Aster’s face grew hot. “Listen—”
Clem grabbed Aster’s wrist, shaking her head and pointing towards the stable entrance. Two men stood in the wide opening.
Augie. He held his lantern high, and a gun hung easy at his hip.
Aster’s heart hammered painfully in her chest as she crouched lower in the hay. She and Clem began crawling, as silently as possible, back into the corner where the others were huddled, alarm plain on all their faces.
“You ever known me to lie, Rich?” Augie asked. “Honest to the dead, Baxter McClennon was at the tables with me, and I won twenty eagles off him.”
“As if McClennon would plant his pampered ass at a table you were reeking up.”
“Hey, any man that don’t reek by the end of the day is hardly a man at all,” Augie argued.
Aster pressed up against the stall’s wall. She held her breath as the men’s voices got closer. Everyone stilled. The light of the lantern swept across the floor.
Clementine gripped Aster’s arm, her fingernails digging into Aster’s flesh.
“You just count your blessings it wasn’t Derrick you were playing,” Rich went on. “Everyone knows he’s the smart brother. Off at some fancy boarding school overseas—”
Closer, closer … Maybe four steps away now. Three, two. Aster tensed, forming a fist, prepared to strike.
“—too busy with his studies to give you the drubbing you deserve,” Rich finished, passing their stall without stopping.
Their voices receded. Rich found his horse a moment later, and Augie led him back out. The girls watched the stableman hurry across the street to Clooney’s.
Aster exhaled.
“That was way too close,” Clementine whispered.
“And he could be back any minute,” Aster agreed. “We need to get out of here—”
“We need to do exactly as I say,” Violet interrupted. “I have a plan.”
Aster turned to her, biting back frustration. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait until we’ve put Green Creek behind us.”
“You don’t even know which way you’re going. You barely made it out of the house. But follow me and we can get rid of these favors for good.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Aster asked, bewildered. Favors were impossible to hide and impossible to remove. Everyone knew this. Aster turned to the others and asked again: “What the hell is she talking about?”
“She explained the whole thing to us while we were waiting for you,” Clementine said. “I think it’s maybe worth listening to her. It might actually work.”
“See?” Violet spat. “I told you. I know things.”
Aster had completely forgotten about Violet’s wild promises of privileged information. She’d thought then that Violet was bluffing, trying to get them to let her come along.
It was clear now that she was just the world’s best fool. But Aster would hear her out, if only because Clementine insisted.
Aster gritted her teeth.
“All right, then, how do we get rid of our favors?”
Violet paused. “We’re going to find Lady Ghost,” she said. “I know where she lives.”
For a moment, no one said anything. Aster felt something bubbling up inside her. A laugh. It came out of her mouth, harsh and sharp.
“Lady Ghost?” Aster demanded in a whispered snarl. “That’s your brilliant idea?”
The other girls were silent.
“She’s real,” Violet said coldly.
“She’s a bedtime story. If I wanted horseshit, Violet, I could just stay in this stable.”
Lady Ghost was just a tall tale the youngest Good Luck Girls told themselves, a mysterious housemistress with the power to magic favors away. Some said she was called “Ghost” because of the way she made the tattoos disappear. Others said it was because she was so elusive herself.
Nobody over the age of twelve believed in her. Aster never had.
“It can’t hurt to try, can it?” Tansy asked. “We have nowhere else to go. If we try to find our families, we’ll just put them in danger, too.”
Tansy. Probably the cleverest among them, and here she was swallowing this false hope. Aster squared her gaze on Violet. “Listen, I get how you might be able to come up really believing Lady Ghost was out there,” she said slowly. “You’ve lived your whole life in this world. But we’re in the real world, now, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this, hear? She doesn’t exist.”
Violet curled her lip. “I’m done explaining myself. I already told you. I know things.”
“So where is Lady Ghost, then?” Aster asked.
“I wasn’t born yesterday. I know if I tell, you all will just abandon me. You’re stuck with me because you don’t know where you’re going, and I’m stuck with you because I know better than to travel in Arketta alone. And don’t give me that bit about cutting my throat. If you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it already.”
Aster stood up and began to pace. She wished to the dead that Violet had never discovered them. But there was no use in arguing with her now, and Aster didn’t want to give Violet any reason to cross them later. And if there was the tiniest hint of a chance … No. Of course there wasn’t.
But what if?
Aster turned to the others. “Do you honestly believe her? Do you believe what she says?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” Clementine asked. Her voice was pleading. Aster had no response. She knew the others were right about one thing—they had nowhere else to go. There was no telling where their families lived now; landmasters traded dustbloods between one another like batball cards. And their parents certainly couldn’t protect them.
Aster never would have wanted to crawl back to the ones who had abandoned her in the first place, anyway. She couldn’t go home.
Violet seemed to take Aster’s silence as a surrender. She flashed a self-satisfied grin. “Right, now that that’s settled. All you need to know for now is that we’re heading towards Killbank. Just do as I say.”
Killbank. A decent-sized town a day’s ride north. Just the thought of crossing the Scab made Aster’s skin crawl. No one traveled far without hiring a rangeman. Not only because of the living things that hunted in the woods, but because of the dead things, too. The predators that couldn’t be seen or heard.
The vengeants.
But we don’t have a choice. We have to get out of Green Creek.
“Unless you have a better option?” Violet said, a smug challenge in her voice.
Mallow and Tansy were staring at Aster.
“We have to go in some direction,” Mallow said. “Might as well be that one.”
Aster turned to Clementine. Okay? she asked with a look.
Clementine gave her a single nod. And while their eyes were still locked, she leaned in, brushed a hand against her own favor and whispered, “Aster, I want to try.”
Aster turned to Tansy and Mallow next. They were already helping each other up, checking to make sure the coast was clear. Like Aster, they probably just wanted to leave as soon as possible.
It was decided.
Aster turned back to Violet.
“All right,” she said. “But you remember what I told you, Violet. You don’t get a second chance.”
“I won’t need one,” Violet said. There was an expression of steely certainty on her face.
They didn’t waste any more time. They ransacked the stable for what little supplies they could find—blankets, a bit of food and a canteen of water, spare men’s clothes from Augie’s living quarters. They quickly changed into the trousers and shirts, stashing their dresses under hay bales, then picked three horses and tacked up: a bay for Aster and Clementine, a piebald for Tansy and Mallow, and a black mare for Violet. It had been a lifetime since Aster had last saddled a horse, but her hands remembered how, and the ritual of it reassured her. Aster took the reins and Clementine slid in behind her, wrapping her arms around Aster’s middle. And with a crack of the reins,
they began to ride.
* * *
Aster led them down Green Creek’s beaten dirt roads, angling north. The heart of town pulsed with wild energy, men pouring out of saloons and shouting to one another across the street. Nearer the edge of town, most of the shops were darkened on the street level, lamplight glowing from their upper levels where the shopkeepers had retired. They rode by the dress shop where all girls from the welcome house were taken, supervised by raveners, to be fitted for their new wardrobes when they became sundown girls. Aster cast her gaze to the mountains that loomed black against the night sky. A girl could lose her way in those mountains, easy. But so could anyone on her tail.
She just had to get there.
None of them spoke, though their tension hummed in the air. They’d wrapped dustkerchiefs around their faces to cover their favors. That in itself wouldn’t arouse suspicion, Aster hoped—plenty of folks covered their faces in the Scab on account of all the mining dust in the air—but it wouldn’t take but a few minutes before their favors started to glow, giving them away. Not to mention the pain.
Still, they moved at a painstaking pace so as not to attract attention. Aster kept listening for any sound, near or far, that indicated the brag’s body had been found, that the alarm had been raised, or that the welcome house raveners were on their tail. But there was only the fading sound of the revelry they’d left behind. They reached the ragged outskirts of town. It was as far as Aster had been from the welcome house since becoming a Good Luck Girl.
But it wasn’t until they crossed the threshold of the deadwall and dove into the woods that something in Aster released, a loosening of the blood in her veins.
“Come on!” she called back to the others, surprising herself with a laugh. They pulled their dustkerchiefs off, and Aster saw her grin reflected on all their faces. Even Violet’s mask of lofty indifference had slipped. Aster broke into a gallop, racing away from Green Creek and up into the foothills. She hadn’t felt this fast since she was ten years old. The way the air rushed against her cheeks, the way her heart beat fast with joy, not fear—there was something indescribably right about the rhythm of a horse’s hoofbeats, the creak of the leather saddle, the earthy, animal musk. Another laugh tore out of Aster. Clementine raised her hands to the sky.
Aster didn’t know if Mother Fleur had found the body yet. She didn’t know if Violet was full of shit. She didn’t know where they would sleep tonight, or where their next meal would come from, or whether or not the iron of the horseshoes would be enough to keep the dead at bay.
But the welcome house was shrinking in the distance, its light no bigger than a candle flame, and just then, that was enough. She savored the unfamiliar feeling of freedom. Grew full from it. Until …
“Thank you, Aster,” Clementine said from behind. Her relief was near a solid thing. “Thank you for getting us out of there.”
And with that, Aster’s happiness fractured, letting in a trickle of fear of what lay ahead. At the welcome house, she’d learned what kind of dangers to expect. Out here, she could only guess. What if she’d gotten Clementine out of one hell just to drag her into another?
Nothing could be worse than what they’d left behind, Aster told herself. Still, even as she squeezed her sister’s hand in reassurance, all she could think was: Don’t thank me yet.
6
It wasn’t long before the darkness of the forest swallowed them entirely. Aster squinted into it, urging her horse along the steep, rocky deer path and ducking her head underneath overgrown branches. She and Clementine led the way, while Tansy and Mallow followed them and Violet brought up the rear. Violet lagged a bit behind the rest of group, seeming to struggle with her mare, though whether that was because the horse was just as hardheaded as she was or because the path was so damned treacherous, Aster couldn’t say.
Aster had considered sparing them the trouble by taking the relatively level main road that cut through the Scab. The Bone Road, folks called it, on account of how many unmarked graves sprouted up along its banks. Most travelers died from heat sickness or exposure. Some were killed by highwaymen. Others just had the bad luck to stir up a scorpion. But deadly as it was, the Bone Road still made for the safest traveling in the mountains. It was lined with iron wardants to discourage vengeants, and it was crawling with lawmen to discourage criminals—which now included all five of them. And so rather than chancing discovery on the Bone Road, Aster had led their group into the trees instead. The law would have trouble following them through the woods, even if Mother Fleur’s raveners would not.
And the dead, of course, would be waiting to greet them.
There were three varieties of spirit this side of the Veil: seraphants, benevolent spirits of your ancestors that returned to the land of the living to guide you; remnants, spirits trapped in the land of the living because they weren’t yet ready to move on; and vengeants, spirits born of the raw anger and anguish of a tortured soul, released at last upon death.
Seraphants were so rare Aster wasn’t convinced they were even real—folks prayed to the dead for wisdom and luck, but Aster knew no one was coming to save her.
Remnants were more common. They could be frightening, but they were ultimately harmless, and a well-trained hallower could help most of them find their peace.
Vengeants, though, would rip into anyone unlucky enough to cross their path—and the Scab was overrun with them. Even now the vengeants’ howls rose up around Aster and Clementine, human cries that had been twisted into something animal. The vengeants started up their keening every night come sundown, right along with the crickets and the bullfrogs. Aster was used to that.
But they’d never sounded this ripping close before.
If one of the vengeants attacked, Aster and the others would have no choice but to flee. They didn’t have the weapons to defend themselves. But how could they escape from monsters they couldn’t even see? Vengeants were only visible in the direct light of the moon, and it was pitch-black here under the trees.
As they rode, Aster’s worry gathered speed. Maybe they hadn’t had much time to come up with a plan, but anything, surely, was better than diving recklessly into the dark like this. Every thud of the horse hooves sounded like a nail in her coffin.
“Clem? You still awake?” Aster asked softly. Clem had gone quiet behind her, though her grip around Aster’s waist was tight as ever.
Clem stirred. “I don’t feel like I’ll ever be able to sleep again,” she murmured. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
It was clear the glow of freedom from their escape had begun to fade, and the truth of what Clem had done had begun to sink in for her. Aster swallowed, wishing she had any idea what to say. She knew all too well what it felt like to be trapped in a bad memory, reliving every moment over and over until your guts turned to water and your chest was fit to burst. But if there was any way to free yourself from those memories, Aster hadn’t discovered it yet. You just had to wait for the storm to pass.
“Try your best not to think about it,” Aster managed finally. “You didn’t do a thing wrong.”
“But Aster, what if I’ve damned myself?” Clementine went on. “What if—”
“No! Come on, now. Don’t even talk like that.”
“It’s right there in the Hallowed Book. To take the life of your fellow man on Earth is to forfeit paradise beyond the Veil—”
“That means murder, Clementine. Everyone knows that. It’s not murder if you’re defending yourself.”
“But murder is what people will call it.”
Well, Aster couldn’t deny that. But she also couldn’t bear for Clem, of all people, to start losing hope. Aster was quiet for a moment, her breath feathering in front of her. It could grow bitterly cold in the Scab at night, and Augie’s thin work shirt did little to warm her. A chill had already begun to settle beneath her skin.
“You know the dead better than anyone,” Aster tried again. She reached for Clem’s hand and tugged gently on her rattle
tail-patterned bracelet. Ever since Clementine had nearly died herself, she’d been sensitive to ghosts—could see a vengeant even without moonlight, could sense the bent of a remnant’s thoughts and sometimes even communicate with it. “Trust that they’ll understand why you had to do what you did, and that they’ll judge you fairly in the end.” Aster glanced over her shoulder. “Speaking of the dead, are any of these vengeants getting too close?”
“I don’t think so,” Clementine said, shifting in the saddle. “I’ve never seen this many before, though. And my skin’s crawling like we’re in the middle of a lightning storm. But they seem to be avoiding us for some reason—”
Then, suddenly, a swift shadowed something dashed across the path in front of them, close enough for Aster to smell the rot left in its wake. Panic spiked through her blood. The vengeant’s howl pierced the air an instant later, filled with unspeakable agony. Clementine screamed. Their horse reared up, nearly throwing them.
“What the hell was that?” Mallow cried out, her voice taut with fear, while Tansy let out a rare curse.
“Vengeant, but it’s already gone,” Aster said quickly, if only to quiet everyone. But in truth, her own heart threatened to leap out of her chest. She searched the thicket of trees helplessly. Nothing but darkness. Then she saw the vengeant for an instant as it cut across a pool of moonlight, silvered and skeletal and feline, lunging for them swift as the wind. Its eyes glowed red-black. Its batlike wings spread wide. Its skull bristled with a crown of antlers and a mouthful of wolfish fangs. Then it passed out of the moonlight and became invisible once more, leaves hissing beneath feet as it rushed towards them.
Primal fear seized Aster by the throat. She spurred the bay forward. “Come on, we need to move, it’s coming back around!”
“Wait, I dropped something!” Violet cut in.
“Ripping hell, just leave it,” Aster cried. But she turned back to see that Violet had already dismounted. This girl was clueless. She was going to get them all killed. “We’re not waiting!”
“Just give me a second!”
The Good Luck Girls Page 6
