OSTENTATION OF PEACOCKS
(A STORY IN THE WORLD OF THE SHADOW)
by Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen
Even in the unforgiving badlands of Durango, there are fairy tales. The stories say that fairies grant wishes and steal frachetty babies nobody wants anyway and lure young, stupid girls into golden chains, where they’ll dance for seven years in a magical land of toadstools. But the stories are a bunch of goddamn lies. Fairies are many things: pretty, powerful, dark, dangerous, and foppish as peacocks. But what they mainly are is assholes. If there’s an outlaw who just won’t die, odds are it’s a werewolf or a fairy.
Of course, there are plenty of things in Durango that refuse to die.
Just now, there’s a carrion bird soaring over battered red rocks, and it fits that description. Big, ugly as hell, and with a twisted scar where its left eye used to be, it surveys the darkening sky and blazing orange boulders and notices something out of place, something so wrong that it falters in flight.
Down below, a naked man runs across the desert, pursued by four men on horseback.
The bird’s belly quivers and flails, and even though it’s not sure why, it changes course to follow the riders. The sun is arcing down to melt into the baked earth, and the naked man falls and scrabbles and runs again as the horses gallop closer. The bird reckons the man would make good eating if he didn’t exude such a sense of wrongness. And if the men in pursuit didn’t just reek of magic.
So the bird follows. It’s not like a giant bird has anywhere else to be, really. The evening sky is purple and puddled with fluffy lavender clouds when the man finally stops and falls to hands and knees. With a disturbing sort of wriggle, he transforms into a possum and scrambles up into the highest branches of a dead tree in a little copse along a dribble of a creek. The posse rides up to stare at the possum, and one man throws a golden noose over the sturdiest branch and laughs like a bastard. The gold of the noose seems to leach into the tree, and the trunk shoots straight up like corn after a rain, sprouting branches and fat, bright leaves. The golden light ripples out through its roots, hops to the other scraggly trees and brush until the whole place is lit up live and green, cool as a sigh in the night.
The bird lands in a quiet place on the ground under the shivering trees, far enough away that the four men won’t notice. They, after all, are too busy hollering at a terrified possum. That they chased up a tree. That they intend to hang it from.
The bird flaps around like an idjit before making a strange coughing sound, as if a hand reached down its throat and pulled it inside out, and then a naked girl is standing there, lean and long-limbed and dusty with disuse, her frizzy black hair off-kilter and overgrown from its close, boyish clipping. Her name was once Nettie Lonesome, and the look in her remaining eye suggests she’s forgotten she’s human, because that’s pretty much what she set out to do. But she’s not really human, anyway. Like the possum, she’s a shape-shifter, what most folks would call a monster. The four men on the other side of the now-burbling creek, however, are something different.
Wild and wide as it is, Durango is chock-full of such creatures—shifters and harpies and sirens and chupacabras. Normal folk don’t even see ’em, not until they’ve killed one by shooting it—or stabbing, the magic ain’t picky—in the heart. Then their eyes are opened to a whole new world of monsters, some good and some bad, just like men. They might find out their local grocer is a dwarf with glittering stone eyes, say, or that the whores at the saloon have fangs and drain a man in a different sort of way than he remembers the next morning. These four fellers are something new, though, something dangerous she hasn’t seen before.
Then again, there’s some as would consider her dangerous. She’s not only a shifter, but the Shadow, a legendary critter among the local tribes who’s dedicated to delivering justice to the much abused. The Shadow is hard to kill, and other magical things can’t tell that she’s got magic too. They just assume she’s a dumb ol’ human, which puts her at a big advantage. The Shadow’s destiny is an ornery thing that leads Nettie around to kill what needs to die, even when she’s got much better things to do. Like now, for instance.
But first, she’s got to figure out what these fellers are up to. Now, men normally build a fire by sending the most squirrelly tenderfoot to gather dry twigs and hopefully some brittle branches and maybe a stump or two. But these men are pulling chairs out of nowhere, because chasing a naked man across the desert just ain’t peculiar enough for the likes of them.
The first man reaches into nothing and pulls out a stool, looks to be made by hand and smoothed with years of use. He plunks it down in the dirt and sits, legs spread, hands on his knees like he’s bellying up to an invisible bar. He’s a rough feller in cowpoke duds with the face of the town tomcat, but still there’s a dandified air in the way he’s tied his cravat. Something about him is familiar, and Nettie wonders if she’s seen him on a Wanted poster. As he’s the one who tossed the noose and made the forest spring up in a desert, Nettie takes him for the leader.
The second man probes the air with white-gloved hands, doctor hands. He withdraws a raspberry-colored drawing room chair, plush and high-backed with an embroidered pillow. When he sits, he flips out his coattails, just so, and adjusts his little doctor glasses over his little doctor nose. His hair is parted, looks still wet from the comb, and he crosses one neat leg over the other.
The third man has the looks of a trapper as pieced together for a stage play; he’s too clean and whole to be the real deal. The chair he pulls out of nowhere is made of antlers all stuck together, with a glossy bearskin tossed overtop. He’s the only one with a beard, and it’s a thick, wavy thing that weaves into his long hair, black as his eyes. His clothes are layers of worn doeskin and homespun, and his grin flashes like a wolf’s bite in moonlight.
The fourth and final man is the squirrelly one who should be collecting firewood. He’s still got the raw cheeks and bones of boyhood about him, like his elbows and knees haven’t quite figured out where to settle down. His hair is just this side of red, and the chair he pulls out of thin air is a kitchen chair carved of shining wood. He slaps it down to complete the circle and slumps to his elbows to stare at the empty space where there should be a fire, were they men who made any sense.
But they’re not men. As they take off their hats, they reveal long, pointed ears that poke straight up through their glossy hair.
“Go on, then, Tom,” the third man mutters.
The young one leans forward, digging his hands into the dirt and pulling up flames with his bare fingers. There’s a great flash in the falling night, and he sits back, dusting his hands off, a bonfire crackles merrily as if he’d been carefully building it for an hour. There’s even a shiny coffeepot perking at the edge of the flames. Nettie has seen ghost fire before, but this ain’t it. She can feel the heat against her chest from where she hides in the bushes.
She looks down and sneers. Her chest is still there, poking out just enough to tell the world she’s not the man she wishes she was. When she travels as a human and as a man, she carries a muslin cloth to bind up her bitty bosoms and hide her secret. She looks enough like a lanky boy to play the part. But here, out in the middle of nowhere, freshly out of her feathers, she’s naked and shy. As soon as the men start arguing over what to do with their prey, she sneaks around toward their horses to borrow some clothes from their packs. Seeing as how they can pull any damn thing out of thin air, they shouldn’t mind the loss of a shirt for as long as it takes her to figure out who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy and kill what needs killing.
Nettie Lonesome, you see, is also a Durango Ranger, charged with keeping the good people of Durango Territory safe from the monsters that lurk in plain sight. So not only does the Shadow need to know why the possum’s headed for a noose, but the Durango Ranger is charged with protecting the innocent. It’s a heavy burden, sure enough, and she’d rather be anywhere else but here. She hasn’t seen her Ranger captain or crew in weeks, maybe months, but she can still feel the weight of her badge, pushing her to doing what’s right.
The men are muddying up the night with their arguing as the possum clings to the highest branch of the tree, and Nettie feels a rush of comfort when she smells their horses. She misses her friends, but she misses horses, too. As she quietly approaches, giving them time to smell her in return, she feels her stomach somersaulting and knows that, like their riders, these horses are not what they seem. Two of ’em are unicorns, brushed whiter than most and with their horns, tails, and balls intact. One horse, a dapple gray with a mean eye, has wings folded down by her sides like a goose, dirty and rustling. The last mount looks like a horse, an eagle, and a lion spent a confusing night at a whorehouse, but it’s watching her like it can see through to her hateful heart. All the beasts are kitted up in fancy gear, dripping with ribbons and gold chains. Nettie didn’t much fancy any of their riders before now, but her feelings firmly point to nope. She has no love for a feller who can’t let his horse rest without a saddle, now and again.
Of the four critters, she’s most familiar with unicorns, having broken a few to ride in her days as a simple cowpoke. Feeling exposed as hell and raw as a chunk of meat, she sidles up to the kindest-looking stallion, cool and showing no fear.
“Hey, feller,” she murmurs, voice rusty from disuse. “How ’bout I loosen that cinch for you? Might be nice to take a full breath, don’t you think?”
His great head swings around, almost snakelike, to regard her, a king surveying a potato. Now, Nettie has a way with horses and horselike creatures, and the moment she’s tugged on his cinch, the beast gives a heaving harrumph and nuzzles her briefly. When she slides a hand into his saddlebags, he sighs in a magnanimous-type way and pretends to ignore the trespass. Her clever fingers find the likeliest fold of fabric and pull it out, where it impossibly unfolds again and again until it’s a sweeping, full-body cloak that drags the ground. She digs around the saddlebag until she finds a golden rope much like the one destined for the possum’s scrawny little neck and uses it to tie the billowy fabric around her waist. It’s somehow both heavy and soft, like wearing a winter blanket made of spiderwebs, and it moves with Nettie’s every step.
“Time to meet a posse in my pajamas,” Nettie tells the unicorn, who nods as if he understands how goddamn preposterous this is.
As she approaches the fire, she tries to figure out what’s going on.
“I don’t care if he’s fair of face. He fired a gun at me.” The first man, the leader.
“Ah, but it was dry. He didn’t actually shoot you. And you’re not allergic to iron anymore. And finally, if we’re discussing facts, you had previously asked to inspect the weapon in question. . . .” The second man, the doctor.
“And had removed all but the second bullet . . .” The third man, the trapper, while grinning.
“And then, when the gun didn’t fire, you took it back and shot him in the gut.” The fourth man, the one with the baby face, wincing as he says it. “Not that that’ll kill a shifter.”
“And shooting can’t hurt you either, after all,” adds the doc, adjusting his spectacles. “It would only tickle a little.”
The first man stands, and Nettie understands that he’s not the clever, kind, brave sort of leader. He’s the sort who leads by force and fear. The sort who drinks power, all sloppy, from someone else’s glass like it’s cheap whiskey.
“Just because bullets can’t kill me and iron ain’t a problem doesn’t mean I enjoy the sensation of being shot. I still say we string him up and cut out his heart. I’d like to put it in a bell jar.”
The doc rubs his stubbled cheeks. “How many hearts do you really need in bell jars? Isn’t your shelf nearly full? Let’s just take him back to Lincoln and let the humans sort out their petty little disputes. This is why they make their laws. And why we should keep to ours.”
“I don’t want to go back to Lincoln,” says the tenderfoot boy. “Let’s go back home. I get tired of playacting so much. My ears feel permanently crushed.”
“How poetic,” the trapper says, sneering.
“Well, he is young still, Rudebaugh,” murmurs the doc.
“I’m only a century younger than you!” the boy shouts, tossing up his hands in a cloud of glitter.
“We can’t go home, and we need to feed, so you’ll keep on playacting. I’d rather play at outlaws and feed on the humans’ fear than go back to the form we used to take, as wee sprites with sparkling wings who sup on milk and grant wishes.” The trapper dances his fingers through the air, leaving a trail of golden light and twinkling sparkles behind. As the others stare into space, looking wistful, he pulls a tin cup out of nowhere and pours himself a slug of coffee. “And we can’t have coffee back home, neither.”
“I still say we kill ’im.” The leader stands, knocks the cup to the ground, and walks to the tree. He flicks the golden noose with his hand, and they all watch it swing. Up on the branch, the possum hisses like it doesn’t cotton to the idea. “If I’m not having fun, why are we even here?”
“Because you’re on the outs with the Queen again, Bonney,” the doc says, all fussy.
“So let’s take back a fine new fur cape for her beautiful shoulders.”
The trapper claps his hands and crows. “Queen Mab in a possum cloak? Now that I’d pay to see.”
“Enough. Chasing that son of a bitch through town butt-naked was fun, but I’ve drunk my share of his fear, and I’m done playing around. Let’s do this.” The leader snaps his fingers, and the possum appears in his fist, dangling by the scruff of its neck. “Damn, you’re ugly.” He laughs, shaking it. In response, it shudders, sticks out its tongue, and plays dead. He drops it and gives it a nudge with his boot. “Skin him, Scurlock, so I can string him up for trying to shoot me.”
The doc purses his pretty mouth and waves a gloved hand, and the possum becomes a man, naked and unconscious in the dust. There’s nothing special about him to draw the eye—he’s just a feller like any other. Nettie had hoped maybe she’d recognize him, but she doesn’t, which makes it all the stranger that she does what she does, which is that she stands up behind the screen of brush, holds up her hands, pitches her voice low, and shouts, “Stop right there!”
The four men are instantly on their feet, but strangely, no guns are drawn.
“Who the hell are you?” mutters the trapper.
The men’s eyes shift and meet, and they swirl as smoothly as hot grease in a pan to form a ring around her.
“I’m Rhett Hennessy. I’m a Durango Ranger, and it sounds like you fellers are an unlawful posse. So what’s this man done to you? Is he a criminal?”
As if on cue, the man wakes up and hops to his feet, one filthy hand cupping his janglies.
“I didn’t do nothin’!” he pretty much yodels.
Nettie instantly realizes he’s dumb . . . as a possum . . . and wishes she’d never shed her bird skin, much less gone poking around in the unicorn’s saddlebag. Whatever it was about the situation that drew her to it was obviously a mistake. But she won’t feel right putting her Ranger badge back on one day if she walks away and leaves him to die, either.
“This man tried to shoot me,” the leader says, his voice just a little too cultured for the outlaw he’s pretending to be. “So we’re upholding justice.”
“That’s not justice,” Nettie says, her dander up. “That’s vigilanteism.”
The doc sniffs. “That’s not even a word.”
“Illegal, then. We got courts for that, and they don’t meet in the middle of nowhere.”
The leader’s eyes narrow. “Are you wearing my cloak?”
Now Nettie sniffs. “No. This is just . . . what I normally wear.”
He starts to turn red with rage before his mouth twitches with a smile. “Fine. Let’s say you’re right. What would you do to save this man? Would you . . . make a wager?”
“Oh, please. Not this again,” the doc wails.
“Yee-haw!” the trapper hollers, slapping his knee.
The young one just straightens up a little, like he wishes he could take notes.
“I’ll fight you for him,” Nettie offers. “If you’ll just lend me a gun.”
She knows that these fellers aren’t human, but she also knows that if she can hit the leader in the heart, he’s likely to die. Thanks to her own destiny as the Shadow, they can’t tell that she’s a monster. They think she’s human. As far as they know, she can’t even tell they’re doing magic. So if they hit her anywhere other than her heart, she’ll just heal up around the hole like the possum did and keep on kicking. The odds of winning, as far as she’s concerned, are pretty good. If the Shadow’s instincts brought her here, then the Shadow must have a good chance of seeing tomorrow.
Again, these fellers don’t know that.
“A gunfight. That sounds entertaining.” The leader looks to his men. “But that leaves my three friends here without their own chance for a bit of tomfoolery. Are you man enough for four challenges, winner takes the prize?”
Nettie chews the inside of her lip, considering. What choice does she have? Say no thank you kindly and mosey off into the night in this feller’s pajamas, leaving the possum to die? Even if she tried to mosey off, there’s little chance they’d let her. Folks who feel the need to string up varmints probably feel similarly about random folks who show up out of nowhere begging for gunfights. Leaving her only one choice, really.
“What kind of challenges?” she asks, one hand on her hip like it’s as simple as a game of cards.
“Oh, this and that,” the leader says easily. As if to seal the deal, he pulls a magnificent gold pistol from his holster and holds it to the man’s heart. The naked man freezes, eyes closed, and starts begging. “You’ve got until the count of three. One. Two.”
“Fine, goddamn it! But I get to name a challenge too.”
“Well then. So mote it be.”
The four men reappear in their chairs, at ease. A fifth chair has appeared, just a stump, really. Nettie wonders what a normal human would see, if it would be as confusing as being drunk, the way they’re waving their goddamn magic around.
“Have a seat, lad,” the leader says.
Much to her consternation, her body sits without asking her mind if it’s a good idea. At least she can breathe again, now that the pistol isn’t pressed to the possum feller’s heart. She can still see the indentation of the steel circle in his pasty pink skin. He’s in manacles now, gold ones, as if he’s been wearing them all along. He stares at the chain between his wrists, jaw open. Nettie grinds her teeth and reminds herself never to help a possum, ever again.
“What’s the first challenge?” she asks.
“Sharpshooting,” the leader says. “But I’ll warn you. You’ve heard of Billy the Kid?”
“Who the hell hasn’t?”
“Well.” He pulls out both guns and twirls them. “I am he.”
Nettie snorts. “Whoop-de-goddamn-do, boy. Line up the cans, and let’s go.”
But now she knows why he looks familiar, and now she knows she can’t outshoot him.
Two apples appear in the man’s hands. “Cans? Pshaw. These’ll do.” With a hand to the possum man’s chest, the leader shoves him backward until he’s pressed against the tree, the same one from which the golden noose still dangles. The possum man is shivering in fear, eyes white all around.
“Please, Billy,” he mutters, but Billy just shoves one of the apples in the possum-man’s mouth and puts the other one on top of his head.
“What’s the rules?” Nettie asks.
“First one to hit their apple wins. I’ll mark it off.”
As he paces away from the tree, Nettie stares at the possum man and considers. She knows for sure now that these four fellers are fae. She’s heard the Captain talk about the strange folks who hate being called fairies, powerful, tricksy creatures who have big magic and love to talk you to death with their pretty lies. But if they like tricking, she figures they can be tricked back.
Thing is, Billy didn’t say, “First to shoot an apple.” He said hit.
Nettie snatches the apple off the possum man’s head before Billy can turn around, tosses it on the ground, picks up a rock, and smashes it to bits. The men in the chairs burst out laughing, and Billy spins around, gun aimed for an apple that’s no longer there.
“First to hit an apple,” Nettie says with a shrug. “Your words, not mine.”
“I— You—!” Billy splutters, his eyes burning as glittery sparks leap from his body like lightning.
“The boy got you fair and square,” the doc observes.
Billy inhales sharply and turns, his shoulders hunching as he doubles over. The fire throws his shadow against the tree and over the possum man, and the darkness unfolds to show clawed hands digging furrows through the leaves, great black antlers bursting from his head like a crown to rake the sky. When he turns back, his shadows folds back in, and he’s just a man again, trying to smile in the same way that spoiled children do when pretending they’re sorry for throwing tantrums.
“One to you, then, boy. Doc, you’re next.” Billy throws himself back onto his stool, but it somehow sprouts arms and a back and is now wide enough for him to lounge in, looking like he’s one step away from bashing in Nettie’s head with the apple-smeared rock.
The doc wiggles tight gloves off his fingers, his lips turned down like he finds this whole thing distasteful. “The violin,” he says. And then there’s one in his long, elegant hands.
He holds it to his chin and draws the bow over the strings, coaxing out a note so clear and filled with longing that Nettie has to struggle to keep from falling to her knees in tears. The bow dances, and his fingers fly, and Nettie can’t keep off her knees now, her fingers tearing at the ground like she’s digging up a dead child as the doc sways overhead. The music fills the night, chokes the stars, slips down Nettie’s dust-rimmed ears and into her soul, clutching it with stunning ferocity. He plays forever and a day, and then she blinks up at the full moon and curls her hands out of black earth that should just be sand. She’s pulled white roots from the ground, torn her nails ragged, but she can’t recall what it is that her fingers sought, nor why.
He holds out the violin, one fine eyebrow arched up.
“Your turn.”
Nettie stands, dizzy and shaken. This must be how the Rangers felt that time she killed a siren to stop the song that bewitched everyone but her. Like something special has been given to her, but it’s gone now, gone forever, and something even more special has been taken with it. Her fingers are black and bloody, her knees shaking. She takes the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. She couldn’t be more goddamn confused if he’d handed her a kitten and an ax. The violin doesn’t quite fit under her chin, the neck impossibly smooth and slender in her rough hands. Carefully, so carefully, she draws the bow across the strings, and the resulting sound could break glass. The four men grimace. Doc’s mouth twitches.
Her hands drop, violin neck in one, bow in the other. She tosses the violin onto the black furrows she dug in the ground, stomps on it, and throws it in the fire. Then she snaps the bow over a knee and tosses it in, too.
“That’s what I think of your fine music,” she hisses.
“One to one,” the doc says.
When she looks in the fire, the violin is gone.
“Now you, Dirty Dave,” Billy says with a grin, nodding at the trapper.
The rough man heaves himself out of his throne like a horse getting up from a good roll in the dirt. He cracks his knuckles and neck. “Fighting,” he says. “Hand to hand. First man knocked out or pinned for ten seconds wins.”
Nettie shrugs like she has a choice. “Wrassling it is.”
Before he can outline any more rules or start counting down, she launches herself into his gut. They tumble into his chair, and the antlers shatter apart like falling matches. He’s twisting and grabbing, trying to get her into a certain position, but Nettie has always depended on fighting dirty. She snatches up a fallen antler and rams a tine into his crotch. He roars like a bear and takes a moment to cup his vittles, and Nettie looks around for something else to use against him while he’s tender. The first thing that comes to mind is the coffeepot in the fire. She picks it up, ignoring the burn on her palm, and dumps the boiling coffee over his head.
Much to her surprise, he screams and flails onto his back, crab-crawling away and lying there gasping like a fish on land. Without a second’s consideration, she throws herself on top of him, pinning him to the ground. He roars and grows and grows until he becomes a bear, a giant, shaggy grizzly, and then Nettie’s on her back in the dirt, pinned and crushed and staring at a mouth full of teeth. As the Doc counts to ten, she struggles in every which way she can, but the bear doesn’t budge from atop her.
And then he’s just a man again.
“That’s ten, darlin’,” he murmurs before hopping off with a grin and a lusty wink.
When she turns to look back at the rest of his posse, they’re leaning out of their chairs, mesmerized. The breeze she feels brings her back to the present, in which she’s revealed a woman’s parts hiding under the stolen cloak that shifted aside during the scuffle. Hot red shame creeps up her cheeks as she struggles to cover herself.
Billy licks his lips. “Tell me your name, girl.”
She doesn’t want to answer, but she can’t shut her mouth. “Nettie Lonesome.”
“What kind of witch are you?” Billy asks, half-amazed and half-enraged at being fooled.
She straightens the robe and reties it. “The kind that ain’t a witch. Why’d he cheat?”
The trapper is back in his unbroken antler chair as if none of it ever happened. No burns, no coffee stains. No sign of getting stabbed in the balls. No sign of recently being a bear.
“The point’s mine unless you can prove I cheated. But you’ve got secrets yourself, huh?”
“Like that she fights dirty,” the youngest one mutters.
“That’s right, tenderfoot,” Billy growls. “She does fight dirty. And it’s your turn, so you’d best remember it and perform adroitly.”
Without getting off his chair, the young one says, “Names, then.”
“What?” Nettie asks.
“Names. If you can guess all our true names correctly. They’re not the ones you’ve heard us say, obviously.”
Somewhere in Nettie’s addlepated brain, this rings a bell. Didn’t the Captain say the fae guarded their true names from mortals and monsters? But these fools didn’t know she’d watched them earlier, when they used different names in easy conversation. Shadow magic is as good as fae magic, she figures, no matter how many goddamn violins you can play.
Pointing at each one, Nettie barks their names. “Bonney. Scurlock. Rudebaugh. Tom.” They’re incredulous. “That’s right, ain’t it? And for my own challenge, why don’t you fellers guess my true name?”
The silence that follows is deep and dark and furious, a bull’s breath before charging. The four men surge to their feet, and they can’t hide what they truly are now. Their coats and hair whoosh back on a breeze that isn’t there, their pointed ears twitching and alert. They’re so handsome her heart wrenches, each of them bestial but beautiful, too, like the prettiest parts of men and women all mixed up, which happens to be Nettie’s particular brand of temptation. Humanity falls off them like the flash of a peacock’s tail opening to reveal what’s been there, all along. The air smells like fire and lightning and crushed pine needles and danger, so much danger. And power. And a whiff of cruelty, dark as pitch. Nettie loves them and longs for them, but the Shadow sees them and hates them.
“You already told us your name,” Bonney says, his ice-blue eyes glittering under a crown of ivory antlers that drip with rubies and emeralds. He steps forward, tall and elegant, trailing a cape made of moss and starlight and pointing one clawed finger at Nettie’s chest. “Nettie Lonesome,” he says, a cruel but sweet smile curving his flawless lips.
Nettie shakes her head. “Nope. Sorry.”
His cloak expands wide enough to blot out the stars, and he’s a startlingly beautiful god-giant made of a million points of light, his hands big enough to crush Nettie and everything she’s ever loved in a tornado of lightning and flowers.
“What do you mean, ‘nope’?” he shrieks.
Nettie closes her eyes so they won’t explode and rocks back on her heels. “Sorry, but Nettie’s not my true name, my real name. I don’t know what my real name is. I was orphaned, and the folks who took me in, they just called me Nettie. I guess Nettie’s my girl name, but I don’t think of myself like that.”
Doc glides over and leans down to inspect her. He’s dropped his human face, too, and the creature before her is so full of sunshine and gilt that he makes Nettie’s best friend, Sam Hennessy, seem like a haystack. His crown is woven of slender finger bones and chunks of amber strung on catgut, and his cloak is the soft brown of baby bunnies fresh born.
“She’s not lying,” he says quietly, as if he can’t quite believe it.
“Oh, hells,” Tom mutters, turning away with the rustle of leaves. His crown is a circlet of vines daubed with poison-tipped thorns and tiny rosebuds, and his jacket is spring green, plush as the new grass by a riverbank and dappled with tiny white flowers. All the magic in the world can’t hide his embarrassment. Black curls of smoke encircle the boy as Bonney’s glittering fingers squeeze their censure with the power of an earthquake.
“Clever girl.” Rudebaugh sidles up and slides a finger under her chin, looking closely at her face. She’s frozen, unable to turn away. “You’d make a suitable bride. Return to Fairy with me, and I’ll gift you an eye that sees the future. You’ll dwell seven years in perfect happiness, dancing and doted on and gifted with every jewel you desire. Your child will be fine and fortunate beyond all men, and when you return, your luck will forever be sevenfold.” He’s the most beautiful of them, to Nettie, with his crown of braided leather and thick, bear-pelt beard and cloak of spotted fawn skin. There’s an animal roughness about him that appeals to her, a glint in his sharp teeth that says he understands her on a bone-deep level, her need to coax and kill and mete out justice in equal measure.
His words, on the other hand, show the truth of him: he belongs to another world, and Nettie Lonesome doesn’t give a shit about magic eyes or jewels or dancing or pretty fairy babies or unearned luck. She’s got to kill what needs to die, and she can’t do that where they come from because nothing dies in Fairy. Ever.
Nettie snaps her chin out of his reach, closing her eyes to the silly but cloying dreams he showed her. “No thanks. I got to get back to rangering. I’ll just take your man, and return him to . . .”
They all look over to find a pair of golden manacles on the ground.
“That son of a bitching possum!” Rudebaugh shouts, but he’s just a man again, a trapper in skins drawing his bowie knife, all raiment of glamour faded.
Bonney claps his hands together, and it’s like lightning striking the glade in a blinding flash of light.
The trees are dead again. The chairs are gone. The fire is gone. The dented coffeepot is gone. The cloaks and crowns and otherworldly beauty are definitely gone. There’s nothing but the full moon, Billy the Kid, his posse, and the chains their quarry slipped while they were showing off their skills. While Nettie watches, the manacles’ metal fades from solid gold to rusted iron. She doesn’t mind a bit that the fairies are wearing their masks again. She prefers them this way, not showing off. Magic’s one hell of a distraction.
“If you’ll excuse me, fellers, I’m free to go, ain’t I?” she asks.
“Without your man,” Billy says with a grin. “The contest was three to two, but I guess I’ll consider it a tie now.” He passes an open hand before her face and murmurs, “Forget us and go.”
Nettie tips her invisible hat. “Nice gambling with you boys,” she says.
As she walks into the woods, she unties the gold sash. Safely in the shadows, she lets the cloak drop, then her humanity. The great bird shakes itself, sick to death of magic. It launches into the air and surveys the moonlit desert below.
All it sees are four road-worn cowpokes arguing as they tighten the saddles of their horses. The leader smacks the youngest one, knocking his hat to the dust. The bird doesn’t know why, but it turns and flaps in the other direction. Farther on, it catches sight of movement and swoops down to snatch up a quickly waddling possum, which it immediately drops. Possums, the bird seems to recall, are not worth the trouble.