by Lila Bowen
“Didn’t say it was wise. Just didn’t think vinegar was the best way to catch a fly.”
“Oh, you want sugar, then, Mr. Red-Eye? Perhaps some sweet red wine? That’s what we used to catch flies in my time, when things were civilized. Before we crossed the ocean and found this land of milk and honey, of gold and blackflies. Do you know that Italia has no naturally occurring monsters? We had to learn to make our own magic there. We had to struggle for our greatness. Now, will you talk, or shall I end it here?”
Rhett sneered. “Reckon I’ll talk eventually. If I’m to die, I’d rather do it under the sky.”
Trevisan smiled again. “Molto bene.” He carefully placed the spike and hammer back on the tray. “I have no honey. My wine stores are low. Do you wish for more vinegar, or will you tell me, once and for all, why you’re here?”
“I already told you—”
Trevisan’s smile went brittle, then feral.
“Allora.”
He nodded once and turned to his instruments, his fingers dancing over them like he was playing a piano. With only seconds left before the man turned back with another one of his goddamn devices, Rhett reached inside, pulled his golden string, and turned himself inside out. It always hurt, at least a little, although the transformation had gotten better when Earl had taught him to accept himself, whatever the hell that meant.
But this time, the change burned and tore, and the bird flapped out of a blue work shirt screaming, its wings ripped and trailing blood and feathers. It hopped across the room, away from the man, shaking loose of everything that had held it down. The man spun and shouted nonsense, and soon the air was full of beaks and feathers and talons, the flock of ravens swarming around the great bird, the lambhawk, the lammergeier, even as it fluttered around the floor, wings broken and unable to fly.
The ravens attacked him like a giant fist, beaks punching and claws ripping for his remaining eye, for his flight feathers, for his breast. But the big bird knew what to do, even if he couldn’t take to the air. His beak and talons were bigger and sharper and stronger, and he thrashed out with his own weapons, ripping their smaller bodies apart and swallowing chunks of what was left.
It was the man he wanted to kill—he knew that much. But the cloud of birds stood between them, and on the other side, the man had weapons of his own. Somewhere, on the edge of his awareness, a child’s voice was crying, the bars of a cage rattling in fear or rage, but that barely registered. The bloodlust had him in its grip, even if the birds he felled contained no blood to soothe him. Soon the floor was littered with balls of wax and bits of string and fluttering, broken feathers. The mad ravens were too few and too fractured to pose a real threat.
The bird almost changed back into a man, but Rhett was there, too, and Rhett had a plan.
With a great heave, the bird hopped across the floor and stabbed at the shiny black shoes, causing the man in lavender, the enemy, to dance back, a great gleaming knife in his hand. The man stabbed at the bird, but the bird stabbed back. A hot metal punch landed in the bird’s back, but it didn’t find home in his heart, and the bird managed to slash the man’s leg, drawing blood and tearing the hated lavender pants.
Deep within the bird, Rhett grinned, missing one tooth.
The man shouted and danced back, and that’s when the bird hopped aggressively forward and became Rhett again, a naked, skinny creature dripping blood from a dozen places.
Standing unsteadily but filled with red-hot rage, Rhett snatched two knives from the roll on the desk and took a step toward Trevisan. Naked, torn, trailing red-dipped black feathers underfoot, Rhett stalked Trevisan around the room, still half animal in his thoughts.
Whatever Trevisan was muttering wasn’t in any language Rhett knew, and it sure as hell didn’t sound like the man was begging for his life. His trembling hand sketched signs in the air as he brandished his knife, and Rhett reckoned that this was how magic happened, with baneful words and stupid signs and a whole bunch of frilly bullshit that didn’t do a goddamn thing. So he slashed for Trevisan’s hand with one knife, and when Trevisan clutched his bleeding hand closer, Rhett punched the man in his teeth with the handle of the other knife, hoping to make it as hard for him to talk as it was for Rhett just then. His busted knuckles burned as they always did, but Trevisan’s pain was worth it.
“Stop, Ned. Just…listen. I know the secret. To living forever. I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you whatever you want. Just stop. No more blood.”
Rhett sucked on his knuckles and laughed with red-splashed teeth. “No more of your blood, you mean. You’d be pleased as goddamn punch for more of mine spilt.”
Trevisan was backing away from him now, looking altogether smaller as fear bit deep. Rhett had somehow wondered if the man would bleed black or maybe be full of feathers like a fancy white pillow, but the witch, or whatever he was, bled as readily as anyone else. And the cuts on his hand and leg weren’t healing like Rhett’s were.
With another violent slash, Rhett split open the man’s lavender sleeve. The blade was so sharp that it was almost a pleasure, slick as…well…other things Rhett had discovered recently.
“You’ll never survive without me,” Trevisan said, as if casting about for just the right words as he clutched at his bleeding arm. “You and Meimei won’t get out of this car. You’ll never find the door. Cora would kill you for that alone, but you’ll starve to death until your heart gives out and turns you to sand.”
Trevisan was backing behind the chair now, past a swinging chandelier where Rhett figured the ravens had been roosting before. Rhett caught his reflection in a tall mirror, just a flash of a half-familiar, half-hated body, all brown and bones and unwanted curves and a gaunt, haunted face that would never need shaving. He lashed out, bashing the mirror with his fist to make it crack into a thousand glittering shards.
“Money? Gold? You can have it all, Ned. I’ll tell you the combination to the safe. Riches beyond your wildest dreams. You’ll live forever, and you’ll do it in whatever fashion you like.”
Rhett’s next slash was meant for Trevisan’s throat, but the man lurched back and took it across the jaw instead. Trevisan dropped his knife and put a surprised hand to the deep cut, touching the bone beneath in abject horror. He licked his lips, panting, one hand out to Rhett in desperate supplication.
“You said you were going to kill me because I was a bad man, but what does this make you?” he said, holding the flaps of his face together with shaking hands. “You began a monster, but you’ll end a monster of a different sort. This is torture. Playing with me, like a cat with a mouse. You can still stop. You don’t have to do this. But if you keep going, you will be as bad as you think I am.”
“Wrong.”
Trevisan had backed himself into a corner now, and Rhett stood tall, naked and unafraid before the cowering man in his fine silk suit.
“I’ll never be what you are, Mr. Trevisan. Because I’m going to kill you, open all the doors, and walk the fuck away.”
“Don’t be stupid—”
“Can’t help that,” he said. “It’s in my blood.”
Whatever his name was, he slashed Bernard Trevisan across the throat.
Chapter
24
Trevisan fell.
Not in a dramatic way, but like a weak man who knows he’s done for and can’t do a damn thing about it. Rhett didn’t let go of either knife. He knew well enough by now that monsters usually got up for a second round of pontificating and fighting, even those whose skin wasn’t knitting itself back together in preparation for another round.
But Trevisan just lay on the floor in a puddle of red, shivering and growing paler, the lavender and pink of his suit soaking up his own blood. Rhett’s wounds had already closed, the holes in his palms no longer burning and the kiss of the silver chains burned away to slightly raised scars at his wrists.
“You done?” He nudged Trevisan with a long, bare foot that made memories of Winifred rise, sharp as the morning, i
n his mind.
Trevisan’s body was done moving, but his fool mouth wasn’t. He was curling in like a bug, getting older and wrinklier and more frail by the minute. He started up in that language of his, and a bobbing, dancing, evil thing it was, full of syllables that sounded like spit and punches. Shaking his head, Rhett walked over to where his boots sat at the base of the chair, stepped into them barefoot, walked back over, and landed a kick square in Trevisan’s mouth. Feeling teeth break was one of the more peculiar things Rhett had experienced, and he watched, fascinated, as Trevisan spit out white and red shards and kept mumbling around whatever stubs were left.
For a split second, Rhett considered fetching those damn pincers and ripping the man’s tongue out, but that seemed cruel now, and Rhett had no admiration for cruel men.
Thing was, though…Trevisan’s neck was split near in two, his blood all pumped out. So why was he still able to move his lips at all? If he truly was human, he should’ve died as quickly as Prospera had. Even his eyes had gone that odd, glassy dark that dead eyes did. But still the lips moved, spitting and punching and lisping inelegantly.
“Why don’t you have the good sense to die when you’re dead?” Rhett said, hunkered down on his haunches with a knife in each hand.
The dead eyes rolled up to look at him, the lips still fluttering. Trevisan said one last thing, breathy and wheezing, something that sounded like Amen, and smiled with his broken mouth. And then he finally stopped moving and seemed really, truly dead.
As Rhett stood, a sound began somewhere he couldn’t pinpoint, and the room filled with a wild gust of wind. Black feathers and bits of string whipped across his face as what felt like a cyclone swirled in faster and faster circles, carrying a loud roar that sounded a little like a human scream of terror and triumph. Rhett fell to his knees, dropped the knives, squeezed his good eye shut, and slammed his hands over his ears. The sound tore at him like wind trying to find the chinks between boards and rip a prairie lean-to apart. Rhett held his breath, tensing his entire body and every damn sphincter he had against the ripping, pulling, hungry onslaught of sound and air. It felt like it sought to tear the very skin from his bones, like it wanted to crawl right down into his throat, and he shook his head and pinned his lips and denied it that pleasure.
The wind carried pleading and screaming and the caws of a million ravens.
The wind carried madness.
The wind begged and demanded and commanded and cajoled, and still Rhett hunkered down further in his skin and mind and refused it any damn toehold. And then someone else screamed, a high, mad child’s scream, and Rhett didn’t know if it was him or the wind, and then the damn wind let up and he realized it was coming from one of the covered cages.
The train car was bizarrely quiet as Rhett stood and brushed snapped black feathers off his ravaged skin. Everything was thoroughly wrecked, the surfaces littered with wax and shattered glass and spilled bones and seeping liquids. With a peculiar sort of clarity, Rhett plucked a whole tooth off the floor and stubbornly jabbed it back in his jaw where it belonged. The roots tickled as they re-formed, and he moved his mouth around and probed his gums with his tongue, pleased to find that whether it had originally been his own tooth or not, it was now.
Glass and bone and sand cracked under his boots as he trod, naked, to the still-covered cages and whipped the indigo velvet fabric away. On the right, a dead raven lay, feet curled up, on the bottom of the cage. Unlike the creatures of wax and magic, this one had been real, apparently. On the left, a little Chine girl with silver-white dragon eyes regarded Rhett in fear, tear tracks tracing long lines down her chubby cheeks.
“You’re Meimei, I reckon?” Rhett said.
She couldn’t have been more than six, maybe, and her baby fingers wrapped around the bars of the cage briefly before shuddering apart as if burned. More silver. She sat cross-legged in a red silk robe, her hair in tufty little tails.
“Cora,” she said with a sniffle. “Want Cora.”
Rhett nodded and swallowed a sniffle of his own. If there was one thing he knew, it was what it felt like to be a small thing living without love, kept caged to be used by a cruel man with no warmth in his heart. He kicked shit around the room until he found a shiny silver pair of nippers. Snip by snip, he cut a hole in the cage and pried the pieces apart so that Meimei could uncross her legs and slide off her silk cushion. The little girl fell as soon as her feet hit the floor.
“Legs asleep, huh?” Rhett said, not unkindly. He held out a hand to help her, but she shook her head and stood on her own, a stubborn set to her round little chin.
Seeing the tiny girl so helpless and determined reminded Rhett that he was standing nekkid in his boots, and he hurriedly shuffled into Dan’s shirt and pants and found Sam’s hat, battered and beaten in a corner. His wrap had landed in Trevisan’s blood, and hell if he wanted that bound tight to his chest. For now, he’d do without.
“You want to go find Cora?” he said, turning back and holding out a hand.
Meimei nodded but didn’t reach for him. Her hands were clasped tightly to her chest. Well, and why would a little girl who’d been kept in a cage trust anybody, especially a scary-looking stranger?
He nodded his understanding and said, “Where’s the door?”
Meimei walked with an odd, weightless delicacy to the wall behind the chandelier and pressed her small hand against a panel, which smoothly moved aside to reveal a sharp spear of sunlight and the noise of a construction camp hard at work. Rhett shielded his eye with his hand and gazed out, expecting to find Trevisan’s lackeys waiting with guns arrayed against him. But not a soul looked to the car, and work went on as usual. Adolphus and his skinny friend were nowhere to be found. Still, Rhett held up a finger to Meimei, hurried back into the wreck of the car, and palmed one of the smaller knives, just in case.
Rhett hopped down the stairs first, and Meimei followed with the carriage of a princess. The little girl stopped, just outside, and pressed a panel that closed the door again.
“Smart,” Rhett said. “We don’t want anybody to know he’s dead, do we?”
She solemnly shook her head no.
“Cora,” she repeated, eyes wide and earnest.
When Rhett led her toward Grandpa Z’s tent, Meimei walked at his side, not close enough to touch, but close enough to show she was scared of the camp. The child shared her older sister’s peculiar calm and steadfastness, never wincing as her satin slippers landed in mud or filth. It was a short stretch to their destination, and Rhett’s every sense was on alert, his fingers clutching the knife so hard they went numb. But nothing came at them or after them, and he couldn’t help his grin as he pulled back the flap on Grandpa Z’s tent and put a hand on the child’s back.
“Go on, sugar,” he said softly.
The soft cry from inside the tent filled him with warmth, and he stepped within and tied the flap, his back to the sisters to give their reunion the sort of privacy such sentiment required. They babbled at each other in their language, laughing and hugging and crying. Meimei spoke very little, and Cora treated her like a newborn kitten, as if she were breakable and easily startled, which the poor little critter had every right to be. As Rhett watched, Cora attempted to examine the little girl, but Meimei pouted and crossed her arms and shied away from her sister’s hands. The tears in Cora’s eyes and the firm set of her mouth told Rhett that she was hurt by her little sister’s coldness but that she understood the sad truth behind it. Maybe Meimei had reasons she didn’t want hands touching her body against her will right now.
Good for her, Rhett thought. Still got spunk.
“Ned,” Cora breathed, and then she was hugging him, filling up his vision and heart and making a sweetly painful lump rise in his throat. “You did it.”
“Reckon I did,” he said, voice husky with feeling.
“I owe you a debt of gratitude. We owe you.”
He patted her awkwardly and tipped his hat a little. “I’m a Durango Ranger, d
arlin’. This is what I do. You’re free now. Trevisan is dead.”
She pulled away and looked at him like he’d hung the damn moon, her bright eyes afire and wet at the same time. “Are you sure? How?”
He allowed himself a little grin. “Gave him a nice smile,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat from ear to ear. “For all his power, he fell as easily as any man. Any human, I reckon. I watched the last of his blood pump out. He’s well and truly gone.”
She shoved hard against his chest as if trying to burrow in for winter. “You have brought me my dearest wish, and I will say prayers for you all my days.”
Letting himself fully enjoy her warmth, he wrapped his arms more firmly around her, lining them up all along the front in a pleasant way and rubbing her back. “There’s better ways to repay me, ma’am,” he said, voice pitched low so the child wouldn’t hear.
She pulled away with a mischievous look in her eyes. “As you would say, I reckon there are. And plenty of time, now, for repayment.”
Much to Rhett’s surprise, things went well after that. Grandpa Z spoke to his Chine boys, and Rhett sought out Digby and Bruiser, and even if nobody believed him at first, the whole damn camp soon had Adolphus and the skinny feller cornered, mud-smeared pickaxes pressed to where their hearts should’ve been. Once those two evil bastards were sand, the scouts riding in to stop the trouble turned their mounts promptly around and galloped for the hills. A crew of terrifying but beautiful dragons crawled up on top of the train cars and took out the snipers, bullets pinging off their scales like the notes on a badly tuned piano. Rhett was pretty sure most of the sentries got et, and that seemed pretty reasonable, as far as punishment and repayment went.
After Trevisan’s men were gone, Rhett didn’t know what to expect from the rough crew of a railroad camp, whether they’d go for weapons and whisky or food and gold, but they’d been so beaten down and fearful for so long that they didn’t immediately get to carousing. The bosses met in the feed tent and decided to divvy up what wealth they could, considering the workers had never been paid for a day of their labors. Griswold’s desk became the place a man could go to tally his time and reckon what he considered fair recompense for fingers and toes and years. Luckily, Trevisan had enough gold around the camp to satisfy men who were happy to simply taste freedom again. A good number of fellers went to visit the shebang, which at least kept them out of worse trouble.
