Cold Copper aos-3

by Devon Monk

  No, not just like Hink. She knew for a fact Hink really did work for the president of the United States, and she’d seen him do some heroic things to save lives.

  She couldn’t say the same about Wicks. While he had seemed nice, she hadn’t actually seen the measure of his character.

  She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders, suddenly all out of fire for adventure. It was bitter cold here, most of the ground covered in snow and ice. She was hungry, dirty, and at the same time, restless to be moving on.

  Far off, the sound of music, maybe piano keys, tumbled down in the dark. She didn’t hear gunfire, which meant maybe the men had managed to settle their differences with fists, although it had barely been a minute since she stepped out into the cold. They might just be warming up on threatening each other.

  Then she heard footsteps in the snow. More than one person, a lot of people—men. Coming this way.

  21

  The Strange in the shadow of the alley drew the pink ribbon closer to its chest. Then it started down the road, not so much clinging to shadows as becoming a part of them, then reforming as a man-shape with the bits of trash from the city whenever moonlight touched it.

  “You heard it speak, right?” Wil asked.

  “Yes,” Cedar said.

  “And you saw it?”

  “Yes,” Cedar said again.

  “We’re following it, aren’t we?”

  Cedar hesitated only a second. “Yes.”

  They did just that. The Strange avoided full moonlight, avoided open spaces, preferring to cling to structures. When those became fewer and fewer, it lingered against trees, brambles, and even drifts of snow.

  But as soon as they reached the forest, the Strange changed. It dropped all the scraps of trash from the city, and instead drew together a body made of twigs and dirt and snow that glittered darkly in the shadows.

  The only thing it kept with it was the pink ribbon, Florence’s ribbon, clutched with one hand against its chest where a heart should be.

  The trail through the woods narrowed until there was no room for the wagon Mae drove.

  When they stopped because of the wagon, the Strange did too, just ahead of them, waiting, its hand held out imploringly.

  “Following that thing is a trap,” Wil said. “Makes my teeth hurt for the want to do…something.” He gave Cedar a fast grin, and there was more wolf in that look than man.

  Cedar felt it too. The curse was returning, growing stronger. Soon Father Kyne wouldn’t be able to hold it at bay.

  At that thought, his vision split again. He was running, no, Father Kyne was running, down the roads of the town, following the Strange, following the blood need to kill the Strange.

  The rumbling sound of something moving underground caught Father Kyne’s ears. The high-whirring chorus grew and grew, like a great engine building steam.

  Through Father Kyne’s eyes, sharpened as they were by the curse, Cedar could clearly see the Strange. And he suddenly knew it was that underground sound that pulled the Strange into the city and pushed them, unwillingly, through the streets toward the men with guns.

  Father Kyne ran for the Strange, jaws snapping. He was no longer in the form of a man. The curse had taken him whole, his body and his mind. He ran the streets as a beast. But it was not just the Strange that he wanted to kill.

  Cedar opened his mouth to tell him to stop, but could not manage it.

  Father Kyne ran after the Strange, followed them as they followed the call. Kyne might not recognize where the call took him, but Cedar did. The entrance of the copper mine. Where the Strange hovered outside the metal door that still stood ajar, caught like flies in a web made of sound. Sound coming from Vosbrough’s generator.

  “Cedar?” Mae’s voice shattered his vision and brought him again to his own surroundings.

  “Kyne,” he said. “I think the curse has him. I think it has changed him.”

  “What?” Wil asked. “How?”

  “Can you see through his eyes?” Cedar asked.

  Wil frowned. “No.”

  “I can. Just flashes. He hunts the Strange. And the Strange have taken him to the copper mine.”

  Mae set the brake on the wagon and made sure the mules were secure. “What copper mine?”

  “Just north of town,” Cedar said. “It looks deserted, but there is a chamber there, with tanks and other devices built to create or store energy. There are copper wires connected to it, cables that run underground.”

  “And you think the Strange want that device?” she asked.

  “No,” Cedar said. “I think they fear it, but cannot resist it.”

  “But the preacher,” Wil asked, “he’s not…not in his right body?”

  Cedar tried to see through Father Kyne’s eyes, but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed that way. Felt that way.”

  Wil exhaled one hard breath. “So do we go find the preacher and take back our curse? Or do we look into whatever it is that is leading us to first?” He pointed through the trees to the Strange that stood there, still clutching the pink ribbon.

  It moved aside, revealing a small opening in a moss-covered tumble of stones. It took a step toward the opening, paused to see if they were following, waited.

  “It wants us to go in there,” Wil said. “Trap, of course. So, brother? A plan?”

  “Mae,” Cedar said, “I want you to stay here.”

  “No.” Mae caught his sleeve. “I don’t think that is just a tumble of stones.”

  “Neither do I,” Cedar said. “There are pockets where the Strange gather. Where they dwell. Pockets like that.”

  He dismounted. “Stay here, I’m going to see what I can.”

  Wil dropped off his horse right behind him. They approached the edge of the clearing, the sound of their boots breaking the snow and filling the night air.

  Cedar and Wil stopped twenty feet away from the tumble of rocks.

  The Strange remained beside the cave, its body a swirl of tiny snowflakes that rose and fell. Thin catches of moonlight slipped out of the clouds to pour patches of white on the ground through the gaps of its skin.

  “We followed when you asked,” Cedar said, his voice pitched low. “We followed because you have a child’s ribbon. Do you know where the missing children are? Do you know who has taken them?”

  The Strange nodded, an odd bowing motion for a creature with very little neck. And then it tipped toward the opening in the stones, and slipped inside it like smoke in a draft.

  “Me.” Wil clamped his hand briefly on Cedar’s shoulder and ducked into the narrow opening that Cedar would have had a hard time squeezing through.

  “Wil, don’t,” Cedar said, but Wil was already off, swallowed by the darkness.

  Cedar pulled his gun, knowing bullets would do no good against the Strange.

  After a moment, Wil called out. “Children. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. They’re…sleeping, I think. I can’t quite reach them; it’s too narrow in here.”

  “Can you wake them?” Mae asked. “Can you bring them out of there?”

  “I…I’ll try.”

  And then a force, as strong as an explosion, pounded through Cedar’s head. He stumbled back as his surroundings faded and the vision took him.

  Mayor Vosbrough stood in front of that huge copper contraption in the mine beneath the city. In his hand was a gun, smoke curling out of the barrel. In his other hand was a heavy metal bar, which he swung with vicious accuracy.

  Pain cut across Cedar’s ribs, buckling him to his knees. Pain that exploded through him again and again as Vosbrough beat Father Kyne bloody.

  “Cedar!” Mae called. She was beside him, her hands on his arm to try to steady him.

  The vision went black.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Vosbrough. It’s…Vosbrough.”

  Cedar pushed up onto his feet. “Wil.”

  Wil was thrown out of the rocks and slammed into the ground in an unconscious he
ap. The Strange burst out of the cavern right behind him.

  Moonlight, full and hard, finally broke the clouds and shot white fire against the earth, bathing them all in its light.

  The Strange screamed and launched itself at Cedar.

  Just as the curse dug teeth into his bones and blood, demanded its due, and racked his body with pain.

  22

  Rose ran back into the warehouse and quickly closed the door behind her. “There are men coming.”

  Captain Hink still had his gun drawn. Pointed straight at Mr. Wicks’s head. Mr. Wicks held his gun at Hink’s belly. Apparently, they hadn’t pulled the trigger to decide who was boss yet.

  “I suggest you settle real quick if you’re going to work together, or just kill each other,” Rose said. “There are men coming. Men who won’t want us to be nosing around their warehouse. Do we hide? Fight?”

  “Hide,” both Hink and Wicks said simultaneously.

  “Dammit,” Hink added.

  Then they both offered their hands to her. Rose just rolled her eyes and jogged down the row of boxes on her own, looking for decent cover in case the men came into the warehouse and decided to put on a light.

  Hink and Wicks did the same, all of them settling near one another between a stack of boxes and a boarded-up window.

  “How many?” Captain Hink asked.

  “I heard maybe six voices.”

  “How far?” Wicks asked.

  “Close. Very.”

  The door opened and Rose curled down lower.

  “. . .isn’t any better, I’m telling you,” one of the men said. “Hob, get the light.”

  “How can you know?” another voice, this one accented with a southern sort of drawl, asked. “They aren’t like buffalo. Can’t just stand on a hill and count out the herd. Ain’t no bones left behind either. Might be we’ve done our part to kill them off. Might be this is the last night we’ll see them on the street.”

  “You can’t be that dumb,” the first man said. “Until we go a full moon without someone losing their youngest, they aren’t gone. Maybe not even then. It ain’t just children they snatch. There’s crops going bad, and that bout of fever that set in last spring? Brought on by the Strange, plain and clear.”

  A switch snapped, metal against metal, and gaslights caught one to the other in a line across the top of the building. Rose blinked hard to get her eyes adjusted to the bright, and hunkered down a little tighter. They’d chosen a good enough hiding place, and the men, five she could see still near the door with Hob walking back from a little farther off, didn’t seem to suspect they were anything but alone in the big building.

  The men were of a height to one another, most of them wearing beards and mustaches cut trim to their faces. She’d guess them all of an age too, maybe even as old as thirty or so. They wore a mix of styles: pants in dark, heavy wool plaid, plain leather, or sturdy denim blue; boots in black polish or oiled hide. The only thing their coats and hats had in common was they all looked warm and useful in the hard weather.

  But there was one other thing that they each sported—a wide-muzzled gun of some sort with a copper box attached to it, hanging at the side.

  One look at that gun sent her mind spinning with possibilities. She’d never seen anything like it, and her fingers itched to figure what it was made of and why, exactly, it was modified in such a manner.

  A hand reached out and pressed gently downward on her arm. She glanced up. It was Hink. He wasn’t looking at her, but crouched as he was at her side, he must have sensed her coiling up with curiosity. He must have known she was pulled by the knowing of something worse than a cat by yarn, and given too much a chance, might just walk up there and ask those men what the guns were for and how, exactly, they worked.

  “Mayor says there’s an end to them,” the second man said. “Won’t need a second warehouse, and this one’s nearly full. I say there’ll be no ghosts in the night come spring.”

  The men each hung their guns on wall pegs, then freed the copper boxes from the contraptions by thumbing off a couple latches and giving them a good tug.

  “Want to put money on that, Sal?” one of the other men asked.

  “Didn’t say I’d bet for it.”

  “Here now. A man who ain’t willing to back up his opinion with money shows you exactly what his opinion’s worth.”

  The men chuckled and walked off with the copper boxes, heading deeper into the warehouse, out of Rose’s sight. In a moment, a clattering of cogs and wheels and chains filled the quiet of the place as some large device was activated. After a bit, there was silence.

  “Should we follow them?” Rose whispered once the racket had died down.

  “No,” Hink whispered back. “We stay here.”

  “We do not stay here,” Mr. Wicks said. “We investigate.”

  Hink just shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how you can’t seem to understand a two-letter word, but let me try again: No.”

  “As your director, I order you to follow my orders, Mr. Hink.”

  Hink snorted.

  Mr. Wicks scowled at him. He stood and very quietly and quickly made his way down the aisle, pausing at the end of the stack of crates and peering around the corner to where the men had wandered.

  “Blasted yatterhead,” Hink whispered. He turned and gave Rose a look that said she would share the blame if Wicks got them all killed.

  There was no use calling out—the other men would likely hear them. So Rose did the only thing she could think of. She pulled her gun and got ready to shoot if Wicks was discovered.

  Thomas didn’t dash out from behind the crates. But it wasn’t long before the men were back, talking over more mundane market prices of buckwheat and potatoes. They crossed over to the door.

  Wicks ducked down out of their line of sight as the men reconnected the copper boxes back to the guns, shouldered them, shut down the lights, then left through the same door they’d come in.

  Rose’s heart thumped for a minute, maybe two, as her eyes, once again, got the hang of darkness. Then Captain Hink was on his feet, just as quiet as Wicks, but twice as large and twice as temperamental as he strode in a killing sort of way down to where Wicks sat.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hink growled.

  “Gathering information.” Wicks stood, dusted his coat, and adjusted his hat, though neither looked out of place to Rose.

  “They could have found us.”

  “Yes. Then we would have killed them, I suppose,” he said nonplussed.

  “Idiot,” Hink grumbled.

  “‘Sir,’” Wicks added. “You will address me as ‘sir.’”

  “When hell burns holes in my boots,” Hink said. “And not even then.”

  “What exactly will convince you of my station above you, Marshal Cage?”

  “Paperwork signed and sealed by the president. Don’t have that, do you?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Wicks dug in the satchel he carried, thumbed through a small stack of paper, and pulled out one clean sheet.

  In the dark of the place, Rose could just make out a seal of an eagle worked up in red and blue ink.

  “Will this do?” He handed the paper to Hink.

  Hink took it and tipped it to the meager light slipping in through the cracks in the ceiling.

  “Anyone could forge a document. There’s practically a printing press on every corner nowadays.” He shoved it back at him.

  Thomas paused, looking for a moment like he might have just noticed the depths of Hink’s stubbornness.

  “Yes. Well,” he said. “I want to know where they went with those copper boxes. Go and see where they put them and report back to me.”

  Hink inhaled. His hand clenched into a fist.

  She didn’t know if he was fighting the urge to yell at the man or just fighting the urge to fight.

  “Lady said she wants to go to town,” Hink said. “Find a nice hotel and a bath. I say that’s the way I
’m walking.”

  “I’m sure Miss Small won’t mind one little jaunt to see what’s behind that door.” He pointed.

  Rose walked over to the both of them. Then walked past them so she could see what he was going on about.

  There at the far end of the warehouse was, indeed, a door. “Armory?” she suggested.

  “Won’t know if we don’t look.” Wicks took the distance at a quick clip, placed his hand on the door handle, and leaned in a bit as if listening for something moving behind the door. Then he tried the latch.

  The door opened. Wicks turned, grinned, and stepped over the threshold.

  “Idiot,” Hink said. “And a fool. We should leave, Rose. Now.”

  “You want to know what’s in there,” she said. “You know you do. Doesn’t matter if he’s your superior or a horsefly. You’ll always wonder what was really back there. Got a case of the curious in a bad way.”

  Hink glanced at the boarded-up windows, then shook his head, a smile easing the edge of his anger. “Woman, the trouble you find.” He turned and stormed off after Wicks.

  “I like to keep my eyes out on the world,” she said.

  “Thought you wanted a bath.”

  “I do. After we find where they went with the copper boxes.”

  Hink pulled his gun again, and stepped away from the stacks of crates and into the darkened room. “Wicks?” he called out softly.

  Thomas seemed to melt out of shadows, a small flame tucked tight in his hand so as not to give more than an ember of light to his face. “Some kind of device here. I think it’s a hoist for the goods. The men used it.”

  Captain Hink never seemed to fail when a light was needed and this time was no different. He pulled a flint and steel from his pocket and lit up a small torch.

  “You hear that?” he asked.

  Rose nodded. “Like trumpets, but higher? And…water? Maybe there’s a waterwheel that runs the equipment under here?”

  “No,” Hink and Wicks said at the same time.

  “You first, Marshal Cage,” Thomas said.