. He thought of Itsike’s steles and how she’d used them to stake her claim on Pitchfork. Elsa had warned Joe to do the same, and he took his little girl’s words seriously. He dumped the first of his markers into the hole and covered it with Pitchfork’s earth. He tamped the earth down with his boots and brushed the turned dirt with his fingertips. He didn’t have any words to say but didn’t need them.
He traveled to a hilltop cemetery and dug another hole. His days had nearly run to an end at this spot. A revenant had opened its tomb in search of vengeance and had tried to claim Joe as its next victim. He’d been so young then, and so scared. He shook his head at the memory of the fire he’d set to save his own skin. Some of the tombstones still bore the dark marks of that battle. Even Preacher Walker’s blessing hadn’t been enough to completely purify the place, but no murderous spirits had crawled out of it since.
The gravedigger’s shed was unlocked, and Joe helped himself to a shovel. He dug a hole in front of the revenant’s tomb and buried his second marker. He could feel eyes on him as he dug and knew that his enemies were recovering. They were wondering what he was up to and where he’d gone. He smoothed the earth over the second marker with the back of the shovel’s blade. “Almost time, assholes.”
By the time he reached his last stop, it was well on toward midnight. The moon was high overhead, and its idiot face glared down at Joe’s work. He didn’t dig a hole here because there was already one waiting for him. The well’s crumbling mouth moaned as a brisk breeze blew across it. Joe stood at its edge and stared down into the darkness. Black ash swirled around his feet, and the stench of rotting death rose up to meet him. Had it really been less than a year since he’d crawled up out of this hole and thought he’d won? “Fucking idiot,” he whispered to his former self, and dropped the last of his markers down the hole.
Joe didn’t hear it hit the bottom of the well, but he felt it. An electric tingle raced up his spine, and a quiet humming noise tickled his ears. It ways like standing next to an electric plant when it kicked on. There was power here. His power. “All right, then,” he whispered to himself. “Let’s get this party started.”
32
Joe let his mind drift as he drove the Ranchero into battle. He didn’t know where Itsike was hiding, but he could feel her out there. They were bound together by the power he’d stolen, and he let that bond guide him. When he arrived at his destination, he couldn’t help but unleash a bitter laugh. “Of course this is where it ends. Where else would it be?”
Though the dark gates looked much the same as he remembered, Joe could feel a difference in the Black Lodge. After he'd crippled the Long Man following his confrontation with the half-made girls, the place had felt rotten and hollowed out. There had been a sense of decay that was absent now. The trees along the road to the Lodge were taller, and their branches laced together overhead like the bars of a cage.
Joe tried not to look into the shadows that filled the pockets between the trees. The mastiffs that once guarded the Black Lodge were long gone, stolen away to become Al’s pack, but there was something else moving through the trees. Whatever it was, Joe didn't want to see it. Not yet. He had another monster to focus on.
The Lodge’s dark stone walls were smooth and polished to such a sheen they reflected the Ranchero's lights like a wall of mirrors. When Joe killed the car's engine and its headlights died, the walls echoed the stars overhead and shattered the moon’s pale light into a thousand milky shards. The Long Man’s home always reflected its owner; the fact it looked like some sort of fantasy novel fortress these days chipped away at Joe’s confidence. "Might as well get this over with, before I start pissing down my leg.”
Joe hopped out of his stolen car and retrieved his satchel from behind its seat. He felt empty-handed, unprepared. He’d made a mistake, and he was about to pay for it. He hadn’t expected to be facing the Long Man and Itsike. “Shoulda thought this through a little better,” he grumbled as he walked toward the Lodge.
The front doors were open and waiting for him like a giant’s yawning maw. He slung his satchel over his shoulder and fished his badge out of his duster’s pocket. He pinned the silver circle over his heart and was surprised to find it bolstered his confidence.
Black candles sputtered to life as he approached the house. They were short and squat, and their flames shed just enough light to cast sinister shadows. More tiny fires ignited as he entered the house, but their light showed him little other than a few feet of floor ahead of him. The candles kept pace with him, lighting just ahead of him and snuffing out as he passed them.
He also noticed that the rooms that had once lined the entryway were gone. The arches that had opened onto them remained, but they were now sealed up with the same shining stones that made up the Black Lodge's exterior walls. As he passed by the choked archways, Joe heard unwholesome noises from beyond the barriers. Gibbering voices clamored for his attention as he approached, fading to incomprehensible sobbing as he passed by them. “If I get out of this in one piece, I’m going to level this fucking place.”
The hallway ended in the sitting room as it always had, but the room had grown impossibly large. Its walls rose to such heights that the ceiling was lost in shadowed gloom, and the firelight from the hearth could not reach the room’s boundaries. The Long Man's twisted chair had grown into a throne of cracked bones, twisted blades, and bloody sinews that defied all rules of construction and geometry.
The Long Man had changed as well. His black suit shimmered with threads of violet light that cast his face in sharp relief. His eyes were chips of black crystal as expressionless as a shark's. He stood before the hearth, but the fire’s illumination seemed loath to touch him. Only his mouth moved as Joe entered the room, quir
king up at its edges. “I see you found your way here again. To what do I owe the pleasure of your appearance? Would you like a drink?"
Joe rolled his eyes. "I don't know what's going on here, but I'm pretty fucking sick of it already. I'm not even hunting you today, so why’d you stick your beak into this mess?"
The Long Man took a seat on his throne, and it creaked beneath his emaciated frame. "So who are you hunting today? If not me, why come to the Lodge?"
Joe could tell the old monster was messing with him because of the way his thin lips twisted into a grin at the end of his sentences. What Joe didn't understand was why. The Long Man had nothing to gain by allying himself with Itsike. After all, she'd come to Pitchfork to take back the territory she believed was hers. Joe didn't think the Long Man was going to sit still and allow that to happen. With his thoughts still buzzing like a pack of fireflies from everything that had gone down, Joe couldn't get his thoughts organized enough to see where this was headed. Maybe it was time to bulldoze a path through the bullshit. "Why don't we stop yanking on each other's dicks and get down to business? Why am I here?"
The Long Man steepled his fingers in front of his chest. "Maybe you are confused? Maybe your hunter’s senses are not as keen as they used to be? Or maybe, just maybe, you've underestimated me yet again."
A rustling sound tickled at the limits of Joe's hearing. He wasn't sure the noise was even real at first, but as the Long Man's smile grew wider, the sound grew louder. Joe realized it was coming from above him and took a hasty step back.
Itsike descended toward Joe headfirst, arms extended out to her sides, legs trailing behind her. Dozens of hair-fine silk strands lowered her to the floor. Her gaunt face was luminous as it descended from the shadows, a falling moon that demanded all of Joe's attention.
As she drew near, he realized the silk strands weren’t attached to her clothing. Her body was covered with juicy spiders, and the webs were spun from their bodies. Their legs were embedded in her flesh, sunken into raised red pores rimmed with wiry black hairs. It was difficult to see where she stopped and the spiders began; they created a lacy patchwork of black bodies and milky skin that Joe found both enthralling and repugnant. Her feet touched down with a pair of gentle taps, and the strands of silk that had supported her fell around her in slow motion.
