Dreadful Skin Copyright © 2008 by Cherie Priest.

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration Copyright © 2008 by Jon Foster.

All rights reserved.

Interior design Copyright © 2008 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

978-1-59606-371-6

Far Territories

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.far-territories.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One: The Wreck of the Mary Byrd

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part Two: Halfway to Holiness

I

II

III

IV

Part Three: Our Lady of the Wasteland and the Hallelujah Chorus

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

Dreadful Skin is dedicated to the memory

of my grandfather, the Seventh Day Adventist

Minister H. A. Swinson.

He probably wouldn’t have read this—

but he might have been tickled

by the idea of it.

Acknowledgements

I need to thank a few people, without whom Dreadful Skin would have never happened—or at least, it never would have been any fun. First and foremost, thanks to Bill Schafer, who likes to take chances on strange things. He has spoiled me with his friendliness, wit, and professionalism.

I know I’m not alone when I thank my lucky stars for his enthusiastic support for projects like this one.

Likewise, thanks to my husband Aric, who paid the bills so I could stay home and write about werewolves; and thanks to the staff at the Aurafice coffee shop in Seattle, Washington—for letting me camp there daily, taking up space in their fine establishment while purchasing precious little.

***

And extra special “thanks so much for being a good sport” accolades go to Dr. Eileen Meagher, rhetoric professor at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga—for giving me permission to get a little silly.

The Eileen found in these pages is only a faint caricature, but my former teacher’s open-mindedness, cleverness, good humor, and uncanny patience did much to inform the heroine of these little stories.

May she read this with a smile, and not a groan of embarrassment.

Part One:

The Wreck of the Mary Byrd

In 1870 the steamboat Mary Byrd vanished on the Tennessee River, somewhere between Chattanooga and Knoxville. She was never recovered, and her passengers and crew have long been presumed dead. No trace of the wreck has ever been found.

This is the strange and tragic story of the boat’s last night—as told by those who rode aboard her. Listen to their tales: the captain, a gambler, a former slave, and an Irish nun with a revolver under her skirt.

And listen as the villain shares his part in the tragedy.

This is his confession too.

From the jungles of India to an American riverboat, his journey was stranger than anyone could have guessed. More monster than man, he was trapped in a storm, on a boat, with a moon above that was almost full—and a deadly hunger that could not be contained.

So here lie the ghosts of the Mary Byrd. This is their last testament. Read it, and may you kindly judge the souls you meet within.

I.

I will tell you how it happened.

It unfolded.

***

My name was Christopher Cooper, and I gambled for my money like a good little sinner. The big-stakes games in Texas, and out in California—they kept me very well fed, and dressed in all the imported clothes I could stand.

I was a big man—once a hard-working man with lots of muscles, but I admit in time that it all ran to fat. It took a lot of cash to clothe me.

I liked big jackets with deep pockets, and I liked boots with quiet heels. No sense in announcing yourself everywhere, I always said. Sometimes I wore bolo ties, but I never resorted to cowboy hats like some of the fellows out west. I always preferred to think of myself as a northeastern lad. The bolo was merely a concession to fashion and a conversation piece.

Women seemed to like it. They’d touch it with their pretty-smelling fingers and twist it around their nails, asking me where I got it from. Once upon a time there was a turquoise slide on it—a fine polished stone set in silver. It matched a pocket watch I carried, and I liked to have them together.

The watch was a gift from a married woman who wouldn’t let me keep her. She had it engraved, so I’d always remember why I loved her, and that she’d sent me on my way. She was a cruel little beast. I worshipped the ground she walked on.

Think of me every moment.

If I was very lucky, she might have thought about me once in a blue moon. I didn’t need a reminder, but the watch was too beautiful to discard in some sentimental gesture. It was worth a small fortune. She’d commissioned it from a jewelry maker in San Francisco. He was an Austrian, she said.

In time, the nuisance longing I felt for her faded to a dull pang noticed only on occasion. But I always did love that watch, shining merrily on its matching silver chain. And every time I considered the time, until the day I died, I thought of her.

***

Those first, lazy nights onboard that damn boat, we came and went from our rooms to the main decks—back and forth from the galley to the prow, starboard to port or however they put it when you’re talking about a water vessel. We wandered around, is what I mean to say. There wasn’t much else to do except stare at the water and play cards downstairs on the first level.

So that’s where I spent most of my time, when I could find someone to play with me. After a while, the pickings got slim. I’m awfully good, and most of my traveling companions weren’t willing to bet in earnest, so there wasn’t much to win. Even so, by a few days into my journey I was willing to bet in buttons or clamshells. Anything to eat up the time.

No wonder the captain drank so much.

Boat was one hell of a dull way to travel. I shuddered to think of my grandparents, who crossed an ocean in a bigger boat than this one. The Atlantic? I would have killed myself from the sheer dullness of it all.

But I must confess, the boat was a pretty thing—and I can appreciate a pretty boat or a pretty woman as well as the next man. The Mary Byrd they called her. I want to say it was named for the captain’s wife, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think he bought it from another man and the name came with it.

Some other man’s wife, more likely—or a daughter. Or a mistress.

I hope she was named for someone beautiful.

On the outside she was painted white, or a bright ivory—and her name was splashed on the side in bloody yellow-orange letters with curlicues. She had a paddlewheel on her stern too, and it matched the lettering. The rails on the deck were lined with that curious latticework you see on houses sometimes; it cast shadows in the afternoons, like eyelets in the fabric of a lady’s nightgown.

On the inside, she was dressed in red and orange that looked like nothing so much as a high-class whorehouse. If I’d said as much out loud, people would wish to know how I was qualified to make such a comparison.

I was qualified. But I kept it to myself.

Where the floors were scuffed and shined wood, they were run with low rugs; and the lamps were all set with glass, brass, and crystal dangles that looked like earrings.

***

The other passengers gathered that I had money, and most of them probably knew (or could guess) how I’d gotten it. I thought maybe the nun would look down her nose about it, gambling not being sanctioned by the Lord, and all; but if she cared or noticed, she didn’t say anything. She was a papist, after all—and open to her own set of criticisms from the other passengers.

To think of it that way—and I guess I should—we all had something like that about us. Perhaps it was just coincidence, or merely the time of year; but the Mary Byrd was a ship of misfits, in a most uninteresting way.

That last trip from Knoxville to Chattanooga was more empty than full; and those of us who were left were those without more proper, permanent places to be. As far as I could ascertain, we were all passing from one thing to another, as is ordinary enough when it comes to traveling companions.

But none of us were coming from home—or going there. So I don’t suppose it’s strange that when we were lost, we were forgotten.

There were signs that should’ve told us to expect trouble from the very start—or from our last stop, at Lenoir City. Whatever went wrong, we picked it up there; and I can only think of one person for sure who boarded then.

I shouldn’t be so veiled about it. After all, by the end, we all knew. And it doesn’t much matter to us now. I’d like to think he’s been waiting all this time, though I can’t imagine why he would. Maybe he lost something when the boat went down. Maybe he left something behind, and he can’t rest until he gets it back.

I doubt it, though. If he watches at all, he watches because he’s afraid. He’s afraid, and he wants to make sure that it stays buried, and burned up there in the water where he left it.

He wants to make sure that she stays buried, and he’s afraid she hasn’t.

II.

I will tell you how it happened.

It broke.

***

I didn’t have much of value, but I was rich. My mother was a slave, and I was born one too—but she stayed, and I went north after the war. I did all right for myself. I worked hard, but I got paid and I paid my own way from it. My name was Laura Brown, and I was nobody’s slave.

When I got up north, first of all I started work in a factory where we plucked poultry—but it was dark there and so close, and it always smelled like the shit of dead chickens, and the fuzz from the feathers made my nose itch all day. It made my eyes water, even on days when the wind blowed through the open windows and the stink wasn’t so bad.

Before long, I left the factory and went to work in a kitchen.

I washed dishes, spent every day up to my elbows in greasy water with cheap soap bubbles. The restaurant was big and it served a lot of folks every day. I stayed twelve hours if they wanted. My home wasn’t worth running home to.

I shared a place high in the city with eight other girls and the brother of one of them.

All of us working together made enough to eat and sleep there, but not by much. But none of us were house niggers, and none of us were field niggers. We earned our own and we paid our way, though living was crowded and dark.

We were sick all the time, one or another of us. One would catch a bug, and the rest of us would pass it around—so it was easier to stay in the kitchen, in the dish room with the pots and pans. It was easier to be clean there, in the middle of the kitchen. It was easier to breathe.

But I missed the sun.

I missed being able to breathe and not smell piss and tomatoes, wine and onions and meat that’s thinking about going bad. I didn’t like the cold, either. I could always handle it hot. Hot meant nothing to me. I was a girl in Mississippi, down by the ocean near where the loud water birds scream and steal your food if you don’t hang onto it.

That’s part of why they liked me in the kitchen. The hot water and the hot stoves were easy work for me, and I could work them all day.

But come winter, every year I thought I’d die rather than stay another season. I’d watch the snow pile high up out the window, and the first time I saw it, it was all I could do not to start crying. I near lost my religion every time the wind blew up and the ice made the street stones hard to cross. I saved my work money when I could, and I bought heavier skirts, heavier coats. But it was never enough. There weren’t boots thick enough to save my feet when the snow went melting through. There weren’t wool socks made heavy enough to keep my toes from turning colors and losing feeling.

And Lord, I was far from home.

I thought, like the rest of us did, that the farther north I’d go, the easier it would be. The less trouble I’d have. The more money I’d make. Nobody told me about the cold, though. Nobody told me about how everything I owned would stink of coal and wood smoke, and how our lungs would turn themselves black. They didn’t tell us how just breathing would make us wish we couldn’t.

I asked around. I thought since it’d been a few years since the war and we were freed all over—I thought maybe it’d be okay to come home.

I heard it wasn’t. I heard times was tough there for everybody, even the white people too. But that didn’t mean much. I saw poor white people in the north cities too; I saw signs that broke them down by what country they came from, and offered them less money for doing the same jobs. I thought it was crazy, how white people thought there was some difference between them, and not just between us and them.

The older I got, the less sense they made to me.

But back down in Dixie I heard tale of sharecropping and bad laws. Nobody getting no work, and nobody having enough to eat. And down there now, where everyone was poor just about, it was like in the cities—and all the folks got to fight amongst themselves for what’s there.

I heard it was worse than before, some ways.

But then I’d sit in our little room, huddled up around the stove with the rest of the girls, and I’d wish I could feel my feet again, and I’d hate it how I could see my breath every morning when I woke up, and I thought maybe it couldn’t be worse than this.

Maybe I could go back down and get some learning. Maybe I’d like to teach a school, and teach little ones to read.

I knew my letters and numbers a little, but not good enough that it helped me. I wanted to learn them better. And then, if I knew them better, I could share it with the rest of them. I figured there were lots of folks who wanted to read. I thought there must be schools coming up fast.

But that wasn’t what I heard.

I got an idea, though—one that made me want to find a teacher who’d show me the letters good enough to write them, and I’d write a book. Not a story book, and not a book for learning by, but a book for cooking with.

A woman told me there were opportunities for women who could cook. She said that without any slaves, the white women had to go into their own kitchens, and they didn’t know what to do. They needed someone to tell them.

So I thought, I could tell them.

I could write a book and I could fill it up with my mama’s recipes. I could put in the pies and the breakfast hash, and the right way to make grits without turning them soggy. I could tell them how to make chicken fry up nice and crunchy, but wet and dripping good in the middle. And maybe, if my grandmother was still alive down there, maybe she could tell me some of the ways they made food back in Africa, too. She didn’t come from there, but her daddy did, and she used to say she knew. So I could ask her.

But I’d need to know my letters better, first.

And I got wind of a possibility. I heard maybe that if you could work a kitchen good, there were boats you could ride. You could work for the people on the boats, the ones that carried things along the rivers. People rode them like floating hotels.

Someone had to do the cooking for the workers. Someone had to run the kitchens.

It took me a year to work my way down to it. It took one more winter up in the city, and I swear, I thought I’d die.

I was aiming for the Mississippi River. I wanted to work one of the big riverboats that went back and forth, from the top of the country to the bottom. I thought that’d be grand, and I could work my way home while making some money.

It didn’t work out the way I expected. I got my start farther east, on the Ohio River instead, and that was all right too, I thought. I’d get some experience on the smaller boats. It took me another year, but I found my way down to the Tennessee.

I found my way to the Mary Byrd.

I did the dishes there, and did some of the cooking too—though I had some help for that, a fat, quiet man with all the shine and color of boot polish. He never talked to me except to give me something to do, and I was all right with that. When first I saw him, I figured he was the kind of man who’ll give a woman trouble if he thinks he can get away with it.

I been wrong before, though. He never gave me trouble.

He was a good cook, too; he made food like the kind my grandmother did. We always had potatoes, because they store pretty good, and he loaded them up with butter and sour cream if he had time to get them when we stopped. Over the stove he kept a cardboard box of salt and beat-up tin of pepper. Just these two things and the butter, and he could make a feast for a king. I swear, that man made cornbread fit to feed Jesus.

He deserved better than that boat, but I guess he had his reasons.

We all had our reasons.

***

The first signs of trouble came after supper, the first night we were on the river after Lenoir City. We’d picked up an extra passenger or two there, and some cargo that nobody asked about. I’d been doing this long enough then that I didn’t ask. You just don’t.

It looked heavy. The roustabouts who brought it onboard staggered underneath it. The hold was already pretty full, so they had to cram it on in.

Some of the hold was taken up with that woman’s baggage, and I don’t know what a woman like that would travel with. She was a nun, I think—the fat gambler, Mr. Cooper, he called her ‘sister’ every time he saw her. He said it like he thought it was a joke—like he knew something about her that made it funny.

I saw some nuns up in the city. They worked in a big walled-in building where people left orphans. I’d hear the kids playing on the other side of the wall, and I’d hear the teachers inside. I guess the nuns taught letters and numbers too, not just how to kneel right and say prayers. I’d sit on the other side of the wall and eat my lunch when I had some. I’d listen while they went over the letters. I wished I could see them, though. It would’ve helped. As it was, I didn’t learn much.

Anyway, I knew a nun when I saw one, but something was off about her. She wore the little head covering like they do, and black dresses that were simple. But there was smartness to her and a fastness to the way she moved. She asked a lot of questions.

She asked them with a smile, and with a tilted down head that told you she was all kindness and don’t you just know, she was only asking because she wondered—and it wouldn’t hurt you at all to talk to her.

But she asked a lot of questions.

She made some of us uncomfortable, but whether that was because she was a Catholic, or a foreign lady, or just because she was an educated lady on a boat full of men who were themselves only half-schooled…I don’t know. There were a hundred and one reasons for them to push her to the outside.

It turned out she was looking for something. And she was very, very close.

I think if there was a God, really a God like my grandmother said—and like the little red-haired nun believed—then he would have let her find it sooner. If she’d gotten her answers before that last night on the Mary Byrd, then we might have found our separate ways home, or to whatever destinations we had in mind. We wouldn’t have wound up where we did, lying down dead in burned-up clothes at the bottom of a river. The river washed us all clean. It washed us down to nothing but bones, and all our bones were the same.

Or that’s just what I think. I been wrong, though.

***

As I told you, the trouble began after supper, as it’s likely to do. Not all the strangers wanted to eat together, but there are always a few who like it—who enjoy the traveling, and like talking to all the strange new people you find on a boat, or on a road. These people find each other.

So over supper that night there was a handful of folks. The gambler was there, teasing the nun in a friendly way, and she didn’t act like she minded it. There were three others, too—including the captain. We were anchored on account of the weather. It was pouring down outside and the water kept sloshing up over the decks.

Mary was riding low in the water, anyhow—because of what she was moving other than people. There was a lot of rocking, and since we were sitting low, the captain didn’t want to rush it. I didn’t want to argue with him, but I didn’t like him being downstairs with no one at the boat’s wheel, either.

That might have been silly, though. I didn’t know enough about the way boats worked to know if it was bad of him to join us. I guess he could’ve had someone else up there helping him; I knew we had a roof pilot too, but I hadn’t seen him around.

Could be the captain was just hungry.

Well, we fed him. He’d have had more room to eat if he hadn’t drank so much. It made me nervous to watch him. This was the man who drove us down the river. Maybe he should’ve had a better idea when to quit pouring himself more, at least while other folks were watching.

I heard him talking to the other passengers, and they didn’t mind him so they let him talk. His voice sounded like childhood to me. It was low and sleepy more often than not, and even when he drank wine he smelled like a cold southern drink served on a porch.

I had a feeling about him, like he’d been in the war, and it hadn’t gone so good for him. But he was a man from south of the Ohio, so no, I guess it wouldn’t have. I wondered how bad it’d been for him, but it wasn’t my place to ask, so I didn’t. He wore that old defeat all over him. He wore it like it was an important thing, or something valuable that he wouldn’t let out of his sight. But it wasn’t. And we all knew it.

“This is my boat,” he told them around the table. “I’ve found a buyer, though. When we get to Chattanooga we’ll stay a few days—and I’ll hand off the boat, and I’ll take my money. That’ll be it for me, then. No more of this river business.”

“Has it treated you so poorly?” The nun asked. Her accent was as heavy as his, but it came from somewhere father away. “You seem like a comfortable man. You’ve earned a life from the river, haven’t you?”

“I have. I’ve earned a second life, Sister.” They all called her Sister, except for once in a while, one of them would call her Sister Eileen.

Mr. Cooper pulled his pretty watch out of his pocket and checked the time. Supper was over and it might have been getting late, but that’s not what he was thinking. He was wondering if it was late enough to bug someone into playing cards with him. But he was willing to wait until the nun left. I guess he thought it was being respectful.

The captain was too drunk to be any good for poker, but one of the other two men might have been dumb enough to take Mr. Cooper on. One by one they retired, though. And then the captain did too. He said he was going back to the wheel, like he was going to start moving again, but we knew he wasn’t.

The rain was coming down hard, still. And he had too much wine in him to steer us anyplace at all.

The rain came slapping against the windows, where we had windows, and it came splashing down onto the deck and into the rooms where we didn’t. Thunderstorms are easy enough to wait through, though. And it was warm. At least getting wet didn’t mean freezing yourself to death, or losing toes. So I didn’t mind the rain. I’d missed it, and I was happy to see it again.

“Can I clear these plates out for you?” I asked them, wishing they’d finish up. Mr. Cooper and the nun, as they were the only two left, they told me that was fine and they were mostly finished. But they stayed out there talking in a friendly way, and I thought it was funny that the two of them would be friends.

Doesn’t the Lord frown on cards and dice alike?

III.

I will tell you how it happened.

It unraveled.

***

My given name was John Gabert, but I went by many others if the mood and fancy struck me. From time to time, the mood and fancy came in the form of police atten-tion, or in the stalking threats of mercenaries. Occasionally, it was a journalist—some ratty, tattered little man with a notebook and a pencil clenched between two fingers.

I could only give them what they didn’t want. I could give them a name (not my own) and an ounce of respectability (borrowed or stolen), and I always had—at my immediate disposal—an alibi.

An alibi was my favorite accessory.

I would wear one like a funeral carnation in a black lapel. I would use it to garnish myself, and to redeem myself. I would sport it in public to reassure London that I was a worthy, plain, and innocent citizen—confused, and in mourning like the rest of them.

But after a while…yes, well. In time, all the expensive alibis in the world could not be stacked, one on top of another, high enough to build a wall between myself and the prying eyes of nervous, curious people.

Jesus, God, or Whoever.

It was only a little hunger. Only a little need.

And I kept it so closely in check. I watched myself for the signs, and for the warnings. After so many years I knew what to look for, and what twisted visions I could count upon to warn of impending change. I had learned how to control it!

All the rest I can blame on my father, because I went to him for help and he refused me, at first. Later, he would use his influence to keep our name out of the papers, and later—always when it was much too late—he would quietly arrange for restitution.

He seemed to think it was a disease—acquired in some opium den or brothel. Every objection I uttered was nonce to him, and every plea for a reasonable treatment fell on deaf ears. So far as he was concerned, I needed a physician like Dr. Marblen, or Dr. Bentley. There was no room in my father’s head for an infection like the one I carried.

There was no room in his mind for the monsters at the far corners of the Good Queen’s Empire.

In time, he came to invent his own explanations. He passed them around to his friends over too much brandy when the weather was cold. Once he said that I’d been cursed by a gypsy, and another time he mumbled that I’d been trampled by elephants while abroad.

Once—just once—he came very near the truth by virtue of his own imagination. Even as he denied any truth to the unflattering rumors, he would feed them seedling crumbs.

One night I overheard him speaking to the marquess. He spoke of me like I was a wayward adventurer from a penny dreadful; he was constructing a myth of me with his words, in his own library and parlor. Deny the facts when they are gruesome, or untidy. Speculate for me something prettier, and simpler, and easier to spread by firelight.

I recall, from my listening place beside the door jamb, that there were expensive cigars that night and a crystal decanter that drained by the hour. I held my position outside the room, and listened to the old men ramble about war, and children, and monsters like me.

“It was during his time in India, you know. That was where the event occurred that changed him so, though you do not think him much changed now. I can only say that there are nights when he must be seen to be believed—and days when we must close him away for fear of him, and for what he would do if left unattended.

“He went out on safari with the son of a friend—I think you know him, so I’ll leave his name from the story, if you don’t mind—but he went out with a rifle and an elephant. They were hunting tigers, as you do when in a place such as that.

“I’ve heard stories, you know—of places like that one. They tell me it is as if the whole land itself rises up and wishes you gone. Every stray plant has thorns and each new creature is deadlier than the last. I swear, I wish we had left it alone. I think so sometimes,” he added quickly, “but I know that it’s all for the best. I’m a brick for the empire, and my son was too. I mean no disrespect or disloyalty when I say these things. I only mean that it’s an inhospitable place, more hot and unwelcoming than hell. That is what I’ve heard, though you can take or leave it as you like.”

I thought the marquess should leave it, personally, as my father was well into his cups, but inexplicably speaking less nonsense than usual. Let him tell the truth through a fog of alcohol. Stories told that way are always easy to discard when morning comes and a headache comes with it.

Besides, India was not so bad. It was hot, yes. But England is cold, as often as not, and between the two I believe that I prefer the struggles of staying cool to the struggles of staying warm.

Like so many other preferences of mine, my father would not understand it.

“Somewhere under the jungle canopy they rode on their elephants with the brown boys guiding them, calling out sights and hushing the party when game felt close. I imagine he wore a proper helmet, and he carried that old gun of mine—I insisted he take it, though now I wish I’d lent him something bigger, or something faster to shoot.

“But then a storm brewed up fast, as these things do in such hellish climes. They were too far into the bush to retreat, so they huddled for camp and sheltered themselves as best they could.

“One of the brown fellows cried out, and was lost. It’s dark there, when the sun goes out and trees stretch high and thick above. They couldn’t see what took the man. They couldn’t tell if he was hurt, or dead, or only running. The storm did not relent, though. Water came down in drops as big as your thumb, and the elephants shuddered for wet and worry. They stamped their giant feet into the mud and wished to be elsewhere, as did the remaining men, I’m sure.

“There in the sodden jungle, where it must have been quite dark, they could not see so well for the shadow and the pitching rain. They could not have known when the trees parted, and through them slipped the beast.”

“A tiger?”

“What else?” My father asked it drunkenly, sloshing his glass and gesturing at the window, at the ceiling with it.

I had told him what else, as best I could. We both knew it was no tiger, but he had no other name by which to call the dread, so he gave it a word he knew.

“It pounced at them, it leaped upon them!” And here he lost more brandy, or scotch, or whatever the drink was that night. “It fell upon them, you see—and my son had not stayed atop his elephant where there was more safety. They say that a tiger won’t disturb an elephant, and if my son had believed it—”

I’d believed it, but I think it would not have mattered. The elephants were trumpeting, by then. The danger was too near, and it was something that made the big beasts break, and run.

“He might have stayed there, atop the beast. But no. He had come down to the ground to chat with another man—and then the beast, it leaped! I said that, it leaped—and it fell on them both. The one man, the friend of my son, he died on the spot.

“But my son was able to crawl away. After the storm was over and the tiger had gone its own way, John was gathered, by the brown fellows and by the remaining people from the hunting party. He was gathered up and taken back into Delhi where he languished there in a hospital. You must understand what it’s like there, so hot and so wet. So damp with disease and I tell you, it is hard for an Englishman to recover from a cold in that place—much less from a wound so dire. And that’s the meat of it, I think. I don’t think he ever recovered. Not fully. Not like he should have, if he’d been here.”

The marquess left his own glass on the arm of the chair, and he did not raise it to his lips. “Is there—I mean, has he a scar, then? Some mark of the injury to show for it?”

My father shuddered then, the way the elephants had when the thing had poured itself out into the trail. “You should see it, Henry. Or maybe, you should not. I’ve seen the injuries of war before. Not much turns my stomach. But oh, the way its teeth met his skin—and the way it bit through bone. What else….” He started a thought and lost it, swirled it around in his glass.

“A tiger, of course. What else could it have been?” The marquess finished the question for him, because I think he knew I was listening from the hall. “No fault of his own then, if it’s left him with a terrible shock. It’s a wonder he lives at all.”

“A wonder,” my father said. “A wonder indeed.”

If it had been my mother there, or my brother, he might have added the rest of his conclusion—that it was a wonder better left a continent or two away. But it would not do to say such things in front of Henry, so he let the story end.

He was wrong, of course. He was wrong in more ways than I could begin to tell, given a full decanter and a willing ear. He was wrong about the city, and the weather, and the tiger. But something about the way he told it—I liked this version better. When I heard him share it with his old friend, I thought perhaps—just for a few minutes, with a brain steeped in brandy—he’d understood what I’d told him after all. Even if he couldn’t fathom the players, he knew the play.

Even if he didn’t want to cry “wolf,” for that is a thing that reckless boys do.

He could think I was reckless if he liked. He was probably correct, after all. There was a reckless beauty to it. There was a reckless poetry when I lifted my face to the sky and bared my teeth like a savage, like a screaming boy, and I made my voice twist itself into the sound of a wolf.

And when I jumped—God, when I jumped.

I could feel myself leaving the earth and clawing my way through the sky, for seconds at a time, and then there was nothing else in the universe—no God at all, even. Only grass and clouds and the scent of a living planet left orphan by a reckless creator.

They said, in the papers and in the penny dreadfuls, that it was as if I had springs on my feet. I must have aid, to leap so high. I must have a coiled mechanism to propel me so. Truly, it was easier to blame science than Mystery.

And truly, it was a silly name they gave me—though they got the “Jack” part right, by guess or circumstance.

Eventually I became too much hassle to hide. Eventually, when the moon turned over and glared down full across the night, it was too much for me to contain. If my father had admitted the nature of my ailment, some better treatment might have been made. Almost anything would have been better than chains and a basement. “Hide the moon from him, if that’s what does it,” he’d said. He was a fool and a liar.

The moon did nothing to me. It was only a cue, a trigger, and a goal. Every jump, every leap, every spring-heeled crouch and short, sharp flight—it was all to reach the moon, because I swear, she was the only one who’d have me.

But failing the moon, and failing my father, and failing my country, too—I made plans to leave. The stories were swirling too close, sometimes. The mad little men with the pencils and the presses swarmed a touch too near. I began to fear quite honestly that if I did not leave, I would be killed.

I left a note, as courtesy demanded.

But I suspect, when my father discovered he was unexpectedly free of me, that he was so overwhelmed with relief that he did not read it.

I went to America. I sequestered myself on a cargo ship with supplies for tobacco farmers. I told them I was a missionary bound for the western colonies, and that after my experiences in Delhi, I wanted to help civilize and sedate the savages on the other end of the world. Whether they believed me or not, I cannot say.

Upon arrival, I found New England too much like Old England for my liking. My tastes wanted warmer weather, someplace moist and green—preferably with a few open spaces to let me leap up at the sky when the lunacy came over me.

I went south, and slightly west—a colony state at a time.

I had no single goal in mind beyond seeking out warmth and seclusion; I was led to understand that these things could be found in abundance down farther in the colonies, closer to the west, and to the ocean. I made my furtive way south, then. Border by border. County by county, and town by town.

It seemed faster and easier, really—more civilized, at least—to try the rivers instead of the ragged old horse ruts.

I went to a city called Knoxville, and then on south to the next stop down—where I was told I could purchase passage on a steamship called the Mary Byrd.

IV.

I will tell you how it happened.

It burned, and sank.

***

My name was Eileen Callaghan, though if I spoke softly people often didn’t notice the Irish in my words, there in America. People thought that a woman in a habit was meant to be quiet and contemplative, so I was rarely asked to speak much, and that was fine.

No one answers that call for the social life.

I answered when I was a girl, still. I knelt in the church and bowed my head, and I asked for the convent because I believed—I still believe—that I heard Him asking me for my time, and my life. I agreed and I answered; because after all, I owed Him no less.

I spent many of those early years with the scriptures, then with other books in the library, then outside the walls when I could leave. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to understand. I wanted to breathe in all the truth.

After a while, I began to think that this was not all there was. There in the convent, with its quiet sisters and thick walls, I could find truth with the Virgin and her son. I filled myself up with prayers and piety; I lit my life with votives, and with the sun spilling warmly patterned through stained glass and screens.

And one day, I confessed in the dark little room: “There is more than this.”

Because they did not understand, they were afraid I would try to renounce my vows out of boredom. So they gave me little assignments here and there—small responsibilities in the community, and in other cities sometimes too.

I found some meaning in the poor quarters in Dublin, Belfast, and later in London, where we fed and clothed the ones we could; but I found more meaning still when I followed the women I found in those places.

I followed them to the sticky streets where they waited on street corners and in alleys, behind pubs and in littered lots. I watched them, and watched out for them when I could. I brought them into the church and let them warm themselves with our small lights—with candles lit for themselves, their mothers, and their daughters.

I watched them come and go from the safety to the streets, back and forth each night like the tide.

Sometimes I would walk with them, if they wanted. Sometimes they did not want to be alone, or they wished for a respite. Having a woman like me there would chase away their customers—and sometimes, for an hour or so, this was good. The dirty men in their itching clothes would saunter forward and see me—they’d see my uniform and know me—and they would think about being boys in white. They would remember being small, and standing before the alter with their mouths open. They thought of communion wine and bland white wafers.

And some of them would be ashamed. They would turn on their heels and slink back into the dark.

Once or twice I was propositioned too, by men who maybe remembered things differently—or who had no upbringing in the church. Once or twice a man would ask me to lift my skirts.

But not often.

On one such night, I stood beside a girl who had the name of her birthday’s saint—she was Barbara, and should have been home safe in her father’s tower. At least, she was very beautiful and would never be married, so some of the story was preserved.

These stories, if you read enough of them you start to see—they come back around again. (I used to think, sometimes, that these stories are all one. And they are told over and over again; we are all drawn to the same ones, to the same lives, and we repeat ourselves incessantly.)

She interrupted me. “Have you heard about the jumping man? Jumping Jack, I think the girls want to call him, but the papers say his name is something else.”

“Really? Have you read them?”

“No, I can’t read. But the news boys tell us sometimes, if we ask them nice. We wanted to know if anyone had heard. Not like it’d matter. So long as it’s just us being scared by him, no one cares. But he’s started chasing finer prey than us, I guess, because they’re talking about him now. He’s working his way up, he is.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well he jumped a fine lady, I hear. Scared her senseless. Tore off her dress and scratched up her belly like an animal. She’s been in bed since it happened, and she might not recover. They’ll catch him now, I bet. They’ll make him stop, now that he’s chasing a better kind.”

“Has he hurt anyone here yet—badly, I mean?” I asked her.

She shrugged like she wasn’t sure how to answer that, or how to quantify what ‘badly’ meant. “A couple of girls, he scratched them up so they bled real bad. And he’s scared ’em half to death, with his ugly yellow eyes and all that, but mostly they get back up again and go back to work in a few days.”

I couldn’t decide how it made me feel—if I was proud for Barbara and her sisters, or if I was sorry for them. Daily or weekly they’d seen enough and been hurt enough that assault was only an afterthought in a night’s tally. The spring-heeled man was worth a mention because he didn’t seem human, and that was worth talking about. That was worth a few minutes of gossip.

“He’s only a fairy tale. You’re making him into more.” I meant to reassure her because I couldn’t imagine what truth there might be in it. I had to assume that it was boredom that made them talk so, and put such stock in such wild stories.

“Not anymore. Not when the rich girls tell it. When the rich girls tell it, it’s news.”

She was right, of course.

I tried to guide her, and the rest of them too—I tried to lend them my support, and give them the sense that someone thought they were worthwhile, and that there was a God who would have them and hear them. In time, I found it best to simply be their friend as well as I could. I would like to say that I made a difference, but I came to doubt it.

And before long, there were incidents, as you might expect.

There were problems. There were deaths, and accusations, and hints of impropriety. Good women of God did not lurk in such places. It would raise questions. Well, I had my questions too. Didn’t Christ himself walk with the prostitutes and the lepers? Times were troubled, yes, but that only meant they needed us more.

I think, I guess, that I came to believe my superiors. I think, I guess, that I started to believe the church. But by then, I had learned the difference between the Virgin and the Church. And I did not believe anymore that the two held hands more tightly than a vise.

“There is truth here,” I said to the priest at my last confession. “But this is not all the truth there is to be found.”

I told him I meant to leave, and he did not stop me.

I had half a mind to follow the crumbs of truth wherever they went. I opened my eyes, opened my ears, and opened my Bible. Piece by piece the trail became clear. A light beckoned across the ocean—it lured me onto a boat, and over the water. I followed it as best I could. I watched it flicker and dim, then flare and sizzle.

I went to America.

Didn’t everyone, who needed a new start?

V.

I will tell you how it happened.

It fell apart.

***

She was my boat, and she was always meant to be my last. After our last run, down that little leg from Knoxville to Chattanooga—hardly a hundred miles—I was going home. My wife was waiting for me there, at her sister’s place on Lookout Mountain. I was to lean hard on the whistle treadle three times when I passed between the hills. She would know to look outside and see me coming. The smoke from the big black stacks would show my progress even at a very great distance.

Her sister would bring her down to the landing.

We might stay in the valley for a while; the weather was good and there was no rush to head back home.

But we hadn’t talked about that, yet—whether or not we’d really go home. We weren’t certain anything was left of it. Last we heard, the Yankees hadn’t burned it; but however Bellehurst was standing, word had it, the place wasn’t doing so well.

Maybe we’d heard wrong. The news coming up was spotty and unreliable, or that’s how we liked to think.

In Chattanooga, the war hadn’t treated the city too bad. It was too important, with the river and the rails. Everyone needed to use it. It took some beating, sure—but nothing like what they got down in Georgia. Nothing like Chickamauga, maybe ten or twelve miles south.

I hear the mountains took the worst of it, but I don’t know if it’s true. I know soldiers and generals always try to take the highest ground, and there’s nothing higher around there than Lookout and Signal.

But after it was over…after Appomattox, there was no going back to the way things were. Not in Tennessee, not in Georgia, and not anywhere else.

I did say they left the house standing, though, didn’t I? Sherman went another way, and burned another stretched-out scar on someone else’s land. But they didn’t take our place—even though we left it for them.

I went into the service. They made me a major, because they couldn’t expect a man with stature to enlist in the infantry. I pray I did them proud.

Nancy went to go stay with family. I’d say that between us, she sure got the better part of the deal. My wife had cousins down in Florida—on an indigo plantation, if I remember right. When the war came, these cousins of hers didn’t just leave the state or the Confederacy, they left the continent altogether. They went to the Caribbean and waited out the conflict there on the sandy islands to the south and east.

In my private thoughts, I felt they were being disloyal. They should have stayed and fought with the rest of us. But if they were determined to leave, then it was just as well they took Nancy with them. I don’t know how well she would have handled it, staying there. She could’ve been killed, or worse.

But when the war ended and the homestead was gone—or out of commission, anyway, since everyone who worked it was scattered or free, I didn’t know what to do. Fortune hadn’t favored us, to say the least. I was out of money, though Nancy was spared that trouble, being in the islands like she was. I am glad for that. I should speak better of her cousins. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t taken her with them.

After my discharge, I sat down and wrote a very painful letter to my wife. I didn’t go into any more detail than necessary; but I told her the truth about our money situation—and I told her that she should stay with her family as long as it was necessary, since I couldn’t provide for her the way I did before. I told her, in short, that I’d made my fortune on the Mississippi, and I lost it to the Union.

I did not tell her how, exactly. It would not have mattered and it would have bothered her something awful. She didn’t need to know about the camp. She didn’t need to know about the drinking, the wandering, and the smuggling.

But I told her I loved her, and I meant to repair the rest.

For two years, I’d been rebuilding my reputation—transporting goods and people up and down the Tennessee River. I taught the roof captains how to watch and guide, and I helped apprentice the mud clerks until they could dock a boat without scraping bottom. I’d done it all before, and I believe that my advice and guidance proved invaluable. I was paid for it, anyway. They needed people like me on the rivers.

The south was being “reconstructed,” as the politicians liked to say it. I had another word for it, but it was not a polite one that I would have used in front of my wife.

But any construction needs ready supply, and a man with my experience could make a fair living off a river. Granted, a man might need to make a few deals he couldn’t share with his family—but I was accumulating a stash of such secrets, and I was getting better by the day at keeping them covered.

I might say, if anyone asked, that all it took was a stash of good scotch.

My wife would have objected, though. That’s why I brought her a nice bottle of wine—a glorious green bottle with a foil-trimmed label, straight from France. I bought it from a dealer who was wending his own way down to New Orleans, or so he said.

Maybe it was a ruse, and maybe he had some other plans. He didn’t owe me the truth, and I shouldn’t have bothered him for it. I do know this much: the first two bottles I drank alone, and they were as fine as the labels promised.

I saved the last, and assumed the best. But Nancy never got to try it.

VI.

Supper was held at the same time, every night, and if you wished to partake, you were welcome to appear. I went every night, in part because I was bored for company, and also because I was hungry. The other passengers always asked me to say Grace, and I didn’t mind. I was thankful for the food. The cook was uncommonly good; I would have ridden that boat another week to let him feed me.

I want to say he came from farther down the river. I thought I overheard—or maybe I just inferred—that he was from New Orleans.

There was always wine to go with the meals, but you had to be quick and beat the captain if he was there.

The poor man. I don’t know what happened to him. It must have been tragic. He said he was on his way home to his wife; and when he said it, there was a blink and a twitch of his neck that told me one or the other wasn’t true. He might have been going home, or he might have been going to his wife. I don’t know which.

At the end of the night—after the captain had drunk himself to bed, and after the others had turned in for the night as well, I was left with Christopher at the table.

There was a serving girl, I think her name was Laura. She was pretty and dark. I made a joke with her once, about how we both kept our hair covered all the time. She smiled politely and ducked herself away from me.

Laura came and took our plates and Christopher was mellow, itching to play.

“You could deal some cards, if you like,” I said.

His eyebrows went up.

“I know how to play,” I told him. “I haven’t got much money, but I can play for fun, if you like.”

He thought about it and then laughed. “Listen Sister, I don’t know if I’d feel right about that. But I do appreciate your offer. Would you like a little nip of brandy instead?”

“You’ll drink with a nun, but you won’t gamble with one, is that it?”

“I believe so, yes.” He rose to get a set of glasses. From under the bar, he retrieved a square glass decanter with a glass stopper that looked like a doorknob. He poured me a splash, and then poured a bigger one for himself—a big drink for a big man.

“It won’t be much longer now,” I told him, accepting the glass and taking a swallow of its contents. “It’s not much farther to Chattanooga. That’s where you’ll be leaving us, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he assured me. “I have some business to attend to there, and then in a few weeks, I’ll be off for Denver.”

“Big card game? That is how you make your living, isn’t it?”

“Nothing gets past you, eh?”

“Not much. Oh, that’s not true, really.” I had to amend myself, since the purpose of my little river trip occurred to me, reminding me that I was a long way from as sharp as I needed to be. “All the wrong things get past me, or so it seems sometimes.”

Christopher sat forward and took a big swallow from his glass. “Wrong things like what? Like missing a sermon about the evils of gambling?”

“Very much like that,” I fibbed outright. “It’s a pity, I must have slept late that day. I missed the ban on smoking too, though I maintain I can’t find a verse for it in the Bible.”

He gathered the hint and pulled a cigarette case out from the pocket just north of his watch. I accepted one, and leaned in for him to light it off a match. He held the flame steady in his palm and said, “I think there’s one about treating your body like the temple of God, isn’t there? Or did I dream that during Sunday school, too?”

“Very good, Mr. Cooper. Paul said so, in Corinthians.”

“A very fine observation, ma’am. I couldn’t have named a book for it if my life depended on it.”

“That’s a shame,” I told him. “‘Christopher’ is a good Christian name. You should have listened closer at your lessons.”

“Good Christian name, eh? Why, does it mean something?”

“It’s from the Greek. It means ‘Christ-bearer.’ You’re named for a Catholic saint, did you know that?”

He laughed again, for the wine always made him jolly like that. “I had no idea, and I assure you that my good protestant parents had no earthly idea either. It’s probably best they’re both passed on now, so I don’t get the chance to tell them. But a saint, eh? So I’m saintly? What’s in a name, after all? Roses and holiness for me, I suppose.”

“As you like, Christopher. He is the patron saint of travelers, and people like ourselves—on long trips—often wear a medallion to invoke him for assistance. I have one on me, in fact, if you’d like it.”

“You’d give it to me?”

“If you want it. I have others, you know how it is. It’s only a little pewter thing, but if it would mean something to you, I’d like for you to wear or carry it.”

The smile on his face told me that he felt like this was a furtive, naughty thing. “Sure, I’ll take a magic charm off your hands. It’s not like those beads you carry, is it? I’ve seen you sitting on the deck, praying with them. They’re very pretty.”

“No, this isn’t like the beads. And thank you. They were a gift from my father when I entered the convent.” And I’m not sure why, but I pulled them out from my pocket and handed them to him, just to show him.

He turned them over on his hands, stringing them through his fingers as if he might use them to make a cat’s cradle. “Ebony?” He guessed, and I nodded. “And this on the back of this space, here? What’s this? A wolf?”

“A wolf,” I confessed. I hadn’t expected the question. I wasn’t thinking about it—the small silver link that held the rosary in the shape of a “Y.” On the back was a tiny piece of art to remind me of home, and to remind me how the universe thinks in puns and patterns. “It’s for my family, the Callaghans. Our crest has a wolf on it.” I tried to say it with a gambler’s nonchalance. After all, it wasn’t important. It wasn’t something worth remarking.

It certainly wasn’t something to be nervous about.

But I was sitting across a supper table from a man who reads faces for a living, and I had a feeling he knew a liar when he spoke to one.

Christopher tensed, and I thought it must be because he was onto me. I was wrong. He shifted his eyes to the left and right like he was looking for something, or someone. Over his shoulder he cast a glance and, seeing nothing, called out, “Who’s there?”

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“Don’t you ever get those feelings? Those prickly feelings like someone’s standing nearby and watching?”

“Of course I do,” I told him. I’d had those feelings ever since I got on board, when I deliberately trapped myself on that damned boat. I knew what I was doing; but that didn’t make the tingling at the back of my neck any less unsettling. After so many hours, I suppose I’d simply become numb to it.

“Who’s there?” he asked again, and I would have answered for him—had the fiend not stepped out into the light himself.

“I didn’t mean to intrude, or cause any alarm.” Jack Gabert slipped into the dining area. He slipped, I said—and I mean it that way. He moved like hot syrup pours across a plate; he glided and rolled. He filled the space he met.

I stiffened, I’m sure.

Christopher relaxed. What a fine primal sense he had! I’m sure it served him well in the gambling halls he frequented. Until he relaxed I almost thought—well, I almost thought that maybe I’d found some assistance. But no, he relaxed. He settled down into his chair and reached into a deep pocket for a cigar to join my smoldering cigarette.

And I’d almost thought…but it was just as well.

Here was a man in tune with the world around him. He heard small noises and took them to heart; he saw small details and filed them away in that part of the brain which quietly lies unless the body is threatened. I tried not to be too disappointed in him. He’d known he was being watched, but he didn’t know what was watching.

It wouldn’t be enough to save him, I didn’t think. It wouldn’t be enough to simply suspect.

“There you are—Jack, isn’t it?”

“John. Or Jack if you like, for it suits me fine.” I preferred ‘Jack.’ He looked me up and down and I let him. It was the first time he’d seen me close in quite some time. It might have been the first time he’d ever looked at me at all.

Oh, he knew what I looked like. He’d gathered a description, I’m sure. He’d glanced me for a few moments here and there, at least. And he knew my scent.

And when he looked at me—when he laid eyes upon me and let them rest there for those pointed seconds, I knew that the information they gave him was scant compared to what his nose was free to gather. He might have thought I smelled like candles and linen, or wool. He might have gathered I smelled like nighttime blue and something red.

He was mentally marking me. What had previously been a faint trail through a crowd—mixed with the interfering smells of the masses—his nose was distilling it down to something more precise and perfectly mine.

I knew, in those seconds, that he would never lose or mistake me again.

“Mr. Cooper,” he nodded at Christopher. “And Sister.” He nodded at me.

“Mr. Gabert,” I called him.

Christopher waved his cigar and patted his chest pocket. “I might have another to share. Would you join us? I wouldn’t ordinarily indulge in front of a woman, but Eileen swears she doesn’t mind.”

“Indeed I don’t. I find the smell pleasing, if you want the truth.”

Jack smiled and it was a sinister thing—a stretching of that slitted mouth, and a narrowing of those copper-brown eyes. “I imagine the little lady there is quite full of surprises. And I must tell you, I have a remarkably healthy imagination.”

“I have no doubt,” I murmured, pretending that the obvious and untoward implications were all I observed.

“Now, Jack—that’s no way to—”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Mr. Cooper. I was only teasing. Since the good sister here can take a bit of tobacco, then I imagine she can handle a bit of banter as well.”

“Whether or not she can—or chooses—to handle it, sir, it’s unseemly and I’d rather you watched your language.”

“Don’t,” I told Christopher. I put my hand out and placed it on his sleeve. “It means nothing, and no offense was taken. All is forgiven, as the Lord would have it.”

I tried to put some gentle warning into my protestations. Jack was on edge—he was glistening with something malicious and happy. I didn’t like the way he stayed on the fringe of the room, lingering at the doorway. The distance between us was surely meant to reassure us, but I knew how little it meant. I’d seen him clear greater spaces in less time than it takes to sneeze.

The gambler had no such frame of reference, though.

“I tell you, Mr. Gabert—ever since you joined us here, I’ve had some concerns. I’ve made gentlemanly efforts to be friendly but you rebuff me—and the other passengers, too—with a rudeness that is nearly intolerable.” He was warm from the alcohol, I think. Or maybe that quiet, nervous part of his mind was working after all, and feeling defensive. “If you aren’t interested in socializing with your fellow passengers, no one here would fault you for it. But there’s no need to be crass to a woman of God.”

I thought Christopher was going to stand, but he didn’t. I left my hand on his sleeve as if by force of will I could hold him down.

Jack leaned against the doorframe. “She’s no woman of my God.”

“Then what God do you serve, if any you serve at all?”

I braced myself for a bit of snappy blasphemy, but he hesitated and held his breath. The question shouldn’t have stalled him. I don’t know why it did.

He leaned his head around the wall and glanced into the corridor. “No God serves me,” he mumbled. “I suppose I could swear by my own true self, for I am the God of my own idolatry.”

When he turned himself away from us like that, I spied something on the side of his neck—beneath his beard, and on it. It was black in the low evening light of the lanterns, but if he were closer, it might have been red.

There was more, too. On his jacket—but his jacket was black and probably silk. It only looked wet, but I wondered—wet with what?

I would have felt bolder if we’d been alone, the monster and I. I would have been more inclined to rise and confront him if not for the slightly drunken chivalry which would surely get in the way.

“Jack,” I breathed.

He smiled at the light familiarity. Or maybe he smiled about something else. Upstairs, on another deck, I heard a fluttering commotion—like a large bird, dying. It was hard to sort out from the rain, though. The rain still pounded and poured, and all the sounds inside it were distorted.

“I wish it would stop raining,” Jack said as if he’d read my mind. He said it in a faraway voice that changed the mood of the room. There was a coldness in his words, and in his tone.

Such a simple sentence shouldn’t have made us shudder, but both Christopher and I did just that. “Yes,” Christopher agreed slowly. I think he preferred to let the tension slide. Again the primal mind was working for him, trying to quiet his offense and ease the moment. “It slows us down, and I think we’d all like to reach Chattanooga as soon as possible.”

“I wish it would stop raining,” he said again. “It makes me feel so trapped. I wish I could see the sky.”

With this passing thought, Jack turned on his heels and spilled back out into the hall.

A chill ran through me, from my feet up to my ears. Small hairs on the back of my neck and along my arms began to lift themselves like hackles on a threatened cat. It was the gold in his eyes, I think. It flashes brighter when he’s hungry—or more precisely, when the hunger comes for him.

I had wondered if the rain would matter. I didn’t know if it would dampen his needs, to use a comically appropriate word. I’d suspected it wouldn’t. The night works on faith—clouds may cover it, but the moon needs no evidence to shine.

In retrospect we see these things so clearly. The covered sky only pent him up—it made him harder to control, because he had no point of reference. He could not look up at the sky and tell himself, “Yes, there is the moon and it is almost full of light. This is why my head is clouded, my blood is bubbling in my veins. If I am not careful, I will reveal myself. I must make precautions if I want to remain undetected. In a few days it will be easier. I will be all right for a few more days.”

Before the rain came, he walked the decks when they were nearly empty. He knew what the sky would tell him, so he watched himself and his behavior. But with it gone? Even knowing what the moon would say, he was acting blind, with only his own instincts to guide him.

“Oh God,” Christopher whispered, stuffing the cigar into his mouth and lighting it with fumbling fingers. And in that moment, in the wake of Jack Gabert, even though Christopher understood nothing at all, I believe that he knew.

VII.

I was alone in my room, retired there because with the rain coming down in such terrific sheets, there wasn’t much to be done. There was no way to navigate, not with any effectiveness. In weather like that, when God Himself is against you, there’s nothing to be done but wait out His wrath and hope for the best.

I dropped the anchor and took one of those French bottles to my cabin.

I still had one left for Nancy.

But the other would keep me company for the night. Let the rain fall and let the boat sway. So long as the tiller lines held and the anchor didn’t slip, I counted it a small blessing. There were only a few of us on board anyway. Let them wait another day. All I wanted was a night when I could drink enough to sleep through my dreams.

I started early—immediately after supper. After the war camps, I never did skip a supper. Every single one was a blessing and I thanked the Lord for every bite.

In my cabin I removed my boots and unfastened my waistcoat, because it was too warm and too tight. At first, when the war ended, I thought I should eat myself strong again; I didn’t want Nancy to see me all sticks for arms, and bones for legs. Perhaps I went too far the other way. Perhaps I had grown too soft.

I had a small couch covered in brown cotton and stuffed with horsehair. It was firm and I could lean while putting my feet up. It was more civilized than drinking in bed.

I didn’t have any wine glasses, and I’m not sure why. I think they all were broken, or downstairs, or there had never been any to begin with. But I had short tumblers for scotch, so I poured a blood-purple shot for myself and drank it that way. It was more civilized than drinking from the bottle.

I listened to the rain and I was happy. In only a few short days, I would see my wife again. It had been—years. More years than I could think to count, but fewer than it felt, I’m sure. These things happened. People were parted, and people came home.

Tennessee was never a home of mine, but it would suffice. Home is where the heart is, as they say—and Nancy was there. We could stay or we could leave. We could go back and try to salvage what was left, or we could go somewhere else and start fresh. I would let her decide.

I don’t know how much time passed from the time I lifted the bottle to the time I set it down. I don’t know where the time went.

When I awakened, the rain was still battering down on the roof, and against the windows, and I was still open-shirted and bootless, on the divan. I’d slept and I hadn’t dreamed of hunger, and chill. I glanced down at the bottle—determined to remember the label, and interested in acquiring more one day.

But between the busy splatter of the raindrops outside, I could hear something else—once in a while, and loud. It sounded like a sharp blow, or a rap. When first I heard it, I thought I imagined it. Bang. Like something solid, dropped and landing hard. I waited and listened, and then it came again. Bang.

I sat up and set the bottle aside.

Bang.

It came from down below, by the wheel.

Bang.

No—not by the wheel. The next deck up, at least. Bang. Again. It came accompanied by a ringing noise this time—a twang, where something else had been struck. I thought perhaps the jackstaff, since it stands so tall. I heard a quick jingle as if from a chain or cable, and we often ran a flag up the staff.

Bang.

Like a drum, but not quite. Like a boxer jumping on a mat, but not quite.

More like a boxer, I thought. More like someone jumping. But it couldn’t be someone, of course. The collisions came too far apart; no one could jump so high, to make such loud landings at such lengthy intervals. He’d have to be jumping from deck to deck around the Mary Byrd, and of course that wasn’t possible. Of course.

I don’t know why it frightened me so—or rather, I don’t know how I knew to be frightened.

There was something frantic about it, about the way it dashed to and fro from deck to deck, front to back. Occasionally it would strike against something and be dazed, then resume again. It made me think of a cat my wife once had; in the evening, shortly before bedtime, it would transform from a lazy beast to a mad terror of a creature. It would tear around the house as if its tail were on fire before settling down and turning in for the night with the rest of us.

I’ve seen dogs do it too, when they’re cooped up too long or kept on a chain.

Outside in the rain there was a flash of lightning followed soon by a sharp rumble of thunder. The rainstorm had gone from pattering to booming, and I was glad for my decision to stop and stay. The water was getting rough for a river, and when I stepped to my window to peer outside, I couldn’t see a thing beyond the rail.

Thunder cracked again—this time like a whip the size of a river. The storm was right above us.

Beside my bed there was a lantern mounted on a swing-arm hinge. It was a mariner’s style, and made for a man at sea, not on a river. When the boat moved, the force of gravity would hold the flame level—or that was the idea. It worked well enough, and I liked the look of it. It struck me as a sturdy, stable thing with an ingenious design, so I left it lit.

The other two, by the mirror and beside the door, I extinguished. Despite the rain, these boats are made more of wood than anything else—and the engines are fed coal. Fires happen, and we were moored away from the banks. On board, we had a pair of small rowing yawls for emergencies or the crew’s quick shore runs, but if there were ever any real, quick trouble, we’d never get them into the water in time. Bang.

Thunder answered it, so loud and so harsh that Mary rocked a little harder against the waves—her windows rattling in their frames. Downstairs near the galley, I thought I heard a crash. It must have been dishes, or plates. I remember, I thought—I’ll ask Laura in the morning.

But then there was a new sound, another sound—not the thunder, and not the intermittent banging. It came louder than both, and twice as nerve-shattering.

I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to keep it out.

It roared, or howled, or scraped across the boat in a long, anguished cry that must have come from a living throat—but what, I couldn’t guess. My mind raced, playing games with itself. I knew that sounds can be deceiving—especially at night, and in the rain, and when a man is tired and slow from wine.

I’d heard mountain lions that sound for all the world like a woman screaming for help, and inmates at a sanitarium who bayed like hounds. I’d heard my own boat make startling pops, cracks, and cries—just the settling of a ship with a few years on her. I knew how strange and frightening the unknown may seem. I knew not to panic.

But how could I help myself? The cry went on and on—challenging the thunder, daring the sky to fall.

I pressed my hands tighter around my head, but nothing could keep the hideous keening at bay.

Then it came in—through the window. There was an explosion and the world caved in. The rain came in, and the howl came with it.

I barely had time to see it, but time stretched for me and I remember every detail. I remember every second as if it happened over an hour—the stinging splash of water, the moaning wind, and the groan of a sagging timber support where the window had burst free of its place. I saw light glinting off of something shiny and round; it took me a moment to realize they were eyes. They were gold eyes, shot through with red and bulging from a face like none I’d ever seen.

I remember there were teeth, and there was hair. I thought at first, “It must be a man, surely,” but before my mind could make the words I knew I was mistaken. No man, no ape. No thing I had ever seen before, nor heard legend of.

It lunged at me, flinging water and broken glass from its hair. It opened its mouth and fired that horrible cry—a screaming, miserable thing that did not slow or cease until it fitted that gaping jaw around my neck, and it drowned its whistling scream in my throat.

VIII.

Jack slipped out the way he’d come, leaving me and Sister Eileen waiting tense and alone together at the table. She handled his rudeness so well, and it made me glad of her sterling character even as the situation made me angry. There was much more to her than you might expect from a small lady in a habit, but isn’t that the way it always goes? Once every blue moon, and once in a royal flush—people will surprise you.

He unnerved her, though—as he unnerved me. I couldn’t say how I knew he was nearby, and watching. When I called him out, I only meant to invite him in, but if he was going to behave so badly, it was just as well that he’d shown himself the door.

So I could not understand why his leaving did not relieve me.

Sister Eileen released a deep breath she’d been holding. “He’s mad,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Perfectly mad.”

“That may be,” I agreed.

“He’s dangerous, you know. Or don’t you think?”

I don’t know why she added the last part, undoing her statement a little by asking for my opinion. I wondered why she felt the need to do that. “I do think he could be, as any madman might be a danger to himself and others.”

“We are the only others here, Mr. Cooper.”

I knew it then—how she already knew more than I did. I could see it in the way she wasn’t blinking, and in the way the muscles in her hands were taut like small ropes. She shifted in her chair as if she’d make herself more comfortable there, then changed her mind and rose to her feet.

“I appreciate your chivalrous defense, but I think it would be best if you’ll let him be. Don’t antagonize him on my behalf, please. I do not trust him, and I think that—given precious little instigation—he would do you harm. He needs only the smallest excuse.”

“I beg your pardon? My dear lady—”

She interrupted me. “Something is wrong tonight. It’s the weather, I think. Isn’t it funny how it affects us sometimes?”

“It’s very loud. The thunder is devilish, suddenly. But the captain has dropped anchor now and we’ll wait it out. The rain will clear and we’ll be on our way again soon. God knows there’s no frowning for the weather.”

“God knows it, and so do I.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, increasingly curious as she grew increasingly cryptic. “I wish you’d do me the favor of speaking directly, instead of these little riddles.”

She pushed her chair aside to leave the table and waited, with one hand on its back. “It’s easier to tell the truth in allegory and riddles though, don’t you think? Jesus did it, with his parables.”

“Like the Good Samaritan.”

“Indeed—just like that one. Do you think there was ever a real man, injured beside the road? Or might he have invented it to convey a point?”

“I’m sure I can’t say. So tell me a parable, then. Make me understand what sets us all on edge tonight, and why you think poor Jack is taking it with such difficulty.”

I thought she’d sit again, but she did not—she simply leaned herself forward against the chair.

“All right. Let us say, then, that there are two men in jail, awaiting execution. In eight hours they will be hanged. One man asks for a clock, so that he may be reminded of how much time is left. He takes comfort in watching the time pass—telling himself, ‘Now I have three whole hours left to live, and I will appreciate these three hours.’ Or, ‘Now I have a whole hour left to live, and I will appreciate this hour.’”

“What about the other man?” I asked.

“The other man asks for a clock as well, but he is told that there is only one—and it’s already been given to the other prisoner. Without the clock to judge by, the other prisoner is agitated and confused. He’d rather see the time crawl by and know how much is left to him; without the clock, he drives himself mad wondering how long he must wait for the hangman’s noose. Because he cannot stand the wait, he fashions his own noose from the bedsheets and hangs himself before the executioner can arrive.”

“I think I see. That’s quite a morbid parable you’ve spun for me. Am I to gather that your mythic clock is the weather?”

“You would be quite clever to surmise as much, yes. Some of us—it helps us to gaze up and know. But when we can’t….” Her voice ran out of air and she let the thought hang.

“I wish I understood better what you were trying to—” I began to press her further, but I was cut off by a most ferocious and terrifying sound.

It echoed loud through the boat, in that omnipresent way that refuses to tell you where the source originates. We both jumped, startled and afraid, as it pealed and rang and roared. I clapped my hands over my ears, but the nun held her ground—eyes narrowing and hands clamping up tight into fists.

The kitchen girl, Laura, came running in, hands over her ears also. The sound—it wouldn’t stop! It followed her and surrounded us, filling the room and the decks and the sky.

The girl looked at us and we saw our own fear reflected there in her round, brown face. “It’s nothing,” I tried to tell her—I didn’t try to tell the sister, though. She was already steeled against it. “It’s only the mud drums. They’re blowing out the mud drums down below, by the boiler. It makes a sound, it’s terrible, I know. But you hear it sometimes when you ride these things a long time.”

“I know what the mud drums are you fool-headed man,” she told me—in a panic, forgetting her place, I’m sure. “I’ve heard them before and I know what they mean. But this ain’t that, and you know it sure as I do.”

We were shouting to each other. We had to. The hoarse, unending blast was filling us and swallowing us whole. It was drilling into my skull, past my ears and under my scalp, into the meat of my brain.

There was thunder, too—though you could hardly hear it.

Sister Eileen released her death grip upon the chair and fled the room with a determined sort of stride that I would not have cared to interrupt. I called after her anyway, because it seemed that someone must. “Sister—stay here. Stay with us.”

She paused in the doorway, one hand grasping the frame as if to hold herself in place while she spoke. “You stay here—both of you. Get into the galley and stay close together. Get the cook, too. Wake him up. I’ve seen him, he’s a big man, like you—Christopher. Grab the biggest knives you find and stay low.”

“Sister!” Laura reached out like she might grab her, but the small nun was faster than she looked. Her skirts swished fast behind her and she was gone.

Laura and I stared back and forth between ourselves, hands on ears, wishing for the terrible roar to subside and shaking as it failed to do so. “Maybe you should—” I started to say, but she knew the rest already.

“I’ll get the cook,” she nodded, and she was off. A moment later she dashed back past me, into the galley. She emerged holding a great carving knife; she held it point down, by the handle, and her wrists were as tight as leather.

I wanted to tell her that I thought this was unnecessary, that it was too much. I wanted to tell her she was going to frighten someone, but I was already more frightened of the warbling howl than I was of this strong-boned black girl.

Still, as she dashed past me I thought that she did not look like a creature to be trifled with. I wished her all the luck in the world. She was gone. And abruptly—with a gurgle and a gasp—the sound stopped altogether.

IX.

You wait as long as you can. You hold onto it, you bite it back and you sit on it, you stuff it back down. You press it back as far as it will go, and you ignore it. You pretend it isn’t there. You tell yourself it only has to hide for a little while more—a little while more. Just look up and see the sky, and you know it’s coming. You know you don’t have to shut it down for long. You only have to last a little while more.

But God sets Himself against me.

You should have seen the sky that night, the way it was covered and hidden and the way it was gray-not-black or speckled with stars. Grey gloves of clouds entwined themselves above me. Veins of lightning split them, parted them briefly, and vanished—leaving the ceiling of heaven bleak again. Leaving me bereft. Leaving me hungry.

If I could have only looked and known. Even if what I saw told me nothing good—if I could have only looked and known.

It’s madness, I know. My father knew it too.

Everyone who meets me comes to know it. Everyone who sees me wonders, and every one of them is right to wonder. It is a dread of difference they smell. It is an old fear I inspire. It is the fear of being chased, and caught, and eaten.

I knew the moon was full and fat, and I knew there was little to be done. I knew I could not fight her, but if I could see her I could appeal to her—I could ask her for one small reprieve, for one small night while a storm kept us trapped in the water.

The moon might have heard me. She might have granted it. After all, I was making the voyage for her.

I was content to be her creation, and to have her as my mistress. I was ready to be whatever she wanted of me—if she wanted me an animal, not man, I was prepared to let her have that. It was why I left England, and why I left New England, and why I wandered west and south in the new colonies.

I understood that out west there were few people—and most of those were savages. If I could not hide myself from man, at least I would hide from civilization. But some of these savages were a knowing, noble people, or so I had been told. In lieu of avoiding them, I hoped to consult with them. I might find a shaman, or a witch doctor who practiced a magic like the one that consumed me, and drove me.

I did not believe I could be fixed, but I thought I might gain some control, or insight. I thought there might be some leash for the hunger and the madness. I would not find it among the white men, this much was clear.

West then.

But the small red-haired woman would not let me go. She would not let me leave. She followed—oh, how she followed! Tracking me, Mary’s dog. Mary’s lap-hound. Trailing behind me, through France and Germany as I went back to the Black Forest there, where the wolves are fearsome as nowhere else.

Back to India, where I was lost and useless, she tagged along a day’s travel late. Through the north shores of Africa, and down to the jungles there, she walked in my wake.

I would lose her sometimes for weeks and think that I had lost her for good, only to have her find me again on the far side of an ocean—as if she’d never lost my scent at all.

For a long time she only watched. She wanted to learn, I imagine. She watched to see what I touched, and what I shunned. She observed me closely, as closely as she could come. I know what she was doing—she was stalking me. I know it when I see it. I know how the patterns work, and how the dance is stepped.

She was a clever little thing, but she was not dangerous to me. I was stronger. I was faster, and I was clever too. I would not give her any upper hand, because I did not need to.

From time to time I would think, “Perhaps I should speak with her.” It wouldn’t be hard. I could stop, and turn around, and there she would be—if I waited for her. I could sit her down and we could share a pot of tea. I would explain, “I know why you feel the way you do—I understand why you stalk and follow and chase. But I want you to understand, I am leaving now. I don’t want to harm anyone, and I don’t wish to be harmed. But I am what I am, and I’ll do what I must. See? I’m looking to minimize this awful trial. I want to flee. I’m leaving to seek the wisdom of the savages, or maybe to kill them all. But better there, than here. Better a few, than many. Can’t you see, I’m doing my best?”

I would prepare these words for her. I would write them down and line them up. I would consider leaving her notes, and then I would do so—never knowing if she’d find them or read them at all.

After Morocco, I thought I’d lost her for good.

And then I saw her on the Mary Byrd, and I knew that the game had changed. She wasn’t following anymore. She was predicting. She was making me come to her, and that meant she was ready to strike.

X.

I took the kitchen knife and I held it like my mama showed me, ready to stab and cut if I had to. I was ready to hurt a man, or anything else that came my way.

I lived enough in thirty-five years to have seen and heard a lot of things good, bad, and otherwise. But I never heard nothing at all like that yowling yell the night we were anchored for the storm. The closest I could think to call it was to say, “It was an animal in pain,” but if you asked me what kind of animal I couldn’t have told you.

Whatever it was, it was big. Nothing small can make a noise like that.

And to think, that fool-headed gambling man tried to tell me it was the mud drums—as if I never rode on a boat before.

I didn’t know what was making that noise, but whatever it was, it was mad and it was big. And I didn’t want to meet it with nothing but my cheeks in my hands. It was coming from upstairs, I thought. Up on the hurricane deck, or maybe from one of the middle-deck cabins.

Just as I thought I had a good handle on it—just as I thought I could pinpoint it if I held still long enough and held my ears right—it stopped.

And there was nothing but the rain, and I was standing in it, holding that big kitchen knife. I stood there stupid, getting soaked to the bone. It wasn’t cold; it was all right to be wet. But the wind was whipping up too, grabbing my apron and tugging it hard. The wind pulled at my scarf and untied it half a knot at a time. I used the hand that wasn’t holding the knife to hold my hair down.

I stared up at the sky and saw nothing. I listened to the night around me, but I heard just the rain and sometimes, the thunder cracking high and hard—rattling the windows and making the deck boards shudder.

I thought about the captain and wondered if I shouldn’t get to him and ask what was going on, but then I remembered he had a bottle of wine and I thought better of it. I’d said I was going after the cook, anyway. I’d go after the cook.

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I sure didn’t like it.

The cook had a cabin down past the captain’s, on the next deck down. I had to run past the captain’s cabin to get to the stairs, so I ran. I was too wet to bother trying to jump between the raindrops, but it was almost worse when the howling stopped.

I mean it like this: while that howling sounded from stern to prow and deck to deck, at least you knew where it was—and it wasn’t right in front of you. Whatever made that cry was someplace else. When the noise stopped, the monster could have been anywhere.

Before I reached the captain’s cabin, even, I’d come to think of it as a monster. I just knew.

There were only a few passengers on board that trip, which was a blessing, I figure. Here and there, they were coming out of their rooms. They wanted to know what that big noise was.

Yes, well didn’t we all?

Somewhere on the other side of the storm, maybe outside on a deck, I heard the gambling man trying to tell some of the others that it was just the mud drums being blowed out. I don’t think he believed it himself, but you know how people get when they’re scared and they’re not sure why—and he was just trying to calm them down. I heard a phrase or two rise up over the rain, “Sounds bad, like the boiler’s going to blow,” and “Perfectly natural. Nothing to worry about.”

I guess he was a man who bluffed for a living, so maybe he was a better liar than I am and he calmed them down. Maybe he sent them back into their rooms.

I remembered that the nun had ordered him back into the galley, though. That’s why I was supposed to get the cook and we were going to hole up back there. That’s what the nun told us to do, and when she said it, I believed she knew more than we did about the noise. She was afraid too, but it wasn’t our kind of fear—mine and the gambler’s. We were afraid because we didn’t know what it was.

She was afraid because she did know.

Maybe she thought she’d spare us knowing, and that she’d be doing us a favor. I don’t know. I don’t know what she thought she was going to do about it. I don’t know why we did what she asked, either—or why we made like we meant to, if the gambling man didn’t stay inside the galley.

But I was going to find the cook, because that’s what I was told to do, and because it sounded like a good idea anyhow. I said it before—he never gave me no trouble, and like the nun said, he was a big man and probably real strong. I’m inclined to take care of myself, when it all comes down to it, but there’s no sense in being alone if there are others to help you out.

Jesus, I was running mindless. That miserable wail—it sent me all scattered inside. But I had that one thought—get the cook. I was going to go get the cook and bring him back and we were going to wait in the galley. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.

I dashed past the captain’s cabin and I dashed right past the hole in the wall where the window used to be—I dashed so fast, I almost didn’t see it. I drew myself up short and sharp. I slipped on the deck and fell down to one knee and I caught myself on one hand. I doubled back and I looked inside.

Jesus, Lord Jesus.

I should’ve just kept running.

The captain was in there—I knew it was him, he was wearing that waistcoat, the one that’s got the blue and red on it. It was unbuttoned, and it was in pieces—some of it on the floor—but it was on him mostly; and on the floor by the basin I saw his black boots with the bright shine on them. They were set side by side how he’d left them.

But the captain was in there—and he was in pieces like his vest. The whole room was splashed with red, and his chin was turned up, cocked up like he was staring at the ceiling. Everything was red. Everything was shattered—there was a thin coat of wet glass and slick rain on every surface. Puddles were forming on the rugs and on the bed, since the storm had come on in and made itself at home.

I’m no doctor and no nurse, but I know a dead man when I see one.

But with Jesus as my witness, I couldn’t have guessed what done that to him.

I turned away—I couldn’t look too long. I turned away, and I held hard onto my knife even though my hands were wet, and I ran.

XI.

I’d told Christopher too much, I think. He was a smart man—probably smarter than I gave him credit for. He wasn’t a fool and I shouldn’t have tried to order him out of harm’s way; but the moment I heard that ugly, beastly scream, I knew there was no such place of safety on the Mary Byrd.

I fled the dining area and slipped straight onto the deck, where water was pooling and sloshing as the boat rocked itself on the river and swayed with the gusts of the storm. I grabbed the nearest rail and clutched it hard. In my hand I was still holding the rosary my father gave me twenty years ago. The beads dug into my palm but I didn’t want to put it away. I anchored myself with my feet and my other hand—and I wrapped the rosary around my wrist to hold it better.

I heard a crash, and a wet banging noise that could have been anything—but was certainly not anything good.

I followed it. Behind me, I heard Christopher disregarding my suggestion and leaving the dining hall. He had come out onto the deck in the rain, not coming after me but answering someone’s question. There were more passengers on the boat, and I knew this—but they needed to stay in their rooms. They needed to hide.

“Get back in your rooms!” I shouted at them, but a resounding clang of thunder drowned me out. There wasn’t time, anyway. If Jack had changed, there wasn’t time for anything.

And us on that boat, in the middle of the river.

Anchor dropped.

I thought at first that I should go to the captain. It would be difficult to convince him that we needed to fire the boilers again and move; it might be difficult to even rouse him. But my only other plan was a short-sighted one and I didn’t think it would work, but I had to try it anyway.

I ducked into a niche between a cabin and the pilot house and hiked my skirt up enough to reach down into my garter holster. I’ve heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal.

We’d see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.

I checked the wheel to make sure it was loaded up, and snapped it back into place. They weren’t ordinary bullets because I had no reason to think that an ordinary bullet would stop Jack Gabert. These were made specially for me, and for this. I held the revolver tightly, but carefully. I was wet—everything was wet, after all. The storm would not abate even the slightest, and I would have to work with it.

It could hinder or help us both.

The boat was tipping and turning on the river. It rocked with the thunder and the wind-blown water, and it made walking difficult. I could barely move through the storm, even under the shelter of the decks. I could barely see and barely walk, barely move. Soaked to the bone in a few short minutes, I dragged myself on—clinging at the poles, rails, and doorframes as I came to them every few feet.

I turned the rounded corner of the stern and found myself near the mighty wheel. Painted red, it looked blood-black in the darkness and it streamed storm water from every edge.

The boat shifted in its spot and the wheel turned a foot or two—creaking, falling, and stopping to lie still again. I stared at the oversized contraption and tried to hold myself still too, listening for some sign of the spring-heeled fiend.

Of course, by the time you hear him, there’s precious little time to react.

He launched himself out of the night, from some tricky corner where he’d been hiding. He moved so fast that I barely had time to see him at all—those copper-gold eyes shining in a big black cloud of muscle, hair, and teeth.

I raised the gun and I fired it: once, twice. By the third time, he was on top of me—but slowed.

He shoved me back; he pressed me hard against the wall behind me and he shoved. I heard the boards crack and felt the skin along my spine begin to bruise. He was all hot breath and the stink of someone else’s blood. He was all tremendous size and an imbecile’s strength, with claws and a voice.

“What’s this?” he breathed, and it was a hiss against the side of my head. With one big hand he pushed me back even harder, and with the other he grabbed at the gun but I held it fast and tried to reach the hammer with my thumb. “Is this all you’ve learned?” he asked, still trying to wrench it away.

“I’ve learned much,” I growled back. I had nothing profound to tell him. I only wanted to distract him enough to cock the revolver again—one more shot, at such a close range. Anything to push him back.

“All your following, and watching, and waiting—and you think you’ll stop me with silver?”

I twisted underneath him and moved my body so the gun was aimed his way again. I pushed it as close to his heart as conditions would permit, but I missed. Even in the missing, the kick of the firearm pushed him enough for me to duck away.

I was small, and I was fast. I was stronger than he thought, and I grabbed the hammer back again—another shot, into that tree-trunk-thick torso.

He threw his arms up and howled that dreadful bellow but I knew I hadn’t hurt him much. It was for show, the way he cried. It was to intimidate me, and for a moment I felt a spark of triumph because he felt the need to frighten me. The triumph passed, and passed quickly.

He grabbed my wrist and hit it against the boat’s rail. I held the gun firmly, but he hit me again and I dropped it—over the side and into the Tennessee. I let it go and he held me up by the one arm as I struggled. “Silver is no enemy of mine, little sister.” He growled it at me, his hideous and misshapen mouth making the words obscene. “It is the metal of the moon, and the moon is my mistress—or didn’t you know? She holds no harm for me. And neither do you.”

He finished speaking, and with it, he lost his interest in me. He flung me—not overboard but back against the wall, and through it. I fell so fast and met so little resistance that I was perplexed when I found myself on a floor, half on a divan and surrounded by glass, wood, and water.

In one short burst he’d cast me through the window of a cabin and I was cut, I knew. I was terribly dazed, and I was bleeding, surely. But I didn’t feel it. I pulled my feet up underneath myself and rose, hanging onto the divan, and the table, and using my hands to walk as much as I was using my legs.

I’d lost the gun, but I had the rosary still, tied around my hand and useless except for it made me feel stronger.

He hadn’t killed me, though he could have—or maybe he couldn’t. He said the silver meant nothing, but something had repelled him. Was it the rosary? Did the beads and the cross provoke him? I know what the folk tales say about other beasts of the devil. I know how these things are supposed to work. I’ve been researching them for years. I’ve been doing my best, and my worst, to understand.

But I hadn’t learned enough. I hadn’t learned how to kill him; I’d only learned that I must kill him, because there would be no stopping or redeeming him.

God might have disagreed with me—but as of that moment where I was staggering in the unoccupied cabin, trying to gain my balance and my bearing, He’d never told me so.

XII.

People were starting to come out of their cabins, wandering into the rain, wondering what that godawful noise had been. They were milling about, walking along that edge of panic—when the unknown is something yet uncertain, but bound to be terrible. I imagined they were right, but I didn’t believe it would do any of us any good to embrace a frightened frenzy.

Two of the young men from supper were out on the deck—I told them about the mud drums, and how they make such a horrific noise that unseasoned travelers often fear the boiler is about to explode.

I knew as well as the serving girl knew that it was a lie. It calmed them anyway. I’ve always been a good liar.

I told them to go back to their rooms and prepare for bed. We’d be stopped for the night, and they may as well rest. I told them that I would do likewise, but then I heard the screaming, and I knew that the bluff was up.

It wasn’t that howling sound—no. It was a woman in terror, or fury.

Based only on suspicion, I thought it must have been the serving girl, Laura. There was a primitive brutality to the sound, it was something less civilized than I thought an educated Irish woman might produce. It was not a sound that would come from a small woman, anyway; and Laura was a tall girl. Furthermore, something told me she wasn’t a nervous girl, prone to histrionics.

And she was screaming.

Only for a moment. It would be more accurate to say she emitted one great scream, and stopped. But it was a scream of decidedly imminent peril.

Several heads popped out of their respective cabins, but I ignored them—I don’t know why. I might have called for help, though they might have thought to help me on their own, and I don’t know why they didn’t.

Out in the elements—buffeted by the cascades and stings of the uncooperative weather—I ran toward the place where the scream might have originated. On the way and on a whim, I ducked back into the dining area and rushed to the kitchen.

Laura had taken the biggest knife, but I did not intend to charge headlong into danger unattended. I found a large serving fork. It was the size of my forearm, with three giant fangs as long as fingers. It might have looked silly, but it was heavy in my hand and I thought it would suffice.

Back into the rain. I was shocked; it hit my face as hard as a slap. It all but blinded me. It confused me, but I heard fast footsteps off to my right—so I chased them.

“Laura! Sister Eileen!” I called out. Nothing answered, so I kept following the patter, though it’d grown faint between the raindrops. I was following their memory more than their echo.

I was down the hall from the captain’s cabin, I thought. He might have been a tired old drunk, but he was the captain—he was the boat’s authority—and I thought that this must be a good time to rouse him. Strange things were happening on the Mary Byrd, and they were surely worse than strange. They were sinister.

But it was then that I realized why Laura had been screaming.

I came upon the captain’s cabin and was stunned into immobility. I stared into his cabin with my mouth agape, collecting the raindrops that streamed from my hair and down my chin.

His cabin had become a slaughterhouse.

The captain was sprawled, his chest and head on the floor—his feet and thighs on the divan. He was perfectly dead, without a doubt. No one lives while missing so much of his face and throat. Hardly any bit above his chest was recognizable, but for one bulging blue eye that pointed sightlessly at the ceiling.

His hands were torn and bruised too, and his wrists; he’d held them out to hold something else away. But what?

I thought of Laura with her knife, but I did not see her and I was not foolish enough to think she was responsible. No, it was only fear I felt for her, when I thought about her roaming the decks alone with her knife.

And where was she?

A crash might have answered me—or it might have told me nothing. At least it startled me away from the sight on the floor of the demolished cabin. At least it gave me something to look for and think about besides, “Where did the rest of him go?”

The crash was mighty, but brief. It sounded like a window breaking and taking part of a wall with it—it was decidedly different from the thunderclaps that coughed themselves into the sky every few minutes. The Mary Byrd shook a little—or maybe she just rolled with a river wave. The wind was moving her too.

The frantic patter of footsteps had been drowned by the rain, so I changed my approach and went toward the stern, toward the crash—or so I thought.

I skidded around the corner and found myself overlooking the big red paddlewheel. I caught myself on the railing’s edge before I could topple down into it, and I thanked heaven and lucky stars both.

I turned around and saw where a window was gone, blasted inside the cabin as if something large and unwilling had been thrown through it. It pained me—I hesitated, and I cringed, but I looked inside anyway. I expected to see something as horrible as the captain’s room, but there was nothing. Only the evidence of a struggle—shards of glass, toppled books, a chair with one leg smashed out from under it.

And blood.

I saw a little bit of blood. But it wasn’t much. It was a small, splattered amount running thin with the added influx of rainwater; it suggested discomfort and inconvenience, not death. Whoever was hurt had left the scene.

“Laura?” I shouted again. “Sister Eileen?”

I tore myself away from the broken window and fought the wind-thrown rain again—I held out my arm, with my elbow pointed forward, trying to clear myself a path through the sheets of water. It hardly helped. I could hardly see.

And that’s why I plowed right into him—the cook. He was a bigly muscled man like I was in my youth, and he was as black as a plum with brown eyes set in yellow. My head connected with his collarbone and I recoiled with apologies begging from my lips.

“I didn’t see you there,” I told him. “I—” I wiped my face on my sleeve and continued. “I wonder, did Laura find you?”

He didn’t react, except to stand there and sway.

I felt warmth in my hair, dripping down my face. I wiped it again with my sleeve—and only then noticed something stained and streaked upon it. It wasn’t mine, I didn’t think.

“Cook?” Between the rain and the darkness I couldn’t make out much detail in his visage. But he was wearing a gray night shirt and it was just light enough to spy the way he had both arms raised up to clutch his chest, and his throat. And his skin was so dark that I hadn’t seen, until I looked for it, that all of his soaking came not from the rain.

I reached out a hand to him—though I don’t know how I meant to help.

He reached a hand to me—though there wasn’t anything I could do. I saw that, when he took the hand away. I saw white there, underneath his grasp. It was bone, and tendons, and the cords of his throat.

Before he could take my hand, he fell slowly sideways. I stepped forward to catch him or assist him—at least to lie him down on the deck, perhaps, and give him that passing measure of dignity. His weight bore him down though, harder than I could hold him up. He toppled past me. His hip cracked against the rail and broke it—the bone or the rail, I don’t know, I only heard it—but over the side he went, and he splashed down into the Tennessee River. He bobbed a moment or two before sinking, or being washed away to a spot I couldn’t see.

I stared down after him, gasping, panting, breathing in the rain and wishing for the sun—for God, for Eileen, or Laura, or anyone.

And above me, up on the hurricane deck and between the gonging beats of thunder, I heard the unmistakable sound of a struggle.

XIII.

The cook’s room was empty when I finally got to it. His cabin looked all right, but the door was hanging open and water was blowing on in. I came inside and looked around, pushing the door shut behind me enough so I could shake the water off myself.

“Cook?” I called, but it was obvious he wasn’t there, and I don’t know why I bothered.

The room was tidy and didn’t have much in it, like mine. He didn’t own much, and what he had was stashed like his mama told him how to do it. The only thing undone was the bed—the covers were pushed aside and the sheets were unmade. It looked like he’d turned in for the night and maybe heard something. Maybe he got up, out from between the sheets, and maybe he opened that door.

Whatever happened after, he hadn’t closed it and he was gone.

I opened the door again and went back into the wet. It didn’t matter. I was soaked all the way down to my skin everywhere anyway. And if finding the captain had taught me anything, it was that hiding in a cabin wouldn’t do me no good, and probably my knife wouldn’t either.

Out on the deck I stepped on something that crunched and slipped. It was a lantern, or what was left of one—the glass kind filled with oil. The cook probably took it with him when he left the room to see what the noise was. And he’d dropped it, but he’d been lucky—or we’d been lucky. Either the rain or chance had kept it from bursting into flames along the deck and setting us all ablaze.

But there were my hints—an open cabin door, a broken lantern, and an unmade bed. No cook. And out in the cabin decks someone was surely going to find the captain soon.

And someone was shooting—once, twice, maybe a third time—the thunder got in the way of what I heard, but I heard the first two clearly enough. Someone was shooting, and that couldn’t mean anything good.

I thought of the pilot’s house, up on top of the boat, and I thought of the big whistle there. It was a whistle you could hear for miles, if you kicked the treadle wheel with all you were worth. You could sure hear it farther off than a gunshot, I’d bet.

Somewhere back towards the captain’s cabin I heard a big commotion, but it sounded too close to have come from there.

I thought it was up by the stern, by the big paddlewheel or thereabouts; so if there was trouble roaming the boat, it was coming my way. I wasn’t running far enough or fast enough, but Jesus Lord have mercy—the captain was dead and we were anchored down to the river bottom. Where could we have gone? What could we have done?

I thought about the whistle again, and I thought maybe it was a bad idea to sound it. Even as I braced myself against the thunderstorm and started to run to the stairs, I thought I might be making things worse for myself. I might lock myself in the pilot’s house and sound the whistle a thousand times—and someone might hear, and someone might come.

But the odds were better than fair that whatever came would kill me as soon as rescue me. The killer was closer than any help, that was sure.

But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t think of anything else and I couldn’t just stand there and wait for it to come and get me. So I ran to the stairs, and I charged up them—stepping on my skirts and falling on my face before making it to the top.

Up there it was cold and windier than downstairs; I was closer to the sky and closer to the storm, but it felt all right. It felt like being surrounded by God, and I felt alive.

And then I heard the growl. I didn’t mistake it for any thunder. This was something other than the sky, making a noise that said it hated me. Well it could hate me all it wanted. I still had my knife.

From the corner of my eye—off to the left, coming around a bench bolted down to the top deck, it crept forward.

Lightning showed me its eyes, and they were the color of new pennies. It was walking hunched over. Its feet made clicking noises on the deck, not like it was wearing shoes but like it was walking on claws. It definitely had teeth; I saw those teeth shining sharp as it breathed and chewed at the wet air.

“Jesus Lord have mercy,” I said, to myself and not to it—whatever it was.

I began to back sideways and away, towards the pilot’s house. It might be locked but I’d break anything I had to, in order to get inside. But I backed off slow, and it came at me slow. Like a game. Like a step from me, and a step from it.

If I ran, it’d chase me.

I tried to angle myself to put obstacles between us—deck chairs, bundled crates, anything.

It was herding me. It took me a few yards of retreat to figure it out. It was herding me away, into a corner, against the big steam calliope at the edge of the roof. I was standing beside the noisy steam instrument when the monster with the penny eyes jumped.

I didn’t waste any breath on a scream. I scrambled aside and grabbed a chair, yanking it loose and pushing it in front of me. The full weight of the beast landed square on the chair and the deck was so wet we both slid—the creature went off to the side, smashing into the pipe organ with its big brass tubes and pedals. I went falling, crashing, in the other direction—back around the deck.

I had a clear shot to the pilot house but I had the monster on my tail.

It recovered quickly, bringing a hairy fist down into the pipes and drawing a shrill, steam-powered squeal from the press of his weight on the keys. Something snagged him and he gave me a handful of precious seconds while he disentangled himself, roaring all the time.

I could hardly see the deck, or the pilot-house door, or my hands in front of me, but that didn’t slow me down. I knew what followed me. I knew what would happen when it caught me, and I didn’t have any dumb ideas anymore—oh, it was going to catch me. But I was going to make it inside that pilot house.

The thing landed on the deck behind me with a crack and a squeal, and I jumped—stepping on and over the deck benches, pushing myself on with my feet, and holding my skirts up with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife.

I’d have never believed I could move so fast—in the dark, in the rain, in that big long dress that slowed me down every turn.

Behind me, though. If you’d seen what came behind me.

You’d believe it. You’d have run too, no matter what.

Behind me I heard it slip and trip its way along, finding footing like I did—just barely, and not very well.

And then the clomping, echoing leaps of its pursuit stopped. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to look and see it back there, flexing its haunches like a cat getting ready to take down a mouse.

But then I saw—over by the stairs, where first I’d come in—someone else was standing. “Jack!” the someone called out, and even in my frantic flight I heard her, and I knew that it was the nun.

“No!” I hollered to her, where what I meant to say was more like, “Get gone! You’re no help to me and it’ll kill us both!” But I didn’t have the breath to do it and I was almost at the pilot house then.

“Jack!” she shouted it again.

It stopped the monster. It didn’t stop me.

I collided hands-first with the pilot house door and it was locked, just like I figured it would be. There was a little window, though—beside the door, and a bigger one that looked back over the decks so the pilot could see what was going on around the boat. I turned the knife and struck the little pane of glass with its heavy wood handle.

I didn’t know why the monster wasn’t all upon me yet, but I took those seconds like the gifts they were. The window wasn’t big enough to climb through, but it was big enough to reach an arm through. I jammed my hand on in, and unlocked the door from the inside—then opened the door and let myself on through.

I flung my back against it to close it behind me but something stopped it. Something wouldn’t let the hinges shut and this something was huge, and angry.

But I’d gotten so close! I was in the pilot house, and my back was bracing against the monster; whatever spell Sister Eileen had cast on it was broken and it remembered me. It wanted me. It had every intention of eating me alive, I knew it like a mouse knows it.

I was crying then, and screaming, and scooting myself down to sit myself on the floor and hold it closed with my feet against the captain’s instruments, and the wheels, and the calling tubes, and the levers and latches. Anything to hold my position there—anything to keep the door from opening enough to let the thing through.

It pushed hard—again, again, and with a great thrust of weight it knocked me lose and threw me all the way across the small room.

It grabbed me—around the waist, trying to whip me around. It wanted me to look at it, but I didn’t want to look at it, and I didn’t intend to. I struck with the knife and it didn’t do me a bit of good. I slashed where I could and felt something warm like blood, but it wasn’t enough to drain it, or slow it down.

With a back-handed swipe it knocked the knife away from me and I think it broke my hand. I felt the bones in my palm and along my wrist turn loose, but I reached with it anyway—at the controls, at the bell pulls, at the cords and cables—and it felt like trying to pull a rope with a glove full of gravel.

It hit me hard, trying to stun me or trying to stop me. It let me go just enough to let me fall over the pilot’s wheel, and then it grabbed me by my arm to whip me back.

But with my unhurt hand, I’d found the whistle treadle down there towards the floor. I grabbed it and I pushed on it with all the weight I could give it.

One shrill, piercing note blew high and hard into the rain.

The monster howled and slacked his grip on my arm, so I leaned on the treadle harder. The note rose in tone and it got so loud, I thought it would break my ears. But I leaned harder, because the monster was letting me go. And then the second note chimed in—and then, because the thing had all but let me loose, I took my whole body and fell on it.

A chord loud enough to wake the saints blasted out, and it hurt my ears and my head so bad that my hand quit hurting, or at least for a few seconds I didn’t feel it anymore.

The monster howled, and howled—and I heard pain in the howl and I wondered if its ears were hurting too. That’s why I leaned on the whistle so hard, even though the sound of it had worked its way into my body and it was making my ribs shake.

In my ears there was a snapping, stabbing pain and then there was nothing but that pain. There wasn’t even any sound anymore. Not even the whistle. And I was afraid that I’d fallen off—or that I’d died and let it go, but it was still there being pushed, so I didn’t let go. I didn’t let up.

I turned around to look over my shoulder and see the monster—since it wanted me to look so bad. It was backing up with its hands or its paws or whatever—it was backing up with its hands over its ears. Its mouth was open and its tongue was curling out with a scream, but I didn’t hear any of it.

I didn’t hear the rain, either. I didn’t hear a thing, except for the sour, deep ringing in my head.

I jumped up and down a little, leaning and pushing and pushing on the whistle. Make it louder, then. Make it louder, and make it hurt. Make someone hear. Make someone send help. Make someone come. Make someone come.

Sister Eileen came.

She was there—I saw her, standing very still behind the monster, but I only saw her when the lightning flashed. Between the lightning strikes, I was blind and deaf both. But I watched through the lightning, and I saw only fragments of what came next.

The nun was holding something in both hands—I couldn’t tell what it was. It almost looked like she was wearing mittens with knives stuck in them, but it was just a trick of the light. She was holding something, I guess—some kind of weapon, I think. She was panting, too—breathing so hard I could see her breasts rising and falling between the white flashes and cracked lines above us.

Her eyes were shining. I swear, it looked like she was growing—but it must have been that she was coming closer. She was running towards the thing. She was coming right at it, and it didn’t see her at first.

The next flash—she was on top of it. She was on its back and she was tearing at it with her hands, or whatever she held.

They fell together, and everything shook. Everything rattled. Everything went dark, and it stayed dark. I fell down, off the whistle, and I leaned myself back up against the pilot’s wheel.

My dress was ripped, and where it was ripped I saw skin. I saw strips of muscle, like on meat when you dress it up to cook. I hadn’t even felt it. I didn’t want to look at it.

I closed my eyes, or maybe I didn’t. I couldn’t tell the difference.

XIV.

The whistle covered every sound, even the thunder, but I could see Jack and the whistle hurt him bad. It hurt me too—it would have hurt anyone standing anywhere near it, when Laura pressed it down full blast.

I pushed it aside, because I had to. I shoved the sound out of my head and I jumped for him, and we struggled there while the sky covered us with rain and clouds, and while the whistle chimed loud with the thunder and the lightning looked so close that it might strike us all.

Then, more suddenly than it began, it stopped.

Jack was bewildered, unnerved, or just relieved. He threw me to the ground and jumped away, but he wasn’t paying attention to where he went. He threw himself into one of the stacks—the big black pipes that billowed steam from the engines. It clanged like a gong and, even after he’d righted himself and dashed away, the metal rivets made distressed popping sounds.

I couldn’t see where he’d gone, so I went to Laura instead. I knew what I’d find. But I had to look, just in case. She’d outrun him for a few seconds. She was strong. She was smart.

But she was dead.

He’d torn her almost in half, and I wondered how in God’s name she’d held on for so long, sounding that dreadful whistle. I also had to wonder, had she held it long enough? Would anyone come?

And even if they came, what would they do?

I had another idea, one that might help Laura’s half-formed plan. If we could lift the anchor, the current of the Tennessee was swift; it would carry us at least to stop against the shore. It might carry us farther to civilization, too. We couldn’t be far from Chattanooga. If we could even reach the shore, at least we’d have somewhere to run. There on the Mary Byrd, we were fish in a barrel.

I didn’t know where Jack had gone.

I had to guess that he’d run back downstairs. He wasn’t finished—the bloodlust wasn’t through with him yet—and he’d be hungry for more. There was no one left up there on the top deck. He’d have to go back down to the cabin decks if he wanted more havoc.

Down the stairs I went back after him, though I suspected he’d jumped down to the next deck by the wheel—where there was room to do so, if you didn’t mind the landing.

I had no idea where the anchor was, and the captain was dead. Laura might have known—she’d been riding the river for a while too. That made Christopher my best hope. Even if he didn’t know how to raise it, he’d probably know where it was. But I didn’t know where he was, so it was a great game of tag and we all knew who was “it.”

I didn’t believe for a second that he’d gone back into the dining hall and locked himself within it. Besides, I suspected the cook was dead—otherwise Laura wouldn’t have been up there alone, and she might have returned. There was no one left to form a makeshift fortress with. If he’d gone back, he was probably by himself, or with some of the other few passengers aboard—though my hopes weren’t very high for any of them.

Back down I ran, taking the stairs two at a time and rubbing at my hands, which ached in a strange way.

At the bottom of the stairs I stumbled over someone’s leg and I fell across the deck with a slide and a splash. I pulled myself together and went to him, on my hands and knees, and I turned him over.

It wasn’t Christopher, but I couldn’t have said much else about him. His face was gone, and so was his neck. So was part of his shoulder. His arms had great tears in them, where he’d held them up to hold Jack away. The man lay crumpled in a puddle of his own waste and blood, well beyond help.

I stood and crossed myself, only then noticing that I’d lost the rosary.

I had no time to mourn for it. No time for anything but the chase.

Around me, up and down—here and there—I heard things breaking but it was hard to pinpoint any of it. The river itself and the woods around it worked against me, casting back the thunder and every echo of every noise. It worried me not only because of the swiftly declining population on the boat, but because the whistle might not have been so helpful as Laura believed.

Even if anyone heard it, how would they find us? I wasn’t even sure it would be recognized as a distress signal.

The anchor, then. I needed to find the anchor.

I checked as far as I could and as fast as I could, every deck. One body here, another there. If I hadn’t tripped over so many, I wouldn’t have believed this many passengers had been on board. Each one made my stomach sick. Each one told me I was failing, and my time was running out.

What if it came down to it—and Jack and I were the last two left?

“Christopher!” I shouted out, because I couldn’t imagine being alone there with the beast. I wasn’t ready for it. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t do it. “Christopher!” I screamed it as I ran, begging God and every saint whose name I could recall—just let me find him alive. Let me find my friend. We can do this together, but I cannot do it alone. I don’t even care if he finds out the truth. Just don’t make me do this alone.

Each crack of thunder was louder than the last. Every shock of lightning brighter, and closer.

I rounded a corner and was quickly grabbed by ordinary, human hands. They pulled me out of the rain and into a nook behind and beneath the great red paddlewheel. The wheel creaked and groaned against the weight of the boat, the tug of the river, and the insistent wind.

“Shh!” Christopher warned, releasing me and letting me face him.

I was so glad to see him I nearly cried. “Thank God!” I said instead, but he waved his finger at me again—as if I did not know, and needed reminding.

“Don’t! Don’t thank anybody yet. Have you seen it?” he whispered. “Have you seen the thing that’s out here?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen him.”

“Him? It’s Gabert, isn’t it?”

I suppose my eyes and open mouth told him what he needed to know. I was astonished, though I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. He was a quick man, I knew as much. It was why I liked him.

“What is he? Wait, no. It doesn’t matter. We have to get off this boat. We have to get out of here.”

“Is there anyone else left?” I asked, because I had to. I couldn’t leave anyone.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

For the first time since the storm began, the sound of the rain comforted me. We were out of its direct path, and it felt like a curtain separating us from the rest of the boat, and the rest of the world. And from Jack. “Do you think anyone heard the whistle?”

“I have no idea. But I don’t think it matters.”

I didn’t either, but I didn’t say so. “Where’s the anchor?” I begged instead.

“Why?”

“We have to pull it up or cut it loose. We can’t stay out here, in the middle of the river, waiting for him to come and get us. We have to get to shore, even if we only drift there and crash.”

“And set him loose? At least when he’s here on the boat, he’s contained. We need to leave and go get help, not give him a lift to solid ground!” Christopher looked surprised at me, but I think it’s only because he didn’t understand.

“He’s already loose! And if you think he can’t swim, you’re fooling yourself. He’s only stayed aboard this long because there’s still prey left to find. When he’s through with us, he’ll head for shore anyway. At least if we move the boat, someone might find it and see what’s happened. People will know the danger is here—even if they don’t know what it means. Now tell me—where’s the anchor?”

“Other side,” he said, indicating a direction over to our right. “Though I don’t know what good it’ll do you to know. Look, I have a way out, maybe. I found the yawls, there are two of them. You and I between us won’t fill one, if we can get it out to the water.”

“A yawl?”

“A rowboat, yes. They’ve always got one on board at least. They’re easy to disengage. We’ll drop one into the river and hop aboard before he knows we’re gone.”

“It won’t work,” I told him, but only out of reflex.

It wasn’t any worse than my plan to pull the anchor.

“The yawls are only around the corner there. We’ve got to go past the anchor chain in order to get them anyway. We’ll kill two birds with one stone. Look—we can make it. We’ll find our way to Chattanooga, or Rossville—we’ll get some help.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s what we’ll have to do. Where did you say the anchor was again?”

XV.

The moment I restated the anchor’s location, she darted around the corner back into the rain and was lost to me. I will never understand why she thought it was so necessary; and I was even tempted to suggest she was terribly wrong, except that it was clear to me that she knew much more about our predicament than I did.

I had a thousand and one questions, but there was no time to ask them.

I doubt she would have satisfied them, regardless.

“You know where to meet me!” I called out into the rain. I had no idea if she’d heard or not, but I told myself she must have. Otherwise, I could not have left my semi-safe space at all.

But I did. I didn’t run too fast, lest I make myself heard and lest I wear myself out. Running didn’t come easily to a man my size, and anyway, stealth alone might preserve me. Up ahead I heard a great tearing and splitting—like a tree being pulled apart, rather than sawed. Then I heard a harsh jangling, and a splash.

When I finally made my way to the portal where the anchor chain should have been, I saw only a large hole where the entire mechanism had been torn free. My small friend could not have done this, but if the strange and wicked Jack had done so, then why?

The deck shifted a touch underneath me. It was only a little jerk, a barely perceptible yanking movement. Behind me, the paddlewheel creaked with idle movement.

Mary Byrd was in motion. One way or another, Eileen had gotten what she wanted.

I wasn’t much of a religious man anymore, but I prayed hard that she’d meet me where I told her. I wished upon all the stars I couldn’t see that I might find her already unlatching the yawl to take us to shore. I didn’t understand why she ran on ahead of me. I didn’t understand how she knew what she seemed to know.

I made haste along the sodden decks and closed my eyes when I passed broken doors. I winced and gazed away when I saw blood smeared and dripping down the windows or on the rails. But I made it down to the ock where the yawls were swinging and creaking in their onboard moorings.

I saw no sign of Eileen until a light behind me nearly sent my heart into my throat.

She was standing there with a lantern, wick trimmed low but giving us light enough. “Hurry,” she whispered. “Do what you must. I don’t know how to work this.”

I took a step and the floor ducked out from under me. I found it again, and put both feet down firmly. “We’re moving.” I stated the obvious—reaching for the lever that would lower the yawl and set the boat down.

“I went to the pilot house. I braced the wheel. We’re headed for shore, but it might take a while to get there. How do I help you with this?”

“You don’t. I’ve got it.” The boat dropped harder than I would have liked. It cracked upon the floor with a noise that must have been heard or felt all across the boat.

“Hurry.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “To the water. Help me push, like this.”

She stood beside me, shifted her shoulders, and shoved. Between us, we forced the little rig to the edge of its slot and then, with a hesitation and a sway, it splashed down into the river. It bobbed there expectantly, oars crossed within. The current felt for it immediately, but it was tied to Mary Byrd yet by a long rope.

“I’ll go first,” I told the nun. “Then you jump down, and I’ll catch you.”

“No!” she screeched.

At first I wondered why my reasonable suggestion had provoked such an outburst, but then I felt it—the blow to my upper arm, the brutal strike from behind that picked me up off my feet and threw me hard and headfirst into the other yawl. Something broke inside me, though whether it was ribs, arms, legs, or skull, I was ill-prepared to say. The world wavered and went dark.

I fought it.

I shook myself and there was pain from every joint and limb. I tried to rise, and tried to see. Sister Eileen was circling in retreat. I think she was trying to reach me, the lovely fool. “Go,” I tried to tell her, but the word was drowned in the blood that filled my mouth.

Pain and blackness welled up in my throat, or maybe it was only more blood. Whatever I’d broken, it bled from within.

I fought it.

I saw her standing alone—just a lantern between them, with a flame trimmed low. I looked madly around, looking for something to strike with, and finding nothing—seeing nothing. The bloody blackness came up high, and my vision was leaving me.

I fought it.

I fell to my knees, then crawled up again. I pulled my miserable body up to my feet, using a support column to prop myself. Lucid thoughts grew harder and harder to come by, but I managed just one: how much oil is left in that lantern?

“Eileen,” I said, and the word came out unintelligible. Neither she nor the beast gave any indication they heard.

She was standing at the edge of the rail, at the edge of the boat—the water behind her. The yawl must have been behind her too. One more lucid thought—one more lucid action. I don’t remember doing it, and I don’t remember how I did it, but I found myself leaning on her with almost all my rather-significant weight.

Then we were falling, and there was fire.

We missed the yawl and landed together in the river, but the yawl was only a few feet away and she dragged me to it. She must have been much stronger than she looked, for such a small woman. For such a small person. For such. I don’t remember.

But I do remember, before it all went black for the last time…I do remember lying on my back, in the boat, and staring up at the Mary Byrd and seeing flames. I saw Jack—the monster that he was—I saw him ablaze and shrieking inside the area where the yawls were kept.

“The river,” I gurgled at Eileen.

“He can’t.” She gathered what I meant. “He’s trapped. He can’t leave the boat that easily. It’ll burn around him, down to the water line, I suppose. And you helped,” she said, and I believe her eyes were full of tears. I hope she wasn’t wasting them on me. “You helped me, you didn’t make me do it alone.”

“Burning.”

She kissed my hand and held it to her face.

Her eyes were shining a funny-bright color, mirroring the flames on the boat, and I thought, “That’s what it is. She’s an angel, after all.”

Part Two:

Halfway to Holiness

In 1879 the Reverend Benjamin Aarons cuts a holy swath across the western plains—taking his traveling revivalist camp from town to town, spreading the word of God and selling salvation.

But beneath the tent, all is not as it seems. The throes of religious ecstasy hide a more sinister kind of violence, and a series of vicious, unexplained murders have followed the itinerant minister from Cane Ridge, Kentucky all the way to Holiness, Texas.

There, Eileen Callaghan joins the audience to pray and watch.

The nun with the hidden Colt pays careful attention to the thrashing of the Christian mystics—for while these people speak in tongues and writhe with the Holy Spirit, Eileen sees signs of an unnatural change.

But is the reverend a calculating fiend, using his position in the church to mask a thirst for blood? Or is he a desperate, frightened man, fighting to control an affliction he can’t explain?

Shudder, dear reader—for the necessary course is grim but clear: if Eileen cannot help this anguished man, she must surely slay the monster he’s becoming.

I.

“COME and WORSHIP WITH US,” read the sign.     Eileen Callaghan peered at it closely. She scanned the print from top to bottom, examining it as if there might be a hidden message, some acrostic clue buried in the call to prayer. The black print at the bottom said, “Friday, September 2—Sundown in CARTER’S FIELD, just outside HOLINESS, TEXAS.”

The small, red-haired woman murmured a ladylike grunt of interest.

She folded her hands and took a step back. She shrugged beneath her bonnet and adjusted it with a frown, because she did not care for it. But the day was too hot for her old black habit, and too warm likewise to let her head go uncovered.

She’d grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.

With the back of her hand, she wiped her forehead.

Behind her, a man approached—or she guessed he must be a man by the weight of his feet in the dirt, and the lack of audible petticoats. He kept a polite distance. He waited until he was sure she must have absorbed the announcement, and he said with an invitation in his voice, “Will you be attending the camp meeting tomorrow night?”

Eileen smiled in a way that reached her eyes, even though her lips were pressed together. Then she turned around to face him. “I think I might,” she said. “Why? Would you recommend it?”

“I…I would,” he stammered. “I would recommend it very much.” He retreated a step and acted as though he’d like to put three or four paces more between them, but his manners prohibited it.

“It’s all right. There’s no need to be alarmed.” She gave him a little wink, and added with a conspiratorial whisper, “We don’t bite.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “It’s only, I didn’t realize.”

She reached for the cross, on a chain at her throat—for that was where his eyes were locked. “Realize what? That I was a Christian too?”

“I only meant—”

“I do know what you meant, dear. It’s strange, the way people recognize it, even when I don’t wear the uniform. I left the convent years ago, and besides, I’m not sure I could bear to wear black in this desert of a place.”

She was careful when she talked to make her accent heard. It was a trick she’d learned through trial and error—how nervous American Protestants were less troubled by foreign Papists than the homegrown kind. And in that part of the country, most of the homegrown Catholics were converts from the Spanish missions; so a white, English-speaking Catholic was a real oddity.

“I hope I haven’t offended you,” he said. He fiddled with his collar, running a knuckle around its rim and withdrawing a finger that was slick with sweat.

“Why would I be offended? You haven’t been the least bit rude. You recognized me as a fellow believer, and you’ve shown great concern for my sensibilities, as you understand they may differ from your own.”

The young man glanced over at the announcement, then back at Eileen. “I feel a bit ridiculous now, since I don’t suppose you’d be very interested in our camp meeting. I don’t mean to imply you shouldn’t come…except,” he ran a hand across his hair. “Except now it sounds like I wish to discourage you, and that’s not the case either.”

She almost laughed, and she might have—except that he seemed so fragile and so prepared to run away. “I’m not so easily discouraged, I assure you. And I certainly didn’t mean to make you ill at ease. I was only curious about these meetings, and I’m very glad you happened along.”

“You are?”

“Indeed I am. Why, just now I was standing here wondering about these meetings, and here you are, full of answers. It’s practically a sign, don’t you think?”

“You mean, from heaven?”

“From heaven, of course. From God—the same one we’ve both been known to pray to. Though my goodness, it’s awfully hot out here, wouldn’t you say? If it wouldn’t embarrass you too much to be seen with me, I’d like to step inside and bother you a bit further. This is all terribly interesting, Mr.…?”

“Leonard,” he said quickly. “I’m Leonard Dwyer, ma’am. And I would be honored for a chance to share my faith with you.” Leonard held out an elbow, crooked and prepared to take a lady’s hand.

Eileen placed her fingers on his arm and let him lead her away from the tree with its nailed-down notice. She walked with him along the main street of Holiness, Texas—past tall, flat-fronted clapboard stores, a barber shop with a red and white pole, a doctor’s office, and a pub.

(No, she reminded herself. They’re called saloons out here.)

Leonard caught her gazing at the saloon and shook his head. “It’s a shame, but there’s nothing to be done about the place. Reverend Aarons tried to organize a temperance movement but the population was not…receptive.”

She glanced around, seeing mostly worn-looking men on horses. “I should think not. There aren’t many families, are there?”

“No. Most of the people passing through Holiness are on their way farther west, where they’ll look for gold. Some of them are Chinamen who’ve been working on the railroads, and a few others are ranchers. But this is no kind of place to raise children. Despite the name, ‘Holiness’ isn’t frequented by many virtuous women like yourself.”

“Ah. You’re speaking of Red Annie’s,” she said.

He blushed beneath his sunburn. “Yes ma’am, indirectly. Those aren’t the only women in town, but they might as well be.”

“Every place has them,” she said quietly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No, I’m sorry. I beg yours. I didn’t mean to let my mind wander; it’s only that I’m very far from home. But some things are the same everywhere, and did I mention that’s where I’m staying?”

“Where you’re…at Red Annie’s? But you can’t stay there!”

“Why not? The rooms are clean, the girls are kind—there are only four of them, did you know that? No, I guess you wouldn’t, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But the place is well-kept and I’ve never met a more agreeable hostess than Mrs. Shannon. Her parents came from my own country, and we’ve found much to talk about.”

Leonard’s skin burned bright against the stained white of his collar. “It just seems—”

“You know, when I was still living in the church, there were ministries that helped women of their kind. There were the laundries, of course, but I never cared for those. I preferred to teach them to read, to find better employment. Honestly, dear—I am not uncomfortable at Red Annie’s. If anything, I’m strangely happy there—because in a place so foreign to me as this one, I’m relieved to observe that some things never change.”

She watched a series of dueling reactions battle on his face, and she was pleased when he finally resolved to be amused.

“Some things are the same everywhere,” he said weakly.

“Some people are the same everywhere. Human nature, I’m sure you’ll agree, is more constant than any other thing under the sun. People everywhere seek the divine; we know we’re sinful and imperfect, and we look to God when we wish to improve ourselves.”

Back again on solid moral and theological ground, Leonard nodded with vigor. “Sinful, yes.” He clung to the word for a few seconds before pushing forward. “And that’s what the camp meetings are for, and about. Of course.”

“Of course,” she nodded and let him continue. She listened to every word, weighing it against what she already knew; and later that night, over supper in Annie’s kitchen, she pensively mined the conversation for further details.

She hadn’t heard what she was hoping to hear, but she had a standing invitation from a respectable young deacon to investigate for herself.

***

In Eileen’s room there was a mirror—an elongated thing in the shape of a gravy dish, clouded and brown around the edges. Eileen stared into it not at her face, but at the small gold crucifix that hung below her throat.

It might serve her well to remove it.

In a plain dress and without the jewelry, she could pass easily enough so long as she didn’t speak. She reached for the clasp, lifting her hair and feeling underneath.

No.

No, she’d rather leave it on. Let the citizens of Holiness, Texas, interpret it as they liked—she wasn’t afraid of them. The hell-hot plains hid stranger and more frightening things than Catholics, after all.

II.

Night fell, and Eileen’s hands were shaking because of the moon.

She could feel it crawling up the sky, not too full and fat quite yet but swelling still and growing. Something else was growing too—something else was swelling still and itching under her skin, just below the surface, straining to be let out.

She was grateful for the room in the house of ill repute. She appreciated the privacy the women there offered her, and the freedom to peel her heavy, hot clothes away and kneel in her nightdress.

The light cotton shift reached from shoulder almost to floor, but indecent or not, it was more tolerable than proper clothing. And when the doors were closed and locked, and when the shades and curtains had been pulled down low, Eileen had bigger secrets to keep than the color of her nightgown.

She knelt beside the bed and closed her eyes, breathing slowly, breathing with forced but measured calm that counted the seconds between breaths.

From time to time, her lungs would catch—but she held the cough down, fighting back the growl. “It’s not time yet,” she said to herself, keeping her voice low. “It’s not time yet. Not tonight. And not tomorrow night, either. It’s not time yet.”

But time was looming close.

As the pulse of insistent pain began to ebb, she relaxed and unfolded her hands. She left them flat on the thin blanket that covered the bed. “Not time yet,” she repeated again, and this time there was less of a plea buried in the words. This time, she was certain. “No. Not tonight.”

When she climbed to her feet again, her face was covered in a light sheen of sweat, and she was steady. But the calm could be deceiving—she’d learned that much the hard way. Better by far to be safe and certain.

There was a man in Louisiana with a dog. There was a splash of pain and blood, and the night sky above was bright without clouds. Behind the church there was a woman, her back bent with age. There was a moment of clarity and a minute of mayhem. In the woods there was a creek that ran between the trees. I awoke naked and filthy beside it, and I tried to focus my eyes. I tried to bring the colors back, there in the black and white of night outside, and I was confused because I couldn’t tell without color for reference—are these the wolf’s eyes, or mine?

I looked for the north star but the time of night was wrong or the forest was too tall, and I couldn’t find it.

She checked again to make sure the door was locked, and yes, the bolt was drawn. It would hold most unwanted visitors at bay, or at least delay them. Keep them out, keep her in. Keep them apart, in case of the worst.

A large tapestry bag sat open atop the chest of drawers.

From within it, Eileen retrieved a green glass bottle and set it on the nightstand; then from the bag she pulled a set of metal shackles. One cuff was raw, unfinished iron and the other had its rough edges softened by a winding silk ribbon. She clapped the softer cuff around her wrist, and slipped a chain with its key around her neck.

The bed’s headboard was shiny brass—or it might have been only gilded. The metal bars felt hollow; they pinged like wind chimes when she flicked her fingernail against them. They’d have to do.

When at last she was ready for bed, she checked the door a third time and shook the corked bottle on the nightstand to swish its contents. And then she turned down the light, and then she slipped the loose iron cuff around a bar on the headboard, where it jangled as she settled beneath the sheet.

It didn’t have to hold for long.

It only needed to give enough resistance to wake her if the monster crept up from the inside while she slept. It only needed to startle her, and bring her around until she could regain control of herself. It only needed to buy her time to open the bottle and breathe or swallow or cough.

Through the slits at the edges of the curtains, and at the seams of the nightshade behind them, the moon slipped higher past the clouds and framed the window with white.

Upstairs, a new client was being shown to his room by Tabitha, the small blonde girl who looked no older than fourteen. Annie was taking a bath and rubbing herself with a bar of soap that smelled like French lavender. All the way up on the roof, Marianne was writing a letter and crying quietly to herself. Outside, two men were riding slowly past on tired horses.

Eileen Callaghan could hear every clipping hoof, every slight sob. She could smell the perfumed soap as if it were lingering above her lip; she could feel the miniature earthquakes of each footstep, each bedspring coiling, recoiling.

She stretched herself out on the bed and pointed her toes at the ceiling. In the back of her throat something was pushing, fussing to be let out—but she had tethered the thing well and its leash would hold.

III.

She rose at dawn, having slept little. She was tired, growing more tired every hour—but such was the price of vigilance when the moon was filling itself up like a bowl of milk.

With the passing years she’d grown aware and wary of the process, and never accustomed to it. The key around her neck unlocked the shackle. She rolled it up and put it back in her bag, hiding it quickly. In case. Always in case.

And the bottle beside the bed, with its green glass spinning runny prisms in the morning light—she shook the bottle and frowned. She hadn’t needed it, but it was just as well. The contents were nearly spent.

The label on the side read, oleum dulci vitrioli, which was an old way of naming it. Americans called it chloroform if they called it anything at all.

Through trial and error she’d tried many palliatives before settling on the chloroform. Prayer, will power, and a profound personal composure could stave off early attacks, but a full moon called for stronger stuff.

Mandrake would suffice in a pinch, when it wasn’t hard to come by. Opiates like laudanum might work perfectly, or they might things much, much worse—and there was no way to predict the outcome.

But fortunately, the fussy little ladies of the American temperance movement skirted the use of alcohol by drugging themselves with cough medicine made of ether and ethanol, obeying the letter of their moral law if not the spirit. Therefore, ether was relatively easy to acquire in lieu of her preferred sedative. But it was difficult to stomach, and it left her nauseous for hours.

Regardless, Eileen vowed to seek a back-up supply as soon as possible, for surely the chloroform wouldn’t last another month.

As she gathered her clothes and pulled them on a piece at a time, she debated bringing the gun. It was a good gun, a Colt six-shooter she’d purchased to replace the one lost on a riverboat, a long time ago. But it wasn’t good enough. Nothing was good enough, yet—not even with the special silver bullets. She didn’t bother to have them made anymore, not since that night when the riverboat burned.

On second thought, better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

A glance into the gravy-boat mirror almost made her smile, but not quite.

It wasn’t a fair trade off, not by far. The monster’s gift was not eternal youth but eternal slavery. It would keep her from aging only so it could continue to use her, so passing for forty was small consolation.

Besides, her true age found ways to show. It glared out from her eyes, and it spoke out with the uncanny measure and confidence of her voice. She was not growing older and weaker, but stronger and clearer in her resolves—though they were many.

I will control this thing. I will find some way to reign it in, and hold it back. I will cure this thing. I will banish it forever, in myself and in the others who may carry it. I will seek out the others. I know they exist, and I will learn from them, and I will kill them if I have to, if I can not help them—if we cannot help each other.

I will find him.

I will find Jack, for this began with him—or I believe it did, I believe it must have. I will find Jack and I will kill him, because I do not believe he wishes to be helped. The thing has eaten his soul already, and there is nothing else to be done for him except give him back to God.

She took breakfast with Annie in the madam’s dining room—where they ate fried eggs with toasted bread, and drank fresh milk from a frequent customer’s cow.

“He can’t afford to pay much, you must understand what it’s like around here—with most folks passing through, not stopping. The people who live here don’t earn much, so we try to make it easier for them.”

Eileen nodded and sipped at the milk. “Bartering is as old as—”

“Older than the oldest profession?” Annie grinned. She was a pretty, black-haired woman who’d slipped from appealingly curvy to somewhat fat from years of leisure. Eileen hadn’t asked, but Annie had been fast to admit that she almost never took customers anymore, and she hadn’t for nearly a decade. The real money was in management, after all.

“And I’d assume that’s why there’s butter, too?”

“Butter, milk—cheese when it’s available. I think dear old Martin is excessively sweet on Tabitha, but he’s a nice fellow. Wife died awhile back. No children, just the cows and some pigs, too.” She waved a hand at the table. “The eggs came from Mr. Hammonds, who keeps chickens; the preserves were generously contributed by Jim Tanner, and the bread, oh my—and this is true, I tell you—the bread was made by Doc Arnold’s wife, she’s so delighted to be rid of him.”

“From his own wife?”

“Oh yes—on the condition we don’t let him know she’s aware of what he’s up to. If he thought she knew, he’d be embarrassed to death and then stay home. She’d rather avoid that if she can help it, so she bakes extra loaves on Monday afternoons as a gesture of goodwill.”

Eileen cackled happily, as there was no sense in feigning shock. “And I suppose this fine establishment of yours is a veritable repository of local gossip.”

The madam lifted an eyebrow, a corner of her lip, and another bite of toast. “It’s a small place. We all know each other’s business, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

Eileen pressed her lips together, but she couldn’t prevent them from creeping up at the edges. “Oh, it’s not gossip I’m after, exactly. I’m interested in those camp meetings, the ones with the announcements everywhere.”

“The camp meetings? Are you going to see about catching some extra religion out here?”

“No, no. I’m content enough with the state of my soul,” she lied, and she thought hard about how best to phrase the rest.

“Then go on,” Annie prompted her. “You’ve got a willing sinner with loose lips at your ready disposal. What would you care to know?”

Eileen settled back into her chair and folded her hands. “I’ve heard rumors of problems—maybe problems with the Reverend Aarons, isn’t that his name?”

Annie made a small “mm” sound and bobbed her chin.

She continued. “This reverend has gathered an unusual reputation, as he travels from place to place, conducting his meetings. Starting with the very first one, in Cane Ridge—”

“That was the big one in Kentucky, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Eileen said. “Several years ago. You heard about it?”

“Sure. He’s getting a name for himself, roaming from town to town, pushing Jesus for whole weekends at a time. And his is one of those shouting faiths, if you know what I speak of. Not Baptists or Methodists like folks around here—not like Catholics, that’s for damn sure.” She fell silent then, like there might be more to be said but she wasn’t sure how much of it was important.

Eileen cocked her head and tapped her thumbs against one another. “They call it a Holiness Movement, and as part of their doctrine, they participate in a baptism of the Holy Spirit—but I’ve heard it called ‘speaking in tongues.’ I’ve never seen it for myself but I’m interested in having a look.”

“You won’t participate?”

“No,” she said—and it came out more carefully than she would have liked. “I don’t care for the sound of it. But I’m intrigued by spirituality in all its forms, and I would like to know more.”

Annie took a long, fast swallow from her own glass of milk. She drained it and set it down on the round, wood table with a smack. “But that’s not why you want to visit the camp meeting, though. Speaking in tongues isn’t a problem, exactly. That’s not what you were talking about, was it?”

“No,” she admitted. “But I think it might be related to their problem.”

“How?”

She stalled, trying to organize the words in a way that wouldn’t say too much. “People have gone missing, and sometimes their families think they’ve left home to follow the meetings. But that doesn’t seem to be the situation.”

“They’re dead.” Annie said it matter-of-factly, as though she’d known all along.

“Er…yes. Not all of them, but some of them. I think there’s a good chance some of the missing people have joined the meetings. But a few of them were found in a terrible condition. You don’t want to use a nasty word like ‘murder,’ but it’s difficult not to; and it’s also difficult to ignore how the murders coincide with the meetings.”

“By which you mean to say, they coincide with the good reverend’s presence.”

“I wouldn’t single him out, except that when I hear about his fits, when he speaks in tongues—I wonder if there isn’t something horribly wrong with him. A medical condition, perhaps.”

The madam nodded, but didn’t offer anything further, so Eileen continued.

“A dear old friend of mine is a wonderful doctor who specializes in diseases of the mind,” she lied again—though this was more of a fib than an outright falsehood. “He’s seen patients with the most unusual disorders, things like you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t know they were true. One of the more interesting sicknesses—oh, there’s a name for it, but it escapes me now—afflicts people with terrible seizures. And these seizures, they predict a period of violent, uncontrollable delusion that might last for hours.”

A light went on in Annie’s eyes. “I see,” she said. “And you think, perhaps, that the reverend may be a victim of such a condition?”

“I hate to put it that way. But people have been known before to address their afflictions with religion, and at times in my own faith’s traditions the line between madness and sainthood has been perilously thin. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I don’t wish to trod upon his customs or their worship, but there are reasons to be suspicious.”

“What a careful little woman you are!” Annie exclaimed with a laugh.

Eileen smiled back, still more cautious than her company. “It’s something of a learned trait, I admit. It’s this country, I think—not the citizens so much as the tremendous landscape of it, the uncommon size and incredible range of terrains. I admire people with such strength to come to a frontier so sparsely populated, and so far apart from more established civilization. Mind you, close living with other people comes with its own host of difficulties, but it must be harder out here. When people are isolated like this, they become so insular…I think they lose perspective when it comes to that which is ordinary, normal, or proper. After a while, when everyone is much the same, then anyone else becomes a threat, or a source of misgiving at any rate.”

She took a deliberate swallow of milk to stop herself from rambling any further.

Annie thought about this, and shook her head. “I can see what you’re getting at. I’ve witnessed it myself, in the travels I’ve made from here to there. People do make groups like that, from necessity and loneliness. They band together when the world is unfamiliar, and I guess it does limit one’s perspective, as you’re putting it. But there’s a bigger point I think you’re missing.”

“What would that be?”

“It’s as simple as pie—people are the same, everywhere. Even when they hide up together, and even when they set themselves apart on purpose, people are the same. They want the same things, need the same things, and lie about the same things, everywhere.”

Eileen’s glass was empty. She ran her thumb up and down its painted pattern and thought of what she’d said to Leonard, offering this precise sentiment just the day before. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right. Perhaps I’ve been taking a narrow view, myself.”

But there was more she couldn’t say—didn’t dare say.

The sticking point was bigger than Annie could have imagined, because Annie assumed that everyone she knew was human. To the best of her knowledge, she was not acquainted with any deviant monsters, and there were no unpredictable, bestial impulses lurking beneath the skins of her neighbors.

Human nature might be a constant thing of reliable wickedness, but the nature of the unnatural was something altogether different.

Or at least Eileen had always believed as much.

Tabitha came in to clear the table, and she asked a word with Annie in private. The madam excused herself and left Eileen alone with her thoughts and her questions that could not be asked aloud.

Perhaps she’d been wrong, after all—and the difference was not a difference at all, but exaggeration. After all, the beast, the wolf, Jack—the creatures wished to feed, they wished for power and strength. They wished for indulgence when indulgence was immoral, inappropriate, and criminal. It would be hard to argue that humanity displayed no such traits when uncorrupted by the inhuman.

It unnerved her deeply to wonder, but wonder she must.

How much of myself rises with the beast when it cries out for blood?

IV.

Leonard Dwyer arrived at six to retrieve Eileen as he’d promised, even though the prospect of visiting Red Annie’s left him visibly troubled. He lingered in the lobby, torturing his brown hat in his hands until Eileen swept own the stairs. She was only a few minutes late—barely late at all, really—but the slight delay had caused him no end of embarrassment.

“I must beg your pardon,” she told him. “I was having the most fascinating conversation with Tabitha. The blonde girl, do you know her? I’m sorry—I meant, do you know who I mean?”

“I know who she is, yes,” he mumbled, ushering her out the door and down into the dirty, late-day heat. “I’ve seen her about town.”

“Yes, she’s an awfully nice girl, even considering…but she’s a clever girl, too. I was hoping to convince her to join us for the meeting, but she declined, alas.”

“Alas,” he echoed without much remorse, but then reconsidered. “I suppose it would be a good thing for her to visit the meetings. After all, didn’t Christ himself walk with the lepers and prostitutes?”

“He did indeed. He counted them among his best friends, and I knew you were too kind to turn her away if she was interested. But perhaps tomorrow. The meetings run through the weekend, don’t they?”

“Oh yes—until Monday morning. That’s when we’ll pack up and move on.”

“We,” she held onto that word, considering it.

The streets were filling with people. It wasn’t a tide, and it wasn’t a flood, but it was a definite trickle—all feet padding along in the same direction, north out of town. In the distance, beyond the hearing of the rest of the pilgrims, Eileen detected music. She detected voices, and percussion in the form of clapping hands.

She listened harder, and thought she heard a pipe organ, the kind that went with carnivals, and possibly a stringed instrument—a guitar or a banjo, possibly a fiddle or two.

“Yes?” Leonard nudged her gently, wobbling the navy blue parasol Eileen held up over her head.

“I’m sorry?”

“I thought for a moment you were going to ask me something else.”

Eileen shook her head to sharpen her thoughts. “How far is it to the camp?”

“Not a mile and a half. It’s down by the river that runs north of town.”

“A river?”

“More like a fat creek, if you’ve crossed the Mississippi—and I don’t imagine you arrived from Ireland across Asia, so you must have crossed it at some point. Am I right?”

She smiled and bobbed her head. “Right as rain, Leonard. I came through New York, and rode much of the way south and west along the rivers. But what about you? How long have you been traveling with the camp?”

“A few months now,” he confessed. “I must tell you, it has proved to be the great joy of my life. Reverend Aarons has changed me. He has saved me.”

There was that name again, and here was a willing disciple. Eileen said the rest with care. “I’m looking forward to meeting him myself, or seeing him, at least. I’ve heard so much about him. I imagine you must know him quite well. You must trust him a great deal, to have left your home to follow him.”

Leonard managed to nod vigorously and appear grave at the same time. “Oh yes, implicitly. He does great work—he’s very devout. Intensely devout, like no one I’ve ever known before.”

“Yes. His religious fervor is a thing to behold, or so I’ve heard.”

“Ah.” He slowed his pace a touch and watched the ground, as if he too were measuring out the caution he’d serve with his words. “You wish to ask me about the way he speaks in tongues.”

She adjusted her grip on the parasol. “I hear he’s prone to terrible fits, and that he appears almost to be possessed.”

“By the Holy Spirit, he is possessed. I know, I know,” he waved his hands in front of himself in a small gesture of helplessness. “I realize that it can appear strange to people accustomed to more sedate services, but it’s the passion that is so compelling. The first time I saw the throes of the Spirit upon him, I was almost frightened. But now I understand, and it moves me. It inspires me.”

“I see,” she said, and she did.

“There have been places before where people were concerned about the services, but more often than not we find that the worshippers are swept up in the ceremony, and after a while, they join in without hesitation. It seems to be particularly effective….” he trailed off as his ears caught the first soft slappings of hands at the camp up the road.

Eileen finished for him. “On women.”

“What?”

“It’s particularly effective on women, isn’t it? They most often find themselves the most moved, as you put it.”

He nodded slowly. “They’ve been known to throw propriety to the wind and make a terrific commotion, but it’s in the name of the Lord so of course their hearts and spirits are in the right place. But except for the reverend, it’s usually the younger women who are most taken up in the moment. I’m not sure why.”

Eileen could have hazarded a guess or two, but she didn’t offer any.

After another few minutes of walking along the dry, brown road, they began to see the first signs of encampment—smatterings of tents, small groups of people lounging with families on blankets, shielding their eyes from the sun. The population increased in density as the larger tent appeared on the horizon. It was an enormous thing that might have hosted a circus somewhere else in the land. There must have been room for hundreds beneath it, and hundreds were filtering fast, wandering a slow and curious path to what shade and salvation the tent had to offer.

The music was louder now, fiddles and pipes and dozens of voices, raised up, singing out—calling the service to disorder.

Ropes and stakes held the tent taut, and open. Eileen folded the parasol and released her polite grip on Leonard’s arm. “You have work to do, don’t you dear?” she asked.

At first he looked confused, but then he agreed. “I do, yes. I need to see to the service, and assist the reverend. Please excuse me,” he said. “And I hope you’ll participate with an open heart.”

“I’ll do my very best,” she assured him.

He looked over his shoulder once, then twice, before leaving her there.

She waved him on. She was fine—and she was far more worried for him than he needed to be for her.

In the back of the tent, around the edges, newcomers lurked. Many of the lurkers were families with small children, uncertain and anxious from the crowds and the noise. The people up front were singing and clapping together; an old standard about gathering at the river was coming to a close, and a faster tune was beginning.

Leading the service was a lovely young woman with caramel-colored hair tied in a modest bun. Her cheeks were dappled with freckles and her eyes were alight with the flush of exertion. The audience swayed with her, and sang with her, and watched her as charmed as any set of snakes.

Across the room, Eileen spied the back of Leonard’s head and she noticed without surprise that he was watching the girl too—as spellbound as the rest, if not more. Eileen wondered how much of Leonard’s own religious devotion was fueled by something more secular than the words of her song, her new song, faster. Her new song, the one that she used to lure the crowd closer to the hastily-constructed stage—she used it to call, siren-like, and her voice was a thing of beauty as it rose up over the crowd to fill the tent.

And Eileen listened too; she listened keenly and with better ears than those that surrounded her. She listened for an unnatural timbre, for coercion or command that didn’t come from God, or from the throat of a pretty young woman with a face like an angel and hands that swayed, clapped, folded in prayer.

She didn’t hear anything of the sort, save a hint of an accent that reminded her of Appalachia and the time she’d spent there. It was a softer thing, a different smoothing of the consonants than the sharper speech of the locals.

Leonard was working his way closer to the stage, and Eileen was satisfied that the girl up front was no more than she appeared to be—though she was certainly charismatic. And her song, the one she led after the river song, it was sung in rounds so that those who’d never heard it before could join as late as they liked and still make harmony.

By and by

When the morning comes

All the saints

Will be gathered as one

Trials dark

At every hand

We’ll understand it better

By and by

It was percussive and seductive, with a rhythm like African voices—and Eileen thought perhaps it was a slave song, passed along and down and over the mountains. Songs pass so easily across rivers, and deserts, and decades. This one stirred Eileen in a primitive way, all the hands beating together like drums.

At the back of the tent there was disapproval. There were shaking heads and children being pulled away, back outside, by one hand or both.

But more than the disapproval there was naked interest written on the faces that were coming to fill the tent. There was eagerness, and pleasure, and a gentle throb of bodies as they moved themselves forward, closer. Closer to the stage. Closer to the girl. Closer to God.

Eileen joined them.

She found her way close to the front, three or four rows of heads in front of hers. Up towards the wooden stage that echoed, smacked, reverberated with the gleeful stomp of fervent feet. On tip-toes she stood, straining to see.

Back against the far corner of the stage there was a piano, and standing beside that were two bearded men whose elbows were pumping madly at their bows and fiddles. There was no sign of Leonard anymore, but she could smell that he’d been nearby. A faint trail marked his body’s passing, weaving and bobbing between the worshippers where he earned his way forward—but it was a hard trail to hold, so cluttered with the stink and motion of other bodies.

Eileen was holding her head up, sniffing, listening with her nose. When she realized this, she dropped her chin and hoped she hadn’t been seen. It embarrassed her, though it was so wonderfully helpful. But it was not a human impulse at all—it was the beast inside, and she didn’t like it.

She didn’t like the way the beast was tapping its foot, either. She was displeased at the pulse within, a fiendish, repetitive tug on her soul that wanted to move, to dance, to crawl forward and howl.

No. Not yet.

Not here, not now.

It’s not even dark.

But dark was coming. And there was the pound of the music and the crushing sweat of anxious bodies, the toxic perfume of a tent filled with blood.

Eileen put her face in her hands and breathed through her fingers.

One, two. Count it—one, two.

Three, four. Five, six. Breathe.

In her garter holster the Colt offered a reassuring weight, and beside it—also strapped against her thigh, was the green glass bottle and its last precious drops. She didn’t want to use them tonight; she didn’t want to need them tonight, but tonight was looming up faster than she’d imagined and the crowd was….

…the crowd was…

“This is too much,” she said to her palms, knowing that even the people on either side of her, leaning against her shoulders, would not hear over the din.

If he’s half as cursed as I am, he can’t stand it. He couldn’t possibly. These meetings, this camp—they can’t hide his condition, they can only aggravate it. It’s not even time yet and I can feel myself losing my grip on my reason—I can feel my fingers slipping free of my sanity because it’s all too much.

The people, all of them smelling like salt and blood—they’re swollen with it, and they’re crying out for violence or music or God. And I…I want to give it to them.

No, the thing inside—it wants them. Not me.

Yes, I want to rise up. Yes, I want to climb out and crawl free and break them one at a time in my hands. I want to bite them until they stop screaming. I want to—

“No,” she said aloud, into her hands.

But the world swirled around her and the chanting voices made her nauseous. They assaulted her concentration and made her vision swim, as if she were watching the service through a fish bowl.

Would anyone notice if I lifted my skirt, just a little, and took the bottle? Just a few drops—just a little bit of that pretty chemical smell. Just a touch and a taste, to push the thing back down.

It might not matter. Any moment now, and it will be indecent and I will be embarrassed by it later—and Leonard might see and he might wish to know what I was doing—but if I do not take the reins back into my own hands, it will be much, much worse.

The thought of Leonard sharpened her sight a tad, so she chased that thought and caught it, held onto it. Leonard, a nice boy. Brought her here because he believed. Brought her here to see the Reverend Aarons, as she’d wished.

“Aarons,” the name came past her lips and was spoken up on stage as well.

The girl’s song was over, the crowd was primed, and the girl was stepping down. She stepped away on a short flight of stairs. She took Leonard’s hand—yes, there he was—and she tripped lightly down to the desert floor that comprised the tent bottom.

Leonard said something into her ear; she leaned in to hear him, and she nodded.

Eileen couldn’t quite catch it, but the effort honed her control further. And when the music had stopped, there was one less thing to distract her. The swollen, aching, chaotic thing inside had less to feed it, then. She forced it back, willing it back and down, and away.

She wanted to see this reverend.

He took the stage in a black suit that must have been dreadful in the sun (but oh yes, the sun was sinking—the sun would be sunk in another hour, or less than two). Reverend Aarons was a tall man, lanky inside the death-black suit, with bird-black eyes and a shock of astonishing white hair that framed his head with the shape of a halo. He hushed the crowd when he opened his hands; he opened his mouth, and the tones that poured forth were as dark and thick as tar.

“I thank you for gathering here with me today. I thank you all for being here.”

He lifted a Bible, black like his suit, and he held it aloft as though it were an empty envelope—though it must have weighed more than a sack of flour.

“We are here for this—for the Word. We are here for the sound of salvation, as comes through Jesus Christ and no one else—no where else. There is no store that sells it. There is no thief who steals it. There is no bank that loans it. There is only Jesus Christ.”

For the first time in weeks, Eileen shivered.

She didn’t even have to listen hard to hear it in his mouth. She was close enough to smell it, sliding off his body like water off a well-pitched roof. The stink of the wolf was there—rank, reeking of old butter, wet dog, and meat that has turned.

The predator glimmered in his eyes…but it was not alone there.

Eileen made herself look. She forced her face up and pried her hands away from it.

Gazing out beside the beast was a very human defiance—a very mortal resolve that stood beside the wolf and wrapped its fingers around the wolf’s throat. It was a determination like nothing she’d ever seen before. It awed her, and thrilled her.

It terrified her.

The longer Reverend Aarons spoke, the more frightened she became because he was doing so well. He was so powerful, so magnetic, and so persuasive—even though night was coming, and the tent was packed with easy victims. His control was unlike anything Eileen had seen anywhere, in anyone.

But it would not be enough.

Just when she’d begun to wonder if yes—faith could hold the thing in check—she began to see the cracks around the edges. The wrinkles around his eyes flexed, unflexed, stretched. The hand that held the Bible began to tremble, steadied, quivered.

“No,” she said. “No,” she urged. “Hold it. Hold it in. Hold it back.”

I want so badly to believe that you can. If you can, maybe I can.

His arm folded, and his hand dropped the Bible. It fell to the stage floor with a resounding thump, sending a shockwave back through the crowd. The reverend’s face was white, almost as white as his hair.

“Is he all right?” someone asked, off to Eileen’s left. “He looks sick, is he all right?”

The reverend began to speak again. His words came slower, as if to create them cost him dearly; but they were clear, and commanding. “I want to ask you,” he began. “I want to know who here among us would come forward and make a fresh commitment to the Lord. I want all of you who are willing to come down here to rise up—and join me in front of this stage. Will you join me for a word of prayer?”

A traveling murmur worked its way through the audience, sweeping back and forth across the room, punctuated by the occasional outburst of, “Yes!” “Yes, I will!”

Behind the stage, Leonard and the young woman stood—eyes closed, hands raised—with the piano and fiddle players.

“No,” Eileen said. No one heard her, and no one heeded her, and she expected that much. The audience surged, and people came tearfully forward—hands outstretched, prayers dribbling down their chins.

“No, don’t go near him. Don’t….” She gave her plea more volume, but it still was swallowed by the ambient hums, hymns, and petitions.

He was cracking, top to bottom—it had happened so gradually, and then all at once. His head went back and a coughed groan came up out of his throat. It was followed by a muttering, mumbling, gurgling torrent of incoherent syllables that rattled out through the tent.

“Oh God,” Eileen said, and the cry was taken up by others. Then, much to her astonishment, more babbling broke out in imitation. A woman here, a man there—another woman over in the corner dropped to their knees, and to the ground, and began an echo of the reverend’s rambled litany.

Circles opened around them, spaces cleared, and shouts of, “Praise Jesus!” rang out.

“You don’t understand,” Eileen declared with a touch of desperation. She reached out to force her way forward, to the reverend’s side. She broke through the ring of people and was pushed back by a rough but determined arm.

“Let him be,” said the pretty singer. “He’s on fire with the Spirit of the Lord.”

“He needs help,” Eileen argued.

Leonard stepped through the crush of people and joined the women. “No, Eileen. You don’t understand. He’s fine, he’s—”

“He’s not fine!”

The man on the ground was curling and uncurling his body in and out of a fetal position, groaning, and twisting. Eileen cast a desperate glance towards the pried-open tent flaps and felt a sharp stab of terror. The desert air was creeping down to blackness, bleeding dark auburn from the sunset and promising stars before long.

The wolf inside was calling her, too.

It was lunging, lurching, throwing itself against her ribcage as if it could break itself out that way. She clutched her own chest and buckled, moaned, reached for her skirt. She tugged at the hem and threw aside the hands that wanted to help her.

“Away,” she gasped. “Get away!”

But the hands petted harder, soothing, encouraging. And on the stage the reverend’s eyes were changing color—losing that pit-deep black and taking on a cast of gold around the edges.

Nearly delirious herself, Eileen fell to one knee and collapsed against the singing girl’s legs. The commotion of the gesture gave her a second to reach under the skirt and the first thing she touched was the Colt. It was snug in its holster, warm against her body.

No, maybe not. Maybe? Please.

She ran her fingers around the garter and grabbed the green bottle instead, tearing it out from under her dress and thumbing the cork loose. She heaved it to her face and threw a few drops into her mouth, wanting comfort and control—or at least a little bit of blackness.

Her eyes watered but the sugar-sweet sting was strong in her sinuses, on her tongue. It made her wobble, but it gave her strength.

She pounced forward, landing hands-down beside and on top of the reverend, who was starting to slather and spit. “No,” she told him, and she lifted the bottle.

“No!” said someone else, but she didn’t know who—and hands reached out to grab her, not understanding.

The halos of gold in the reverend’s eyes were expanding, swallowing his pupils.

Desperate, Eileen shrugged her shoulder with more strength than she should’ve used. Even with the invigorating fog of the chloroform, she was too strong for someone her size—and she cast the unhelpful helpers away as if they were children.

She took the reverend by the upper arms and rolled him onto his back.

His teeth were changing, stretching and pointing up out of his mouth.

Outside the moon was rising, rolling, sliding across the sky.

The reverend’s lids blinked, and the halos warped as he struggled for control. He seized it—his muscles tightened beneath Eileen’s hands—but he couldn’t keep it. His head snapped back on his neck and his chest sucked in enough air to fill a barrel; and then he began to roar.

Around him, the circle of faces retreated fast. Shock swept them into each other, toppling and frightened, even as they were intrigued and awed.

He thrust his chest forward, trying to rise, but Eileen forced him down. His hands shot out, fingernails peaking into sharpness. But she caught his hands up in her arm and twisted them back.

Pandemonium seasoned with fear began to snake through the audience.

There was no more music, there were no more instruments or prayers, and the moaning of the other tongue-speakers had either burned itself out or was abandoned to curiosity. The worshippers in the back of the tent wished to press forward, to the reverend; the worshippers nearest the reverend wished to press backward, away from him.

Eileen would not let him go. They thrashed together, his legs kicking and scraping along the ground—seeking purchase.

He found it on the edge of the stage. He thrust a foot against it and used that leverage to launch himself out from under her. He rolled then, scrambled and ran for the tent flaps which were peeled back and open to let in the night.

“Stop him!”

Over her shoulder she heard the singing girl beg.

“No!” Eileen commanded. “Get away from him!” she ordered, even as she hauled herself up and began to dash after him.

Aarons had cleared a path and it remained parted long enough to let Eileen slip through the confused crowd. She staggered and caught herself, tripped on her skirts, slipped and skidded on the dusty ground, and reached the desert night too slowly to knock the reverend down.

Leonard was behind her by half a second.

But she wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t let him catch her, either.

It gave her focus. If the wolf inside wanted to run, if it needed something to chase and catch, then let it be this other wolf. And let her chase him far away from these people, from the singing girl, from Leonard.

She took a deep breath and felt her chest stretch against the fabric of her dress.

His scent is strong and fresh, but I don’t need it. His shadow scuttles there, it hunkers and jerks towards the river. He’s not moving as fast as he could, because he’s fighting it.

God bless him, he’s fighting it, look. Look, he’s taking himself away from them after all.

I can move faster. I can let the wolf run, and I will catch him because he still wants to leash and bind his own monster. But if I let mine take the lead, mine will outrun him. I can stop him, I can work with the thing inside and bring the beast down, or hold him still and steady until the moon has done its worst.

Her legs started to pump even as her feet began to stretch and the first hint of claws tore through her flat leather shoes. The pain writhed up her calves and joined the misery that leaned so hard against her ribs, but still she ran—and her steps grew longer, and she outpaced the people at the tent until the darkness swallowed her whole.

And then there was only the reverend, loping forward in the darkness, hunting for the river.

“Not yet,” she growled at the change, she commanded her hands as they sprouted hair and the knuckles twisted like a wind-blown tree.

The reverend’s odor was a slick and ill-smelling tendril of air. She snapped her jaws at it, biting her way through the darkness, keeping the trail even as her teeth were breaking and crowding inside her mouth.

There.

She leaped and landed with her face in the small of his back, her hands around his waist, and she tumbled with him to the ground on the banks of the small river. Leonard had been right, it was more of an oversized creek, but it was water—and it was deep enough to drown in.

“That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?” Eileen tried to accuse him, but the words had a hard time forming around the swell of her tongue, past the cliffs of teeth that would not stay down.

He howled again. He cuffed her, but she caught his arm.

“You are stronger than this!” she screamed the words down into his face, but she wasn’t sure who had said them—her own frustration, or the unchallenged monster. “Fight it!” she cried, but she wanted to say instead, “Fight me!”

He aimed his struggle inward, refusing to let the thing take him whole and refusing to resist Eileen, though the size advantage was his and she was imploring him to make the physical effort.

She needed a reason to lash out. She needed an excuse, as perfect darkness draped itself around them both, to lash out—to let the wolf wear out its rage against a target less innocent than those in the tent.

But the target wasn’t cooperating. He was wrestling with himself, and losing that fight too.

“The river,” he gagged, choking on the inside of his mouth as it continued to rearrange itself. He pointed one ragged-looking hand at the water, mere feet away from his head.

Eileen’s head was swimming with too many things at once—the wolf, the chloroform, the moon, the sky, and the sound of searchers crawling along in the desert, trying to track down the missing minister and the deranged little woman who’d followed him.

“The river,” he said again.

“It won’t work,” she told him, and tears were filling her eyes. She was so frustrated and so frightened, and so impressed. “I’m no Baptist.”

His eyes were locked, though—on the soft patch of skin below her throat. A far-off flicker of starlight glinted on the tiny gold cross that hung there.

He moved his mouth like he wished to say more, but his face was changing too much. It was shifting into something that wasn’t meant to speak. The taut, curling lips formed the shape of that word again, “River.”

Eileen wondered where her green bottle was and if there was anything left inside it, but it was long gone, back by the tent or inside it still. No help from the chemicals, no help from heaven—only the insistent, maniacal pull of the moon.

She nodded. She bit her own lip and made it bleed with pointed canines too large to be her own.

Inside the reverend’s chest black things were bubbling and a growling thing was forcing its way out, up, into the desert. The afflicted man rolled onto his side, and using his misshapen hands to pull himself forward, he dragged himself head-first towards the rippling stream.

Eileen permitted him this much; she lifted her body off of his and let him shift his hips, climbing with his elbows, contorting himself in agony, squirming into the water.

On her hands and knees, she moved beside him—and past him. The river swirled up around her ankles, soaking her dress and weighing her down. She leaned back farther, deeper, holding his arms as she retreated into the muddy strip of water. Thigh deep, hip deep.

He was floating then, and easier to draw along.

He was hardly fighting her at all, mostly fighting himself, or the thing he harbored.

She snaked her arms up under his. She wrapped her limbs around his chest and clutched him there, the back of his head lolling against her breasts. “This isn’t right,” she said, and a sob came with the sentiment but it was one of anger and jealousy more than sorrow.

Down on the river’s bed her toes had burst free of the shoes and were dragging along the muddy bottom. he braced them against a boulder, and she took a deep breath.

The reverend’s head slipped underwater and she leaned down, folding her body in half to hold him there.

As the lack of air smothered his reason, the wolf rose up and began to struggle on his behalf; but Eileen’s grip was firm and her legs held fast against the slight current. Even wolves need to breathe, and she was not going to let him.

He tore at her—lashing and thrashing, tearing at the woman with claws as sharp and thick as flint, coiling in her grip and trying to roll to shake her free, but the reverend had rendered the monster too weak.

Curls of blood muddled the water. It was too dark to see, but Eileen could smell it and she knew that most of it was hers. But. Only a little longer.

His strength diminished slowly—then suddenly, and completely.

He hung in her arms.

She raised her head and his stayed where it was, nodding sleepily beneath the surface of the water, sputtering bubbles and blood, and then nothing at all.

Eileen untangled her arms from his body. The current pried him gently away from her. His face was peaceful, and all his teeth fit inside his mouth. It was the body of a man, not a myth, and it was finished fighting because it had won.

Eileen stood in the river up to her waist—her dress slashed and her skin torn. She held her hands to her mouth and pushed her fingers against it, feeling the shape of something inhuman spilling out over her edges, refusing to drown or to die.

Part Three:

Our Lady of the Wasteland and the Hallelujah Chorus

Two years after Eileen parted company with a Pentecostal revivalist camp, an urgent letter reaches her with frightening news: the meetings have been revived, but not to serve any purpose of God’s.

Though the Reverend Aarons has perished, his son continues their unholy mission…and Daniel lacks his father’s devout restraint.

Indeed, he has joined forces with a malicious stranger known only as “Jack,” and Eileen fears the worst. She once knew a Jack of the same description, and he was a murderous fiend who doomed a small steamboat a decade before.

And now this pair of inhuman hunters leads a ministry of the damned through the desert southwest, gathering victims and fellow monsters alike.

The nun and a young deacon will work together to stop the traveling horror show before it claims more lives. But their interference in the Devil’s plans may cost them more than they bargain for.

I.

Dear Leonard,

I’m afraid this letter will never find you, for I sent it to your father in Houston—knowing nothing but his name, yours, and a general neighborhood. I’m also afraid that—even given the best of circumstances—you’ll receive this letter and wish to respond, but it will be too late.

Terrible things are happening. The camp, the church, the reverend—he’s dead, you know. I think you must know, since you fled so quickly the night he died. (And I never did heed the talk. I never did believe, not for a moment, that you had anything to do with what happened to him.)

But you left.

I don’t suppose you owed me an explanation, though I did think we were friends. I hope we were friends. If we never were friends, you might not finish reading this, and I don’t know where else to turn.

I half hope this letter never finds you. I am crying as I sit here, knowing perhaps that I’m doing you a horrendous wrong by pleading for your help. But I will write this down, and I will send it along as soon as I can, and I will leave it in God’s hands.

If this reaches you and you come, then it was God’s will. If you never receive this, then my own selfishness has been punished—as rightly it should be—and I will bear my fate in silence.

I need to write it down, regardless.

***

After the last meeting in Holiness, we spent all night looking for Reverend Aarons and that strange little woman who followed him. It was so completely dark that we were lost before we began. But come sunrise, Mr. Martin found the reverend floating facedown in the river when he led his cows out there to drink.

No one knows if the reverend fell, jumped, or was pushed, but all the same, he drowned. And all the same, his son Daniel had to bury him.

We all took it hard, Daniel most of all. He talked as if perhaps we should close the camp and disperse, for it had always been his father’s ministry and not his own.

But no, he kept the camp.

We helped him roll the tents and break down the stage; we loaded the wagons, and we moved farther west. East hardly seemed an option, or that’s how he behaved. He implied that there were problems behind him back east—and there was nowhere to go except toward the Pacific. So we followed him, because what else could we do?

***

(I wish that I’d pressed him about those problems, though. I wish I’d pushed him for more information. Even if he’d only told me a little, I might have gleaned enough for myself to know that I shouldn’t go with him.)

***

We held the meetings again—in the backwaters, the wilderness, and all those vacant places in between. Attendance was lower because there were fewer people, I suppose. I do not believe our reputation preceded us. Even those of us within the fellowship didn’t know, so I’d find it difficult to believe that word had spread very far beyond us.

Except…and here’s something else I always meant to ask you—that woman you brought to the meeting—she knew, didn’t she? Then perhaps I’m wrong, and I’ve always been blind. You used to tease me about the way I didn’t notice things, so I think you must have been right all along. Imagine, then, how bad things must have become if I’m writing to you now!

But it didn’t get bad overnight, you know. It happened so slowly, it tangled us so cunningly, that by the time we realized the threat there was no way to escape it.

Would it shock you to learn that most of us are dead now?

It shocks me to write it, and as I reread the words I know how astonishing they appear. But you may as well believe me. I’m the only one who remains from the time when you were with us.

The rest are gone, buried or lost in the desert…or worse yet, they remain beside us, damned and walking.

***

We both know that the reverend could be a maddeningly intense sort of man—and it must have crossed your mind that there was something incorrect about his faculties. I do not mean to imply that he was not spiritual, for indeed he was; but I had come to wonder if something less noble was at work beneath the surface.

You didn’t see him like I did, when he would writhe in the dirt after the meetings in his own tent. I saw him, through the flap when he kicked it open. I saw him slathering like a rabid dog, and I saw his arms thrash in such a way that I thought they must be broken from the strain. His hands would curl—I can hardly describe it. His hands would curl and his mouth would stretch as if something were trying to crawl out of him.

I won’t say he was possessed. I can’t say that. No man possessed by the devil could do such great work for God.

But if it wasn’t the devil then it must have been an illness. That was the solution I came to, because it was the only one that fit all the facts as I saw them. But I am no detective or alienist. I can only tell you the conclusion I had to draw—because to draw any other would have destroyed me.

I still think that I might have been right, a little.

And whatever was wrong with the reverend, I think it spilled over to his son. I would see it sometimes. I would note a flicker in his eye or a fever tinting his face. His hands would shake and he had such trouble sleeping, that on some nights he would not rest at all. You could hear him pacing back and forth outside the camp, beside the wagons. You could hear him coughing or mumbling to himself as his feet kicked the sand and dirt and….

I shouldn’t stop there. This is my confession, as I said. If you read it and think my mind has snapped, then so be it. I can only give you my impressions of these awful times, and you can make of them what you will.

So I’ll tell you the rest, unbalanced as it makes me sound.

Daniel’s favorite place to roam at night was back alongside his father’s wagon, and I had my tent pitched close to it because once, it made me feel safe. The reverend might have been gone, but I missed him and I missed the comfort of his presence. So I laid myself out near his place in the camp.

When I couldn’t dream, I would listen to the sound of night in the desert. The wild dogs called, the big cats screamed, and the smaller things would scuffle and slide around in the gritty earth.

And outside my tent, on the other side of the wagon, Daniel would walk a circle path when he couldn’t sleep—and although I could hear him chattering softly, his voice would drop low to a gargle. Then the cadence of his feet would change too. Though before I could recognize the one-two patter of his boots, the pace would shake until it sounded like the track of a terrible great beast—a thing that walked on four feet instead of upright.

After a while, his wandering would take him farther away or back to his own tent, and then I would hear him no more. But I noticed—after weeks of this peculiar behavior—that it was worse at certain times, or near certain phases of the moon.

I will not tell you more than that, because anything further would sound indecent as well as insane, but a woman has ways of following the moon and noting its cycles in the sky. And there were a few days each month that he would come closer to my tent than before, and his unusual pattering steps would bring him right up to the edge of the fabric.

And there was nothing more than the flap of canvas between us. It would scare me to death to lie there, wrapped tight in a blanket that I’d draw up around my shoulders. I would pull my feet beneath me so I could hug my knees and wonder about the noises he made, and they were unimaginable noises. They were sounds of sniffing and snuffling. They were the mutters that a tracking dog makes when it’s found something it wishes to investigate further, and it appalled me.

But at least it was only Daniel who I feared. I watched him wrestle with some internal demon and I believed, at the time, that he was a good man at his core and that he was doing his best to live according to God’s principles.

***

Back when I was a child, I knew a man who had a problem with alcohol. It would turn him in such a sharp, meaningful way—it was as if two people lived inside him, and drink was the key to unlock the wicked one. There are patterns to it. There are excuses, and promises, and struggles that look the same to me, as when Daniel would walk the camp bleary-eyed in the mornings after the moon was full.

He was sorry about the noise. He was aware of the disruption. He was feeling a bit unwell, but was otherwise fine. He did not wish to make us worry.

I’ve heard such things before, and I knew they meant trouble; but so long as the trouble was only Daniel’s, I thought everything might eventually be all right.

And then came Jack.

Or rather, his name was John something or another and he spoke with an English accent—but he wished to be called Jack, and it fit him better than the civilized name, so we took to it.

He was charming, at first. He’s not a large man, but he’s lean and strong looking. He’s a man who demonstrates good breeding when he wishes to. I thought he was a little bit handsome, and a little bit brilliant. He came to the camp looking for the reverend, but when we told him of the reverend’s passing, Jack opted to remain, regardless.

We all found him to be a breath of fresh air, so dour had our daily lives become. Here was a fellow with a touch of that infectious personality, and a way of speaking that charmed the soul when he was feeling light and friendly.

Daniel and Jack became fast friends. They became brothers the way some people fall in love, swiftly and stupidly. Within a matter of days they were inseparable, and most of us thought it was a good thing.

Daniel had become so alone in the wake of his father’s death. Jack brought him back around; Jack made him smile, even as Jack changed that smile.

I don’t know of a better way to put it than that—Jack changed Daniel, or that’s what I tell myself, because that is what’s easiest to believe. It might be that Jack only gave Daniel permission to act out in unacceptable ways—but if that’s true, then I have wasted too many tears on a man who did not deserve them at all.

***

This is what’s happening, Leonard. This is what’s become of us, now.

I must write the rest quickly, or else I’ll lose my resolve and wad this up. I’ll throw it away before I ever let you see it, and even now I wonder if I shall ever mail this.

I think maybe, perhaps I won’t.

It’s easier to continue if I tell myself, “He’ll never see this. I’ll throw it into the fire.” Let me go on, then—pampering myself with that delusion. I’ll write as if you’ll never read, if this is the only way to go forward.

***

They began to leave the camp at night, together. I heard them, as I was usually awake and I was closest to the wagon they’d come to share. I was relieved, because this meant no more strange nighttime wandering for Daniel—or so I thought.

Instead, it meant he had company when he rampaged through the sand and dirt. Instead, it meant that the unsettling sound of four feet had blossomed to the awful patter of eight.

One of two things will happen, if I continue to write and you continue to read: you will not believe me at all, or you will think I’ve been a fool for taking so long to discern the nature of these two men. I’d rather you think me a fool. I most certainly qualify for the word, I’ll be the first to confess it.

But this is what I did—I began to lie in wait for them, even though I was so deeply afraid I could barely breathe when I heard their paces outside my tent. The sound intrigued me so much, and I heard it so regularly—I was insane with curiosity. I had to know what they were doing. Surely whatever sight would greet me could be no worse than the terrors my own mind imagined.

Little did I know.

I should have left the tent flap low, and never lifted its corner.

Late one night when the moon was high and I heard their hoarse, coughing laughter, I roused myself from my cot and went to the tent’s edge. Daniel and his friend were mere feet away, on the other side of the wagon—I could hear them moving together quietly, but roughly.

I crouched down and took the edge of the tent between my fingers, lifting it up and pressing my face down to the ground so I could see them.

It was the most unnatural, hideous thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. Leonard, I cried out—it was a tiny cry, a small yelp of astonishment and loathing—but it was heard, and I was lost.

They were not men anymore, but I could recognize their clothes and there remained some cast of their mortal posture. But both of them were transformed into monstrous things—beasts, covered with hair, and with faces that stretched to shape themselves like the snouts of dogs. Their hands were disgustingly transfigured into claws, with fingernails that came to yellowed, filthy points; and their eyes were most dreadful of all. Their eyes appeared polished, mirrored like a cat’s, and they burned a loathsome shade of gold when the moon’s light was captured there.

And these two men, now beasts, were frolicking together like puppies. They were tugging at something heavy between them, and at first I did not realize what it was. I could see it, plainly enough. I could make out the contours of the hands, the rising stripes of ribs, and the mangled legs that were missing feet.

I could see, well enough, that it was a corpse they teased and picked apart.

After I cried out, and after they turned their bloodstained muzzles to leer at me, I fainted.

***

Oh, at first we all said “coyotes,” of course. At first we all shuddered and vowed to keep vigilant watch for ourselves, and for our neighbors. The time had come to move on, anyway. It was easy for Daniel and Jack to tell us all, “Let us go west again, and north. Another camp meeting will take our minds away from this tragedy. Another meeting will remind us God is great, and that our sister Pamela sleeps in Jesus now.”

But ever after, when they would see me—if they would catch my eyes, and I would look away with panic in my face—they would smile.

With each stop, with each meeting, we would stand on the stage and praise the Lord. And with each stop, with each meeting, one or two of us would vanish into the desert beyond the safe-seeming bounds of the camp.

***

I think they kept their wickedness quiet because at first, they chose victims from the towns where we stopped—and they threw the bodies far into the night, into the sand. The people they took and mutilated were never found until after we were gone; and even then, when the bones had been gnawed by the wild dogs and the sand rats, who could say what dire event had brought about their deaths?

But as you might have guessed, or as we should have suspected—rumor travels faster than fact, and faster than the law.

Before long, we were not welcomed as visiting emissaries of Christ; we were greeted with suspicion, and told to keep moving.

The first time it happened, Daniel was livid. He responded to the small town’s mayor with such defensive anger that it only reassured the mayor he was making the right decision. It was Jack, of all people, who soothed the situation. It was Jack who told them both, “We’re only a few miles away from our last stop, brother. We can go farther into the wilderness, like Jesus himself. There are other towns, other communities. Other places where the Word won’t be treated like so much trash.”

Jack meant to insult the mayor, but if the mayor was insulted, he wasn’t weak enough to let it change his mind. I thought of staying there, of flinging myself at the man and begging for asylum in his borough…but then I saw his wife, standing behind him with two small children—a babe in arms and a toddling youngster who clung to her leg.

And I thought—no. If I am ever to escape these men, then I must do it alone. I must escape into the wilderness if it comes to that, or into a great city filled with policemen and many guns. But I cannot stop at a place like this, defenseless even with so much pride. I’d see them all killed for their kindness, and then the blood will be on my hands, too.

So I stayed with the meetings, because my options were few—and growing fewer. One by one the original brethren began to vanish. Sometimes they left us a bloody trail, and sometimes they left nothing but their belongings. Sometimes they left no sign at all that they’d ever lived, or ever traveled with us. It was as if the earth had swallowed them up; but I knew they’d been swallowed by worse than the grave, and it turned my stomach.

I used to lie awake and pray, and cry. I would ask myself and God, “Why not me? Why leave me for last?”

***

My despair has become so great, and so consuming, that there are days when I wish, and pray, and beg, that they will give up the charade and take me, so to end the suspense. If they mean to tear me to pieces, let them get it over with.

But they won’t. I know that now.

I can see it when they sneer at me, that it pleases them for someone to be aware. They keep so many secrets, and they play such elaborate parts upon the stage. I think it gives them pleasure to know that there is one member of the audience who sees through the smoke, and who knows where the mirrors are hidden. They are showing off for me, like schoolboys.

***

If I find the strength to mail this to you, if you find the courage to read it, and if you find yourself down to these last few lines…you’ll believe me, won’t you? We are headed west, always west—into the old Spanish territories west of Texas. There is a settlement at a place called Mescalero, and on the other side of Mescalero, there is nothing but desert and canyon so far as I’ve heard. Once we’re past that tiny place, I fear that we’ll all disappear together into the wilderness; and I, for one, will almost certainly not be seen alive again.

Come for me, Leonard, or don’t.

Come and rescue me if you can, or remember me fondly if you can’t.

~Yours,

Melissa Anderson

II.

Dear Miss Callaghan,

I never did know for certain how I should address you, but since I’m begging for your counsel, then the formal salutation sounds best. This having been established, I wish to apologize before I begin for any undue familiarity I might display in this letter—for I realize now that, in truth, we barely knew one another. Two days of slight acquaintanceship at Holiness does not equal friendship, but I am at my wit’s end, and I believe that you and I may share a secret, after all.

I do not think it will come to you as any real surprise that Reverend Aarons was found dead—in the morning after the camp meeting where last I saw you. I suspect it might even come as a relief to know that he was most thoroughly drowned.

Let me not mince words, for I haven’t the ink and Melissa hasn’t the time—I believe you know what happened to him, and I might even be so bold to suggest that you had a hand in his passing. The reverend was not in his right mind, those last few days. But you knew that, didn’t you? You knew it all along.

***

Dear God, I have paused to reread my introduction and I am deeply ashamed. I began this letter to beg your assistance, and instead I opened it with an accusation of murder. If you refuse or rebuke me, I’ve no one to blame but myself.

Forgive me, please. I am afraid and confused, and I need you. I need your peculiar strength, and your careful sensibilities. I need to know what brought you to Holiness. I believe that Melissa Anderson’s life depends upon it.

You may remember Melissa—you must have noticed her.

She was the beauty who sang the service with a songbird’s voice. When she read from the scripture or closed her eyes to pray for the congregation, you could hear the eastern states in her words, for she came to us from Carolina.

She was the daughter of a merchant in Charleston. Melissa’s parents had her tutored, and groomed to marry a man who would help her father send ships back and forth along the coast and across the ocean. He traded in cotton, tobacco, and indigo, and upon such things was the family fortune built.

But Melissa heard another calling, as well you know. She demonstrated unparalleled courage when she defied her father and went to follow the camp. He could have chased her down and called her back, but it was only the Lord’s hand that stayed him. Or so she had always thought.

Now she wonders if her flight was a sin after all, and God is punishing her for abandoning her parents. She wonders if her fervor was not a mistake, or a misunderstanding of youth.

I do not know how to answer her. The things she has told me—they make me question all of it. I’ve read the frail pages of my mother’s Bible until my eyes are weak from the strain of it. Still, I have no answers—for Melissa or myself.

And so I write to you.

You knew something about the reverend, from before the moment you saw him. You came to Holiness to seek him out because you had suspicions—I know that now, or at least, I suspect it. Seeing him confirmed something for you; that’s why you followed him into the night.

For many weeks after the meeting at Holiness, I read my Bible and prayed—trying to reconcile my own suspicions with what I’d gathered of you in the short time we knew one another. I have since concluded that you knew what was wrong with the reverend, and you intended to help him. I am certain now that you chased him from the tent because you meant to assist him in some way—that you knew what he needed, though the rest of us were confused.

He is dead, though. This is the part that leaves me with doubt.

The reverend is dead, and it is difficult for me to avoid the possibility that you killed him. But it might be that death was the only peace available to him, and you gave it to him as a gift, with God’s blessing. If I am wrong, then I am only making matters worse by seeking you out.

But I do not think I am wrong. My conviction in this matter might be born from desperation, but that does not make it any less firm. If you cannot help her—if you cannot help us—then I’m afraid no one can.

Melissa has written me the most appalling letter. She’s remained with the camp meeting, for the reverend’s son Daniel has taken control of it. But now she is trapped there with him, and with someone else, too—a newcomer called Jack, who seems to be orchestrating some of the mayhem, or at least encouraging it.

Help us, sister. You said it once yourself, that we both pray to the same God when we close our eyes and fold our hands. That same God is being greatly offended, and His children are being led to the slaughter by these wolves who lurk among the flock.

I’ve been searching for you idly since the day you vanished, but now my quest has been given new urgency—and I hope I am not relying too heavily upon sources with too little credibility. I’ve heard that you were seen walking towards Presidio; and I thought perhaps you might be stopping at the southern missions. I wondered if you hadn’t made your way south to seek representatives of your own faith.

And thus I began to track you, making enquiries wherever I could—from anyone who spoke enough English to humor me. I walked through the Navajo and Apache territories, but God protected me.

Your trail was faint, and I lost it more than once. In fact, I’ve lost it now, and I’m sending copies of this letter to several of the missions where I think you might be staying, or where I think you might soon arrive. I’m sending this out with a prayer that this desperate note might find you—and in turn, you might find me.

The camp is moving westward. Daniel Aarons, Melissa, and the horrible new Jack are on the road to Mescalero, and I believe they intend to hold a set of meetings at the settlement there.

I’m following as fast as I can, having only just received her summons through the helpful post of my father. We might already be too late, but if God is willing to grant us this one small favor, we’ll catch them yet.

Please, I beg you, don’t make me do this alone. I don’t know how to defeat them. I don’t even know how to approach them. But I’m going to try. Please join me. I believe in your strength, and I believe in your faith. We can do this together, outcasts in the desert, making a glorious charge in the name of our Father. I will wait for you—as long as I can—at Mescalero, in the old Mexican territory west of Texas.

Please, for Jesus’ sake. Please.

~Leonard Dwyer

III.

Dear Leonard,

My dear young man, I am overjoyed to hear from you—despite the news you’ve shared. I’ve long regretted the circumstances of our parting, and with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to realize that I fled you in fear, and that you deserved better.

I had my reasons, and I think you’ve guessed some of them, maybe all of them. Obviously we are both being veiled in our speech and composition, and with good reason—but I want you to know that I never intended you any harm, and I am deeply grieved by the reverend’s passing.

He was an honorable man—and may you never suppose otherwise. I only wish I’d had a chance to know him better. I think we could have learned a great deal from one another. I wish things could have been different.

For a moment, he gave me hope.

But you—I applaud your caution and your strength of conviction. You are right to have your suspicions—you’d be mad or simple if you didn’t—but it speaks well of you that you’ve overcome your concerns in order to help your friend. I know how my disappearance must have concerned you, and I hope with all my heart that I can prove myself worthy of your confidence, because you are right about this if nothing else: I’m a danger to you, and to everyone you love, but I might also be danger to those who oppose you.

I’ve spent years now—more years than you’d believe, if I were to quote you a figure—chasing the thing who calls himself “Jack.” I’ve followed him across continents, oceans, and half of America. He is a murderer and a fiend, and he will not stop until someone stops him. It brings tears to my eyes to think that he uses praise and scripture to draw victims into his fold.

Yet I almost feel a grudging kind of respect for this ruse. Such a ploy! I imagine he wonders how he never thought of it sooner. He travels freely and under the banner of Jesus, spreading his nightmare from town to town, in the pockets of civilization that smatter the western wilderness.

May Heaven have mercy on this country, too big to govern itself—and too sparse to unify against threats such as these, which arise from within.

***

I am doing my best to reach you, Leonard; but this letter might precede me to your location, and in case it does, I offer you everything I know that might help. If this message finds you in advance of my personal arrival, then may you gain some insight and assistance from what you find within it.

These are the things I know, laid out as simply as possible—but without extraneous information or clarification. You will simply have to trust me when I tell you things that sound absurd. It’s been a lifetime of trial and error.

***

First, know that your adversary is no mere man. There are many things that slow him, but few things that will bring him to a halt. He fears and loathes fire, but I have yet to see a fire great enough to consume him—and I’ve seen great blazes give it an honest effort. He does not care to be shot, but bullets that land anywhere apart from his head can cause him inconvenience, not mortal injury.

I had heard legends that bullets made with silver might slay him, but this has proved to be incorrect. Still, I believe he must have weaknesses and I intend to find them. I’ve been experimenting with certain alloys, salts, and chemicals—trying to see what might give him pause and pain, but I’m meeting with only limited success.

But I digress.

He is weakest during the day, on days farthest from a full moon, but do not mistake me when I tell you that his weakness is still an astounding thing.

Not under any circumstances should you seek him out at night.

I tell you this not because I doubt your ability or sincerity, but because I know his all too well. I’ve seen him shot, burned, beaten, and stabbed…but still he rises. At best, with such conventional means, you can expect to put him off and buy yourself a few seconds. At worst, you can expect nothing at all except to die.

***

If it sounds like I’m trying to frighten you, then good. Jack is deadly, and by the sounds of things, he is not alone. Engage him only within the context of his deception, if at all possible—by which I mean, scout the premises during the day, while the charade is in full effect and while Jack is not as his peak of strength.

For that matter, engage him as little as possible, and with as much calmness as you can muster.

It might serve you well to approach him as if you’d like to rejoin the meetings. He may welcome you in; or then again, he might not. But it’s as close to the truth as anything, and staying near the truth is always easier when one is out to perpetrate deception.

***

Oh Leonard, I hate this. It sounds like I’m encouraging you. I feel like I’m encouraging you—that I’m pushing you forward into the lion’s den, unarmed and blindfolded, even as I try to open your eyes. I know with a terrible certainty how insufficient my warnings are, and how nearly useless my guidance is.

I try to console myself with assurances that you mean to assist Melissa with or without my thoughts on the matter. But still, it unnerves me—the thought of you fighting alone.

I’m not sure what else I can give you, though. I don’t know what other advice or aid I can share in a letter like this that would give you measurable benefit. I can only close with a promise that I will join you as soon as I can, for whatever value my reinforcements can provide. Take care of yourself, Leonard. Be careful, and be wise.

And I would remind you of this, too: for all Jack’s strength, and for all his cunning, he bleeds. And he can drown like any other thing with lungs.

Write to Melissa. Tell her to have hope, and to have faith. But be cautious in your language. Be cautious with what you tell her, and remember, whatever you send might not be read by her eyes alone.

I’ll join you as soon as the Lord permits.

~Eileen Callaghan

IV.

Melissa, July 2, 1881

My mind wanders everywhere, all the time. It may as well. It can’t stay here—it would go perfectly twisted.

A thousand times a day I wonder about Leonard. I wonder if my letter ever found him, and then I go back and forth…overcome one moment with joy, and the next with guilt. I should have never sent it. I should have sent it sooner. I hope he comes. I hope he stays away.

These days, I find myself wishing harder and harder that he stays away, and stays safe.

Every day the horror doubles. Every night I lie on my back underneath whichever bastard won the coin’s toss and I remember fondly the weeks before, the months before, when I was only afraid. When I was only ashamed. When I was still alive, and not this battered shell with a mouth that dares not open, even to pray.

Yes, back then. Was it a year ago, or only a few months?

I measure the days in meetings. We have them every few weeks, here and there. I look forward to them in an idle way—which is wicked, I know. When we set up, when we pitch the tents and post the announcements…when we invite the unsuspecting multitudes to come and worship with us…we are killing them. I am killing them, with every nail I beat into every tree. I am damning them with every sheet I press against a wall.

But they do come. They know nothing except the charisma of the brutes that preach and pray.

And I look forward to it.

When I walk through the town with my stack of papers, I am dressed like a normal woman, behaving in kind. I am pleasant and polite, and I pretend like an actress on the stage. I know my role.

Sometimes when I walk I think I must have awakened. “Ah,” I say—and it’s like breathing fresh air. “Yes, all the rest—it was a nightmare, and look, here is the morning and the world is right again.”

I smile, and it is not forced. For a few seconds at a time, it is beautiful. It is enough. Almost. Even though I know it damns me too to be so pleased, for I am complicit in this farce.

***

It happened slowly, at first. One or two here, there.

And I knew, of course. It was a preposterous merry-go-round of knowing, and being known, and being silenced. We were three, then—bound together in hatred, and knowledge. Eve and her two false Adams. Oh, such a secret did we share.

If Leonard had been here, I would have gone to him. So there’s one thing to be thankful for—Leonard was not here. But is it right to be thankful that he was not killed, and that others took his place?

God. There’s that sound again. I haven’t mentioned it, I guess, but I know what it means. It means they’re coming—one or the other of them. I’ll have to finish this later.

V.

Dear Melissa, July 3, 1881,

I realize that it’s been quite some time since we’ve seen one another, but I have heard that you are still traveling with the camp meetings—despite the fact that Reverend Aarons has passed away. His death was so unexpected, and so strange!

But I miss you, dear Melissa. You were a true friend to me, in a world where such friends are few and far between.

I wonder if you haven’t grown lonely since I’ve gone. We had so many things in common, and I’d like to think that perhaps you relied upon me in some fashion.

You can still rely on me, let there be no question of it.

I hope you do not think me foolish for my insistence on this point. I hope you don’t think I’m a braggart when I tell you that I have strength untapped, and unexpected resources. I am not fearless, but I am brave—for I am not alone. Remember King David, who told us, “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them who fear Him, and delivereth them.”

These are not such dark times that the angels have all forsaken us. I’ve met one or two myself, as of late, and they are a hardy bunch, astute and willing to lend aid. They are a very present help in times of trouble.

Nothing has changed, in this regard. God never changes. He is constant, and He is with you.

And, on a less celestial level, soon I will be with you soon. I’m greatly looking forward to it, I must say. It’s been almost eight months now—can you believe that? Eight months since I’ve stood on the stage to sing, or since I’ve wandered a new town with an armload of announcements. I’ve missed it terribly.

But this is not to say that I plan to rejoin the show. I suppose I mean to ask you, is there any chance you feel the same way? Might you be interested in going back east—or even further south, or north?

***

It sounds as if I mean to swoop down there upon the camp and spirit you away—though you and I share no formal union, and any such action would appear rash and unconsidered.

I wish to inform you, though, that I’ve considered it most deeply. I’ve thought of little else over the last few days, and it might be that my imagination is running away with me…when it would rather run away with you. Ask for me a week from Thursday—that’s the soonest the coach can bring me. I thought of acquiring a horse and starting off alone, but I’ve been discouraged from such a course by a knowledgeable friend.

***

(As an aside, I do believe this friend shares advice with heaven’s blessing, though our doctrine might not necessarily line up on all points. Diversity of knowledge is a marvelous thing when one has diverse questions.)

At any rate, I am confident that I have been soundly advised, and if all goes well, this friend shall join me. I will be glad of the company, for the journey is a long one through treacherous territory, and the end is always uncertain when we travel through such unmarked places.

Did you know that on the old maps—when first this continent was being discovered and addressed—that carters used to write upon the ocean, “Here there be monsters.” I wonder what they say now, about this vast expanse of wasteland that makes up the whole heart of this nation? It’s a funny thought, that’s all.

***

When we arrive at Mescalero, I’ll rest myself at whichever hotel I find there first, and most tolerable. Be on the lookout, and please come join me if you can. Ask for me, and I’ll inform the desk clerk to expect a beautiful woman to enquire there.

I’ve also notified my friend about your presence at the camp, and my friend is quite eager to meet you. I think you’ll get along well, and I look forward to making a round of introductions.

~Yours,

Leonard

VI.

Eileen, July 4, 1881

It’s difficult to do this kind of research while on the road, but I have my methods, and I have my contacts (here and there). The mail moves slowly in these parts, if it moves at all. Gossip flies faster, but is less reliable.

Even so, accounting for things which may have been told with exaggeration, this is what I’ve gathered.

***

To begin with, people are killing coyotes. People always look to kill them, I know. To cattle men and farmers they are a nuisance, so they’re regularly shot on sight. But great round-ups are being orchestrated to purge the territories of the canine blight.

It’s a wasteful, needless thing. I understand why the effort is being undertaken, but it can’t help. The poor dogs. They say that Christ sees even the sparrow fall from its tree, so perhaps then He also watches these dogs of the wilderness during this time of persecution.

***

The first victims were all women. I wonder why that is? Wouldn’t the male members of the congregation prove a greater threat to Jack and his newfound accomplice? Or—and this is a terrible thought indeed—perhaps the men were attacked too, and permitted to survive.

That’s a frightful scenario, and it makes me tremble.

I never feared for my own strength as a woman, even before anything changed. But in the face of this…well, it’s a pack, is what it is…I would hate to be one woman standing alone against them, responsible for the well-being of others. But Leonard and his Melissa are in peril due to Jack. And I could have killed Jack. I could have stopped him and I did not, because I feared my own strength.

That night on the Mary Byrd—this should have ended there. I saw him surrounded by flame, and that very flame was surrounded by acres of water in every direction.

I told myself then (and I’ve assured myself since) that I fled the boat for poor Christopher. He was dying. I knew he was dying, but I wanted just one miracle…and I could have lived and believed, having one friend in the world to share my secret.

I thought about it, for a few seconds.

I actually considered, once I had given up any pretense that he might survive…I thought about his blood there—all over my skirt, and I thought, “How much would it take? Only a bite? More than a scratch? What would it take to infect him?”

One of my hands was beneath his arm, there in the small boat, but the other hand was across his belly and I thought—“It could be an accident. He would never know; I wouldn’t even have to lie.”

And then he died.

The last breath rose up out of that barrel-shaped body of his, and he was gone, and I never had a chance to perform such a terrible experiment upon him. And in this way too, I was reminded that Heaven watches us all, even the little sparrows, and even the frightened little monsters who work so hard to be good.

I was saved from that choice, from that sin.

But I had dallied too long, there in the boat, and Christopher was dead and the Mary Byrd was sinking, burned to the water line like so much kindling.

I couldn’t see Jack anymore, writhing and angry in the light of the fire that consumed the decks. I couldn’t see him, and I told myself that it was because the smoke had overwhelmed him and he had fallen. I would never see him again. I would never need to chase him any farther, because my work was at an end.

But my work hadn’t ended.

I knew it must go on when the morning came and I was sodden, miserable, and alive—there in the rowboat with Christopher’s stinking body.

***

God is good. I believe that.

God is good, and He would not leave me to live this way if there were no other service I could offer Him.

***

Jack was gone, so far as I could tell. I accepted it as fact because I could not bear the thought of returning to look—and besides, I could scarcely do so without calling scrutiny down upon myself. So I took the coward’s way and simply left.

I thought of going back north, but I found the southern climate more agreeable. Farther south it was easier to find others of my kind—from a religious standpoint, not a corporeal one.

There’s a very old Spanish city, very far down by the coast of the Atlantic. It’s called St. Augustine, and I rested there for some time. I learned enough of the language to converse with the people who managed the missions.

While I was there I prayed at the shrine—at the little spot where the very first mass in the New World was ever performed. It uplifted me. It made me feel as if I were part of a great pattern, and that even as governments and churches and boundaries shifted, changed, and fell in and out of power—there are things that remain. There are things that we all come back to, again and again. It’s not a circle of life or time. It’s not a Great Chain of Being. It’s a series of loops—it’s an endless pattern knitted over and over, by One who is careful to count every stitch.

***

But yes, they are killing coyotes all over the western territories, as far as they can reach out and grab them or shoot them. So there is something reasonable to be blamed, and really, it’s better that they blame some four-footed thing they know. In other times, in other places, they might have looked for demons or witches. They might have sought out an old woman and burned her, or they might have looked for cloven hoof prints in the dirt.

It’s an irony then, isn’t it? The one time they’d be right to assume the otherworldly worst—mortal monsters are ready at hand, easier to eliminate by far. It makes them feel like they’re doing something to push back the fear, and it’s working, I’m sure. Does it matter why people stay closer to town at night? Does it matter why they walk with greater caution, so long as they do?

***

I estimate a death count that stands higher than twenty, lower than forty. It’s a broad estimation, distilled from speculation, rumor, and hysterical hearsay, so I’m afraid it must remain a wide net of guessing. And clearly, I have no way of knowing yet how many are left within the camp—changed or unchanged.

I wish I could speak to Melissa directly. Possibly it could be arranged. I don’t know—I don’t know enough about how they’re carrying out their ruse.

It sounds ordinary, but the worst things always do, at first. The meetings come through an area, posters go up, word of mouth spreads (and this means hands to place the posters, mouths to share the words). The townspeople send out feelers, families and curious folks, devoted Christians who wish to share fellowship with others like themselves.

And somehow, fewer return home.

***

The gossip didn’t begin until Midland, Texas. The group changed course then, heading not west but north and east, pitching their tents again at Big Spring. After Big Spring, chit-chat began in earnest. Three women vanished in the wake of the meetings, that much is certain.

Two bodies were found. Enough body parts were present to indicate a third, but there weren’t any doctors near enough to evaluate the mess.

East again, they settled briefly in Sweetwater. Three more went missing, two women and a man—the husband of one of the women. Four bodies were found that time, but the fourth was unrecognizable. It’s possible that this was a camp member.

This time there was a doctor, and the doctor swore before a court that the bodies had been mauled and gnawed by coyotes. A frontier doctor would probably recognize it, I suppose; but it’s also possible that the poor dogs only found the bodies and worried the bones.

North went the group, to Snyder. Six missing. Only two confirmed dead. Were they swelling their ranks, or only getting better at hiding the corpses?

***

(You know, it’s hard to hide a corpse from a dog. I would not be surprised if this is why the bodies surface.)

***

Following Snyder, the group turned west once more. Their most recent stay was in Brownfield. Eight missing. Four confirmed dead. The local authorities became interested, and I think they may have drawn civic suspicion.

Now they have been gone from Brownfield for a couple of weeks, and their latest journey has them moving farther between meetings than before. Mescalero is quite a ways away from Brownfield. It might mean they’re plotting a great run, or a long stretch to the mountains. Maybe they know people are beginning to look at them askance. Maybe they have gleaned that law enforcement, such as it is, is taking an interest in their affairs. Maybe they know that the time has nearly come when they will need to run.

Run or fight.

God help us if they make a stand.

VII.

Melissa, July 5, 1881

Yesterday was Independence Day. Jack told me all about it, while lying beside me smug and chipper—despite the early evening heat. He likes to talk, just to hear himself, or just to bother me—I don’t know which. He’s a thing in love with the sound of his own words. He loves himself at least as much as I hate him.

It’s just now the middle of moon’s cycle, so he isn’t as wild or bloodthirsty as the fuller moon makes him. This doesn’t make him any gentler a companion, but it means that tomorrow, I will look less like I’ve been tied in a gunny sack and beaten with a cane.

I hate the smell of him. I hate the way his body changes, and the way it snaps and shifts with the sound of splitting bone under leather—it makes me ill. He makes me ill.

I hate the look of him. I hate his warm-orange eyes that still look cold, somehow; and I hate the way he swells into a knotted mannequin of lumps, hair, and sharp-ended angles when the moon hits him hard.

I hate the sound of him. He makes my ears ring when he is overcome with the moment, or with his bestial attentions, and he pulls all the air in the tent into his chest and he howls, brays, roars—like some bizarre amalgam of creatures never meant to mate or cross.

But most of all, I simply hate him.

Look what he has done to us. Look what has become of the reverend’s wonderful holy dream—look at how Jack has perverted it. We began as a band of disciples, following Christ’s footsteps through the wilderness. We were poor in funds, but rich in mercy and love. We never wanted for any of the necessities, and as our company grew, our family grew. It was a fellowship of like-minded followers.

And what is it now? A charade of evil. A band of devils.

I am the only one left intact. I alone walk with human footsteps when the night falls and the moon rolls up in the sky.

By my best count, which is not a good count—but is only the roughest estimation, there are twenty of them. All men, who fight amongst themselves constantly. All the women have been used up, worn out, thrown away or devoured except for myself. And me? I think they keep me because they mean to punish me.

Jack says that it’s because I’m so pretty and proud, and he likes things that are pretty. I think it’s because he likes to defile things that are proud.

He is very proud himself. I wonder what terrible thing overcame him once, or do I already know? But no. It wouldn’t be the wolf. I believe he greeted the wolf with joy, and with welcoming arms. I do not think the wolf changed him; I think that it freed him to be as wicked as he wished.

I don’t know why I wonder about it. I don’t really care. Whatever was done to him in the past, it doesn’t excuse anything he does now. Maybe I just want a reason, even as I realize that there can’t possibly be one.

So Jack lies beside me still, if not every night—then so many nights as it makes no difference to say otherwise. At least when he’s on top of me, he doesn’t talk much. What an existence this is, where I split hairs of misery like this.

The more he talks, the more I understand how thoroughly insane he is.

Last night he gave me a secular sermon on Independence Day, and he explained how they would declare an Independence Day of their own—because really, there’s nothing he won’t try to corrupt.

“What about the rest of us?” he mused, kicking the edge of his heel against the bar on the cot. “Independence Day for whom? For men, for women, for good little citizens, to be sure. But if their laws—if their happy little government—will not protect and serve the interests of those who remain, shall its government apply to us as well? Should we follow their laws if they would kill us on sight?”

If I cared for him at all, I might have interjected an encouraging noise. But I don’t, and I didn’t.

“Oh, we are few enough now. Maybe that’s why they’ve excluded us. Maybe they don’t even know about us—but that’s going to change. Already we are growing this pack; already we are stronger than I could’ve imagined. It took me time—time to sort out the details and time to learn about the transition. It’s rather like an infection, but it’s not one that’s easy to spread.”

Then he rolled over, facing me, even though I was staring up towards the sky. But even the stars were denied me by the canvas of the tent.

“I could do it to you, if I wanted to. But I don’t, not yet. I like you like this. I like you soft, and easy to hold.” He ran one of his hands—normal-looking, now—up and down my arm.

I knew better than to jerk away.

“It’s as I said, an infection of sorts. To spread it the body must be badly damaged, but the blood must continue to circulate. If the blood doesn’t circulate, the infection doesn’t dig itself in deeply enough. Or at least,” he said with an airy flip of his wrist, “that’s my supposition. I’m no doctor, but I’ve been examined by many of them. You learn things. But you know, I don’t want to call it an infection. It’s no disease, obviously. It’s nothing that needs to be treated or cured—even if it were possible to treat or cure, and I’m confident that it isn’t. If you look at it this way, I’m a pioneer of science. I’m an explorer into uncharted realms of human experience—not because I’m human now, because I’m much more than that. But because I was human once, and I am pushing this thing to its limits—I want to see where the boundaries are.”

I couldn’t restrain a small cough, from the dust or from simple congestion. He took it as a prompt, and he continued.

“You live here with us, among us. You should be observing this. Do you have a journal, or some papers? I think you should write this down. Think of it! The future may remember you as a brave historian, instead of the captive you think yourself now.”

“I’m not a captive, then?” I shouldn’t have said it, but the implication that I was free galled me enough that I engaged him, though I didn’t look at him.

“Of course not. Think of it instead as being a…as being a spectator. Think of yourself as a scientist, watching the birth and evolution of a spectacular new creature, destined to change the course of history, the paths of nations, and the very nature of humanity itself! How can you consider these things and not find them thrilling?”

He sat up, clapped his hands together, and said, “That’s it. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll bring you paper—I’ll go to town, to the nearest one, whatever it is—and I’ll buy you a blank book if I can find one. I want you to write about us. I want you to chronicle this beginning of an era. I want you to record this for the future.”

“All right,” I told him. Yes, I was learning. Tell him what he wants. Give him what he wants. Treat him how he wants. Whatever it takes for him to leave as quickly as possible, in as good a mood as I can conjure for him. Whatever it takes to keep him away from me. “Get it. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent!” He climbed over me and off the cot—which was surely going to fail me one day soon. How the poor contraption has held together this long, I have no idea. “I’ll go into town myself. I’ll get it for you, and I’ll give it to you, and it will be a wondrous exchange of gifts.”

“Hm?” I said, not a question, really.

“Yes, an exchange. I’ll give you the supplies, and you give me a history of our people. And if I like what I read—and there’s no reason to think I won’t—perhaps we’ll lift you up into our ranks. Another three or four experimental volunteers, and I’ll have the process down pat. We can, we can—I know! It will be the first and holiest sacrament in our own church!”

He was dancing now, naked there in my tent. “Oh, there will be ritual and beauty—same as the churches now. The blood of the martyrs are the seeds of the church, oh yes. And my blood, or our blood, it will feed the priests and ministers! It will bind them all to us, to me.”

And then, he stopped. His feet settled into the dust and a pensive, almost fond mood overtook him. “Though we have no priestesses yet. No holy sisters. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, my dear. I don’t want this to become some dull old collection of monks, but I do suspect that it might become more of a hive, in some respects. One queen. One woman to rule and to serve. But as of yet, there have been no sisters strong enough in constitution to survive the infection—God, I want a better term for it. The sacrament, then. It frustrates me, honestly it does.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“As well you should. And it’s another reason, I must confess, that we’ve left you this long. I want to turn you, even as I want to preserve you forever, just like this! But nothing so mortal lasts, and if I cannot discover a way to pass this along to you, you’re worthless to us, my love.”

I tried not to cringe at the endearment. His love. He loved nothing, and no one, and not me. Nothing but himself.

“You’re tougher than they were—the other girls, and the older women who were here before. You’re stronger, you’ve survived more. You can….” The wheels in his brain were turning like the insides of a wound-up watch. I could almost see the gears clicking on the other side of his eyes.

He reached for his pants and idly pulled them on. “Would you like that?”

“What?” I didn’t believe for a second that he cared one way or the other what I would, or would not, like.

“Would you like that? To be the queen of our kind? Our mother and wife, empress. Maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be, after all. One woman. One muse, one divine feminine. Isn’t that the way the church already tells it? One woman in a story at a time. It seems to be all the public can bear.”

“You’re talking in circles.”

“And why not? It’s all circles, anyway.” He waved his hands like he was flicking flies away from himself.

If he’d been an ordinary man I would have called him crazed and dismissed him, but I could only shrug. Any enthusiasm for anything, even feigned, would be misinterpreted and used against me. “As you like, then. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.”

He wanted something else from me. His mood shifted, and grew instantly darker. “I’m offering you greatness. You might show something other than disdain.”

“It’s exhaustion,” I corrected him with a lie that was half true. I watched him consider this, and decide that it was possible. He’d believe anything that flattered him, in even the most round-about way. “I’m tired, Jack. That’s all.”

The absent stare he flashed over my head told me he was already thinking about something else. His addled brain went from one subject to the next like a skipping stone. It made him hard to follow, and tricky to read.

I was afraid, for a moment, that I’d invited some new assault or injustice with my protests, but his attention had left me and he followed it close behind—out the flap and into the early night. I sighed with relief and remained on the cot, too tired and miserable to move. Who would wish for such royalty? Who would ask to be queen of all she surveyed, if this was all she could see?

I didn’t think he’d try it, anyway. Or if he did, I did not think I’d survive it. I’d noticed before what he’d complained about—that women were difficult to come by with their condition. He gave me too much credit. God willing I’d bleed to death first, or else become so strong and wicked that I could slay them all. Anyway, isn’t that what a queen does? Doesn’t she hold power of life or death over her subjects?

It’s a thought, isn’t it—something to sustain me, or entertain me if it all comes down to the worst. Change me then, you bastard, if you can. Give me that power, and I’ll use it against you. I’ll be your Madonna. I’ll be your queen.

And I’ll have your head if it’s the last thing I ever do.

VIII.

Leonard, July 7, 1881

Mescalero.

A freak rainstorm washed me into town last night. There was lightning to stretch across the sky, and water falling in curtains. This is what people mean when they talk about gully-washers. Now, come morning, the land is scarred. The water has cut trails through the dirt, small canyons worn into the packed earth.

I didn’t see much of the town when I arrived. The rain fell down with animosity, as if it wanted to strike and harm everyone and everything beneath it. I ran from it, like everyone else. Everything was boarded, and the street was empty.

The stage driver was a soaked mass without eyes or a face. He hollered, lifting a sopping arm and pointing towards a hulking shadow that must have been a building, there on the other side of the angry rain.

“The Primrose,” he said.

I nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and I was standing there getting wet. I ducked my head and dashed for the shadow, which had a porch for me to stumble up, and a door for me to fumble with. I pushed it and it gave, and I staggered inside.

The manager at the desk was a small fellow. He was older than me by thirty years, and he wore round spectacles pushed up on his forehead—instead of over his eyes. “Come on in, son,” he told me.

I tried to dry myself off, there in the doorway, but the desk man shook his head. “Don’t do it. It’s worse with you leaving the door open. Just come on in and drip. Nobody here cares.”

I winced at the suggestion, but accepted his offer. This was his property—or so I assumed. I adjusted my grip on the wet carpet bag I carried, and approached the desk while he looked me up and down.

“I’d like to ask a room for the night,” I told him.

“Sure. We got plenty. You’re here for those meetings, aren’t you? The church folk camped outside town?”

“Yes,” I confessed, because it was as true as anything.

He reached behind the desk for a ledger and offered me a quill with a half-dry ink pot. “I’m not sure how I feel about it. The whole thing smells funny to me.”

“The meetings?” I tried to keep my voice disinterested, but polite.

“It’s a bunch of men, so far as I can see. And that one woman, who always looks so tired. And this rain—we don’t have rain like this here. Once every couple of years, maybe, it’ll fall so hard and so mean like this. It’s a bad sign.”

“You believe in such signs then, sir?”

“Maybe God’s trying to tell us something.”

“God is always speaking,” I agreed, though I don’t think he and I were talking about the same thing. I was deliberately being evasive, or deliberately misunderstanding. I didn’t like the way the conversation was turning. I didn’t like having company for my concern, although it should have relieved me.

“Number six,” the man said, handing me a key.

I thanked him, took the key, and said, “There is someone who will likely seek me out here. Could I leave a message here, at the desk?”

He produced some paper and I wrote quickly.

Sister C.—I’ve arrived, and I await you. I’ve been given room number 6. I’ll remain here in hopes that you’ll join me soon, but I won’t wait more than another day. I must see Melissa. I must bring her out of this.

I folded the note and addressed it simply, with a first name.

The desk man put it under the counter. “Number six is upstairs. First on the left.”

I thanked him yet again, lifted my drenched luggage, and stepped down the hall with a squish in my shoes.

My room was simply but comfortably furnished. The linens were clean, if not new; and the basin was filled with fresh water. Beside it was a bar of white soap and a gray towel. I disrobed and spent the next half hour hanging my things around the room, hoping that by morning they might dry.

By the time I finished, the rain had slowed to a trickle.

I thought of Melissa, alone at the camp—surrounded by the devils and the deep blue sea. I prayed for her, before I slept. I prayed myself to sleep, praying for her strength and praying for the protection of the Almighty.

***

I thought surely I would dream of her, but I did not. I dreamed instead of Eileen, small and self-possessed in her dark dress and modestly covered hair.

I saw her standing alone in the desert, arms outstretched. She was gazing up at the sky, and the sky was gazing back. Clouds were unrolling, unfurling, and flapping like a blanket snapped to fullness across a freshly made bed.

In one hand she held a chain of black beads that dangled a metal cross. In the other she held a sword—and in the sword I saw the reflection of a mighty army, each soldier dressed in gleaming white armor.

The dream comforted me, even as it confused me.

I awoke in the room, by myself. The rain had stopped, and the sun was hours from rising. I laid my head back down and tried to dream again, but failed.

***

Morning began with a knock on my door. It was the desk man’s wife, I believe. She was informing me that breakfast was served downstairs, but only for the next twenty minutes. I was hungry, and my belly churned with anticipation.

“I’ll be down shortly,” I said to her. “But could you tell me, has anyone come by to ask after me? I’m expecting company, after a fashion. I was hoping to meet with an old friend here.”

“Sorry.” She shook her head. “I haven’t seen any messages down at the desk, save what you left in case of your visitor. Twenty minutes,” she said again, and left.

I walked to the window and opened it. There was a muggy staleness about the room that made me uncomfortable, and when the daylight came inside, I understood. It wasn’t even eight yet, but the heat was coming up fast, steaming the places where the rain had been closed out.

My clothes weren’t completely dry, but the ones hung highest were fair to wear so I quickly donned them and went downstairs in time to find toast, grits, and eggs. I ate faster than I should have, but I wanted the day to begin—even if it meant hours of ‘hurry up and wait.’

I finished up, washed up, and went outside.

Nine o’clock, and the world was on fire. It wasn’t as if I’d forgotten how the heat of the desert feels. No, I think it was the way things were still shedding their moisture. I think it was the humidity, making the temperature feel sticky.

Cracks were opening in the ground. Where the water drained or evaporated, the dirt went dry and split beneath my feet.

I was wondering how to begin. Where to start? Where to enquire, and where to look? And behind me, I heard a woman’s voice with an accent that came from across an ocean.

“There you are, dear boy. And you only beat me by a day.”

IX.

Eileen, July 8, 1881

I arrived in the evening of the seventh of July. The town was covered with a smothering layer of clouds, all colored up dark like a bruise on the sky, hanging low and heavy.

I hope Melissa’s all right. She almost surely isn’t, but I think Heaven knows what I mean. I hope Jack and this Daniel are alone in their mayhem, but they almost surely aren’t.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if Leonard had been patient enough to wait for me after all, I found him—and it cheered me greatly to see him there.

He was wearing rumpled clothes that looked like they’d been dried over a set of railroad tracks, and he didn’t have a hat. He was standing beside the street, scanning the buildings for—what? Signs of announcements, I imagined. Signs of Melissa.

I approached him without bothering to keep a quiet tread, but he didn’t hear me until I called out, “There you are, dear boy. And you only beat me by a day.”

Leonard jumped as if he’d been stuck with a pin.

“I didn’t see you there!” His face broke out in a delighted grin that warmed my heart.

I had to laugh—to show that the sentiment was mutual, and that I was glad to see him, too. I honestly hadn’t thought he’d stay in town. I figured that once he got here, he’d take off immediately for the camp. Men are so rarely called to be proper knights in shining armor anymore; and men like Leonard are the sort to leap at the chance.

He took my hands in his, and then threw formality out the window and embraced me in a hug. He was a bony thing under those loose-fitting clothes, but there was lean meat there as well. Maybe he was stronger than he looked. And why shouldn’t he be? I am, after all.

“I’ve been thinking,” he announced as he stepped back. “I’ve been thinking about…them. About what we can do. Would you like—I mean, I could buy us some tea. We should sit, and we should talk.”

“Your American tea I can take or leave, but I could use a drink and there’s a pub right down the way here.”

He failed to look less than scandalized, then rallied, and stretched out his arm as if to let a lady go first. “After you,” he smiled. “Perhaps I could use a dose of liquid courage, myself.”

“Liquid courage? Now where did you hear it called that?”

“It’s something my father and his brother used to say.”

When we reached the pub, it was nearly empty but not quite. Three or four men loitered in the background, in the small tables up against the wall, behind a broken piano. Another lounged behind the bar with a book in his hand. The title was something sensationalist and silly. It was something about a cowboy with a violent reputation, I’m sure. But at least the man could read, which said something for his character, I guess.

The reader folded a page corner and shut the book around his thumb. He looked me up and down in an appraising sort of way that was too disinterested to be either offensive or flattering. “Huh,” he said.

I ducked my head at him, meaning for it to be a polite acknowledgement. “Leonard?” I said. I tapped his elbow. “Ask if they have Irish whiskey. If they don’t, the colonial version will suffice.”

He agreed to these terms, and I chose a seat in the corner. I liked the position because I could see out the window without immediately being spotted myself, and there was no one behind me. I don’t know when I became such a defensively-thinking woman. Perhaps it happened when I became such a dangerous one.

Leonard returned shortly with two small glasses, one for himself and one for me. He sipped at his with a wince, I swallowed mine with a grimace. Irish whiskey had been too much to ask.

“Tell me what you’ve been thinking,” I urged him. “And I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Between us, we might have a good idea or two about how to proceed.”

“Yes,” he said, lowering his shoulders and his voice so that everyone who could see us could tell we were having a private, possibly interesting discussion. But no one inched closer, and no one gave us more than a sidelong glance. “It’s about what you said in your letter—which I received shortly before I left for here—about how…they can drown like any other creature.”

“Go on.”

“If they can drown, they can choke. They can smother.”

“And they bleed,” I added. “Let me assure you of that much, they bleed. And if they bleed, they can bleed to death. I’m not sure how much abuse is required to cause it. It must be a monumental amount.”

“A slit throat? A lost head?”

Now there was a thought. I murmured agreement. “I think the lack of a head might confound them. But it’s one thing to propose removing something’s head, and another thing altogether to perform it.”

“I’m sure,” he said, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never tried to decapitate anyone before, and I could see him turning the idea over in his mind. He was wondering if he could do it—if he’d have the stomach, or the strength. I don’t know what conclusion he reached before changing the subject. “So what plan is there, then? You’re here, I’m here. She’s there, somewhere. Outside town.”

“And they’re running for the west—to the mountains, and to more bleak deserts than this one, or so I hear. They’re going to run out of water before long. What then? Maybe it will weaken them, or slow them to go without it. Maybe they haven’t thought of it yet. But their location, their camp—it isn’t a secret, I suppose?”

“No. It’d be easy enough to find them. Should we go then?”

“No! Not yet. Now we evaluate. It’s morning, dear. There’s time to weigh our options.”

This frustrated him, I know. He wanted to take action, to seize the day, to rescue the damsel. And there I was, reigning him in.

“What then? This is what I really meant, when I asked you if there was a plan—what weapons can use against them? How are we going to retrieve Melissa? I don’t know if she ever received my letter. I don’t know if she will ever come to town, though I asked her to—in a veiled way, as you suggested. But she’s been seen here, in the company of others.”

“Others?” A warm, dense feeling in my stomach tightened, and dropped.

“Men.” He spit the word across the table. “They’re holding her hostage. They’re keeping her there at that camp, and it’s caught people’s attention. They’re guarding her, that’s what they’re doing. But you know how it looks. You know what people think.”

“Of course I know what people think. But my boy, it’s not half as bad as what it makes me think.” I sank into silence. I had no proof of it, but I was increasingly sure: they were culling the women, whether they meant to or not. “Oh God,” I breathed.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Let the world think what it wants. Let the citizens of Mescalero assume the worst. They won’t even be halfway there. We’ll do what we need to do, and propriety be damned.”

Again, there was that flicker of shock and disapproval, but he was learning.

“Look,” I said. “You’re sitting in a saloon with a papist and a handful of hard liquor. A year ago, this would have seemed improbable, at best—and embarrassing or unthinkable at worst. Yet here we are, you and I. And we know there are worse things than critical glares and the snubs of our fellow men. The rules are changed now, Leonard.”

“Changed? By whom?”

“By me. By you. By Jack, and Daniel. They aren’t playing by the rules, and neither are we.”

“Then we become monsters too, in order to engage the monsters? I don’t like that.”

No, I wanted to say. No, of course you don’t want to be the monster. You want to be the knight, not the dragon. “No, that’s not what I mean. We aren’t breaking any rules, we’re writing new ones to repair the damage done by others.”

He went calmer, and he nodded as if by moving his head he might make the idea dissolve there better.

***

Tomorrow, if we haven’t yet heard from Melissa, we will leave together for the camp.

X.

Melissa’s Journal, July 8, 1881

Leonard wrote!

He wrote back, and he’s here—now! Or rather, he’s nearby in Mescalero. Only two short miles away, and I can hardly believe it. I wish I could feign some ambivalence in the matter. I wish I could return to my previous attempts at moral confusion about his presence, but I cannot. I can scarcely contain my complete, abject, absolute joy at the prospect of seeing him again.

He’s nearby, and he received my message, and he’s coming for me. He means to take me out of here. I was lucky his response wasn’t seen by anyone else here in the camp—he was being careful with his words, but not careful enough. Or maybe I only know what to look for, and that’s why it seemed so obvious to me that he was speaking of a rescue.

I can hardly imagine it. It’s astounding, the things a woman can grow accustomed to in time. It’s amazing, the horror that can become so commonplace as to feel inevitable and inescapable.

Oh, there’s the dread. Yes, a prickle of it. Poor Leonard, come to save me.

It might not work. It might fail outright—a hopeless and laughable attempt that ends with the death of both of us. But my ambivalence is gone. I can’t even care that this threatens him. I can’t even muster a shred of decency to say, “I should not have asked him for this.”

If this fails, then so be it. If we die, we die.

We won’t be here.

But I won’t sit here and wait, like a toadstool on a log. I need to prepare. I’ll need an excuse to go to town. The meetings begin tomorrow night.

***

There will be things I can never tell him. I care enough for him to keep things from him, and I care enough for my own preservation that I think, it is likely, that I will be better received if he’s never made aware of the humiliation I’ve daily suffered. I can live with his rage on my behalf, but I cannot live with his pity or revulsion.

I’m not entirely certain that he could live with it, either—and live with me, too.

Is that what I’m thinking, then? Is this how it will go? I’ll run away and marry Leonard because he’ll suspect enough to ask no questions.

***

He’s mentioned a “friend” in his letter. There’s something he wants to say about this friend, but he dared not—and I wonder what it is.

It sounds like help.

I’m going to get ready, and when I meet with Leonard, he will know that I did not sit idly by, wringing my hands and weeping while I waited for rescue. He will know that I am here, and I am trapped, but before I will surrender, I will fight.

If I were ever hungry enough to eat anymore, I’d complain that it’s past lunchtime. But I should eat something, anyway. I should keep up my strength. I should bolster myself for this coming—

No, I should be more careful.

I can’t let them see that anything unusual is present or coming. They must not know that I am alive after all, and that there will be more to my life’s postscript than, “reluctant concubine.”

***

Daniel almost caught me, just then.

I’m getting good at hearing them, though. Their footsteps are quiet—quieter than a man’s ought to be. But like everything else, I’m growing accustomed to it. I felt it more than I heard it, a slight jostling of the ground outside.

I slapped my journal shut and pushed it under my pillow, then lay my body on top of it like I’d been napping, or crying. I don’t cry anymore. They don’t believe it; they think I cry when they’re not looking. They don’t understand that they’ve wrung it all out of me already.

But there was Daniel, twitching the tent flap with his hand.

I’m less afraid of him now, though my contempt for him is greater than it ever was. He should have been stronger than this, stronger than Jack. I can’t forgive him for his weakness, despite his inhuman strength.

Around the meeting time, he gets quieter. It might be that he’s growing tired of Jack’s company. Or it may be only that he thinks of his father more, and he can give a name to the voice of his dying conscience.

Regardless the cause, it makes me glad—so far as “glad” may go—that he abandons me more and more to Jack. It isn’t that I have any fondness for that other brute either; it’s only that I tolerate the one of them, and not the pair of them. Better just Jack than to be shared like a toy between quarrelling children.

They don’t quarrel much, but when they do, it’s over me.

I’m glad they resolved it, however much it may be resolved. I hated being jerked between them. I hated….

I’m tired of writing about it. I hated them both, and I hate them both. But I hold the most anger against Daniel, because once, he was my friend—and he thought better of me than this.

***

But it was Daniel who nearly caught me writing about Leonard, and I understand enough of the relationships here to know how strange and nasty jealousy is between men, even when it isn’t warranted. They aren’t fighting for my affection, after all. They’re bickering for my body.

He sulks when he sees me. I think perhaps he’s been reprimanded by Jack, or maybe they fought like dogs for dominance, and Daniel lost. Whatever the lesson, he’s learned it, or he’s learned to pretend it. We’re all pretending here, anyway.

“What?” I asked when he stood in the opening. “What do you want?”

He said, “The meeting’s tomorrow night.”

I said, “I know. What of it?”

“Will you go to town tomorrow morning? Jack thinks….”

“He thinks what?”

“I think that we should try to do more to bring the families, the women and children too. There was talking in Mescalero, that this was a camp of men. You should be seen, so that others aren’t afraid to attend.”

Instrumental in the damnation of others again, of course. As you like. “What would you ask me to do there?”

“Visit the ministers. Stop at the general store. Here’s money.” He threw a wad of bills down onto my cot and turned to leave. For a second I could not believe my luck, and then I remembered that I have no luck. “I’ll come and get you. We’ll walk into town together. You’ll be my sister.”

My heart sank, but it was too buoyant to drop far. At least it wouldn’t be Jack. There was something beaten about Daniel that made me feel like he was easier to control in some respect. I might be able to fool him or flee him ore easily.

“Tomorrow morning. Whatever you like,” I said. I held my voice down, kept one toe upon it to hold it flat.

***

Tomorrow morning I’ll go to town and Leonard will be there. Daniel will know Leonard, of course. He’ll know the lie we perpetuate, and he’ll raise suspicions, seed dissent, rally the town and the surrounding towns, if it comes to that.

God knows what it will come to.

God knows what it will cost.

XI.

Leonard, July 9, 1881

The meetings begin tomorrow.

I can see where announcements have been posted, and there is gossip about town. These meetings will not be so well attended as our old ones, I’m sure of it. They’re giving themselves away—they’ve hunted themselves into obviousness.

Women and children, even those who’d like to join the fellowship, are being urged to remain home and indoors.

It astounds me what people can glean from behavior. It delights me how astute even the commonest, plainest laborer can be, when faced with peril and threat unheard of. They may not riot in the streets, screaming for the blood of the monsters—but they are wise enough to keep themselves hidden. They shut their doors and fasten their windows, and they keep the little ones inside.

Much as it makes me tense, it pleases me to see the town’s reaction. There is fear in the air, and anticipation. There is worry on the face of each passerby, and caution in eyes everywhere.

And they don’t even know what they’re up against. They only know that something is wrong.

This is not a traveling worship camp, not anymore. The beasts are being found out, slowly, and by God’s hand. They will not be allowed to continue, not like this. Not under the cross. Not with songs of praise melting in their mouths.

***

Eileen, always prone to thinking of the things I miss, also noted the simmering scent of fear. “I’m glad they’re catching on,” she said. “But it makes me afraid for them, too.”

I looked at the flimsy shutters and thin wood doors. “I hope they stay home.”

“But hope and suspicion are two sides of one coin. Closing their doors won’t do much help to them.”

“But we will help them.”

She nodded, but otherwise didn’t answer.

“The best thing we can do for these people is tell them to leave, don’t you think?” I asked.

“No. The best thing we could do for them is make them leave. But we can’t do that, just yet. They won’t believe a plague of wolves, though you’ve gotten me thinking. We might need to destroy the town to save it.”

I frowned. Destroying a town to save it—I hoped she wasn’t serious, but she looked serious. She was different now from the first time I met her. Then, she was a little lighthearted, even when she was concentrating. Now she was grim in a way that didn’t seem to suit her, even as she wore it like a mantle. It didn’t fit her, but she would have been naked without it.

“We should part company,” she said quietly.

“Why is that?”

“I have some shopping to do. I have some preparations to make, as do you.”

She was right. But I didn’t want to admit that I felt helpless without her. Instead, I asked how she was planning to fill her day.

“I’m going to see about some tools.”

“Tools?”

“Dangerous tools. Do ye also likewise,” she said, and she was paraphrasing the Golden Rule. I didn’t like the perverse twist she applied to it, but I didn’t argue with her. She was right. Our window of time was narrow, and we would need to be ready to take advantage of it.

“Do you have any suggestions?”

“Sharp tools. Heavy tools. Things that might prove uncomfortable to carry, but will be necessary all the same. Tell me, do you know anything about guns?”

“Guns?” I was startled by the sudden note of pleasantness she applied to the word.

“Guns, yes. The kind that leave big holes wherever they’re aimed. They seem an efficient manner of testing our theory of bloodletting, and maybe—with a good shot—even our thoughts on beheading.”

“That’s….” I was flabbergasted. She spoke so casually.

And then her eyes narrowed, and her conversation turned dark again. “I don’t know what you think you’re up against, boy—maybe you have no idea, after all. But this is not the time for niceness. This is not the time for the rules of ordinary thinking.” She stopped on the street and faced me. I felt for the first time that she was reconsidering…something. Not the mission, but me.

She pulled me aside, off and up onto the nearest porch. It was the entrance to a barber’s shop.

“Have you given this any real thought? Have you considered what we might be facing tomorrow? Or tonight—for that matter, if they learn we’re here and what we intend. If Jack gets a gander at me, the jig is up and we’ll be forced to move, now or never. I know you haven’t seen…I know you don’t know what’s waiting for us. You have your imagination; but your imagination is fooling you. Until you set eyes on these things, you won’t be ready to kill them. And if you never believe another thing I ever tell you, believe this: we will have to kill them.”

I gave her monologue the pause it seemed to require, and then I spoke. “I’m ready to kill for Melissa.”

“Good. But you’re forgetting that these things were men once. And they could appear to us as men again. Would you kill a man for Melissa?”

“I’d kill an anything. I’d kill an angel, or the devil himself.”

She stared at me hard, still working something out in her mind. I didn’t know where the verdict would fall, and I didn’t know what it meant when she went on. “Keep that in your mind, then. Jacob wrestled with an angel, but we won’t have that luxury. By the time we resort to wrestling, the fight is nearly decided against us. Arm yourself, Leonard. Boys go into fights with their fists and their expectations. Men know better, and they bring lead.”

“Then we’ll fight like men!”

“And we’ll die like dogs. Use your head, Leonard. And please, do as I say. I want to protect you. I want to protect her. But I need your trust—above everything else. And if you can’t trust me, trust her. She’s tried to warn you, and you know her better than you know me.”

I was near to tears, but I bit them back and stood my ground. “I do trust you. And I trust her. But how are we supposed to fight this? What am I to do?”

“I’ve told you—arm yourself. Hunt for things with which to hunt, and meet me in a few hours, back at the Primrose.”

She left me then, and I was confused, and I was afraid. She frightened me, as she meant to. I wish she’d given a better try at inspiring me.

XII.

Eileen, Morning - July 10, 1881

He trusts us for opposite reasons. He trusts her because he knows her, and he trusts me because he knows me not at all. I can’t make him understand, but I can’t stop trying, either—even as I see that it pushes him away from me. He sees this as a simple thing: rescue the girl. He probably thinks they’re dangerous, yes, but dangerous like a pack of wolves.

I shouldn’t try so hard to enlighten him.

I do not fear frightening him out of his task; I don’t think a legion of devils could manage that. He is invincible, because he is right. And there’s no telling him otherwise.

Bless the boy, he doesn’t understand anything important about the way the world works.

***

And now I realize I am being condescending towards him because of his faith. I never thought I’d find myself doing anything of the kind, but there I am—almost mocking him for it. Heaven forgive me.

How far have I wandered away from faith then, that I act from a point of pragmatism alone? Where is the balance between trusting in God and not behaving like a suicidal fool?

Since I do not have an answer for myself, I have no business criticizing Leonard for the place where he’s drawn his line.

***

I’ve gone to the smith’s and I’ve gone to the general store. I’ve bought things. I’ll arm the boy. I’ll arm myself.

David had his sling. I have my Colt and a knife. It’s a big knife, called by slang after a dead Texan. The men who carry it joke that it’s long enough for a sword, sharp enough for a razor, wide enough for a paddle, and heavy enough for a hatchet.

I do believe they’re right. It’s almost as great a weight beneath my skirt as the gun is. Mine is a Sheffield Bowie, and it’s a mean-looking thing.

I’ve been practicing my aim with that gun. I’ve been teaching myself how to hold the gun straight and how to aim for the most vulnerable bits of a body. The silver bullets didn’t significantly harm him; I decided long ago to spare myself the expense. Ordinary lead is good enough for Jack. And I know where to aim. I know which parts to destroy. He will not intimidate me.

This time, he will not frighten me into rash actions or sudden mistakes.

XIII.

Melissa, July 10, 1881

Daniel will be along soon, so I must write quickly. I do not intend to return to this tent, or to this journal, or to this camp. Not willingly. Not alive. So I’ll leave a testament—just this last page, and I’ll take the rest with me.

Read that part and weep, you brutes.

You wanted a record, didn’t you Jack? Well I’ve written you one. It isn’t what you had in mind. But it is true, and it is mine. All you’ll ever see of it is this tiny epilogue.

I hope you choke on it.

XIV.

Leonard, Evening - July 10, 1881

Eileen and I parted company in the morning. She was vague about what she intended, and I’ve learned it’s useless to press her about her secrets. It reminds me of things I’d prefer to forget. It reminds me that, in some way I do not understand, she is one of them.

She believes that if she tries to explain herself to me that I might be afraid, or I might not trust her anymore. She might be right, but I don’t like being left in the dark.

So I’m trusting her now. And I wish she would trust me, too.

***

I saw Daniel Aarons first. He was walking with an arm around Melissa’s waist, and to see it made my throat clench. They were together with a minister, a stranger to me. As I watched and listened, I learned that he was a local man, a preacher who spoke at the clapboard structure with a graying steeple, down at the end of the street.

He was shaking his head, and telling Daniel that no, he would not join them tonight. He was folding his arms across his chest and saying, no. Not tomorrow night either. Nor would he encourage his flock to attend.

No.

I silently praised the man. Something was tipping, turning, and shifting. Whatever sway Daniel’s pack of beasts had held over the wilderness…whatever spell they cast, or whatever ruse they held up as a magician’s curtain—it was slipping.

These people, these towns, the ones farther and farther west—they were not the same as the southern and eastern towns, where hospitality was important and curiosity was lure enough. In these places, at the cusp of the desert, under the unblinking eye of the unforgiving sun, the population had learned a kind of toughness that did not leave them as vulnerable.

The pack in the desert—they want women and children. They want families because they want easy prey. I do not think they will find it here.

***

I stood on the corner, partially hidden by a horse that was tied outside a store. I examined the people who passed me by, and almost all of them were men. Almost all of them were sunburned and weathered-looking like meat that’s left to dry and salt in strips. Or like leather.

They all had guns. Long guns with barrels that hang down to their knees…. or short ones in holsters, hanging out and open for easy reach. This was a town filled with men who worked, and men who shot. (I do not know how to even hold a gun. I’ve never done it before, and I don’t think it will do me any good to start now. )

But I was standing, watching, and I began to imagine how I might lure Melissa away from Daniel. He was guarding her, but he was losing his patience, too. He wanted to argue with the man in the preacher’s coat. Even before, when I was with the camp, Daniel was not the sort of man who would have easily realized how counter his behavior ran to his goals.

Then he stopped, mid-sentence.

He turned away from the minister and looked around, up and down the street. I swear he lifted his face up. I swear he held his nose up just like a dog trying to catch the scent of something faint but familiar.

I knew, without knowing why, that he was looking for me.

I stepped out from behind the horse and made myself known before he could accuse me of hiding.

“Daniel?” I said, trying to infuse his name with an old fondness. I don’t know how well it worked. I could scarcely look at him. “Melissa?” I said, because it was easier to sound happy to see her, though it was harder to sound light when I said her name.

Her face froze. Her eyes were wild behind that mask, and there was elation there, too. She was controlling herself so much better than I was. She did better than Daniel, as well.

Once his surprise had passed, he frowned with open irritation before managing a more neutral niceness. “Leonard,” he said my name slowly. He said it like he was trying to remember it. “Such a coincidence to find you here.”

“Coincidence? I don’t believe in anything of the sort.” I steeled myself and approached them, resisting with every ounce of my rational self the impulse to grab Melissa and crush her in a protective embrace.

“Then what would you call it?”

“Careful planning. I heard that the camp was stopping here, and I wanted to come by. I’ve missed the meetings, and I’ve missed the fellowship.”

“There might not be any meetings at all,” he spit. “It appears that we’re not wanted here. Can you imagine a thing like that? A fine spirit of Christian fellowship we have found here.”

The minister shrugged and backed away. “Take it elsewhere,” he said. “It’s not needed here, or wanted.”

He turned on his heels and left us there, as another man approached.

This man identified himself as McKenzie—no first name offered—and he called himself the “law,” though he didn’t specify further. I saw no badge on his chest, but I got a fine view of the pistols hanging in the holster that slung around his hips.

His countenance inspired confidence and authority. I was glad to have him join us, even as I realized he assumed that I was one of them.

“You’ve been warned now. All of you, when you come to town. You’ve been asked to move along.”

“We won’t move along until we’ve had a chance to share—”

McKenzie cut him off. “You’ll move along before you get any of that nonsense underway. Save it for the next town, or save it for the mountains, if that’s where you’re going. But save it. And pack it up, and move it out of our city.”

“This is no city, and we’re not within it. And you’ve got no call to send us moving along.” Daniel’s eyes were flashing. They weren’t flashing in a poetic way, with emotion. They were shifting in their color. There was the brown he was born with, and it was flecked around the edges with something gold and unnatural.

If the lawman noticed the firestorm in Daniel’s face, it didn’t bother him any. “There are stories going around about you, and yours out there. I don’t like the sound of those stories, and I don’t want any new stories cropping up after you pass our humble settlement here. I want you gone before sundown.”

“You won’t have it. We’re not going anywhere until we’re heard this evening.”

“You hold a meeting, and we’ll show up to shut it down.”

Melissa had been silent all this time, watching back and forth between them, and at me. But now she saw an opportunity, and she cleared her throat.

“Perhaps,” she said, “I might be able to speak with the authorities on our behalf.”

We all went quiet then, and Daniel’s face was changing color, going red with anger, or frustration, or something else.

“Would you permit that, Mr. McKenzie? Perhaps you’d let me take tea with you or the mayor. The town has a mayor, doesn’t it? Don’t all of them? I think I could explain things more gently, and you might see the mission from our own point of view.”

McKenzie wasn’t stupid. He knew a plea when he heard it, even when it was delivered with so many meaningless words, hiding an impossible fear. He started to offer her his elbow as if to accept her proposal, and she kept talking.

“Leonard here—this is my old friend Leonard. He was once with our camp, and then he left us after Daniel’s father died. I’m sure that Leonard would be able to help me outline our mission. And he’s not staying with us at the camp, so perhaps you’ll consider him a more impartial voice.”

McKenzie looked me up and down, trying to tell me something with those green-gray eyes of his. Whatever it was, I missed the bulk of it—but caught the general idea and responded as best I could. It was half a prayer to him, and half a vain attempt to project my thoughts.

You’re not one of them?

No longer.

All right. She comes with us.

Melissa turned to Daniel and gave him a wide, lingering smile that was full of venom and light. “You’ll excuse me,” she declared, and it was not a request for permission.

“You’ll—”

“You’ll excuse me. Leonard?” She put her hand on my arm and turned her smile to the lawman.

Together we three left him there. I did not realize until we reached the end of the block that I’d been holding my breath, unable to breathe until I felt he could no longer see me. Even McKenzie was wooden, for he too had prepared himself for some assault or resistance.

Melissa was silent again until the lawman stopped her, and I stopped too.

“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t like it. Am I to understand you’d like to leave that camp? Is that what this is for?”

“Yes sir,” she told him, and this was the first time I’d heard her speak yet when she wasn’t being monitored. “They’ve been keeping me there, and I cannot stay any longer. If you send me back, I’ll be mad, dead, or worse by nightfall.” The words were flat and perfectly formed, like they’d been cut out of a newspaper and laid out in a row.

“I don’t know what’s going on out there, but no group of men who talk about God and ask for women can be up to any good. Any woman who wants free of it has my support. Now what can I do for you? Where can I put you up, that you’ll be out of their reach?”

She faltered then. She considered his question and I thought she was going to weep, but she did not. “Underground. There’s nowhere else they can’t find me. And I want you to know, they will find me. They’ll come for me.”

He thought about this. “Oh, they might come for you, but they can’t have you. You’re not wife or daughter to any one of them, are you?”

“No sir.”

“Then they’ve got no claim on you.”

She took a deep breath, and sighed another smile at him. “That will never stop them.”

***

I did not care how it looked. I took her back to my room at the Primrose. She moved like a doll, unwilling to bend or step without being commanded to do so. I sat down beside her on the bed and tried to draw some speech out of her, but it was a losing battle.

She was full of things she wanted to say, and full of things that she thought she shouldn’t say. She was filled to the brim, compressed like a steaming kettle. But nothing came out. Not even tears.

I think it might have made me feel better if she’d cry, or laugh. If she laughed hysterically and without ceasing, then I’d know she’s mad and then I’d have an answer.

But this doll, this pretty woman who overflowed with grief, she sat still and drew short, quick breaths.

When she did speak it startled me so badly that I jumped, there beside her.

“Leonard,” she said my name and it made my heart swell. “My God, Leonard. I think I’ve killed us all.”

***

Now evening will soon be upon us. Eileen has returned, carrying more than her own weight, I suspect. All is curiously calm. We are all waiting for something. The three of us here, holed up in the room. The shop owners who closed up early. The gaunt, gray-haired lawman who paces slowly up and down the sidewalks though no one else is in sight.

I am at the edge of some precipice here, but I can’t see it, and I have no idea how far I’m bound to fall.

XV.

Eileen, Evening - July 10, 1881

We only have until tonight, if we have even that long. The winds are changing in this little strip of wood and weeds. Dust blows in the streets, now that the streets are dry. Horses whinny and strain at their tethers, and the tame mongrel dogs that live on scraps keep themselves low to the ground. They hide beneath porches and behind stables, and outhouses. They know the night is up to no good. They can smell the things that are coming.

The pretense is almost up.

There was a fit and a fight, almost this afternoon. The sheriff, or mayor—or whatever weird authority holds sway in places like Mescalero—he told Daniel that there would be no nighttime meeting out by the creek. He told them that no one was coming, and that there would be no prayers or hymns.

What a bold old fellow!

He’s tall and lean, and probably as old as I am, though he shows his age where I do not. All his hair is gray, from his eyebrows to the curly tufts on the back of his hands. I have not spoken with him yet, but I’ve seen him pacing back and forth along the main street, under this window. Oh, he knows there is peril in the air tonight. He can smell it as well as I can.

***

The point remains, he sent them away. Leonard witnessed the exchange when he went to find his dear Melissa. And he found her, too. He brought her back to the hotel like a damn fool.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw, when first I laid eyes upon her.

She’s a perfectly pretty and soulless little thing who has been stretched beyond the limits of her endurance. There’s hardness around her eyes and a flinty set to her face. Her body is rigid when it moves, all tension and preparation. She lives as a woman braced for pain, moved by invisible strings.

There’s intelligence there, too. There’s a plot in her eyes, and hope that’s been soured by agony.

She hardly speaks, even when I am gentle, and even when I am firm. Melissa shares what she thinks might help, and she holds the rest back. I can guess the things she doesn’t wish to say, and I think Leonard can too—though he’s happy to pretend otherwise. Let him. She’s right, and he wouldn’t know what to do with the information if she gave it to him.

At this point, it means far less to her than it would to him. Good girl. Keep it down. Lock it up and put it away. He’s burdened enough as it is.

God willing, there will be time for her to pour her sorrows into some other vessel someday. But now, it is her duty to hold herself together. When Leonard had gone from us for a few minutes, I sat beside her and whispered.

“Use it,” I said.

She looked up at me with those beautiful eyes of hers, so full of hatred and anger, and she nodded.

“Use it, hold it. Wield it like a weapon when the time comes. If your rage is the hardest thing inside you, pull it out. Hold it up. Make it a shield. If it’s the deepest well of violence from which you can draw, then lift up the lid and drink your fill. You’ll need it, tonight. You’ll need every ounce.”

She nodded again. Yes. Good girl.

Keep it down. Lock it up. Put it away. And when you’re called upon, pull it out from behind your back and use it to strike.

XVI.

Eileen, July 11, 1881

We didn’t have time to go to them, but it didn’t matter. They would come to us, as soon as the sun was down and they were stronger for its absence. We all knew it. We felt it in our very bones, we felt it moving beneath our skin, the dreadful pull of circumstance. The creeping alarm of certainty.

When I looked out the window, I saw the lawman alone, ambling back and forth in his black boots with the pointed toes. Here and there I saw other men too, closing doors and dimming lamps.

They’re all going to die, I thought.

Everyone I see. Every soul who lingers in this stretch of desert. Everyone who lives here, or who has nowhere else to go. Everyone who works late, or who lingers at the pub after a double-shot too many.

Leonard, who had been sitting quietly—holding Melissa’s hand—saw me staring outside under the shade. “Is McKenzie still out there?”

“Is that his name? Yes, he’s there. Pacing about.”

“Good. I like him.”

“I like him too,” I agreed, though I’d never actually met him. “It makes me think I should do something for him.”

“Like what? Warn him?”

“Something like that.”

“We ought to run,” Melissa said. It was her first sentence in an hour, and she didn’t sound like she meant it very much.

“To where?” I asked. “Into the desert? Into the mountains? Where do you think we can run, that they won’t follow? Better to meet them here, before they have time to grow their ranks any further. If we’re ever going to have a chance against them, it’s now—when they don’t expect to be met with any real resistance.”

If she agreed or disagreed, she didn’t say.

“It’s going to be a massacre,” I said. “We have to do something before it gets any darker. We have to…evacuate them. All of them. The whole town.”

“How would you recommend we do that?” Leonard asked.

I didn’t answer him. I was thinking. I was staring out the window at the only town official I’d ever heard of in Mescalero. “Wait for me,” I said.

“What?”

“Just wait for me.”

I left them there in the room with all the blades I’d been able to get my hands on that day. I had two scythes, a plow blade half as big as I am, and a pair of navaja clasp knives I’d found at the general store. The woman behind the counter made big eyes at me, but didn’t ask what I planned to do.

I took the stairs two at a time and pushed the front door open. McKenzie stopped his pacing when heard me. I ran up to him. He put his hands on either side of his waist.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

“I doubt it. But I hope that I can help you. You’re expecting trouble tonight, and you’re right about it.”

“It’s that damned camp meeting, if you’ll pardon my language. Those men I’ve seen here, they’re…I don’t like it. Have you seen that poor woman they drag around with them? She left with some young fellow today, I hope he’s—”

“He’s a fine lad. Name’s Leonard. He came here with me, with the specific intent of rescuing her. I wish I had more time to explain,” I said, as I found myself speaking so quickly I feared he might dismiss me for a maniac. “But she’s been a prisoner for months now. We came to reclaim her, but sir, I must warn you—it will come at a cost and I don’t know if any of us will survive this night. That’s why I must beg your help. The whole town is in danger, and it’s because of us—it’s because of this girl, who they’ll never allow to leave them.”

“Ma’am—”

“Sir, please. If there were any safe and hasty way to evacuate this place, what might it be, and would you help me?”

He took a deep breath, removed his hat, and scratched at his head. He looked over my shoulder, then back over his—glancing up and down the street and seeing no one at all but the pair of us.

“I was thinking about starting a fire, myself.”

I took a step back and stared at him.

“Unless you’ve got a better idea, that is?”

“I—I haven’t. Wait, I beg your pardon?”

It was then that he reached into his jacket and pulled out a badge. “Ma’am, I’ve been following these folks since Snyder, Texas. I don’t know what they’re up to exactly, but I’m getting some mighty strange ideas. There’s going to be trouble tonight, and I don’t think there’s a soul in this sad little strip that needs to be caught in the middle of it.”

“This isn’t Texas.”

“They killed people in Texas.”

We stared back and forth at each other for a minute. He sized me up like a man about to buy a horse. I don’t know what he saw. I don’t know what he guessed. “What are we going to do now?” I asked.

“They’re coming, aren’t they? When it gets dark out?”

“If not sooner.”

“There’s a stash of gunpowder back in the basement of the general store. Let’s start with the saloon. There’s enough alcohol in there to send the place back to Jesus. By the time it gets caught and burning good, the few folks left here will come running out to see or help—but it’ll spread before anyone can do anything. I figure this place’ll go up like a tinderbox. Except, you know…” He inclined his head to indicate the last stop before the town ended and the wilderness resumed—the one building set apart from the rest.

“Except the church.”

“You go on up inside and get your friends. Get them to the church. It’s a little thing, but it’s sturdy enough. It’ll be better than leaving them in that matchstick hotel you’re hiding in now.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Hurry,” he called behind me.

I ran back up inside with a new sense of purpose. I felt invigorated, I felt hopeful—honestly hopeful—for the first time in days. I was afraid, yes. I was terrified for the lot of them, and for us. But there was someone else here too. Someone else knew the score and was fighting with us, instead of against us.

I pushed the door open and Leonard and Melissa were sitting exactly as I’d left them.

“McKenzie is a Texas Ranger,” I blurted at them. “He’s been following the meetings. He knows—well, he doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough to be a good help to us. Get your things together. Arm yourselves. Get a blade, get something you can carry and use. We’re leaving.”

Leonard rose quickly, pulling Melissa to her feet behind him. “Where are we going?”

“To church,” I answered. “Quickly now. Move.”

***

Church was a tidy, square building with a steeple that leaned slightly to the right if you stood on the front steps and squinted. By the time we reached the doubled front doors, the sun was nothing more than a gold-pink line on the horizon—and blackness crept up from the other side of the sky.

The doors were locked. I pushed my shoulder against them and lunged, and they caved inward.

Melissa’s eyes widened. I didn’t understand why until I looked at the doors as I pushed them shut behind us. They were thick and oak. They’d been braced with a fat peg lock that shouldn’t have broken beneath a woman’s shoulder.

***

I lead them inside, into the blue-gray interior lined with plain pews. Leonard gazed up and around, holding Melissa’s hand. I felt a stab of fear for him there, standing with a large reaper’s knife in one hand and Melissa in the other. He held the knife like a child holding a kitten up by one foot—like he had no idea what to do with it.

Outside I heard a slight commotion, something moving down at the end of the street. I recognized the ranger’s steps, and by the sounds of things he was still alone.

I closed the door anyway. He’d knock. I’d know.

“You broke the—” Leonard began to say.

“We’re going to start moving things around. Making barricades.” The church was lined with long, slim windows that were wide enough to let a body in, but not much ider. They were four to a side, except for the front and ack behind the pulpit—where there was only one indow and it was square, with an inlay of the cross done in colored glass.

“The pews,” Melissa said, letting go of Leonard’s hand.

“Good,” I told her. “Leonard, help her. Prop them up, yes. You start on that side, I’ll start this side.”

I wrapped one arm underneath the nearest bench and lifted it, pried it up and leaned it forward against the window. A corner went through the glass, breaking it, but it wasn’t enough. I pushed harder, lodging the pew in the frame and leaning on it until it stuck. Behind me, I could hear my companions following my example.

One by one we plugged the windows. The glass broke, the wood splintered, and the floors creaked beneath us. The night was a symphony of small destructions.

Beyond the walls of the church, a new glow swelled and warmed the edge of the desert. I smelled the metal-tasting sting of gunpowder and smoke before Leonard raised his voice to announce, “There’s a fire!”

“There’d better be,” I said.

And as if to assure us that yes, here it comes—a bright pop sounded and was followed by the pattering rain of splinters, glass, and kindling dropping from the sky.

“Fire! Fire!” McKenzie was shouting. “Fire, and it’s spreading! Everybody out! Everybody move, everybody get out!”

There was a faint sizzling beneath the commotion. I heard it crawling in a line, along the street. It made me think of a fuse, and when I cracked the front door, a lean trail of powder was sparking, sprinting along the streets, and up the steps, and around the porches and beside the walls of the tinderbox town.

At the other end of the street, the saloon was ablaze and men were emerging to address the situation, but they were confused and disorganized.

“Water!” someone demanded.

“Forget it!” McKenzie ordered. “Run. Grab what you can and make for Tularosa. This place is going up, and there’s not enough water for a hundred miles to stop it!”

From out of the inn I saw the desk man and his wife stumble. The wife was screaming, the desk man was swearing. The first tongues of flame were brushing up against the foundation of their quarters.

The ranger held aloft a big gun, a rifle with a barrel half as long as a broomstick. He fired it into the air and the percussion was as hard and heavy as a brick wall.

“Evacuate!” he bellowed. His shape was all angles and black pitch, framed against the orange and white of the growing blaze behind him. I could not discern his face, but I knew he was looking at me, at the church. He dipped his head, a gesture I could only see by the shifting of his hat’s shadow.

He was coming.

I checked over my shoulder and saw that our job was more than half finished. I pushed my thigh against the door and dashed to the front of the church. The square window behind the pulpit was still uncovered.

Its cross was yellow, I realized when I came close enough to see it clearly. Behind it the moon was in motion.

I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and crossed myself.

The front door opened and McKenzie entered, taking off his hat and throwing it into a corner.

“Sir,” Leonard began.

“Save it, son. We’ve got problems barreling our way. I’ve got a rifle, two revolvers, and enough shot to hold myself for a while.”

“I’ve got a Colt,” I added. “And bullets.” I ducked down for the spot where I’d stashed the weapon.

Leonard steeled himself, as if seeing a woman reaching for her knickers was a tremendous burden that Christ was asking him to bear. “Do you think the fire will reach the church?” he asked, trying to change the subject or give himself something else to think about.

“I hope not,” McKenzie drawled. “Unless it crosses the street, we should be all right. I didn’t put down any powder that way, so let’s just say our prayers and settle in. They’ll be out before long, won’t they, ma’am?”

He directed the question at me, so I responded. “Any time now. Is the town cleared out?”

“As cleared out as it’s gonna get. They don’t want those fellows anyway, do they?” He peered meaningfully at Melissa, who shook her head. “Well, we’ve got to catch them sometime. Now’s as good a time as any.”

“It’s going to have to be,” I breathed, because even while he was still speaking, I heard a shocking, sharp howl.

The girl heard it too. As the canine tone whistled through the air, over the crackling of the burning town, she twitched a delicate shudder. She fought it back, and down. She had resigned herself to something. But I had not. I’d not resigned myself, or any of them, to anything. The night was just getting started. We were all together, and unharmed, and prepared.

A second howl joined the tail end of the first.

A third chimed, harmonizing and clashing with the same threatening vowels, the same blood-curdling chorus.

Leonard was going pale. I wanted to urge him to sit down, but I didn’t. No one was going to sit down, not yet.

One of the remaining pews was lying on its back. I went over to it and stepped on it, as hard as I could. It splintered and split. I grabbed the back plank and carried it to the door, where McKenzie helped me jam it onto the supports—replacing and reinforcing the bolt I’d broken to let us inside.

“Will this hold them?” he asked.

Melissa said, “Not for very long. Kill Jack, though. The rest will leave.”

“Do you think?” I asked.

“They fight one another all the time. They’ll scatter without him.”

I couldn’t decide if I found that thought reassuring or not.

The window behind the pulpit—it was still uncovered. I was reluctant to disturb it; the cross there comforted me, even as I knew it was a weakness in our fortress. I hesitated, but Melissa did not.

Made bold, or simply inspired, she walked to the pulpit and pushed it with all her might. It rocked, and she pushed it again. The heavy old thing teetered and fell backwards, flat through and against the cross, pushing it out into the dirt, in pieces.

I did not realize until she’d plugged that gap how much light the window had provided. We didn’t dare light a lantern, not with the gunpowder and not with our own selves now nearly trapped inside. But with the last window broken and covered, the shadows within went jagged.

We looked at each other with a new wariness, a new resolve. Our faces were more hidden than revealed, and our movements were harder to track, but we were our own pack now.

A new dog-shout barked and whined, and another picked up the call.

I was counting. Trying to sort them out. How many? Two. One, two, three more. Four. Five. Seven altogether? More?

My heart was pounding, and it was not all from fear. I wouldn’t have admitted it to any of my company, but I was excited, too. I’d seen the moon before it’d been obscured. I heard the pack hounds calling outside, and the monster inside my own breast was aching to answer.

But no, not yet.

Not a call and response. They knew where we were, or if they did not, they’d find us soon. They could smell us, as surely as I could smell the fire and powder and charred wood blowing through the cracks where the windows let the night air in.

I prayed for the town, and everyone who might be left in it. After all, only God could help them now. I prayed for this church, and for everyone in it. After all, only God could help us now.

But God had done this, hadn’t he? God had sent Leonard to Melissa. God had sent me to Leonard. And, when I was sure I could not save them alone, He’d sent McKenzie to me.

God had done His job. The rest was up to us.

***

Padding footsteps slapped heavily up to the wooden stairs, and climbed them—one foot, two feet. Three. Four. The wood of the porch groaned under the weight.

The ranger lifted his biggest gun and aimed it at the sound, even though the doors stood between us and it. Leonard lifted his scythe, and wrapped both hands around the handle. Melissa picked up the biggest, ugliest blade that remained—one of the navaja blades with a curved tip that was sharpened almost all the way around.

I checked the chambers in the Colt’s barrel, and they were all occupied.

“There,” Melissa whispered, and the word sounded fierce to me.

I pointed the gun where she indicated, and yes, I heard it there too—more feet. More rustling steps shuffling through the dirt. And the sniffing, snorting of a hound on the trail of its quarry.

“Everywhere,” I argued. My ears strained and heard too much, from too many directions. The fire in the background distorted the noise, but not so much that I couldn’t tell we were surrounded. Some were holding back. Two were coming in close. I could guess which two.

I knew the scent of the one, and Melissa’s black, angry eyes told me the other.

The two nearest monsters circled the church once and retreated to confer with the others. “They’re leaving?” Leonard asked nervously, crazily. He knew better. I don’t know why he bothered to say it.

“They’re discussing,” McKenzie replied. “They’ve found something they didn’t quite expect.”

“You can hear them?” I asked.

“Well enough. Not as well as you, I reckon.” He stared at me, and through me. Who was this man, who deduced the meat of things so quickly? What else had he seen, and what else had he encountered in his work as a ranger that the prospect of human wolves did not shake him?

“They didn’t count on you, did they, ma’am?”

“Eileen,” I offered. I didn’t think I’d ever told him my name. “But no, I don’t think they did. And they won’t be deterred by me. There’s one of them—Jack. We’ve fought before.”

“You must’ve won.”

“No. Why would you say that?”

“Because you’re still alive.”

I moved the Colt, using it to track the things I heard beyond the walls even as I carried on the conversation with the ranger. “The first time I lost. I lost everything, including my humanity. The second time, I lost an opportunity to end him. I’d hardly count myself among the fortunate or successful.”

“Eileen?” Leonard said.

“As if you didn’t know.” I was concentrating more on the night outside than the confusion in the church. “Why did you write me, if you didn’t? I killed your preacher, you knew that.”

Melissa gasped, a puff of surprised air.

I swiveled, and the ranger did too. We were aiming at nothing, at everything. Slowly, with fingers on triggers. Ready to aim for faces, for eyes, for throats. “He asked me to do it. He was one of them. One of us. He wanted out. You didn’t tell her. I don’t blame you.”

“I didn’t know, not…for certain.”

“Of course you did. I told you in the letter, and I’m reminding you now. I’m a danger to you all.”

“What are you?” Leonard asked, and for the first time I thought he really did want to know.

An expression like a smile, but not a smile, bloomed on Melissa’s face. “I know what she is.”

The ranger answered. “She’s like them.”

“No,” Melissa insisted. “She’s not. She’s what they wanted to make me. And that’s why they are afraid of her. They are afraid of you, aren’t they?”

I wished she’d stop asking questions. It was hard enough to hear their movements without the distraction.

“She’s the mother and goddess Jack wanted to make. Not a pack, but a hive. Not a wife, but a queen.” She was speaking faster and faster, her words tumbling close together. “And terrifying, because she is beyond their control, because she answers to none of them and she is stronger than all of them.”

Leonard moved to put an arm around her, but she pushed him away. “No, don’t. Stupid men. All of them, stupid men. But not so stupid as that. Not so stupid as to come in here, when we are not alone.”

“Melissa.” I threw it with as much authority as I could muster.

She turned to me and with that same killing face that wasn’t smiling, but showed all her teeth—she growled more cat than wolf. “Our Lady, full of grace.”

On the other side of her face there was a window with a pew’s raised end holding the moonlight out. But there was a crack, too—between the church and the night. And in that crack peered an eye the color of sunrise over smoke.

I fired.

Melissa squawked. The bullet grazed her ear but fully hit its mark and a screaming whine shrieked into the sanctuary, but the invading eye retreated.

And that was the end of our preparation, and our peace. The pack came fast, without patience and without any more caution. McKenzie shot again and again. When his rifle was dry he went to his hip holsters.

“Their faces!” I shouted. “Blind them, make them bleed. Take off their heads if you think you can do it in a shot or two.”

He heard me, I know he did. But he was too busy to respond. I didn’t hold it against him.

“Their hearts, their lungs, they heal too fast. Don’t waste any bullets that way!”

Leonard had another idea. He had it beside a window down front, where a hair-covered hand was pushing at the fragmented glass. The hand writhed and reached, groping and grasping for any flesh it could clutch.

“Leonard!” I shouted.

He lifted his blade and brought it down in a heaving, hacking motion. The edge didn’t sever the hand but it lodged itself deeply and when the hand tried to retreat, it was barred by the steel. It beat itself against the frame and the pew while howling, spraying blood.

Melissa brought her knife to the scene and attacked the pinned hand savagely, until the last of the holding bones broke and the skin tore and the appendage flopped, twitching, to the floor.

The sound outside was unbearable to me.

It was awfulness in my ears, and it was calling me in a most hideous way. I didn’t know if they knew it or not, or if they even meant it—but they were calling me, or calling to the thing inside me; and the thing inside was begging to answer.

“No,” I told it. “No,” I said as I watched the blood-smeared hand spasm and disappear beneath a pew.

Teeth and a muzzle too high to belong to a dog slathered and stuffed themselves through a window’s wreckage and I fired. The teeth shattered, and saliva mixed with urpley-black slime spurted across what was left of the glass. A piece of something’s leathery nose slipped stickily down the pane.

They were all around us. Above us, even. Up the side of the porch, onto the tower with the ratty steeple, and with a clang of a bell—clapped by a foot—one was above us and stomping with leaden feet upon the shingles.

McKenzie was reloading. I had two shots left before I needed to do the same.

I held the gun above my head and tracked the thing with my ears. Even if I didn’t hit anything vital, the force of the bullet might send the beast back to the ground.

Two cracks sent dust fluttering down onto my head, along with a rain of splinters. An angry but undeterred yowl answered, and was triumphant. McKenzie’s rifle echoed my own gunfire, and then the thing yelped and fell.

On the way down it jammed a knee or an elbow into the roof, and the night spilled in from there, too. I stood beneath it, in the spot where the moon looked down and encouraged me—the moon was calling too, ally and ene- y both. I couldn’t fight it, I couldn’t move. I could only stand there and feel my bones struggling beneath my skin, itching and aching to rearrange themselves into a more fitting shape.

I could only keep it down for so long. I could only hold it at arm’s length for…for not long enough. They were coming for me, the moon and the dogs outside, and the force of nature that reared up from the pit of my stomach—from the base of my neck, and from the depths of my lungs.

Out, then. Let it out.

I dropped the Colt. I couldn’t hold it anymore, my hands would not accommodate it. They were coming out. Everything was coming out.

And the things outside were coming in.

Leonard and Melissa were back to back, in a corner by the window fighting with their feet and with their flickering, flashing blades that I’d all but stolen from a farmer’s store. Better than nothing. Not as good as me.

McKenzie was hurt. I smelled the blood reeking from his body before I saw the injury, and the injury was not so bad that it stopped him from shooting. I reached for my Bowie knife, but it was gone, it was on the floor. My body was stretching and outgrowing these weapons, made for human hands, to strap against human thighs. I bent down to pick it up and it felt like a toy to me.

The front door was losing its battle to remain closed. The pew-back buttress was failing, and an arm, a shoulder, a neck and a face were pushing, forcing, shoving inside. McKenzie’s aim was slipping as he continued to bleed, and his next two shots only struck the thing’s forearm.

But I had my toy. I had my tiny little knife, wide enough for a paddle, heavy enough for a hatchet. I threw it with all my might and it disappeared into the creature’s throat.

The beast froze with astonishment or pain. The knife handle jutted out like a knob on a door.

The Texas ranger redeemed himself with a bullet to the thing’s forehead, and it fell backwards, if not dead, then at least out of the way. But it was replaced immediately by another creature, and Melissa was screaming with rage—screaming battle screams, an Amazon warrior woman covered in blood, some of it her own.

Leonard was—I didn’t see Leonard.

Everything looked different, the color (what little there was) drained and the shape of my eyes, it contracted and opened again and the dog’s eyes were all I had.

I lunged at the door and I reached for whatever thing was behind it, and I pulled Jack’s disgusting face up into my own.

All around me the world was in flames, and heaven had left us altogether. McKenzie was still shooting, though he must be nearly out of ammunition. It didn’t matter. McKenzie would go on shooting even after he was dead, probably, and Melissa was swearing and grunting, but none of it sounded like pain—it sounded like the anger still, muted with contempt, and she had more of it stored inside. We’d run out of bullets long before she’d run out of anger.

Jack jerked his body backwards and I was hanging on tight, and I would not let go. He wanted to draw me out, to pull me onto his territory and wrestle me there, but I did not intend to leave the church. I caught us both with one hand on the porch pillar. It broke with our weight, but it slowed our retreat, and there he was—his body rigid and taut beneath mine, stinking of sweat and blood and…yes. And fear.

“No more,” I told him, and my jaw was distorted beyond human speech, but he understood and was afraid.

He grabbed for my throat, and he got a good grip there—a grip filled with puncturing claws, and itching with the wire-rough hair he worked into the wounds with his fingertips.

But I had my teeth in his throat. I bit, and a gushing torrent of salt and bile and green-copper flavor gushed into my mouth. I swallowed, and my jaw was almost unhinged with the grip of my bite. I cranked my mouth shut, jamming my teeth deeper into his flesh. My tongue brushed against something smooth and bumpy, and he wheezed hot air across it—I gnawed harder, with every drop of strength I had.

He was not taking this quietly, no. He was kicking at me—jerking his feet against my chest and my abdomen, trying to tear at the skin he found there. I felt something rip, and the pain was shocking and bright, but I had my mouth on his throat, almost through his throat, and I was not going to let go.

The harder I held, the weaker he grew.

My teeth met, somewhere beneath his chin, under his skull. The tips of my teeth found one another and I grasped, wrenched, slashed the muscles and tendons and bits of bone I found in my mouth.

I gagged on him, but still I pulled. The tatters of his neck split loose, dangling from my chin. I flung them away and dove down again, and again. Into that soft, wriggling tissue that shuddered when it was bitten.

And then there was nothing but bone.

I sat up, pulled myself up and together, and I yelled at the sky. When I looked back down at the pulpy thing beneath me, its face was slack and the metallic eyes were dark.

***

The noise behind me was crackling still. Mescalero was burning into an amazing, ashy skeletal thing, and there was running. There was retreat, and flight, and Jack was beneath me, his heart still and his throat gone—gone down to the bones that held his head upright.

I rose, and I staggered.

McKenzie was standing with his rifle hanging down at his side. One arm was ruined. One ear was gone. Even as he fell to the ground, too weak to stand any longer and maybe dying—maybe changing—his attention was locked on Melissa, who was still hacking, hacking, at a body that looked, at a glance, like the corpse of a deformed coyote. She’d taken it to bits.

She’d taken him to bits. I could see the parts that made him a man strewn across the floor, splattered near the altar.

Leonard, though.

He was down, draped and limp, outstretched along the floor in what was left of the aisle. His stomach was gone, his intestines stretched and curling, hanging from the ends of the nearest standing pew. His mouth was open, and he was gasping quietly, fishlike, gasping while his tattered chest fought to pull in air and while his heart…his heart pumped poison to all the parts of him that remained.

“Oh Leonard, no.”

But even as I watched, yes. He was coming together. He was mending.

“No.” The sound bubbled up out of his mouth. The word came out covered in spit and blood. He rocked his head back and forth. No. No. No.

I felt helpless. I felt small. My hands were working themselves back into something like hands, less like claws—and there was this poor, dear boy, dying and not dying. Changing. No. Not Leonard. Not him, too.

Melissa saw.

She stood, abandoning the remains of the thing that I guess was once Daniel, and she held up that big Spanish knife I’d given her. It slipped in her grip. She was soaked in blood, drenched in it.

***

I looked away. I looked for McKenzie, but he was gone. A spot of blood and wet dirt marked the spot where he’d fallen—but not stayed.

***

Melissa climbed past the broken pews. She stared down at him, and if the blood hadn’t obscured her face so thoroughly, I might have known more of what she was thinking when she said to him, before she brought the knife down on his throat and carved out the last of his life,

“Thank you.”

Table of Contents

Copyright

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One: The Wreck of the Mary Byrd

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part Two: Halfway to Holiness

I

II

III

IV

Part Three: Our Lady of the Wasteland and the Hallelujah Chorus

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI