Bullets had been peppering the bonfire line for quite some time, most passing through the fires before they could reach their targets. It was a small thing, but enough to throw some of the shots ever so slightly to the left of true, leaving them to whiz harmlessly by.
Or perhaps the people shooting at them from above were not truly interested in killing them all, just in pinning them down. Nathanial had to allow that this was possible, even probable, especially since the screams had come from the circus behind him, where the children and the people who weren’t equipped to handle a fight like this were hiding in their wagons, waiting to be saved. Counting on him to do the saving.
There wasn’t a single person in this show who didn’t trust him to keep them safe. That was what it meant to sign on with a circus with no patron, no backing, no powerful ties to some permanent place: it meant accepting that the ringleader would be the one to protect you. But he was the one who had decided that they should come to Oregon, following tales of prosperity and plenty that bore no resemblance to this green and dangerous land. He was the one who had told them he would protect them if they followed him into the woods.
He had to keep them safe. He had to keep all of them safe. If he failed to do that, he might as well sell his wagon and settle in the first town they passed, because he was no longer equipped to serve the circus.
Martin stood, firing at the men on the ridge before dropping back down into the shelter of the fire. “I’m running low on bullets, Mr. Blackstone,” he said, with an anxious glance at the only man who had ever been willing to tell him he had value. “I think we all are. What should we do?”
They couldn’t run; the lit-up wagons were blocking the road, effectively pinning circus and settlers alike inside The Clearing. Whatever would have possessed people to make it all the way to Oregon before building their homes inside a pit where anyone who came along could turn them into targets? It didn’t make sense. It was like the settlers had been trying to get themselves slaughtered.
They couldn’t take the fight to the ridge. There was no cover there. Even if they could manage to climb the soft walls of the bowl without sliding back down to level ground, they’d be picked off one by one as they walked.
They couldn’t surrender. Those people …
Most of the circus didn’t know that Annie had changed her name upon joining the show, or that she had worked for years to strip the Deseret influence from her voice, shaping and flattening her vowels for the sake of sounding like she came from the same amorphous West as everyone else. There was a circus accent, a mashed-up mix of a dozen territories, and she had learned it one careful word at a time, gradually erasing the woman she had been. But when she was tired or under stress, she sometimes slipped, and the Deseret would come out, written clear as anything in every word she said.
Nathanial had never known her as “Grace,” but there was no question of who the madman on the hill was demanding be returned to him. He was here for Annie. If it was her or the circus …
Maybe it made him a terrible person, or maybe it made him a man in love, but Nathanial thought that he would let the whole damned show burn to the ground before he handed her over to the man on the hill. Deseret had failed her once. There was no other reason for a woman to run with a baby on her hip and a wildcat wrapped around her shoulders. He wasn’t going to be the one to fail her again.
“Who’s injured?” he asked, voice tight.
People murmured from either side of him, whispering their names into the night air like secrets. They were all on edge, terrified of what was yet to come, but aware that they had passed the point of no return. They had nowhere to run. All they could do was stand, and fight.
“Who’s dead?” he asked.
“Caleb, and Roland,” said Martin. “Roland was done in by one of our own. A bullet bounced back when it struck the wall. Caleb went out from behind the fires. They saw him too clearly, and they shot him dead.”
“So we stay behind the fire and we hope for a miracle,” said Nathanial.
“A miracle?” asked Martin.
“Morning.” Nathanial frowned through the flames at the bright-lit shapes up on the ridge. The cocky bastards were making no effort to hide themselves. Why should they? There was no way for the people on the ground to reach them.
Had the settlers been joining the fight—in either direction—things might have been different. Between The Clearing and the circus, the people on the ridge were well outnumbered. There would have been casualties, yes, but they would have been an overwhelming wave. They could have won. And if the settlers had set themselves against the circus, which they had seemed determined to do before the wagon train had shown up, the bonfire line would have been gunned down in minutes. Instead, the settlers stood in silent clumps between the two parties, some of them holding weapons, none of them opening fire.
It was strange. It was wrong. It was, like everything else they had experienced since reaching Oregon, barely this side of incomprehensible.
“We can’t stay like this forever,” said Martin, almost as if he had read Nathanial’s mind.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“I do.”
Nathanial went cold. He turned, and there was Annie, walking up behind them. She had bloodstains on her dress. Not dainty drops; great streaks of blood, drying to a dirty brown. Another streak bisected her face, running along the bridge of her nose and onto her right cheek. She didn’t appear to be injured. Whoever had bled to bring her here, the blood was not her own.
“Annie,” he said, half-standing. “You need to get down and get back. It isn’t safe.”
“They won’t shoot me,” she said.
“Annie—”
“They might shoot Annie Pearl. But they won’t shoot Grace Murphy.” Annie lifted her head a little higher, the firelight playing off skin and blood alike. “My husband has come too far to shoot me.”
Nathanial stopped in the act of reaching for her, going silent before he finally said, “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”
“I know,” she said. Then she smiled, the expression faded and wan. “I intend to be a widow when I come back down that hill, Mr. Blackstone. If you’d like to make an honest woman out of me, we can talk about it then. In the meantime, if I don’t come back, take care of Adeline for me. Tell her that I’m sorry.”
“I’ll raise her as my own,” said Nathanial. He started to reach for her and stopped himself mid-motion, leaving his hand hanging lonely in the air, the gulf between them unbridged. “Be careful, Annie. Come back to us.”
“I will,” she said, and walked on, out of the firelight, into the no-man’s-land between the bonfires and the hill. The settlers watched her go. Any one of them could have drawn on her and shot her dead where she stood, but they did no such thing. It was as if the world had been encased in amber, cast in firelight and shadows like molasses, and no one could break free.
A bullet whizzed past her cheek as one of the men on the hill fired again. She felt the breeze from its passage. That confirmed, as much as anything could, that Michael had never been intending to kill the people down below: not until he had her, and Adeline, back in his clutches. The Clearing and the circus would become expendable once she and her daughter had been returned to him. Until then, killing the people who might know where they were would have been counterproductive.
If he had come in quietly, sending his little helpers to slit throats and burn bodies, she could have slipped away in the chaos. She could have freed herself. Instead, he had come in like thunder and made it impossible for her to run. She could admire that, even as it drove home precisely how little he had ever understood her. He thought that because she had run away from him, she was the sort of person who ran away from everything.
He’d never been able to understand that in the end, he had been the only thing she needed to flee. Everything else could be faced, but him …
Well, she was going to face him now, and may God have mercy on her soul.
Someone must have seen her, must have recognized her from Michael’s description, because the gunfire stopped after that. Maybe it was even Michael himself, although she doubted that. She was older than his blushing bride, harder, with fewer soft curves and more jutting angles. Grace Murphy had never gone out into the woods and come back with a woman rescued from the jaws of monsters; had never killed a man, or held a lynx while it breathed its last, beloved breath. Grace Murphy was the skeleton Annie Pearl had built herself upon, and while she could still feel Grace moving beneath her skin, she wasn’t that woman anymore. Try as she might, she could never be that woman again.
Foot by foot, Annie climbed the soft side of the hill, sometimes sliding backward when her feet failed to find the proper purchase, other times grabbing scrubby little bushes or jutting roots to pull herself a little closer to the top. No one came to help her. That, too, made her believe that it had been one of Michael’s men, and not Michael himself, who had spotted her. He might not have helped her, but he would have come to taunt her as she climbed, reminding her of all the luxuries she had cast aside when she had chosen to run from him.
Finally, her questing hand found the hard soil of the road, and Annie pulled herself up onto it, standing. Three men with guns were already there, weapons drawn and aimed at her, like they thought one woman would be enough to bring their entire operation tumbling down.
It would. Please, God, it would. Annie straightened, pulling herself up until she felt as tall as any pine in the forest. Tall as a wendigo, and equally as terrible.
“Take me to my husband,” she said.
The men moved to flank her. One stood behind her, digging the barrel of his gun into her spine, so that the metal bit into her flesh and made her shudder. She refused to allow herself to slump or shy away. If she showed weakness, they would forget that they needed to respect her as a woman of Deseret and start treating her like one of the faithless. That would be … bad.
The trouble with dividing the world into the Saved and the unsaved was that eventually you began to think that something must be wrong with those who had not been found worthy of salvation. There was no one kinder than a man of Deseret to one of his own, nor was there anyone crueler than that same man when faced with an outsider.
“You’re Grace Murphy?” demanded one of the men.
“Mrs. Grace Murphy,” she replied coldly, stressing her title. Let them remember who she was, in Deseret. Let them remember who owned her.
He had certainly never forgotten.
The man behind her dug his gun in a bit more harshly, urging her forward. She walked, head held high, refusing to let him knock her off-balance. Let them be the ones unsure of their footing. It was already working. They were casting confused glances between themselves, unable to reconcile their ideas about the kind of woman who would run away from a wealthy, loving, respected husband with this proud, blood-streaked creature before them.
I was always a person, she thought, putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to think about her daughter sleeping down below, unaware that her mother had left her, possibly for the last time. The fact that I was once for sale to the highest bidder did nothing to reduce my humanity, and that which is human is also complex. That is the cost of humanity.
The wagons were even brighter from this close, spangled with lights and humming from the strain of their steam engines. Michael must have drained his coffers to buy this much equipment—or else he had been funded entirely by Hellstromme, a thought that made her skin crawl. There were few people, even in Deseret, with this much ghost rock to waste in the recovery of a single runaway bride. For Hellstromme to be this extravagant … he truly wanted her little girl.
They kept walking, and suddenly, with no fanfare at all, there was Michael, and for a moment, Annie felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
He had been a handsome man when they had married, and he was still a handsome man now, straight of back and long of limb, with a face that verged on beautiful when he smiled. But if the years had stolen away her softness and replaced it with the strength to survive, they had peeled away some ineffable quality of his humanity, leaving behind a man who looked as if he had been crafted from a flesh-colored stone. Michael Murphy had always been hard, had always been cold, and yet. The man who turned to face her as she walked along the road was to that long-gone scientist as a tree was to an acorn.
We are all built on the skeletons of those who came before us, Annie thought, and for the first time she realized that she could feel sorrow for Michael, who had been as much a prisoner as she was, in his own way. Once.
“Grace,” he said, and smiled. The expression did nothing to chase the cold calculation from his eyes: he was taking her measure with every second that stretched between them, and he was finding her infinitely wanting. “I knew you would come back to me.”
“You sent people into my home to kill my friends and steal my daughter,” said Annie. “I thought it best for me to come and tell you to your face why I needed you to stop. There’s nothing for you here, Michael. Take your wagons and your weapons, and go back to Deseret.”
“There’s you,” he said. “There’s Pearl. That’s two pieces of my property in this Godforsaken place, and I’ll have both of them back again before I turn and head for home.” He took a step toward her.
It took everything she had and more not to answer with a step back. “I am not your property,” she said. “I am a free woman, and I am no more of Deseret. Two of your men are dead below, by my hand. Let that be enough to tell you that I am not your wife, and that you should leave me be. I would bring nothing but disgrace onto your house.”
“I would have made you a princess. I would have made you a queen.”
“I was already a princess, as Deseret measures such things, and even you lacked the power to make me a queen. Dr. Hellstromme could have done it, but he didn’t want me. I know, because he didn’t have me. He left me to you, to warm your bed, to soothe your flesh, and he told you what he wanted of you. He ordered you to create life. Did you ever think to ask what I wanted? Whether I wanted to be a princess, or a queen, or anything more than a beloved wife? I could have learned to be content, if only you had learned to love me.”
“I did love you,” snapped Michael. “I gave you everything, and you stole from me.”
“You were going to kill our daughter.”
“I made her!” He lunged forward, grabbing her forearms before she could flinch away. “She wouldn’t exist without me! You would be nothing without me! I have the right to do as I please with my own things, and what I pleased was to take her apart! Now where is she? The girl needs her father!”
“The girl needs to be protected from her father,” said Annie. She had to fight to keep her voice level. If she let him see how frightened she was …
No. This ended here. Tonight. It had already gone on for far too long.
“Liar,” Michael hissed, and yanked her closer to him. “I have you back now. I will keep you. And you will see what you’ve done.”
Letting go of her right arm, he dragged her by the left, fingers clamped down so hard that they were sure to bruise, until they had reached the largest and most elaborately-lit of the wagons. He turned to glare at her.
“You’re filthy,” he said. “I shouldn’t allow you this. You leave me no choice. If you’re to understand what you’ve done to me, you need to know what you’ve done to her.”
He jerked open the wagon door with his free hand. Annie had time to see the billowing white curtains inside before he shoved her through, slamming the door behind her.
She landed facedown in a pile of bedding. The smell of sweet wine vinegar hung thick in the air, barely masking something darker and sourer, like the taste of rotting meat.
“Hello?”
Annie froze.
The voice was not familiar. It was female, and young, but those attributes were almost outweighed by the faintness of it: it was a sigh masquerading as a little girl’s voice, pushed out into the world despite the protests of the flesh around it. None of that mattered. Annie recognized it instantly. Even with all the years and miles between them, there was no way she could fail to recognize the voice of her own daughter.
“Who’s there?” The voice sounded peevish now, like Annie was violating some sacred script. “Come where I can see you.”
Annie sat up, pulling her face out of the bedclothes. White netting hung over everything, even here, inside the wagon. It would keep mosquitoes at bay during the summer months, but now, with winter coming, it seemed oddly excessive. She swept the netting aside with her arm, moving to kneel on the mattress beneath her—
And there she was. A little girl who could have been Adeline, were it not for the scars. One slashed across her throat like a permanent crucifix, arms climbing up toward her chin and reaching for her spine. Another peeked above the collar of her frilly white nightgown, hinting at something more extreme slicing across the meat of her chest. Her white-blonde hair hung prettily over her shoulders, pulled forward into two pigtails, presumably to keep it from getting tangled with the thick black tubes that connected her to the machine behind her.
It chugged constantly, adding a soft whine to the sounds inside the wagon. The tubes connecting Annabelle—because it had to be Annabelle, it had to be; Annie had no other daughters—to the machine were attached to the flesh of her back and shoulders, driven into her body like railroad spikes into the earth.
Annabelle blinked, mouth curving downward in a confused frown. That, too, was exactly like her sister: Adeline frowned in just the same way when she was unhappy.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you my new nanny? I don’t need a new nanny. I want to go home. I want Helen.”
Helen. Annie remembered Helen. She had been a timid, tidy girl, working at the fringes of the household, bringing bowls of apple slices floating in sugary lemon water when Annie—when Grace, she had still been Grace then, taking service and sweetness as her due—when the pregnancy was too hard on her. Helen had always been a good girl.
She supposed she should be glad that Helen had managed to weather the upsets in Michael’s household that had no doubt followed the disappearance of the lady of the house. All she could feel was jealousy, burning in her breast like acid, that she could finally meet the daughter she had been forced to leave behind, and the first name from her child’s lips belonged to another woman.
“I’m not your new nanny,” Annie said through numb lips. “I’m your … Annabelle, I’m your mother.”
Annabelle looked at her with cool, dark eyes, and there was no love in them, nor kindness, nor joy at the reunion. “He found you.”
“Yes.”
“You left us.”
“Yes.”
“You left me.”
“I didn’t—I never meant to harm you,” said Annie. “I didn’t know you had lived past infancy. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You took my sister, and you left me.” Annabelle’s small frown had become an outright scowl, distorting the planes of her face, making her look ancient and cruel. “Why?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Annie again. “I couldn’t take you both.”
To her surprise, Annabelle laughed. The sound was thin, brittle, and almost drowned out by the steady wheeze of the machines. “I would never have gone with you,” she said. “Even if I were a baby, I would have fought. But you took my sister. She was supposed to fix me, and you took her. I won’t forgive you for that.”
“Annabelle—”
The wagon door swung open. Strong hands grasped Annie, hauling her back out into the night, where the shadows surged thickly around her ankles, seeming to pin her in place. Michael was standing impassively by, face a mask as he watched his goons restrain his wife.
“You’ve met our daughter,” he said. “Isn’t it nice to see your own flesh and blood with your own eyes? It’s a joy I haven’t felt in years, thanks to you. I wanted you to understand what you walked away from.”
The image of black tubes and a strange machine flashed through Annie’s mind. She began to struggle. “What have you done to her? Can she even get out of bed?”
“She will,” said Michael. “I’m no monster. I have been healing her, perfecting her, making her into the woman she should always have been—would always have been, if you hadn’t stolen her sister from me and disrupted my work. I’ve had to settle for nonfamily donors, for piecemeal repairs, and why? Because you couldn’t accept that we had the makings of one perfect child between the two.”
“You had no right.”
“I am your husband. I am their father. That gives me all the rights I could ever have wanted, in the eyes of both God and the law. I will make a perfect child. I will show the world that Deseret is the perfect country, so great that even our babies are without flaw. I will do it with you or without you. My Grace.” Michael took a step forward, reaching up to caress her cheek.
Annie writhed, trying to break free, to no avail. “Don’t touch me.”
“Love, honor, and obey,” he said. “Remember? Alive or dead, you’re coming home with me. I would much prefer alive. You need to be disciplined for what you’ve done. You need to be forgiven.”
Annie spat. Michael smirked.
On the bluff above them, the wolflings began to howl. It was a chilling sound, like moonlight made manifest. Michael took a step back, eyes widening.
“What is that?” he demanded.
This time, it was Annie who smirked.
“The monsters heard you wanted to join them,” she said. “I suppose they’re coming to test your mettle.”