by Keta Diablo
A short, closed smile flitted across her face. "No. I was in St. Louis long enough to be hired, and then sent right back out. I didn't meet many people at the home office." Her expression suggested she would be perfectly happy to keep it that way.
"You?" she asked, taking a sip of her drink. Trip had half-expected her to push it aside in favor of something more ... he paused in the thought. Ladylike? That wasn't quite it. This woman wasn't soft. But she wasn't the kind of hardened plainswoman he had grown to expect out here, either. As a general rule, there wasn't much in between the rancher's soft, sweet daughter and his hard-bitten wife to be found out here on the frontier. Mrs. Baumgartner, for all her round smiles, was probably a more common type than someone like Ruby Silver.
And if that name isn't an alias, I'll eat my own hat.
"That's pretty much everything I know about Rittersburg," he said.
She flipped open the sketch pad and with one forefinger, brushed and smudged a few lines before tapping at the remarkably good rendering of the bank's lobby. "This interior is still new, but the chips in the marble columns are either from several different events, or from one event that included attacks from a number of different angles." She turned a page and tapped the image, her voice dropping and becoming more contemplative. "I would need to take more precise measurements, but I would guess that this damage came from at least four different directions."
Trip blinked. "Measurements?" A grin tugged at his lip. "Do you need to make calculations?"
Ruby's eyes flew up to his, wide and startled, almost as if she had been expecting to see someone else sitting in his space. Her mouth tightened, and he regretted the gentle poke.
"No," she said. "Of course not." With a snap, she flipped the cover of the sketch book closed and set her pencil down atop it.
"My apologies," he began, but she interrupted him.
"Are not necessary." She drew her shoulders back, brushed imaginary lint away from her lap, and glanced around for Mrs. Baumgartner. "You should find out what you can about the town and its inhabitants. I will see what our hostess—or her girls—can tell us. Perhaps you might see if a general store or some similar establishment can offer any insight into the town's troubles?"
Curse it, Trip. If you had kept your fool mouth closed, you might have found out everything you need to know about the woman right then.
Then again, how much did he need to find out, exactly? They were here to do a job together, that was all. No one in St. Louis had said a word about assigning him a partner for good. All he had to do was figure out how to work with the woman this once, and then he’d be on his way.
He didn’t know whether he hoped the case would wrap up soon or drag out for weeks. Ruby Silver was having some kind of effect on him, and she’d been in town less than a day.
Standing, he gathered his hat off the bench beside him and gave his new, temporary partner a short bow.
"Shall I see you at dinner then, so as to compare notes?" she asked. Her tone was much more formal than when she had been considering taking measurements inside the bank, and he found that he preferred the other voice.
Even if he was more than a little certain that voice had not been meant for him.
He knew it was foolish to get involved with one's partners. Although it might not be forbidden by the company, it wasn't exactly encouraged, either. Theirs was a dangerous business, and a nomadic one. He never knew from week to week where he would be, or what he would face.
And that's a fine excuse for avoiding involvement with someone outside the business.
What about avoiding the woman with whom he had been partnered?
Watching her speak quietly to the girl wiping down the trestle-tables, he suspected he already knew the answer that: he would not have to avoid her. She would avoid him enough for the both of them.
Chapter Four
It had been a while since Ruby had actually forgotten herself enough to lose track, even for a brief time, of Flint's absence.
Those moments usually came in the morning as she was waking up. All too often, she still found herself reaching across the bed for him, or listening for the sound of him moving around the room.
Now, once again in her bedroom, she pressed her face into the counterpane spread across the bed and bit back tears.
The room was airless and hot. She wouldn't be able to stay in here long.
Only long enough to collect herself.
Then, perhaps, she could lose herself in the work.
And either way, she would see to Lakota when she was done. Then she would lie down and rest before supper in order to remain awake all night.
"With any luck, I can rid the townspeople of their ..." What had that word been? Something geist. A noisy ghost, Mr. Schmidt had told them. Her German skills were sorely lacking—but if German immigrants were picking up spiritual riders like that and bringing them to Ruby's part of the world, she apparently needed to brush up on the language.
Her mind firmly centered once again in the task before her, she stood straight and smoothed out the blanket.
"I can do this. I can do anything I sent my mind to."
Smartest woman Flint had ever met.
A crooked smile, backed with pain, made its way across her face.
And while I'm at it, I think I'll go take those measurements Mr. Trip Austin dismissed so readily.
* * *
"Have you noticed any pattern to the ... poltergeist's ... appearances?" Ruby glanced down at the sketchpad, where she had been prepared to jot down anything of note as she spoke to the mayor's wife and the women who regularly joined her for tea.
The page remained blank.
Truth be told, Ruby would rather have been conversing with Mrs. Baumgartner's whores.
For that matter, they might have been more forthcoming with details.
Not that the townspeople of Rittersburg had attempted to hide anything, as far as Ruby could tell. The woman whose drawing room Ruby currently occupied—married to the bank president, Mr. Schmidt—was perfectly pleasant, if perfectly dull. Nothing about her seemed at all out of the ordinary.
The quiet preceding this morning's flying-glass incident had actually been a lull between two attacks by the spirit, Ruby had discovered. That she had arrived in time for that quiet period was the cause of much speculation among the townspeople, though Ruby herself was as likely to mark it down to malevolence as luck.
There was something not quite right about this ghost, however. It wasn't performing like any specter she had ever encountered before.
Not for the first time that day, she wished she had Flint's expertise to fall back on. Rather idly, she wondered exactly what Trip's expertise was. Rubbing one hand across her forehead, she closed her sketch pad.
Mr. Austin, she reprimanded herself. It would not do to get lazy, to fall into the habit of calling him by his given name—or worse, his nickname. It would, however, be useful to discover what, if anything, he had found out during his time in town.
"Thank you, Mrs. Schmidt," she said, standing more abruptly than she had intended to.
"Ja, yes, of course," the woman of the house said, scrambling to cover for her ill-mannered guest. "You will of course let us know if we may help you in any way?"
The other women bobbed and nodded, and Ruby took her leave.
As she moved down the front steps, a girl, perhaps nine or ten, stepped around the corner of the building and glared up at her.
"Hello," Ruby said, keeping her tone light.
The girl narrowed her eyes.
"Were you looking for me? Can I assist you in some way?"
"No one wants you here." The girl's voice echoed oddly, in a way that made Ruby's heart catch in her throat.
"Pardon me?"
"I said, no one wants you here. You are unwanted." The girl's nostrils flared, and Ruby backed away, glancing briefly from side to side to see if anyone else had seen the exchange.
The street was as empty as it had been that morn
ing, right before the poltergeist attack.
The child picked up a length of rope from the ground and began skipping, her voice a sing-song chant. "Unwanted. Uninvited. Unrequested."
As Ruby's steps picked up pace, the child began laughing maniacally. A pressure began building up in the air behind Ruby, whipping her skirts around her ankles.
"Unloved!" the child called out as Ruby scurried around a corner, leaning against the building to catch her breath as the sudden wind died down.
When she peered around the side of the building again, the little girl was peacefully jumping rope.
Mrs. Schmidt’s front door opened, and a maid called out something indistinguishable to the child, who answered in a normal voice.
No wind. No chant. No strange, echoing voices.
Nothing.
There is nothing here like that.
It was a coincidence. It had to be.
There was nothing at all to connect Rittersburg to the church.
Nothing other than Ruby herself.
* * *
By the time she reached the boarding house, she had a full-blown headache. Her hands shook when she closed the door behind her and reached up to untie her bonnet. She needed to relax, lie down for an hour or so and begin preparing to open herself to the Great Beyond in some meaningful way, in order to end this haunting.
As she hung her bonnet on the peg rack by the door, she considered what she knew so far. There had been a number of incidents, and everyone she had spoken to had seen something—much of it like the flying glass that had greeted her arrival in town. There had been a number of flying objects—often dangerous items, caught up in a maelstrom of wind and ethereal forces. Townspeople had been hurt, though none had been killed as of yet.
But a young girl had been knocked unconscious by a butter-churn that had sailed through the air and connected with her temple. It would not have taken much more force to cause lethal damage.
And yet no one had any definitive information to give her about sudden, unnatural deaths in the community—nothing that might normally lead to a haunting.
Ruby stepped up onto the staircase, her brow furrowed in thought, as the front door opened to admit Trip Austin.
"Ah, Miss Silver. I was hoping to find you in." He pulled his own hat off his head and tapped it against one leg, his thumb playing along the rim. "I would like to compare notes with you, if you are not opposed."
"Not at all." Although she wouldn't have said as much, Ruby was glad to have someone with whom to spin theories. No matter how often she spoke to Flint now, his persistent quiet—even in the face of her almost nightly séances in the beginning—left her feeling as if she were speaking to herself all too often.
"Shall we retire to the drawing room?" she asked, "Or would you prefer the garden?"
He glanced around. "I think the garden. At least for now."
That last had a more ominous sound to it than Ruby would have liked, but she preceded him out of the main house and took the same seat she had occupied earlier.
"You learned something?" she finally asked, after he played with the brim of his hand for several silent moments.
He set the hat aside, rapped twice on the trestle-table, and folded his hands in front of him. "Tell me about your partner—and the demon that supposedly killed him."
* * *
Ruby froze in place, only her gaze flicking along the path to an exit giving away the fact that she had heard Trip speak at all.
Even if he had not seen the calculation behind her stare, though, he would have known that she had made out his words perfectly clearly.
This was not the stillness of calm. It was the stillness of a hunted animal—possibly even a wounded one, trying desperately to find its way into the safety of a bolt-hole and finding no path to salvation.
"My partner?" Her voice remained soft and unshaken.
But Trip had seen that expression in her eyes.
"Flint Donahue."
Ruby didn't exactly close her eyes, but her blink lasted a heartbeat too long to be natural.
Trip glanced around to make sure no one was around to hear him speak. "And you're Rowan Argent."
"Not anymore." Her words came out strained and raw with pain.
"You were in that church up in New Mexico with him, weren't you?"
Now she closed her eyes in earnest and nodded, a single tear gathering at the corner of her eyelid before she dashed it away. When she opened her eyes again, she had clenched her teeth. "Does it matter to you what I call myself?"
He shrugged. "I don't care, but our employers might."
"The Tremayne Agency knows exactly who I am." She all but hissed, leaning in so her face was close to his. "I am Ruby Silver, medium and half-competent exorcist. I have no other ties to those who hunt the spirit world, and when this town is cleared of its haunting, you and I will go our separate ways."
"What about the demon?" Trip asked, ignoring her last claim. "Rumor had it you were dead. Is it possible your demon survived, too?"
The air around Ruby seemed to thicken with anger, but she didn't answer.
Well, Trip wasn't new to this investigation game.
Time to change tactics.
Chewing on one side of his lip, Trip kicked his legs over the bench and spun around so that he sat with his elbows leaning back on the table. Picking up his hat, he dropped it down onto his head and leaned back to stare up into the bright blue sky, with its puffy white clouds—very similar to the ones that had been in the sky that morning when he had seen Ruby—Rowan—whatever her name was—do her trick dissipating the storm of glass that had blown in on the town.
"Where did all that glass come from?" he asked.
"Pardon me?" Ruby blinked and shook her head.
"A glass storm suddenly blows up, a person's gotta figure, it's not exactly out of nowhere. This ain't exactly plate-glass window country, not even with that big, new, fancy bank going up in the middle of town. I got to wonder: where did all that broken glass come from?"
He glanced around the sky. "I'm also wondering where it went—and if the people there are wondering where it came from, too—but right now, I'm mostly thinking about where it might have come from. Because it's my experience that when the kinds of creatures we fight use things of this world to attack people, they take it from someplace nearby. Somewhere that's familiar to them. Safe, even."
When he glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, Ruby was nodding, so Trip kept talking. "While I was out doing my rounds today, I went to the church. It's got a lovely stained glass window. One. Perfectly intact. Not much else there unaccounted for—not glass, leastwise, not so's I could tell. That takes the church out of the reckoning, I think." A slight shudder shook her frame, and he paused, then spoke as gently as possible, given what he had to say. "And taking the church out of the equation pretty much removes that church-lovin' demon of yours, too, doesn't it?"
So prepared was he to hear her say yes that he was halfway through his next sentence before his brain caught up with him.
"No."
"Good. Then we will need..." He trailed off. "No? Your demon's not out of the reckoning?"
"I don't think so."
"Why not?"
"The bank manager's daughter was possessed when I left their house." He barely made out the words, her voice was so harsh and dry.
Trip ducked down until he was certain she was looking into his eyes. "Was it the same demon who killed your partner?"
She nodded, eyes wide. "I think maybe it was."
"And what did it say to you?"
"That I am not wanted here."
Chapter Five
"We need to track this manifestation to its source." Trip managed to sound calm, but his eyes on her were troubled.
Ruby bit her lips closed and played with a sliver of wood that she had worried free from the tabletop.
Exactly how much did he know about the incident in New Mexico? How much of the story had gotten out?
&n
bsp; Hunters talked.
How much of what they had said was true? When Ruby—still Rowan, then, before she had undergone the whitewashing of her past that the Tremayne Agency had sworn would hold up to almost any scrutiny—when Rowan had come reeling out of what was left of that tiny silver-mining town up the mountains, she had been virtually incoherent.
It had taken her days to find her way to the lowlands, even longer to get to a safe-house.
At the time, she had simply been thankful the demon hadn't followed her.
Now... now she wasn't certain that it hadn't.
Can I even tell the difference any longer between a noisy ghost and a demon?
Have I lost my edge?
"Has he been playing some kind of game with me?" she whispered, pinning the splinter to the table and holding it down tight, as if by keeping it still she might halt the demon's actions. "Did it know where I was the whole time?"
Crossing his arms over his chest, Trip regarded her through narrowed eyes. "Maybe." He shrugged. "Hard to tell, really. In any case, if it's really here, it's almost certainly connected to the thing the townspeople are calling a poltergeist."
Panic bubbled up in her throat, clawing away at her insides like an acidic compound. "If it's the demon, I can't beat it."
"Of course you can." Trip's brows drew down in a V over his eyes. "I saw what you can do out there in the street this morning, Ruby. You have real power."
"Not enough." Her voice scraped its way out of her chest. He didn't understand. She had known he wouldn't.
"Then I can help." When Trip stood up and moved around the table to sit next to her, it was all she could do to keep from flinching away. No one had come this close to her since she had left Flint stretched out, cold and still, on the altar in the church and set it ablaze behind her.
Now, this man's shoulder bumping against hers felt like an imposition, the weight of his expectations folding in on her, pinning her to the bench she sat perched upon. As if, were he to stand up and leave, she would shoot into the air and fly away with a pop, much like the flying glass she had sent into the sky earlier that morning.
