by Jim Butcher
I regarded Earp thoughtfully. It was, I supposed, possible that he could be in league with the German, playing some sort of deceitful game. But it seemed improbable. Had he and the German wanted me dead, Earp could simply have watched him walk me out without taking note of it.
“I believe you,” I told him simply.
“That cell’s warded,” Earp said. “From the inside, he’s not going to be doing much.” He glanced over at the German and gave him a cold smile. “Makes a lot of noise if you try, though. Figure I’ll shoot you five or six times before you get done whipping up enough magic to hurt anybody.”
The German stared at Earp through narrowed eyes and then abruptly smiled and appeared to relax. He unbuttoned his collar, removed his tie, and sat down on the cell’s lumpy bunk.
“Nnnngh,” Earp said, a look of mild disgust on his face. He squinted around the room at the building’s windows. Then he looked back at me and said, “Warden, huh? You’re a lawm—” He pursed his lips. “You carry a badge.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“What I mean to say is, you can fight,” Earp said.
“I can fight,” I said.
He leaned his lanky body back against the wall beside the desk and tilted his chin toward the German. “What do you think?”
“I think he has four friends,” I said. “All of them gifted. Do your windows have shutters?”
“Yep.”
“Then we should shutter them,” I said. “They will come for him.”
“Damn,” he drawled. “That’s what I think, too. Before dawn?”
The hours of darkness were the best time for amateurs to practice the dark arts, for both practical and purely psychological reasons. “Almost certainly.”
“What do you think about that?”
I narrowed my eyes and said, “I object.”
Earp nodded his head and said, “Only so much I can do about someone bringing spells at me. Can you fight that?”
“I can.”
Earp studied me for a moment, those dark eyes assessing. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “How about I’ll put up the shutters?” he said. “Unless you’d rather me make the coffee, which I don’t recommend.”
I shuddered at the American notion of coffee. “I’ll do that part,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “We got ourselves a plan.”
“WELL,” EARP SAID a few hours later. “I don’t much care for all the waiting. But this is some damned fine coffee, Miss Anastasia.”
I had, of course, used magic to help it. The beans had not been properly roasted, and the grinder they had been through had been considerably too coarse in its work. Some other Wardens thought my coffee-making spells to be a frivolous waste of time in the face of all the darkness in the world, but what good is magic if it cannot be used to make a delicious cup of a fine beverage?
“Just be glad you did not ask me to cook,” I said. “It is not one of my gifts.”
Earp huffed out a breath through his nose. “You ain’t got much femaleness to you, ma’am, if you pardon my saying so.”
I smiled at him sweetly. “I’m on the job at the moment.”
He grunted. “That Page fella you mentioned?”
I nodded.
“What’s he wanted for?”
“He murdered three people in Liverpool,” I said. “A girl he favored and her parents.”
“Guess she didn’t favor him back,” Earp said. “He shoot ’em?”
I shook my head and suppressed a shudder at the memory of the crime scene. “He ripped out their eyes and tongues,” I said. “While they lay blind and bleeding, he did other things.”
Earp’s eyes flickered. “I’ve seen the type before.” He glanced at the German.
The German sat in exactly the same place he’d settled hours before. The man had his eyes closed—but he smiled faintly, as if aware of Earp’s gaze on him.
Earp turned back to me. “What happens to Mr. Page when you catch him?”
“He will be fairly tried, and then, I expect, beheaded for his crimes.”
Earp examined the fingernails of his right hand. “A real fair trial?”
“The evidence against him is damning,” I said. “But fair enough.”
Earp lowered his hand again. It fell very naturally to the grip of his gun. “I’d never want me one of those, if I could avoid it,” he said.
I knew what he meant. There were times I didn’t care for the sorts of things it had been necessary to do to deal with various monsters, human or otherwise. I expect Earp had faced his own terrors, and the dirty labor required to remove them.
Such deeds left their weight behind.
“I wouldn’t care for one myself,” I said.
He nodded, and we both sipped coffee for a while. Then he said, “Once this is wrapped up, I think I’d like to buy you a nice dinner. When you aren’t on the job.”
I found myself smiling at that.
I was an attractive woman, which was simply a statement of truth and not one of ego. I dressed well, kept myself well, and frequently had the attention of men and women who wished to enjoy my company. That had been a source of great enjoyment and amusement when I was younger, though these days I had little patience for it.
But Earp was interesting, and there was a tremendous appeal in his lean, soft-spoken confidence.
“Perhaps,” I said. “If business allows for it.”
Earp seemed pleased and sipped his coffee.
THE TOWN HAD gone black and silent, even the saloons, as the night stretched to the quiet, cool hours of darkness and stillness that came before the first hint of dawn.
The witching hour.
We both heard the footsteps approaching the front door of the marshal’s office. Earp had belted on a second revolver, had a third within easy reach on the desk, and rose from his chair to take up a shotgun in his hands, its barrels cut down to less than a foot long.
My own weapons were just as ready, if less easily observable than Earp’s. I’d marked a quick circle in chalk on the floor, ready to be imbued with energy as a bulwark against hostile magic. The sword at my side was tingling with power I’d invested in it over the course of the evening, ready to slice apart the threads binding enemy spells together, and I held ready a shield in my mind to prevent attacks on my thoughts and emotions.
And, of course, I had a hand on my revolver. Magic is well and good, but bullets are often swifter.
The footsteps stopped just outside the door. And then there was a polite knock.
Earp’s face twisted with distaste. He crossed to the door and opened a tiny speaking window in it, without actually showing himself to whoever was outside. In addition, he leveled the shotgun at the door, approximately at the midsection of whomever would be standing outside.
“Evening,” Earp said.
“Good evening,” said a man’s voice from outside. This accent was British, quite well-to-do, its tenor pleasant. “Might I speak with Mr. Wyatt Earp, please?”
“Speaking,” Earp drawled.
“Mr. Earp,” the Briton said, “I have come to make you a proposal that will avoid any unpleasantness in the immediate future. Are you willing to hear me out?”
Earp looked at me.
I shrugged. On the one hand, it was always worth exploring ways not to fight. On the other, I had no confidence that a member of the Thule Society would negotiate in good faith. In fact, I took a few steps back toward the rear of the building, so that I might hear something if this was some sort of attempt at a distraction.
Earp nodded his approval.
“Tell you what,” he said to the Briton. “I’m going to stand in here and count quietly to twenty before I start pulling triggers. You say something interesting before then, could be we can make medicine.”
There was a baffled second’s silence, and the Briton said, “How quickly are you counting?”
“I done started,” Earp said. “And you ain’t doing yourself any favors right
now.”
The Briton hesitated an instant more before speaking in an even, if slightly rushed, tone. “With respect, this is not a fight you can win, Mr. Earp. If the Warden were not present, this conversation would not be happening. Her presence means we may have to contend with you to get what we want, rather than simply taking it—but it would surely garner a great deal of attention of the sort that her kind prefer to avoid, as well as placing countless innocents in danger.”
As the man spoke, Earp listened intently, adjusting the aim of his shotgun by a few precise degrees.
“To avoid this outcome, you will release our companion unharmed. We will depart Dodge City immediately. You and the Warden will remain within the marshal’s office until dawn. As an additional incentive, we will arrange for the new ordinances against your friend Mr. Short’s establishment to be struck from the city’s legal code.”
At that, Earp grunted.
I lifted an eyebrow at him. He held up a hand and gave his head a slight shake that asked me to wait until later.
“Well, Mr. Earp?” asked the Briton. “Can we, as you so pithily put it, make medicine?”
Something hard flickered in Earp’s eyes. He glanced at me.
I drew my revolver.
That action engendered a grin big enough to show some of his teeth, even through the mustache. He lifted his head and said, “Eighteen. Nineteen …”
The Briton spoke in a hard voice, meant to be menacing, though it was somewhat undermined by the way he hurried away from the door. “Decide in the next half an hour. You will have no second chance.”
I waited a moment before arching an eyebrow at Earp. “I take it these terms he offered were good ones?”
Earp lowered and uncocked the shotgun and squinted thoughtfully. “Well. Maybe and maybe not. But they sound pretty good, and I reckon that’s what he was trying for.”
“What was he offering, precisely?”
“Bill Short went and got himself into some trouble with the folks north of the tracks. They want to clean up Dodge City. Make it all respectable. Which, I figure, ain’t a bad thing all by itself. They got kids to think about. Well, Bill’s partner run for mayor and lost. Fella that won passed some laws against Bill’s place, arrested some of his girls—that kind of thing. Bill objected, and some shooting got done, but nobody died or anything. Then a mob rounded up Bill and some other folks the proper folk figured was rapscallions and ran them out of town.”
“I see,” I said. “How do you come into this?”
“Well, Bill got himself a train to Kansas City, and he rounded up some friends. Me, Bat, Doc, a few others.”
I glanced at the lean man and his casually worn guns. “Men like you?”
“Well,” Earp said, and a quiet smile flickered at the edges of his mustache. “I’d not care to cross them over a matter of nothing, if you take my meaning, Miss Anastasia.”
“I do.”
“So, we been coming into town to talk things over with this mayor without a mob deciding how things should go,” Earp continued. “Little at a time, so as not to make too much noise.” He opened the peephole in the office door and squinted out of it. “Got myself redeputized so I can go heeled. Been over at the Long Branch with Bat.”
“The saloon the mayor passed a law against?”
“Well, it ain’t like it’s a state law,” Earp said. “More of a misunderstandin’. See, as much as the good folks north of the tracks don’t want to admit it, cattle and these cowboys are what keeps this town alive. And those boys don’t want to come in at the end of a three-month trail ride and have a nice bath and a cup of tea. Kind of country they’re going through can be a little tough. So they drop their money here, blowing off steam.” He rubbed at his mustache. “Hell, sin is the currency around this place. Don’t take a genius to see that. Those good folk are going to righteous themselves right out of a home.” He sighed. “Dammit, Doc. Why ain’t you here yet?”
“Friend of yours?” I asked.
“Holliday,” Earp confirmed. “Good fella to have with you when it’s rough. Plus he’s got two of them Venator pendants around his neck. Took one from some fool in a faro game.”
“I need to know,” I said, “if you mean to take the Thule Society’s offer seriously.”
“Can’t do that, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “They’re only offering me something I can get for myself just as well.”
I found myself smiling at that. “You’re willing to challenge an entire town to a fight? For the sake of your friend’s saloon?”
“It ain’t the saloon, ma’am,” Earp drawled. “It’s the principle of the thing. Man can’t let himself get run out of town by a mob, or pretty soon everyone will be doing it.”
“If a mob is responsible,” I said, smiling, “is not something close to everyone already doing it?”
Earp’s eyes wrinkled at that, and he tapped the brim of his cap.
“Idiot,” said the German from the cell, contempt in his voice.
“Sometimes,” Earp allowed. He shut the peephole and said, “Those Thule bastards ain’t going to wait half an hour. Snakes like that will come early.”
“I agree,” I said. “But going out shooting seems an unlikely plan.”
“Can’t disagree,” Earp said. “Course, maybe it’s just a man’s pride talkin’, but it seems like it ain’t much of an idea for them to try to come in here, either.”
It was then that the drum began beating, a slow, steady cadence in the darkness.
I felt my breath catch.
The German smiled.
Earp looked at me sharply and asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Trouble,” I said. I shot a hard glance at the German. “We’ve made a mistake.”
The German’s smile widened. His eyes closed beatifically.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He said nothing.
“What the hell is going on?” Earp said, not in an unpleasant tone.
“This man is no mere member of the Thule Society,” I said. I turned my attention toward the outside of the jailhouse, where I could already feel dark, cold, slithering energy beginning to gather. “We are dealing with necromancers. They’re calling out the dead. Is there a cemetery nearby?”
“Yep,” Earp said. “Boot Hill.”
“Deputy,” I said. “We need to plan.”
“SHOOT,” EARP SAID a quarter of an hour later, staring out the peephole. “I didn’t much like these fellas the first time I shot them.” He had added another revolver to his belt, and had traded in his shotgun for a repeating rifle. “And time ain’t been kind. I make it over thirty.”
I stepped up next to Earp and stood on my tiptoes to peer out the peephole. We had dimmed the lights to almost nothing, and there was just enough moon to let me see grim, silent figures limping and shambling down the street toward the jailhouse. They were corpses, mostly gone to bone and gruesome scraps of leathery skin with occasional patches of stringy, brittle hair.
“There’s some more, coming up on that side,” Earp said. “Forty. Maybe forty-five.”
“Properly used, a dozen would be enough to kill us both,” I said to him. I took a brief chance and opened my third eye, examining the flow of energies around the oncoming horrors. “We are fortunate. These are not fully realized undead. Whoever called them up is not yet an adept at doing so. These things are scarcely more than constructs—merely deadly and mostly invulnerable.”
He eyed me obliquely. “Miss Anastasia, that ain’t what a reasonable man would call comfortin’.”
I felt my lips compress into a smile. “After a certain point, the numbers hardly matter. The drum beats for their hearts—it both controls the constructs and animates them. Stop that and we stop them all, even if there were a thousand.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, aim for the head. That should disrupt the spell controlling them.”
Earp looked over his shoulder at the German. The man looked considerably less
smug or comfortable than he had throughout the evening. At my direction, Earp had hog-tied him to one of the wooden pillars supporting the roof and gagged him thoroughly. I had chalked a circle of power around him and infused it with enough energy to prevent him from reaching outside of it for any magical power. They were crude precautions, but we could not afford to give the German an opportunity to strike at us while we were distracted. Such measures would hinder any particularly dangerous attack—and would not stop Earp’s bullet from finding the German’s skull, should he attempt anything that was not instantly lethal.
I stepped back from the window, closed my eyes, and invoked the communication spell I had established with the näcken.
Karl, I murmured with my thoughts, are you ready?
Obviously, the näcken replied.
Have you located the Thule Society?
There was an amused tint to the dark faerie’s reply. On the roof of a building three doors down and across the street. They seem to think that they have warded themselves from sight.
Excellent, I replied. Then we will begin shortly.
Four warlocks, Karl mused. You realize that your death releases me from our contract?
I ground my teeth without replying. Then I cocked my revolver, turned to Earp, and nodded.
“Seems like a bad hand, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “But let’s play it out.”
And with no more fanfare than that, Wyatt Earp calmly opened the door to the jailhouse, raised his rifle to his shoulder, and walked out shooting, and I went out behind him.
Earp was a professional. He did not shoot rapidly. He lined the rifle’s sights upon the nearest shambling figure and dropped a heavy round through its skull. Before the corpse’s knees began to buckle, he had ejected the shell and taken aim at the next nearest. That shot bellowed out, and as the sound of it faded, the crowd of corpses let out a terrifying wave of dry, dusty howls and began launching themselves forward in a frenzied lurch.
I raised my Webley, took aim, and dropped a corpse of my own—though in the time it took me to do it, Earp had felled three more without ever seeming to rush.
