by Sam Witt
He felt like hammered shit. A leaden weariness had settled into his bones during the night. The Jack had coated the inside of his head with sandpaper that was busy grinding the grooves off his brain. The tremors in his fingers let him know his body wasn’t satisfied with the booze he’d allowed it last night, and the burning ache in the pit of his stomach warned him he’d better fix that situation before things got out of hand. He couldn’t shake the image of the Long Man’s bar and its bottles of delicious poison. He swallowed a mouthful of bitter spit and turned the last corner to the Lodge.
He found the dogs.
Their heads were nailed above the main entrance, their bodies slit open and scattered across the asphalt driveway. One of them had been hacked open, its gutless corpse was splayed open across the hood of Stevie’s Rambler.
Joe took the pistols from the case and shoved them through the back of his belt as he exited the truck. The fit was uncomfortable, but he didn’t have a holster. He put it on the list of things to take care of after he figured out whether his family was still alive.
He wound his way through the bodies. The dogs were much bigger cracked open and spread wide, and their black blood was a sticky maze on the asphalt. Joe threaded through the labyrinth of offal and stopped at the doorway, peering into the gloom.
The doors were gone, leaving behind jagged, pale splinters of ancient wood jutting out from the hinges that had once held them. At the far end of the entryway, Joe could see the flickering light of a fire and hear quiet sobbing. He hesitated at the threshold, weak and exhausted. He didn’t want to know what had happened, didn’t want to find out what new tragedy had landed on his family like an avalanche.
The sobs pulled him forward, set his feet one in front of the other. They belonged to Stevie, he could feel it more than hear it, a raw, ragged emotion that burrowed its way out of her heart and into his ears. He followed her sorrow down the hall, one plodding step at a time, until he came to the sitting room.
Alasdair growled at Joe’s approach. The boy hunkered near the shattered bar, bestial snout lowered, feral eyes catching the glow from the flickering fireplace. Joe stopped in the doorway, letting his son recognize him, doing his best to appear unthreatening. He felt about as dangerous as a wet kitten; it wasn’t much of an act.
The young man slunk back into the shadows, but his green, glowing eyes never left Joe.
The Long Man reclined in his gnarled chair, hands loose and trembling in his lap, eyes closed and swollen. Stevie crouched next to the Long Man, her talented hands moving over him, finding his hurts, leaching away the sting and pain. Her hair hung down on either side of her face like golden curtains. Her shoulders hitched with painful sobs.
A dark, sharp rage burnt the weariness out of Joe’s muscles. He cleared his throat. “Stevie. Al. Let’s go. We’re done here.”
Stevie turned toward Joe, one eye glaring at him through the veil of her hair. “You’re too late. We can’t leave. Not now.”
She sobbed again, a sound half-mad with fear and anger and despair.
The Long Man stirred, his shadow fluttering out behind him.” There’s nowhere to go. No place will be safe.”
Joe stormed toward the tortured chair and whipped a pistol clear of his waist band. He leveled the heavy hexagonal barrel at the Long Man’s forehead. “I’m done. I quit. We’re going.”
Stevie exploded up from kneeling, shoving Joe’s gun hand away. “You want to kill him? Now? When it won’t do us any good, now you want to quit?”
His wife’s touch curdled Joe’s blood. The old curse wrapped fingers of iron around his spine and yanked him to attention. His finger was heavy on the trigger, and for one red second Joe saw Stevie on the floor, blood and brains fanned out around her head like a halo from hell.
Alasdair growled and padded out of the shadows on all fours. His scimitar teeth gleamed white through curling lips as he stared at his father. Joe eyed his son, lowered the gun.
“What the hell happened here?”
The Long Man coughed up blood and licked his crimson-stained lips. “I was wrong. We misjudged what was happening.”
Stevie sighed and pulled her hair back from her face. Her eyes were ringed with bruises of exhaustion. “They took Elsa.”
The pistol’s grip creaked in Joe’s fist. “Who?”
Alasdair licked his muzzle with a long, black tongue. “Your girlfriends,” he growled. “The half-made girls.”
Joe raised the pistol again, held it trembling toward the Long Man’s face. “How could you let this happen? They came here for protection.”
The Long Man doubled over in a coughing fit. When he looked up at Joe, one of his eyes was filled with a bloody red stain. “They were not here for you. They came to Pitchfork because of me. They took something.”
Joe’s finger hugged the trigger. One tiny bit of pressure would break his oath to this man, his lifetime of duty would end. The Long Man looked weak, defeated. Joe was certain one shot would kill the old man. He wanted it, more than almost anything in the world. But not more than he wanted his daughter back.
The gun went back into Joe’s waistband. He walked past Alasdair to the trashed bar. The young man sniffed at Joe as he passed, but he didn’t growl. He sat on his haunches and panted, watching Joe dig for an unbroken bottle.
Joe raised the bottle and spun off the cap. He took a long swallow and closed his eyes as the liquid fire found all the hollow places in his gut. He threw the cap into the fire, took another drink. His hand stopped shaking, and he felt the first tingles of a buzz tickle at the edges of his brain. For that moment, he didn’t feel like killing anyone.
He watched the Long Man cough again, waited for him to settle back into his chair. “You’re going to help me get my girl back.”
Stevie’s laughter was cold and metallic. “Look at him. He can’t help himself sit up. If he lives through the day it’ll be a miracle.”
The Long Man nodded. “She is partly correct. Whoever brought the half-made girls here did it to hurt me, to rob me of my power, to disrupt the balance of Pitchfork County. I can offer advice, but little else now that their plan is nearly complete.”
Joe felt the truth in the words, felt it in the aches and pains that had taken root in his own body. The vitality, the raw force of life he’d come to associate with the office of the Night Marshal, was gone. “Then you better start filling in the blanks, old man, before I decide I really don’t have a use for you anymore.”
Stevie drew herself up and stalked to Joe. She planted her feet and stared up into his shadowed face. “You have to stop.”
The air crackled with churning flashes of rage and regret, whipped into a furor by the Bog Witch’s curse that weighed heavy on both their hearts. Joe wanted to reach out to his wife, but he knew his hand was as likely to strike as to comfort when it got like this. He clenched his fists and lashed out with his words, instead. “Stop what?”
Stevie’s eyes darkened and a spectral wind tugged at her hair. “This. Trying to kill your way out of every problem.”
“The whole county wants to kill me. I might as well return the favor.”
Stevie took the bottle from Joe, careful not to touch his fingers, wary of igniting their curse. She allowed herself a long drink, let it slosh around in her belly. Handed the bottle back to him. “That’s what your father understood, but you never did. He was a shepherd, he helped people stay on the right path.”
Joe filled his mouth, smelled the fumes percolating through is sinuses into his brain. Swallowed and tried to keep his voice level. “And what am I?”
Stevie looked away from Joe, folded her hands in front of her. Joe could feel something else, something he hadn’t felt in Stevie for years. It made his stomach hurt, his brain ache.
“You’re a wolf, Joe. You don’t care if anyone stays on the path; you just kill whoever steps off it.”
Joe drank from the bottle until he felt the soothing poison settling in his head, then he drank for another handful of seconds before he
lowered the bottle. “Did you step off the path?”
The Long Man staggered to his feet. He leaned against his chair. “Elsa was going to die. Your wife did what any mother would do. Without Stevie’s power, your daughter would not be missing. She would be dead.”
Joe felt the itch of the pistols against the small of his back. His hand hungered for their grips. This is what he’d given his life over to, this was the code he’d lived by since the dark work had killed his father.
Stevie stared up into his face, and he recognized the shadows there not as weariness, but as strength. She was tired, but only from holding in the gifts her mother had left her. Stevie was overflowing with the stink of darkness. She represented the kind of nightmare that blossomed when the taint wasn’t cut from the body of the herd. “You can’t banish every shadow, Joe. You can’t kill us all.”
Joe took another drink. “This is what I am. This is what it takes to keep the world safe.”
Stevie took Joe’s chin in her hands, held his eyes with hers. He trembled at her touch, at the twisting rage of their curse, at the way she made him feel, the strength of conflicting emotions so great he feared it would tear them both apart. “Are we safer now?”
She released him, pried the bottle from Joe’s hand, and let it fall to the floor. “My mother’s dead, she’s been dead for years. She killed your father. You killed her. Let it go. We can work together. We can get our daughter back.”
Joe took his wife’s hands in his own. He shook with the effort of not crushing the delicate bones of her fingers. The curse burned within him. “At what cost?”
“What cost could be too great?” Stevie tore away from Joe and motioned for Alasdair. She moved to the door. “We’ll be outside.”
The Long Man settled back into his chair. “Come sit with me, my boy.”
Joe swung an unbroken chair over near the Long Man and flopped into it. The alcohol burned in his stomach like a pleasant fire. His brain felt smooth and dull. He didn’t want to think about anything, didn’t want to consider the choice he had to make. He just wanted to sit and listen. Let someone else decide what needed to be done and who needed to do it.
The Long Man peered at Joe over trembling, steepled fingers. Joe wondered if he could take the old man, if he really could kill him in this moment of weakness.
“I will not ask you what happened to you, Joe, but you need to know that something did happen.” The Long Man took a long, shuddering breath. “Something in you has changed.”
Joe waved the Long Man’s words away. “Just tell me how to get my daughter back.”
The Long Man sighed and shrugged. “They took my power, your daughter, and the Kirshnir Marg at dawn. They will bring your daughter and the idols somewhere safe, somewhere they are strong.”
Joe leaned back in his chair, dug the pistols out. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you. These things are uncomfortable to sit on.”
“You will not be able to take them head on. You need to find a way to weaken them, to even the odds.” The Long Man watched Joe, then continued. “You will need allies. As my star has fallen, so, too, will the powers of your office falter. You are not as strong as you once were.”
Joe laughed. “There’s no one left in this town I can trust. The fucking sheriff turned on me.”
“Your son. Your wife. There are others in Pitchfork whose interests intersect with your own, despite that you have angered them. They are far from powerless. Use them.”
At the mention of Stevie, Joe felt his stomach tighten. “You turned her back to the shadows, didn’t you? Nevermind, don’t answer that. How can I ever trust her, now?”
“I do not know the answer to that. But you must find a way to mend the bridges you have burnt down. Your wife is right. You cannot do this on your own.”
“Great. Any other pearls of wisdom for me?”
“You do not have much time. Their triumvirate is complete. They will do what they came to do, and they will do it soon. I would wager before the next dawn.”
“Then I guess I better get to work.”
“What will you do?”
Joe walked to the doorway, stopped, turned back. “I’m going to get my daughter back. Somehow. Then I’m going to kill those fucking bitches and everyone who worked with them.”
“And then?”
“I’m going to come back here, and we’re going to find out just how much I’ve changed.”
CHAPTER 45
STEVIE WATCHED AL clear the dead dog off the Rambler’s hood. Her hands were tight around the wheel, knuckles tenting the backs of her hands into white mounds. This was it, what she’d feared the whole time she’d been married, the moment she’d been terrified would come to pass for as long as she’d known Joe and understood his role in Pitchfork County.
She was a witch who’d walked the Left-Hand Path. In the eyes of the Night Marshal, the penalty for that offense was death. Stevie had never known Joe to shirk from fulfilling his duty.
But she didn’t know what would happen when she was faced with her own death.
Yesterday, she would have knelt and waited for the bullet to come. Today, she doubted she could bow her head. Stevie was a different woman now, maybe the woman she was always meant to be.
She didn’t want to hurt her husband, but she wasn’t sure she was going to have a choice.
Al threw himself into the car, leaned back against the passenger seat, and closed his eyes. Stevie squeezed his hand. “It’s gonna be all right.”
Joe stepped out of the Lodge’s shadowed doorway and stepped around the scattered dog corpses to get to his truck. He didn’t look at Stevie, didn’t wave or throw her the finger, or put a bullet through her forehead. Stevie took that as a good sign. She sucked in a deep breath, then let herself out of the Rambler.
She walked toward Joe, but he still didn’t pay her any attention. He had the truck’s driver-side door open and was fiddling with something inside, all his attention focused on something in his lap. Stevie kept walking, skirting around the front of the truck with her her hands loose and away from her sides. She didn’t know what Joe was thinking, what the Long Man might have told him, and she didn’t want to spook him just then.
She was five feet away from him, her hip next to the truck’s front bumper when he spoke. His voice was thick and slow and tired. “Why don’t you just stay right there.”
Stevie froze. “I just want to talk.”
“Seems like that’s all anyone’s good for today.” Joe slammed the truck’s door closed, and Stevie’s breath caught in her throat. Her husband had one of the big pistols clenched in his right hand. “Go on, I’m listening.”
“I didn’t have no — any choice.”
Joe looked at his wife, seeing her as if for the first time. Stevie didn’t look away. She knew what Joe was taking in, and she didn’t try to hide it. Pale skin that seemed more like fine china than flesh. New streaks of vivid silver woven through the golden tangles of her hair. Dark shadows had sprung up around her eyes overnight, and no amount of morning sunshine would ever drive them away. She wondered if he could hear the echoes that she did, the screams of tortured souls separated from their host and locked away in crystalline prisons. She wondered if he could see the black stain spreading across her soul, the darkness she had embraced to save her daughter.
“People keep telling me that. I keep saying it. Maybe it’s true.” Joe raised the barrel of the pistol, touched it to his temple. Scratched at the side of his head with its sight. “Maybe none of us have any choices. We’re just thrown down here like fucking dice to rattle around until we come up snake eyes.”
Stevie struggled to find the words. Her tongue was clumsy, tripping on her feelings and tangling in her thoughts, but Stevie let the words roll out without trying to pretty them up. “I reckon you and I been headin’ this way for all our lives. But it ain’ just chance that threw us together, and it ain’ blind luck that’s kept us that way either. I ain’ had a lot of choices in my life, J
oe. I didn’t choose to be the Bog Queen’s get. I didn’t choose to fall in love with the man who’d kill my mama. But I did choose to stick with it, to love you as best I could. I chose to give you babies. I chose to raise ‘em with you.”
Joe kept the gun raised, resting his hand on his shoulder with the barrel aimed at the sky. Stevie tried to hold his eyes, but he looked away from her, watching something back over her head. “Maybe those weren’t your best choices. Maybe they weren’t mine either. Maybe I should have chosen differently out there in the swamp and put you down alongside your mother. It would have been easier twenty years ago.”
Stevie threw her shoulders back and raised her chin, letting the tears roll down her cheeks. “That’s how you feel? Then go ahead. I got nothin’ to live for but you and my babies. I lost one of them today. I reckon if you draw down on me, I’m gonna lose the other when Al tries to keep you from killin’ me.”
That got Joe’s attention. She locked eyes with her husband and held onto his gaze for all she was worth. Stevie wasn’t sure how much time she had left, how many breaths would pass her lips, but she wanted them all to count. “I walked the Left-Hand Path last night, and there ain’ no mistakin’ that. But nobody got hurt except them what wronged my family. I didn’t conjure up no swamp haunts to smite the meek folk. I sure as hell didn’t draw spirits from their graves to do my biddin’. I saved my baby girl, or at least I tried.”
“That’s a lot of words just to admit you broke the Night Law.”
Stevie’s heart sank. Her hopes that her husband had changed, that the night had worked on him as it had on her, that his eyes were opened to the truth that there were no absolutes, that everything was open to change. That anyone who did not adapt to the world around them would be killed by it. She brushed the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Get it over with then. Just promise me you won’t stop lookin’ for Elsa. Promise you’ll save our baby after you’ve killed me for what I done.”
Stevie closed her eyes and waited for the end. She felt the cool morning wind blowing down across the ridge to dry the tears on her cheeks. She felt warm rays of sunshine on her face. Pine and cedar and the cool scent of morning dew filled her nostrils, driving out the stink of blood and death. Birds sang their morning songs, and Stevie believed they were just for her, the last sounds she would ever hear before the thunderclap that would crack open her skull and empty her brains onto the asphalt behind her.
