Michael whirled, eyes scanning the ridge for the source of the howling. Annie went very still, offering no resistance to the men who held her. If she fought them, if she resisted them in any way, they might forget that they weren’t supposed to harm her. But if she could hold her peace for a few seconds longer—
White bodies began to appear around the curve of the bowl, flickering out of the darkness like lanterns being lit by some terrible and unseen hand. They resolved into the bodies of creatures that were wolves and more than wolves, too large to be the creatures they so resembled, too white to be truly of this world. They were so white that they burned, and the thickened shadows swirled around them, unable to touch them or dim that brightness.
The shadows and the wolflings were cut from the same cloth: Annie saw that now. They were part and parcel of the same terrible West, neither moral nor amoral, as wild as the weather and as deadly as the desert. They did not judge. They did not forgive. They did not forget. They simply were, and they would do as they would.
Remember me, she prayed—and if it was blasphemy to direct her prayers to white wolves out of nightmares, she was fine with being blasphemous. They had been kind to her Adeline. That was all she required in this world, to make something acceptable. To make something kind. Remember me, and spare me when you descend.
“What madness is this?” demanded Michael. “Kill them! Bring me their pelts!”
The men along the lighted wagon train opened fire. They were no longer the ones with the higher ground. The wolflings shied back from the sound of gunshots, dancing along the ridge, and no red blood fell to stain white fur. Michael’s men were burning their ammunition on nothing. Annie’s heart sang. Bullets were a limited resource. No matter how many they had, they could run out. They would run out.
There was no more gunfire from below. She risked a glance at the bowl containing the town. She could see her friends and traveling companions clustering together, lit by the bonfire line, preparing for the next stage in the siege.
A bellow split the air, freezing the fingers of the gunmen on their triggers, echoing through the forest and The Clearing alike. Annie lifted her eyes, starting to quake as dread clutched at her heart and joints, seeming to turn them into stone.
On the other side of the bowl, blocking all hope of retreat, stood the wendigo.
There were less than a dozen of them. Somehow, that seemed like more than enough. Enough to destroy everything below them; enough to send this night straight to the depths of Hell. The townsfolk down in The Clearing pointed and ran, descending into panic. The circus folk grouped even closer together, like they thought the firelight would be enough to keep them safe.
Maybe it would. Faced with a choice between well-armed, well-protected people and the villagers who had been their prey for so long, why would the wendigo spare the townsfolk? The bargain between them was easy to see, even without hearing it stated aloud: The Clearing lured in travelers, circuses and vaudeville shows and tinkers, and gave them to the wendigo in exchange for their own survival. But this time, the travelers had fought back. This time, the travelers had taken back one of their own, and killed one of the wendigo in the process. The compact had been broken.
The compact was between the wendigo and the settlers. Who were they going to punish?
The men on the ridge were running low on ammunition. More and more, they were glancing at Michael before they pulled the trigger, waiting for him to give the command to run. They had half of what they’d come for: they had his wayward wife, finally back where she belonged, ready to be dragged home to Deseret and punished for the temerity of thinking that she could ever get away.
Did they even know that they were supposed to stay long enough to retrieve his little girl as well? Or did they think their job was done, and wonder why he hadn’t given the order already? The trouble with the kind of loyalty that had to be bought and paid for was that it was never as strong as you wanted it to be. In the end, it was always loyalty to the money, and not to the person who paid the bills.
“What are they?” Michael spun on Annie, face contorted in rage and fear. “Did you do this? Tell me how to be rid of them!”
“This is their place, not yours,” said Annie. She felt surprisingly calm. Terrified, yes, but she was accustomed to terror. She had been a wife in Deseret and a mother running through the West with a silent child bundled at her hip. She knew fear in all its shades, all its subtle flavors, and while she had the utmost respect for it, it could no longer command her. “The wolflings and the wendigo, they had things divided between them. You’ve thrown off the balance. They’ll have your head for that.”
Roaring—sounding half-wendigo himself in his rage—Michael ripped her out of the arms of the two men who had been holding her in place. He jerked her forward until their noses almost touched, until she was afraid, for one dizzy second, that he was going to kiss her, to wipe the memory of Nathanial’s lips away.
Do not let me die with you the last man I have kissed, she thought, and did not struggle, because struggling would no longer do her any good.
“Slut,” he hissed. “Consort of monsters. Demon bride.”
“All those things and more,” she replied, in the sweetest tone she could muster, and brought up her knee, and slammed it as hard as she could into Michael’s manhood.
His eyes went wide and round, matching the perfect circle of his mouth as the blood drained slowly from his face. Then he collapsed, falling into a heap at her feet, hands scrabbling uselessly at his crotch, like he thought he could somehow undo the damage she had done.
Annie turned to flee, and was unsurprised when strong hands grasped her shoulders. The men who had been ordered to hold her hadn’t gone far. She closed her eyes, waiting for the bullet to pierce her skull. Instead, she felt her feet leave the ground, and she opened her eyes to find herself plummeting down, down, down into the bowl that contained The Clearing, flung so hard and so far that she seemed to be on a direct course with the ground.
Only seemed: her shoulder slammed into the side of the bowl, striking hard enough that she heard something inside her body snap, and then she was rolling end over end, scrabbling frantically for a handhold on the scrubby soil. Bits and pieces of the scene around her flashed by as she tumbled: wolflings leaping from the ridge down to the path, still unbloodied, fangs already bared; wendigo racing down the side of the bowl as if it were nothing, as if gravity were of no concern; muzzle flashes from both above and below, as the people with guns suddenly snapped out of their temporary truce and realized how much danger they were all of them in. And at the top of the bowl, far from the fight that was to come, two wendigo who had traded the fight for a feast, their teeth and claws red with Michael’s blood, her marriage finally dissolved in the covenant of their hunger. A rush of hot, vindictive joy raced through her.
Thank you, she thought. That was all she had the time for before she hit the ground hard, landing in a heap well outside the shelter of the bonfires.
Get up, she commanded herself, to no avail. Her body refused to listen to her orders, refused to even entertain the idea that they might be important: her body was perfectly content to remain where it was, beaten and bruised and waiting for the aches to die down.
A wolfling howled, the sound too loud for the creature to be more than a few feet away. It was answered by the snarl of a wendigo, and then, almost as ominously, by the report of a rifle. The wolfling yelped. A man screamed. One of Michael’s men.
Good, she thought. You get what you deserve.
But what did she deserve? She had left one daughter behind for the sake of saving the other: did that mean she deserved to die here, on the cold hillside, while everything she had ever loved burned around her?
She had run away from a man who had claimed to love her, who had put a ring on her finger and a roof over her head: she had left him to be devoured, and rejoiced at the fact of his death. Did that mean she deserved to lie helpless while the man who might have come to love her died at the hands of men and monsters who had once been men?
The question of the deserving and the undeserving was a difficult one to answer. It pained her even to try.
Then a familiar voice screamed, and she suddenly found the strength to climb to her feet and run, despite the ache in her thighs and the arm that dangled, limp and no doubt broken, against her side. She raced for the bonfires, pausing only to grab a burning brand from the edge of one of the stone circles, and when she saw the wendigo poised to rip Nathanial’s throat out with its talons, she did not hesitate. She leapt between them, swinging her makeshift weapon wildly, heedless of the blisters rising on her palm.
The wendigo roared and stepped back, more puzzled than pained, and was hence off-balance when three wolflings slammed into it from the side, their teeth tearing, their hand-like paws scrabbling for a better grip on the creature’s rank fur. The wendigo howled. Annie hit it again, careful to avoid the wolflings. They might be monsters, might be man-eaters in their own right, but the enemy of her enemy was her friend, now as much as ever.
Nathanial swung his gun around and shot the wendigo, five times in the chest. It howled again before turning to run, shedding wolflings as it went. More fell in behind it, chasing it into the darkness.
“Annie.” Nathanial grasped her uninjured arm with his free hand. “I thought we’d lost you.”
“We may yet have lost ourselves.”
The chaos was continuing to unfold all around them. As Annie watched, the wolflings took down a man from The Clearing, while two wendigo fought over the body of a circus roustabout. The largest of her snakes—a diamondback rattler as pale as bone and as thick as her arm—coiled on the chest of a dead man, heavy head resting against its coils, seeming content. The night was alive with screams, and with monsters.
Through the thick of it, Adeline came.
The little girl was still barefoot, still pale as the world. She walked between the fires, stopping right next to her mother and looking up at her with wide, weary eyes.
“Delly…” whispered Annie.
Adeline walked on.
She walked until she reached the midpoint between the settlers and the circus. The largest of the wendigo was waiting for her there. She looked up at it. It looked down at her. Monster and monster’s greatest creation stared at each other, across a gulf as wide as all the West, unfordable, unbroken.
The wendigo snarled.
Adeline shook her head.
‘No,’ she signed.
The wendigo snarled again.
‘Not my family,’ she signed. ‘Take yours. Go.’
There was a long pause, split only by the screams coming from the ridge above. Finally, the wendigo nodded its vast, shaggy head, and turned to the settlers.
The sky was brighter with screams than with stars, and the night went on.