Dayna K Smith - [BCS276 S02] - Hangdog (html)

by Hangdog (html)

  After a pause, he settled on, “Thanks.”

  Past their heartbeats and breath, the fitful rain eased to sinister quiet; horses bickering for cover, repetitive zip of soaked rope, furtive fumbling through a saddlebag. Then an abrupt scuffle.

  “If these horses scatter because your nose gets long, Rissa, and I’ll feed you to Jonah for his last goddamn supper,” said Lloyd.

  So, her hangdog’s name was Jonah.

  A prissy hiss inside the cave was Lloyd stepping into the smoking kindling while fussing with the saddlebag Rissa must’ve snooped in. The lowering sky further divided Lloyd’s attentions, threatening like a poor-pitched tent come to smother them in the night.

  Rissa bitched outside, indistinct for human ears. “Solid silver. Fleecing us and riling wolves and I’d sure better kowtow. Wasn’t wolves left everybody to bleed out in the middle of nowhere.”

  Sounded like an open window. Now, to figure out how to wriggle their sorry asses through it. Grinn’s chest panged; she was no dab hand at appeals to sisterhood, but—beggars, choosers.

  Softness she almost couldn’t feel brushed her palms. A ginger rabbit twitched a determined nose at her, smelling of pepper and magick.

  “Aw, hell,” Grinn said. “Naked thirteen-year-old is better than this. You couldn’t pull off a snake?”

  First time she’d seen a rabbit shrug. Buddy bumped the silver, then squeaked, nursing her nose.

  “Left one shouldn’t hurt to bite. Get it off.”

  Buddy minced over to nibble the tin manacle’s pin.

  “Friend of yours?” Jonah asked, staring.

  “Jury’s out,” Grinn said. “See? Pack’s never too far.”

  Jonah tipped his head, like an etching of Dejection. Whiteness licked his ribs, so Grinn kicked his knee, and his eyebrows had something to say about that, for sure.

  Even a hint of fight, she could work with. “Jonah, right? Don’t sleep, it’ll spread. Why such hurry, anyway, if Lloyd’s what’s waiting? Shit, we’re not blood kin back home, but we’re solid ground. That fucker seems a slippery slope.”

  Jonah cracked a smile, sighing, “I got twenty cousins, human and wolf. Lloyd’s one flake in a blizzard. Family keeps him in line. Usually.”

  A different kind of lightning struck outside. For a blink, everything darkened tintype green, and the rain stopped. Buddy gnawed harder at the pin, trembling.

  Lloyd jittered to the entrance, yelling, “What, are you hoping to spot Lincoln? Hurry up.”

  The scene dulled again, and the two kinds of lightning shook out two kinds of thunder. Clotted smoke from his fool indoor fire made Lloyd shriek, “Ah shit, they’re comin’ for me.”

  “Doesn’t weather the weather too well,” Grinn whispered. Jonah frowned.

  “Hell’re you two barking about? Ain’t you dead yet, Jonah?” said Lloyd, hefting a petulant kick at Grinn as he passed. She accepted the bruise, sheltering Buddy.

  Lloyd grabbed Jonah’s hair, stuck out his wrist, thought the better of his tender veins, and settled on presenting an elbow. Demanding to be made a wolf, like an impatient nursemaid with a spoonful of ipecac.

  “Open up, now,” Lloyd said. “Really think you’ll make another year on your own?”

  Gods, lone that long? No wonder Jonah’d rather leave his paws full of thorns than trust strangers. He’d forgotten how to expect better. A person could bond with all kinds of evil stuff just to keep sane—even pain, if there were no pack to provide focus. Grinn’s eyes flashed, and she braced him with a knee.

  “One little bite, and it’s all over. Your suffering in this world’ll end, and my rights returned,” Lloyd said, slipping on brass knuckles wired with Jonah’s plucked claws. So that’s where they’d ended up. Doc would sure cluck her tongue.

  “You don’t deserve the strength,” Jonah said, clenching his jaw. Despite the shitty circumstances of how she was bitten, Grinn had to admit that amongst her many desires, there lay not a single wish to be human again. Had to be killing Lloyd’s delusions of grandeur to be born into a big pack and come out normal.

  Lloyd backhanded a slice through Jonah’s cheek, but Jonah didn’t give an inch.

  “Like hell I don’t deserve it!” Lloyd fumed. “Ain’t I family?”

  When he got no response, Lloyd eyed Grinn as a likelier mark. She leered the bloodthirstiest she could, drooling. “One little bite and it’s all over,” she echoed. His guts, that was, and all over the cave. She could be patient, though the silver kept her fangs as blunt as regular teeth. Good thing jackass didn’t infect like wolf could; she’d hate to catch it while chewing him to bits.

  A leaden bolt of ghost lightning blasted between them, brambling through the rimequartz. It withered Grinn’s throat with the scent of hot coals and illuminated a small crowd behind Lloyd, all facing away.

  Color returned, and everyone Lloyd had ever killed vanished.

  Grinn understood it like she’d understood that figure behind her reflected in the stormwater, years ago, though she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She hunched, knowing Salva must have loomed behind her again in that same brief flash, poised to collect Grinn’s killing debt.

  Buddy’s lungs pumped, tiny bellows in the crook of Grinn’s elbow, and Grinn wondered what, or who, she could’ve seen. The kid was no killer, even by accident.

  “Jesus,” Lloyd gasped, staring past Jonah as though off a cliff or into a vista. Without the untoward light, Lloyd was boggling at nothing but rimequartz and the haze of electrical discharge. Seemed Jonah had his ghosts, too.

  “Could’ve sworn that was Aunt Kay. And Bobby, and—” Jonah broke off, similarly stricken by the space between Lloyd and the storm. “You didn’t come with us in ’62. Were all those people from home? Is there anyone left?”

  Snowflake in a blizzard. Jonah had recognized someone. Lots of someones. Guess nobody in Jonah’s pack would give Lloyd the power he wanted. Some of those figures had been children.

  Lloyd gripped his pistol, a rope to sanity. “Got enough aconite candies left to shoot out that sanctimonious tongue. See if you snap then.”

  Jonah knelt, poison marbling his chest. “Yeah, I’ll. Bite. Your fucking arm off. With Sanctimonious. Fangs.”

  The first oily drops slapped the stone outside, blooming a hell-smell of creosote and sulfur. Lloyd, compensating for his shaking hand, cocked the pistol right in Jonah’s face.

  Buddy tugged whole-bodied at the skeejawed pin, hind paws braced on Grinn’s ass.

  Then, pitched for wolf ears, Rissa said, “Hey, Little Water.”

  Grinn twitched, finally noticing the clatter of the ponies’ hooves headed for the distant edge of her hearing.

  Rissa said, “You left Zeke and Clara alive. So. You wanna whup him, better do it now, ‘manita.”

  Little Water horses were bred to weather magick’s threats and didn’t have any debts to the storm; Rissa was cutting an escape fine, but she could hang on and trust to the horses’ speed.

  Grinn let slip a raw giggle. “She’s stealing the horses. Again.”

  Lloyd skedaddled into the oily drizzle, shooting. Grinn puffed her cheeks. With any luck, Lloyd would forget his own debts until his ghosts caught him up and took him down.

  Luckless Jonah collapsed.

  “Shit,” said Grinn, wedging her tin-cuffed hand between her butt and her bootheel. “Buddy, get the bullet out of him.”

  Buddy retracted her head, rattling her feet; HELL NO.

  “Toughen up,” Grinn snapped.

  Ears back, Buddy nibbled at Jonah’s wound. Milky blood slid between the glowing rimequartz crystals.

  With a grunt, Grinn dislocated her thumb, freeing her left hand.

  A bullet glanced her forearm; the brass knuckles hampered Lloyd’s shot. Grinn slapped away aconite sizzle and ricocheted crystal, accidentally snapping her thumb into place.

  “You’re stray now, sucker,” Lloyd yelled, storm-oil spraying from his moustache. “That’s what they call a pyre-ick victory.”

>   The black revolver clicked, empty. Lloyd’s sneer crumbled. Used up his special bullets, shooting at his fair-weather friend.

  “That’s what they call pissin’ into the wind,” Grinn said, lunging.

  Without thinking, she called out fangs, and the manacle’s silver deadweighted her to the hips in response. Thanks to momentum, though, at least she made a passable battering ram. And she only needed human teeth to restrain Lloyd’s false-clawed hand. His fingers spasmed, skittering the pistol off to the side, but the claws stayed on, nicking Grinn’s lip.

  Expecting the tussle to resume, Grinn gnawed harder, but to her surprise, Lloyd went limp, his free hand cradling her head. They landed flat and Lloyd gave a triumphant moan. Eugh, he thought she was giving him the bite.

  Grinn spat out the taste of Lloyd’s grubby knuckles and swung her loose manacle into his jaw. A satisfying hit, though it used the last of her strength under the silver, and on the follow-through she toppled like a scarecrow.

  Lloyd crawled after her, all set to skin a hide. “So help me, I’ll get mine if I have to take it piece by piece.”

  Lightning cast a lengthy shadow. Leery of wronged spirits, Lloyd flinched.

  At the cave’s mouth, a fire-eyed rabbit bounced in the air, spattering blood. With a bullet between her teeth.

  “Get back here, you sonofabitching mitten!” Lloyd yelled, but Buddy did not oblige.

  Before he could catch his chance for a reload, Grinn stomped on his arm. A few of his stolen claws pricked through her boot sole, sticking her and Lloyd together, so she rolled, dragging him with her into the embers. Storm-oil that had soaked into Lloyd’s trousers made a sudden success of the fire. While he hollered, Grinn kicked free, scrambling for the fallen pistol to whack open her silver cuff. Only took three tries.

  Pins and needles flamed her flexing arm, but calling claws felt delicious. Fangs out, she snarled. The rimequartz rang like a giant bell. Thunder snapped the air to pieces.

  Altogether, it was a hell of a ruckus.

  Lloyd froze in fear, alright, but he stared over Grinn’s shoulder.

  Like a fool, she looked back—at Jonah, swaying to his feet, coughing out the last of the bad blood...

  Rank after rank waited behind him, backs turned, uniforms tattered, idle hands drifting at their sides. Biding time until a breeze showed them where the living stood.

  She’d forgotten Jonah would have so many vengeful spirits to tear him apart in the Storm, unlike her. Another time, she might’ve felt fortunate. Instead, her innards cringed for him.

  Then the lightning stuttered out, and Buddy leapt for Lloyd’s mustache, toppling them both into the bruise-yellow wind. Grinn swiped to catch Buddy midair, but past the safety of the cave-mouth, it was like grabbing a swarm of bees. When Buddy hit the muddy rock and skidded to a senseless stop, she was human again. The Storm fell still.

  Lloyd’s panting echoed through the ragged fog. Then something yanked him out of sight.

  In the same instant, Grinn windmilled her arms, reeling away from Salva’s hand hanging thumb-down in the silent fog. A nightmare playing hide and seek, no longer just behind but anywhere. Despite the stillness, Grinn’s head felt the wheeling of the weather turning them all to face the past.

  Jonah steadied Grinn by the belt as she trembled, clawless.

  “Buddy, honey, the Storm ain’t got a claim on you,” Grinn whispered. Her breath made Salva’s chalk-brittle fingertips flutter. “Get up.”

  Like a beetle on a frying pan, Buddy hitchingly stood—and turned her back on Grinn. Just another figure in the fog.

  Grinn snarled at Jonah for dragging her to safety, but anyway, the cave had vanished.

  Instead, a long, long line of extended hands swept for him through the fog like a closing gate, with Jonah at the hinge.

  The storm struck, deafening and drowning.

  Grinn wheeled, fled, wheeled, fled. Always a slender hand reached, ash-covered, oil-pelted—either Salva’s revenant scrabbling for Grinn’s soul or Buddy struggling to escape to the living world. Maybe there was no difference, anymore, and Buddy had shifted shape for the last time, into a Salva, into the Storm.

  According to Doc, full wolf shift was full moon business. Hell with that. She needed all of herself. She snarled out a quick and dirty deal with the moon. Pack, lost. Not again.

  Ghost lightning cricked so slow she could tell it came from the ground and not from the sky, like proper. Everything slowed with it.

  Butcher noise. Grinn’s boots busted. Bones twisted like new twigs, sending her to her toes and then to all fours. Her shoulders hitched, spine creaking from jawbone to assbone. Cartilage crackled; ears pinned, a tail shook itself to fur. Fingers fisted. Teeth burst sharp.

  Sight slipped to violet twilight, and full-wolf Grinn sneezed the magick out. Wolf sight might be for shit, but scent made the world.

  Unfortunately, the storm only smelled like one thing.

  No time to cower. Use what you know: stuck in a room with a dead body, there was no keeping the stench out; you had to let it in. Grinn braced paws and opened her jaws.

  Terror blistered her nostrils, curdled her tongue, and ate into her skull. Too strong, too fresh.

  Woman peeled from wolf anchor on the edge of a memory that the storm pried loose; the cut of it was too familiar, the sourness of—

  —white sheets, ripped. White foam from Salva’s mouth. White moonlight pouring, scouring away the girls, tide-swelling beasts to the surface. One, a wolf. The other lost, corner-crazed but human.

  A crunch, a shriek. Salva’s raging panic weakening as her life fled, the scrabbling of crooked fingers softening until she almost tenderly cupped the wolf’s muzzle.

  In a still room in a quiet house on a silent farm, Grinn killed her last sister.

  This was her wolf’s first memory, so jarred by ugly circumstance as to feel like nonsense, half of a stranger’s story; an ill-braided aroma, overpowering with in-the-blood bad. Rabid. No hope, no denying. The wolf would rather person-Grinn stopped crying and smelled harder. Wasn’t a foreign tongue, wasn’t the same old pain of dreaming in Spanish, if the human would stop making herself difficult and let herself understand.

  See, a single strand never made a rope. Salva dying hadn’t only shown the wolf death-smell and run-smell. The wolf—sensible, patient—wanted to teach Grinn the other things she was shying from; even in this awful room, there lingered the green-growth, kissed-cheek smell of sister. And... a hint of cool-water, licked-wound, sudden shelter. No denying that, either. The wolf—and, finally, Grinn—tasted Salva’s relief, made it her own.

  She hadn’t been able to discern that, before—that Salva had been glad to go, to be released. The wolf stood stronger with Grinn; was Grinn, now.

  Wait. How could one moment happen twice? How could it be Now, again? Hm. Nothing was as now as this broken place tried to be.

  The Salva-smells were present, and true, but also done. Gone. Even though the breath in her nose gave it to her all at once, now that person-Grinn and wolf-Grinn had come back together, she could feel that the scents were a story—and stories had beginnings, ends, even futures. Well, what do you know; focus a little bit, and Grinn could smell time. Grinn sniffed out the trick, and kept sniffing, seeking escape, a window.

  Her nose latched onto a bright, unburied thread. Twanging with need, that powdery hope-in-worry sister-smell—not sister by blood, but scents could change from the impressions left upon them; weren’t just what a thing itself exuded. They’d marked each other, Grinn and—

  —right, Bud!

  Chaos resolved into a current swirl. Two hands reached through the cackling lightning, but Grinn trusted her nose. She ducked, heaving Buddy astride her giant back. Then she loped into a run, licking the wind for a ragged trail of Jonah’s scent as she remembered it, already familiar: raw-lumber determination and mellow, mesmerizing spice.

  Buddy clung to Grinn like a second pelt, her body humming like a guitar string under a finger seeking
a note. But every word she babbled into Grinn’s ruff seemed to solidify her further. “You’d think it’s a gaggle, or maybe a scare, but guess it’s a gust of ghosts.”

  There.

  Her nose, at least, said that arm-wrapped hulk clinging to a twisted railroad tie was Jonah. Waiting, or trying to, to share the abandoned rail line’s trail of escape. Face-first, Grinn burrowed through the tangle of ghost limbs surrounding him.

  When her muzzle finally pressed to Jonah’s fur-streaked cheek, he rounded on her, foam flecking his fangs. Grinn whined. This from the fellow who hadn’t flashed eyes for anything. But then a dark droplet of storm oil leaked from his eye, and a few sooty fingers protruded from inside his mouth. He’d already let too many spirits in, either guilty or just plain tired, and they were getting a grip on his jaw to peel him apart from the inside.

  Well, hush that. Grinn caught Jonah’s throat in her jaws, pressing just until she felt his heartbeat in her teeth. She whuffed, demanding submission: Master yourself. Are you ours, or the Storm’s? Who will you let in?

  Moving far slower than the heaving snarl of Jonah’s ghosts, Salva’s fingers slid into view, close enough for Grinn’s wide silver eye to see the graphite-like sheen of the soot. If Grinn let Jonah go now, he’d be lost. If she didn’t run from Salva there wouldn’t be anything left of her to find when the sun came out again. If it ever did.

  Against her neck, Buddy was rumbling a staunch encouraging growl, throwing her lot in with wolves regardless of what she might be. And while Grinn would run from death at every chance, she didn’t want to run from Salva any longer. Grinn stilled, tensed, all in.

  With a bone-light gentleness that had been rare when she was alive, Salva petted Grinn’s cheek as though marveling at how big Grinn had gotten. Grinn wished she could turn and look at her.

  A gale buffeted Jonah’s ghosts loose, more effective than the mightiest roar. Momentarily freed, he gagged out a bristleful of fitful fingers.