The Gunslinger's Man

by Helena Maeve

  His insides twisted at the sight. He was suddenly glad that he’d left Willowbranch without his supper.

  “Well?” Malachi snapped, impatient. “Can you fix it or not?”

  “I don’t know.” The eye alone would require delving into Uncle Howard’s notes in hopes of some instruction. Deciphering his spidery script could take hours. But the maid’s troubles didn’t end there. A fire stoker had been thrust through her rib cage, the tip sticking out through the fabric of her uniform, under the left arm.

  Even if Asher somehow figured out a way to make her function without the eye, he couldn’t begin to judge what there was to be done about the steel impaling her. “Did you ask Matheson? He’s a doctor—”

  “He’s more preoccupied with my sister.”

  Asher bit down on the urge to point out that Angelita wasn’t sick. Or, at least, not sick the way she had been. But what if Malachi already knew? Making others jump hoops for his amusement seemed like the sort of lesson Ambrose would’ve taught all of his progeny.

  “I can… I can take a look.” He’d make no promises, but the maid was still watching him, her expression as blank as canvas.

  Malachi clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Excellent. I knew your uncle taught you a thing or two. Father will be pleased. If you need me, I’ll be at the house. Send word with my man,” he added, gesturing vaguely toward the door.

  The stern-faced creature who had followed them from town hall wasn’t there for Malachi’s protection, then, but to keep an eye on Asher.

  The snare was closing around him once more.

  “Malachi.”

  Long, raven-dark hair fluttering over one shoulder, Malachi turned at the summons.

  Why do you care what happens to a house maid? Where is the other one? The likelihood of a straight answer to either question was slim. “Did you do this?” Asher asked instead.

  As if wounded by the accusation, Malachi pressed a hand to his chest. “Perish the thought. I don’t bother with half lives.” His expression turned feral as he dragged his gaze down Asher’s body. “Not often, anyway.”

  “You know Nyle is gone.”

  “Some rumor to that effect reached my ears,” Malachi confirmed, cocking his head. “Is that relevant to doing what I asked?”

  “No,” Asher was forced to admit. Not relevant, not practical. Not anything that would get a rise out of Malachi if indeed he’d been pulling Nyle’s strings.

  “Then I suggest you get to work.”

  The door remained open in Malachi’s wake, as though he wanted Asher to be aware of the sentinel parked outside. He needn’t have tried so hard. Proof of his captivity was laid up on the table, gazing up at him with a hollow stare.

  She had a comely face. Not as breathtaking as the likes of Angelita, certainly, but not unhandsome. Her small mouth and upturned nose gave her a vaguely mousy appearance.

  “Hello,” Asher said, more tentative than he’d been about any piece of machinery. He remembered this one from his first time at Ambrose’s. She’d offered him a drink just before the master of the house arrived to greet his guests. And, later, she had brought supper to his room. Asher had barely exchanged a few words with her. He wasn’t sure it was allowed.

  There was no one to stop him now.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “D-D-Dorcas.” The tinny whirr that accompanied the answer suggested that more than her eye had been spliced with metal.

  “I’m Asher. Do you remember me at all?”

  The maid’s features remained still, no reaction in her warm brown eye.

  “Can you tell me who did this to you?” It shouldn’t have mattered. Ambrose’s house teemed with monsters.

  Dorcas went on staring at him as if the question hadn’t registered. Those metal plates welded into her skull must’ve run deeper than just the eye socket.

  Asher shoved fury and horror aside, and tried again. “Does it hurt?”

  A minute headshake this time. She wasn’t all machine, then. She was more like Asher than the time pieces he was used to operating on.

  He spared a glance to the door. Malachi’s thug was still out there, but fidgeting. Human. Asher leaned a hand to the desk and dropped his voice. “What’s the last thing you remember, before you were hurt?”

  It was a stab in the dark, but he reasoned that knowing how the maid had come to be like this would give him a basis for how to help her. He refused to think of it as fixing a broken device.

  “Eight-f-fifteen to nine o’clock, I dust. I c-clean. I fold. Nine—nine o’clock. Bring b-breakfast tray. Tea, not coffee. Twenty—” Dorcas cut herself off, head snapping to the right. “One, two, three, four—four steps. Unlock the door, unlock, unlock—”

  “Okay, okay. Shh,” Asher said, worried that the rising fervor of her attempts to answer would draw unwelcome attention.

  He didn’t need to hear the rest to guess where it was going.

  “Is the rest of you like your eye…or is it, uh, flesh?”

  Either unaware or unwilling to say, Dorcas remained silent.

  Asher sighed. His hands shook. “I have to unbutton your dress and see, all right? I’m so sorry. I wish there was another way.” Malachi had left him none but for the clear instruction that Asher was to mend this—somehow. Knowing him, it was a test of some sort.

  It was just as well that he’d cleared out quickly. Had he stuck around, Asher might have dug out his cache of silver bullets and squeezed a few into Malachi’s skull. He hated him in this moment. He hated Halloran and all the rest of them, for allowing Sargasso to become a place where this happened.

  He hated himself for not knowing what to do.

  The thin white camisole Dorcas wore beneath her uniform was soaked with a viscous black substance. Asher grimaced, praying for it to be oil rather than blood. He touched the protruding end of the stoker with a fingertip. Her body remained as still as a corpse but a muscle twitched in her neck at the tentative graze.

  The unfortunate comparison stuck in Asher’s mind. He recognized the melding of steel and flesh below her collarbones. He looked the same under his clothes.

  “Do you feel any pain?”

  Dorcas treated him to another of her weighty silences.

  Whatever she was now, she’d been someone’s daughter in another life. Maybe she’d had friends who cared about her, or a sweetheart. A life beyond the invisible collar around her neck.

  Asher blinked back the sting in his eyes. “I’ll try to be quick,” he said, and seized the long, tapered end of the stoker with one hand.

  The slick, fleshy sound turned his stomach. He didn’t let himself glance away from the gushing wound. He owed her that much.

  Chapter Thirty

  The sky had begun to blush pink in the distance, light streaming through the east-facing windows, when footsteps finally echoed through the shop. “Nothing could be done for it?” Malachi huffed, peering at the cloth-covered body. “Pity.”

  “Her.” Asher’s voice was rough with exhaustion.

  “Pardon?”

  “Her. Not it.” He cut his eyes away from his blood-stained hands. “Her name was Dorcas.”

  As though taken aback by the revelation, Malachi shifted his weight, long strides giving way to a loose, liquid gait, as if the floor were not entirely steady beneath his feet. “Huh. I always called it…it. Thank you for that valuable piece of trivia. Were you able to find out anything useful?”

  Only that my uncle wasn’t the man I thought he was.

  The things Howard had done to Dorcas—and presumably the other maids—made Asher’s own transformation seem like child’s play. At least Asher had retained the full use of his faculties.

  “Oh, don’t look so glum,” Malachi scoffed. “I’m sure you tried your best. Come to the house. I’ll have my man dispose of this and you and I can have a nice supper.”

  “It’s almost dawn.”

  “A nice breakfast, then.”

  The offer was accompanied by the slide of
a cold hand around Asher’s shoulders, Malachi smiling down at him like some trickster god. Under the desk, Asher fingered the trigger gauge on his one and only pistol. He wasn’t sure the bullet would fly cleanly through the wood. Silver alloy changed the simple aerodynamics of a lead-capped bullet. He wasn’t sure that squeezing off one round would be enough to end Malachi. If he missed, there would be hell to pay. If he didn’t, he’d be dead.

  He fought a shudder as Malachi traced his jawline with a fingertip.

  “How I would love to know what goes on in that head of yours… Oh, but I forget. I can.” His grin gave way to a snarl. Fangs dropping like razors behind his lush pink lips.

  Malachi pounced.

  It happened so fast. Asher fumbled his hold on the pistol. He would’ve fired it were he not wrenched out of his seat before he could do so, a hand in his hair and the other shoving him bodily into the wall.

  The buttons fastened at the collar of his shirt gave way to a brutal yank. The back of his head slammed against wood.

  His revolver clattered to the ground but mercifully did not fire. Asher clung to that tiny speck of relief as his flesh opened beneath Malachi’s fangs. Pain shot through him, radiating from the shelf of his clavicle. It spiraled outward, fiery-hot and debilitating.

  And something else, too, far more distressing.

  Like Halloran and Moreau before him, Malachi felt it. He pulled back laughing, blood smeared over his mouth and chin. “And to think my fool of a brother claimed you were nothing to write home about! No wonder Halloran’s been keeping you to himself…”

  “Get,” Asher bit out, “get off—”

  “Oh, you lovely thing. I very much intend to…”

  “Malachi.”

  His sense of timing could have used a little work, but Halloran’s entrance filled Asher with more relief than he wanted to admit.

  Malachi’s smile sharped. “Shouldn’t you be herding cattle?”

  “Thought I’d check on my property,” Halloran drawled. His eyes met Asher’s over Malachi’s thin shoulder. “He has a knack for getting himself into trouble.”

  Asher really wished he hadn’t dropped that gun. Never mind shooting Malachi, who was responsible for the sting in his chest, he wanted to see Halloran’s smug face crumble into dust and viscera. A knack for getting himself in trouble? He hadn’t courted Malachi’s interest any more than he’d courted Halloran’s.

  Outrage crammed too many retorts into his throat, reducing him to silence.

  “That he does,” Malachi agreed, withdrawing fangs and hands alike. “But he tastes divine. And you neglected to mention that he happens to enjoy it.”

  A muscle twitched in corner of Halloran’s eye, far too visible, despite the low brim of his hat, in the pink light of morning. “Didn’t know he was an interest of yours, Malachi.”

  “He’s not. You, on the other hand…”

  It was as if Asher was no longer in the room. Malachi paced a slow, deliberate circuit around the desk, grazing the unmoving form upon it with his fingertips before hooking them in Halloran’s belt. “Why don’t you both join me at the house, hmm? We could have so much fun together.”

  “What about Dorcas?” Asher blurted, the lesser of all the questions he wanted answered. Did Nyle’s death mean nothing to Malachi? Surely he knew Halloran had shot him—and why.

  Malachi turned. “Who? Oh, that…” He waved an indifferent hand. “You may salvage what you like and burn the rest. Later. For now, you’ll come along. Your master didn’t ride all this way to see me.”

  You only wish he had. Envy would have been a mistake, so Asher decided the squirming in his gut was merely rage. He cocked an eyebrow at Halloran. Well, master? What do we do now? Dance to Malachi’s tune or tempt fate again? Neither option appealed.

  “You’ll come along,” Halloran muttered after a beat, aligning himself with Malachi, as Asher had always known he would, as he should’ve expected even from a vampire who killed his own.

  He toyed with the thought of trying to retrieve the pistol, but there was no time. Malachi could shatter his spine in the half second it would take Asher to crouch. Halloran could easily get caught in the crossfire. Asher’s skin prickled. He hated himself for considering that an impediment. He hated Halloran for making him weak.

  Gears and pistons engaged as he made his feet follow the summons, the sensation unsettling but not without merit. Dorcas hadn’t been aware of her body as her heart beat its sluggish last and ignorance had done her little good.

  All over Main Street, shadows stretched along the shuttered storefronts. The hour was too damn early for anyone to be out and about. That was something to be glad of, at least. There was no one to see Asher get marched up to the town hall, no one to watch him enter Ambrose’s home like a good little pet, a mindless automaton tethered to its master’s whims.

  Halloran’s hand at the small of his back kept him from stumbling up the steps—or worse, bolting. Asher could’ve shaken it off. He didn’t.

  * * * *

  Asher’s insides twisted as the door closed behind him. He’d never been to Malachi’s wing. He had never cared to know whether it was more or less lavish than the guestroom he’d been offered for a time. He would’ve died quite happy without that information.

  Malachi stripped off his pinstriped frock coat and jettisoned his cufflinks to a nearby table. His aim was as impeccable as the cut of his clothes. Asher had never seen him dressed down. If he’d stayed human, he might have hung on to a reputation as something of a dandy. No one in town would dare speak that way about a vampire. Not if they wanted to live out the day.

  “Well, gentlemen?” Malachi rounded to face them.

  “Well, what?”

  The deep, low baritone of Halloran’s voice set the hairs on the back of Asher’s neck on end. He couldn’t help but be aware that he was suddenly trapped in a room with two creatures built for speed and agility, stronger than any boy he’d ever wrestled in play or genuine scuffle.

  “Is this how you spend your time together? Quietly pretending not to look at each other? It’s very sweet,” Malachi simpered, “but we can dispense with the flirting. We’re all men here. Aren’t we, Asher?”

  The pointed question seemed to conceal another. A shudder rippled down Asher’s spine. He didn’t know where this was going but he’d never had trouble using his imagination before. If he tried hard enough, he could scare himself into freezing where he stood, like some witless desert rat trapped in a hunter’s sights.

  “Halloran don’t share.”

  Malachi arched his brow. “He will, with me. Won’t you, darling?” His smile only widened when Halloran failed to correct him. “See? And if I were to suggest that he take your clothes off, I’m sure he’d do that too…”

  Fists balled at his sides, it took everything Asher had not to flinch at Malachi’s approach. He’d felt naked under scrutiny before, and he’d had Halloran’s hands on him half a dozen times already. But not like this. In this ornate, Fabergé egg of a room with its thick draperies and large bed, he felt like an elastic band stretched to breaking point.

  “I wonder,” Malachi went on, lodging a knuckle under Asher’s chin, “do you enjoy his mouth or the other way around?”

  He and Asher were almost of a height. It wouldn’t have been an effort to meet his eyes or refrain from biting his tongue as Malachi traced his lower lip with a finger.

  “Mm, yes. I think I’d like to see that. Get on your knees, lovely.”

  “That’s enough,” Halloran barked.

  “This is my father’s house. I decide what’s enough,” Malachi corrected sweetly, “and I say he takes off this blood-spattered shirt and shows me just what it is about him that’s got you cooped up at Willowbranch instead of coming here as you used to.”

  The pressure of his touch left Asher with a Hobson’s choice to open his mouth to the intrusion of Malachi’s thumb and potentially loose a tooth. He tasted metal and honey, the sharp, piercing flavor of strong whi
skey making him gag.

  He didn’t see Halloran stride forward until he’d pried Malachi’s hand off and sent him staggering back a pace. “Leave us, Asher.”

  Malachi caught himself easily, his laughter like the scrape of a blade against porcelain. He’d only been dislodged because he allowed it, this latest retreat as false as all others preceding it.

  Asher understood why. Malachi’s gaze might as well have been glued to Halloran. Asher was only the bait, just as Halloran had claimed he’d been for Moreau.

  “Asher.”

  He snapped himself back from that train of thought.

  Without letting Malachi out of his sight, Halloran nodded toward the door. The message was clear.

  Asher clamped his mouth shut. The last he saw of Halloran and Malachi on the other side, they were facing each other like two fighting hounds about to lunge.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Angelita’s voice rose from the depths of the corridor, too soft to echo.

  Her door had opened soundlessly, but a triangle of light spilled onto the landing, giving away her presence. If he’d been thinking clearly, Asher might have judged that as a good moment to run.

  The memory of what Angelita could do was impossible to set aside.

  “You’ve said that before,” he recalled.

  “You shouldn’t be back.” Petulance slithered into her tone. “Why are you—?”

  A clatter upstairs curtailed the question.

  Asher leaned his head against the banister. What was he waiting for? It didn’t matter what went on behind Malachi’s door. Halloran would land on his feet. He was a vampire, nigh indestructible. He was also the prize Malachi wanted for himself, which implied a longer lease on life than any other man in his position might have enjoyed.

  “Oh.” Angelita glided onto the landing, the train of her cobalt frock dragging over the boards.