by Helena Maeve
If there were tears, then they were spilled behind closed doors. Too much was left to do in Sargasso for anyone to stop and weep.
As darkness fell over town, Asher hoisted himself out of the last six-foot-long hole and wiped his hands on his thighs. It wasn’t enough to cleanse them, but then vinegar and soap wouldn’t have done it either.
“Forty-eight dead.” Wesley sighed, picking up the shovel. “You’d think that’d be enough for the rest of ’em to get the message.”
Two of the town’s men came bearing the last limp body. Scarves covered their mouths and noses, and the gloves on their hands were just oven mitts. “What message is that?”
“Sargasso’s done.” Wesley spread his arms wide. “Look around, man. We’re down a quarter of our population. We got no cattle, no resources. Train’s stopped running ’cause of Ambrose… If it weren’t for Redemption going to the dogs ’fore we did, I’d say we’re fish in a barrel.”
“But Redemption is gone.”
“Don’t change the fact that we’ll be starvin’ in a couple of weeks’ time.”
Too tired to argue, Asher pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll take it from here,” he told the two ersatz undertakers. “Think there’s some soup left in the church if you boys—”
“You reckon there’s any liquor left?” asked one of the men.
He was tall but skinny and once he lowered his scarf, Asher saw the multitude of pimples on his face. He was just a kid.
“You’re Ada’s boy, right?” Asher sucked his cheeks in to conceal a smile. “Go on to church before I tell your mama what you’re up to.” He clamped the boy on the shoulder. Ten years ago, that could have been him putting on a brave face while doing whatever it took to keep going.
The only difference—and it was a big one—was that his mother would’ve already been long dead.
“Fucking figures,” Wesley muttered.
“What?”
“Big man in town, huh? That boy’s gonna worship the ground you walk on.”
Asher rolled his eyes. “Shut your mouth.” He knew when he was being mocked.
“I mean it! You should hear how they talk about you when you ain’t around… Screw the Second Coming, you’re their new messiah now.”
“Why? ’Cause I shot Ambrose?”
Wesley nodded. “Amazing what people will forgive if you give ’em what they want.”
“People,” Asher repeated, his mood souring all too easily at the end of a long day. “But not you, huh? Great. Thrilled to hear it, Wesley. You know, it’d be real nice if you could drop that holier-than-thou attitude—you think I don’t know I fucked up? You think I wanted to become vampire feed?”
His jaw tensing, Wesley glared down at the shovel in his hand. Asher tracked his gaze, self-control dangerously close to snapping. What did Wesley think, that he was going to hit him with that thing? Let him try. Asher was exhausted and thirsty, and so very ready to use his hands for something other than digging graves.
“Guess that means you haven’t found him yet.”
“What?”
“Halloran.” Tilting his head to one shoulder, Wesley dug the edge of the shovel into the mound of dirt at his feet. “I know you’ve been hunting for him. Five times I had to ask you what you wanted to do about moving the reverend.”
“I told you. I was tired.”
“Distracted, more like.” The blood behind his ear flashed in and out of sight when Wesley shook his head. He’d washed up as best he could, but there had been no time for baths.
Asher had spent the better part of the morning scouring the ruins of Sargasso in hopes of finding Halloran hiding somewhere. By noon, he had come to dread pushing past doors for fear of what he’d find on the other side. He couldn’t walk past the concave pit of a vampire’s last resting place without looking for some speck of familiarity in the apparel left behind.
“I don’t blame you,” Wesley added. “Guy kept you prisoner for months. Did—whatever he did to you, I don’t know and you don’t gotta tell me. If I were in your boots, I’d be afraid he’s comin’ back for me too.”
Asher held his stare. It seemed suddenly imperative that he not blink or breathe or move. Wesley was no vampire, to read falsehood in the leap of his heart, but he knew Asher better than anyone besides Connie. The slightest twitch in his expression would give him away.
“Of course,” Wesley went on, sighing, “if he ain’t come back while we’re all too weak to fight him, you probably have nothin’ to worry about.”
“You reckon he bit it?” Asher was almost proud of the surety in his voice. They might have been talking about one of Malachi’s thugs.
There were plenty to choose from. The fracas had left the de facto mayor with only a small handful of lucky acolytes and curiously none of his maids.
Wesley shrugged. “Must have… That one Rider, she’s still around, ain’t she?”
He meant Maud, whom Asher had last seen gathering up her things and saddling Blackjack’s horse. He didn’t know if she’d left already. They had never been close and he wouldn’t have known what to say if she lingered to say goodbye. He had noticed that Charlie disappeared around the same time, but that might have been a coincidence. He nodded.
“Then yeah, I reckon he’s no longer our problem,” Wesley finished. “Hallelujah! Hey, where’re you goin’? We got one more!”
“You can finish up on your own,” Asher tossed over his shoulder.
He felt shaky all of a sudden and it had nothing to do with the bodies they’d been carting around all day. The stench of mortality didn’t bother him anymore. Flesh was just flesh, alive or dead. Someday it would be him in one of those graves. By rights, it should’ve been him already.
He made it around the corner and down the side street that led to his uncle’s shop, before his legs folded under him. Neither machinery nor bone could hold him up. The problem wasn’t physical, though it sure felt like it.
Breaths knifing in and out of his chest, Asher slumped against the nearest wall. He jammed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes as if grit and dust would wipe away the sting.
It stood to reason that if he’d combed every inch of Sargasso in broad daylight and turned every stone with no sign of Halloran, then there was no Halloran to find. Fury had done for him in the end. Or maybe one of Wesley’s bullets. Maybe Connie had beaten him to death like she’d done Ivan. The how didn’t matter so much.
Asher sucked his lips into his mouth and bit down until his jaw ached.
“You all right, kid?” Romero’s voice trickled through the screen door. The back of the saloon had weathered the carnage better than the front. Romero’s canary was even alive and well in its cage, wings fluttering against the bars.
“Fine, yeah.” Asher plastered on a weak smile.
“That why you’ve parked yourself on the ground like some guttersnipe?”
Silhouetted behind the screen, Romero looked more ghost than woman. It wasn’t unlike how Asher felt.
“Just havin’ a rest.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, Wesley’s got this whole idea about me being the next big cheese. Glad to see you’re not gonna start faintin’ when I walk into a room.”
Romero nudged the screen door open and stepped onto the porch. “You havin’ a rest or you havin’ a drink? ’Cause only one of those is any excuse for talking drivel… What’re you grinnin’ at me for?”
“Nothing shakes you.”
Ambrose could croak, half-wild vampires from out of town could blow into Sargasso like the whirlwind, and still Romero hung on to her aloofness, glaring at Asher as if he’d just stumbled into her bar to whine about Octavian. The memory almost hoisted a smile onto Asher’s lips.
“Should it?”
“I don’t know. I just got done burying forty-eight of our neighbors. Guess I’m feeling a mite shook up.”
She sighed as though it pained her to have to listen to him. “You want a drop of liquor or not?”
Asher jerked up his eyebrows. “There’s whiskey left?”
Romero merely turned on her heel.
After a moment, Asher pinned a hand against the wall and pulled himself to his feet. Romero had mostly swept up the debris, but a few shards of glass remained, crunching underfoot as Asher made his way to the bar. The first stool he tried creaked and fell apart under him.
“Try another,” Romero said without peering up from the bottle.
He was luckier the second time around.
“You remember the first time you came in here?” she asked and slid a chipped glass along the bar.
“Sure. You said I was too young, threw me out—”
“Nah, boy. The first time. Back when your daddy was still around.”
Tumbler halfway to his lips, Asher froze. “I don’t remember that.”
If not for the wedding photograph Uncle Howard kept of his folks, Asher would’ve struggled to remember his father’s face. In it, Asher’s parents stood shoulder to shoulder in a fuzzy oval, the two of them wearing twin expressions of fright and disbelief. Over the years, Asher had often wondered if that was the photographer’s fault or a true reflection of their marriage.
Romero poured herself a glass and set aside the bottle. “You were four, maybe five, just a skinny little slip of a man in a calico shirt and trousers that were too long in the leg. Your daddy sat you on his knee while he played a hand of poker. Right over there,” she said, pointing to a round table near the window. One of its legs was broken and bullet holes dotted the surface, but on a good day, men would sit around it for a game of cards—at least until the vampires came in for a drink. “Said you were his good luck charm.”
Asher could picture it clearly, the low lights in the saloon, the jaunty music from a piano that hadn’t worked in years. His father holding him steady with an arm around his waist. The smell of rye on his breath.
“Yeah, well…he was wrong about that, wasn’t he?” Case in point, Asher’s father was dead, just like his mother. Just like anyone he’d ever cared about.
“When you’re done feelin’ sorry for yourself,” Romero scoffed, “you might wanna consider what you’ve done here.”
“And what’s that?”
“Used to be this town was too afraid to sneeze for fear of Ambrose and his brood takin’ offense. But last night, there wasn’t a man, woman or child who didn’t fight against ’em.”
“They weren’t fighting Ambrose,” Asher quibbled. “They’d never—”
“No, ’cause he was already dead. Him and most of his tribe. Why do you think Malachi’s been holed up in that big ole house all day, huh? Polishin’ the family china?”
The saloon windows overlooked Main Street and the ugly mansion that served both as town hall and Malachi’s home. Gaslight gleamed in the windows upstairs, peeking around the edges of tightly drawn curtains. Even if Asher didn’t acknowledge the discolored ground or scattered bullet casings surrounding it, the torn siding and broken shingles testified to the hostilities endured.
“You have a chance to do something here, kid.” Romero tipped another measure of whiskey into his glass. “Don’t squander it.”
Asher glanced at the tumbler, its contents swirling with the promise of oblivion. “Ambrose ain’t the only one who’s dead,” he said quietly.
It wasn’t safe to admit and as long as he didn’t say the words he could pretend they weren’t lurking on the tip of his tongue, but he felt no triumph in their victory. The hollow in his chest wouldn’t let him.
“To them who we lost,” Romero said and lifted her glass about an inch off the bar. Her voice remained hard, but her eyes had softened with pity.
She better than anyone in town knew that Halloran hadn’t been all rotten.
Asher clinked his glass against hers. “The ones we lost.” Whiskey burned a path down his throat as fiery as Halloran’s blood.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Under normal circumstances, Asher wouldn’t have dared bring a gun to a sit-down with the town mayor. But nothing about this was normal. Across the dining table, Malachi sprawled in his maker’s high-backed chair like a portrait of nonchalance. Only two vampires flanked him. The others had either met the true death or fled during the night. They were grossly outnumbered by Asher and the half-dozen men and women he had asked to join him at the negotiating table.
Romero was right. Six months ago, the mere suggestion that they should enter town hall voluntarily, let alone prepared to make demands of their mayor, would’ve earned Asher snickers and cold shoulders from most of his neighbors. Now, he’d been inundated with ideas. Everyone seemed to have an opinion of how Sargasso should change. Everyone was hopeful.
That wouldn’t last if Asher failed to reach an agreement with Malachi. And Malachi knew it.
“You’re aware that we’re down to whatever’s left in every man’s pantry,” Asher started, shuffling his papers. He’d brought the stock book with him so there wouldn’t be any doubt as to the findings. “We’ve made an inventory of all our grain and meat. It’s enough to last—”
“Supplies have already been sent for.”
Asher looked up from the roster. “They have?”
Malachi inclined his head. “Two of my men left this morning to secure a shipment of grain from Mesa.”
Truth or lie? Malachi’s expression betrayed nothing.
“That was…timely.”
“I care for my people. I intend to see them fed and warm this winter. And happy, of course,” Malachi added with an insincere smile.
“What about the cattle?” asked Connie. She had been the first to stand up when Asher started going door to door, looking for volunteers. Her father had tried to dissuade her, but in vain. “Without the ranches runnin’, we’ll be out of money by spring. One supply of grain won’t last forever.”
Murmurs rippled around the table.
“That’s been dealt with.”
Asher frowned. “You’ve recovered the herd? We weren’t told about this.”
“You had other preoccupations.” Malachi shifted in his seat, tilting forward to join his hands over the table. “Which brings me to my main point. Ladies, gentlemen, Sargasso has passed through the crucible. We’ve come out the other side wounded and scarred, but stronger.” He glanced from Asher to the other humans gathered around his father’s table.
Was he thinking as Asher, that in Ambrose’s day the only humans to set foot in this house would’ve been lobotomized or dinner?
“I would like to make a clean break with the past. To start over,” Malachi said, “for the benefit of our human population and my vampire brethren.”
“We want the same thing.” Asher mimicked the pose. “But we’ll reserve judgment until we hear your terms.”
* * * *
The sun had begun to dip in the sky by the time they reached an agreement. Exhausted but satisfied with the result, the men and women of Sargasso filed out of the dining room in chattering twos and threes, practically thrumming with the newfound power to decide their own destinies.
“Asher, would you linger a moment?” Malachi called from the far end of the table.
Connie tightened her grip on Asher’s arm.
“It’s all right.” I’m not afraid of him.
She didn’t seem convinced, but neither did she press the point. The click of her boot heels faded down the hall.
Asher rested his hands on the back of a chair. The whole expanse of the dining table lay between him and Malachi, but they could have been standing as near as lovers for how close and intimate the moment felt.
“I haven’t forgotten, you know, what you did to my family.”
“I’m not the one who shot your sister,” Asher lobbed back.
“Didn’t realize you were so fond of her… Or Halloran.”
A muscle twitched under Asher’s eye.
“You see,” Malachi went on, rising from his seat, “I knew he was infatuated with you. But I thought it was simply one-sided
. I couldn’t believe that Asher Franklin, my father’s most unlikely foe, would stoop to feel anything but hate for a bloodsucker.” His tread was nearly soundless as he rounded the table. “How would your friends feel about that, I wonder?”
“I’m not the only man in town who’s been owned.”
“Indeed. But you are the only one for whom a vampire nearly gave his life,” Malachi admonished. “Don’t act surprised. I know it was you who killed Ambrose. And I know it was Halloran who killed my brother.”
Asher tilted his head back fractionally, the better to look down his nose at Malachi. “Seems we’re all murderers here, then.”
“No remorse, hmm?” Peering deep into his eyes, Malachi smiled. “Good. That will make working with you so much pleasanter. I simply can’t wait for our next council meeting.”
Although dismissal was audible in Malachi’s voice, Asher made no move to leave until Malachi had glanced away. “What did you mean,” he asked, already on the other side of the threshold, “about Halloran nearly giving his life?”
Malachi arched his brow. “I told you. The herd’s been dealt with.”
“Yes, you mentioned…” That piece of news had set the tone for the rest of the meeting, softening the hardliners against Malachi’s subsequent proposals. But what did it have to do with Halloran?
The herd’s been dealt with.
But not by you.
Asher opened his mouth to speak just as one of Malachi’s thugs stepped into his path. The double doors swung inward, curtailing his view of the dining room. Just before they snagged shut, Asher saw Malachi sink into Ambrose’s chair, his bony frame dwarfed by a tall backrest.
* * * *
The hammer struck a single, dull note, the thud only growing louder as Asher neared the farm.
