Yea Though I Walk Read online

  Probably not for long.

  There’s a lot of light. Has to be daytime, though I can’t make out any trees around me. Just brush grass and dry dirt. I must have pulled myself well clear of that ghoul forest somewhere between passing out and waking up again.

  Footsteps.

  I ain’t alone. Maybe it’s Gil come to find me again? We were supposed to meet up in Cheyenne, but Gil has a manner about him to feel ill winds before they blow. He could have rode hard back east to Gold Vein, maybe found me in the forest. The striggers may be all dead by now, lined up with wood in their chests. Even the Master. That would satisfy me even if I scratch today.

  A pair of Sunday shoes steps in front of my face. Fingers land on my neck.

  “Good, you’re alive,” a stranger’s voice whispers near my head.

  It ain’t Gil.

  I try to say something, but my throat won’t open enough to get a noise out. I manage a cough.

  “Easy,” he purrs, putting a hand on my back. “Don’t strain yourself. You hurt?”

  I manage a wave of my hand, and with considerable effort, bring it across the grass and against my leg.

  The stranger sputters some flowered language he probably feels is vulgar, and crouches down.

  “Christ, that’s a snakebite. Come on, can’t leave you lying out here to die, can we?”

  He tugs on my arm, and I black out.

  My stomach lurches, and I feel like I’m falling.

  I am. I’m falling, though still gripped by whatever clutches have me. I must be dropping directly to Hell. Seems my penance with the Godpistols weren’t figured as adequate.

  This place is dark. So dark. Cold. Who would have figured Hell would be this chilled?

  The ground hits me hard, and my brain spins…

  Swaying.

  Bumping and swaying. The smell of horse sweat fills my nostrils. Familiar, too. I pull an eyelid open enough to find the flank of a chestnut under my face. Could be the venom stirring in my brain, but it feels like Ripper. Thought I’d lost this horse.

  I’m over the saddle, hanging like a sack of potatoes. I try to steady myself, but my arm won’t move. No strength left.

  I catch sight of the stranger a few paces ahead of me, Ripper’s lead in his hand. I can’t see his face, but there’s nothing about him to convince me he belongs west of the Mississippi. His short coat was probably a bit sharper before the weather and grass pulled its threads loose. His head hangs in a hunch, stringy dark hair reaching his collar without a hat to cover it. He can’t be traveling; he’s not dressed for the prairie. We must be close to his home, or whatever hole he manages to survive in.

  Ripper checks his hoof on a stone in the grass, and my weight shifts forward. As I start slipping headfirst over the edge, the dandied stranger turns and grabs my shoulder. The twist on my body sends a shock of pain up into my legs, and I black out again.

  I’m lashed down to something flat in this infernal abyss. God, the darkness is absolute! This Devil that has me must be hungry for my eternal torture.

  I gasp, and try to shout, but my throat is too seized up with pain. That, or there are no screams allowed in Hell.

  My hands ball into fists and pound the back of whatever brimstone I’m laid against. But it feels soft. Almost comforting.

  This must be my comfort… This is what I deserve, after all.

  The stranger hoists me from Ripper’s back. I drop onto his shoulder before rolling into his arms. His strength isn’t as solid as he seems to think it should have been, and my body falls to the dirt. Again, he swears under his breath and jerks me by my arms back to a sitting position. My head falls back against something solid. Wooden.

  His hair parts from the sides of his face, and with a sheepish furrow of his brow, he says, “Let’s get you inside, shall we?”

  I must be dead by now.

  It’s dark and cold, as Hell should be. At least I’m not slung over a saddle anymore. I’m face-up.

  Under a roof.

  The stranger got me to shelter, that’s clear enough. But it’s too dark to be daytime any longer. And if it’s night, I’ve been out the better part of a day. The venom should have taken me by now. I felt it in my leg the second the little rattler bastard set fang to skin. The wound still hurts, but the burning has gone.

  I look down to my leg. I’m naked, laid out on a bed. Something dark is huddled over me. Some shadow. Maybe a ghost, come to collect my soul.

  Not a ghost.

  Long, silken black hair spills over the shoulder of a woman. She turns and sets a knife down alongside my thigh. Before I can clear my throat, she lunges down. Sharp pain stabs into my flesh, and I suck in a breath.

  She rises up from my leg in a start, blood smeared over her lips.

  Her eyes are wide. Wild.

  Black as coal.

  The face before me is not human. Its angles and complexion are that of a strigger. Dark charcoal skin. Sharp cheekbones.

  She spits a flow of blood into a bowl and reaches with long fingers for my head. This would figure. Survive the ghoulish Parson and the venom of a rattler just to get snuffed out by some strigger bitch.

  Gil would be ashamed.

  The pain eases. Clouds gather in my brain. Sleep finds me once again. For the love of God, let this be the last time.

  A seizure of coughs pulls me awake. I gag once and spit what’s in my lungs over the side of the bed. I pull myself upright to catch my breath. Sunlight is spilling into this room from a high window across from the bed. Its hazy, dust-choked beam lands directly onto the white sheet covering my legs. I’ve inherited someone’s night robe. It’s linen, I think. Fine weave. Very nice.

  It has to be the dandy’s.

  “Welcome back, my friend,” a voice leaks from the shadows beyond the sunbeam. I squint through the light, lifting a hand to shield my eyes. A pair of spectacles hovers in front of a lily-pale face.

  The stranger leans forward with a child’s grin.

  “Where am I?” I manage through dry lips.

  “Wyoming, not to put too fine a point on it.”

  I hack out some rummage from my throat. “I’m alive.”

  He nods. “Thought for certain you had departed this world last night. But for fortune if not providence, you remain among the living.”

  I clear my throat and cough again. “You always talk like that?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  I shake my head. I can’t be rude. I’m wearing the man’s nightclothes, for Chrissakes.

  “You saved my ass. Much obliged, uh…”

  He hops to his feet and bounds over to the bed, holding out a smooth hand. “Apologies. My name is Denton Folger, and it was my pleasure.”

  I reach for his hand and find much of my strength has returned. I give him a shake and a nod. “Odell. Linthicum Odell.”

  “Mister Odell, I can’t say how lucky you are. That snakebite had aged longer than it ought for a man to survive.”

  I lean back against the headboard and take a few breaths. “Yeah. Thought I licked it for good.”

  “As did we.”

  “We?”

  “Katherina and myself,” he replies, pulling his chair closer to the bedside. “You have her to thank for nursing your wound.”

  I think back on the face of the woman who had set upon my leg. The face of a Strigoi. “That’s your wife?”

  He pulls his spectacles and squints at them before wiping the lenses along the hem of his shirt. “As much as any two people choose to celebrate a life together, perhaps without any clergyman declaring it as such.”

  “Well, she did a good work here, and I thank the both of you.”

  He nods with a bashful lift of his shoulder and replaces his spectacles.

  I add, “I’d like to thank her personal. Is she around?”

  “I’m afraid she’s taking her rest.”

  I look up to the sunlight spilling into the window. “I bet so. Long night.”

  “She never left your s
ide. When she puts her mind to something, very little in this world will stop it from coming to fruition. Be it life or death or God Himself.”

  “Do pass on my thanks, then,” I mumble.

  Folger stands up and lays a hand on my shoulder. “Are you hungry? She took some time before turning in to put a stew on the fire.”

  I shake my head.

  “Fair enough.” He stands awkwardly, shifting from heel to heel. “Well, you should probably rest, and I’ll leave you to that.”

  “Denton? Mind if I call you familiar like?”

  He nods with enthusiasm.

  “Where is this? I mean, where’s the closest town to here?”

  “We’re about an hour west of Gold Vein.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “Is there anything you need?”

  I pull myself to the side of the bed and survey the room. My clothes are sitting in a pile by the corner.

  “I had a pistol. Ammunition.”

  He squints before nodding. “That’s right. I have it in the next room.” He takes a breath and adds, “You’re safe enough here. I didn’t feel a weapon would improve your health while you were recovering, so I secured it in the front.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  This man doesn’t know me from shit. He’d found me bleeding and half-dead in the grass and brought me into this house to nurse back to health. I figure either he has some kind of need for a man to be beholden to him, or he’s one of those Good Men you hate to see in this ass-chewing piece of the world.

  And if he’s a Good Man, then I have to wonder if he even knows he has a strigger living with him. The Strigoi are known to twist the minds of their prey, rearranging memories, sometimes keeping them like pets or servants. That being the case, I might have been snatched from certain death to live a longer life as this thing’s beef cattle. One man’s blood may not be enough to bed her thirst back down. I’d have to take the measure of this before long. If I was going to earn the name of Godpistol, I’d have to set this right.

  It’s what Gil would do.

  Folger leaves me with my thoughts, closing the door behind him. Finally alone, I test my feet. My head spins a little, but I can stand. Maybe not run, but I have enough steel to take steps. I shimmy out of the night robe and pull on my clothes, beating some of the dust off them. I inspect the tear in the thigh of my pants. I’ll need new britches before I travel again.

  Gold Vein. That’s my next stop. Gil had sent me to Gold Vein in the first place, and man-eating ministers notwithstanding, I managed to find myself a knife’s throw away. I’d need to check Ripper’s saddlebags as soon as possible. There’s a purse of silver coins from St. Casilda of Toledo in that bag. Blessed silver, ready for smelting. Gil sent me on an errand to find a smithy by the name of Holcomb, a former Godpistol that took a wound to the chest and hung up the lifestyle. He still turned out ammunition for Gil and the others from time to time, recognizing its value when standing off against creatures of darkness. And as silver is a fine weapon against evil, but a poor material to fire out a pistol, his skills were worth the extra week’s travel.

  After a polite space, I peek out my door into a cramped room with a fireplace and a long table. No sign of Folger or his wife. I see only one door, which by virtue of the front windows must lead outside. It’s a plain, uninteresting room. A frontier room. A pair of cast iron pots hangs on hooks beside a cast-metal stove. The wood of the table is blanched with age and harrowed from use near the hearth end. Dark wood slats line the walls and floor, and a few bundles of herbs hang from the ceiling joists, dryin’. Folger decks himself in his East Coast trappings well enough, but his home bears nothing but the simplest of arrangements.

  I nudge open the outside door and take in the surroundings. Flat, grassy prairie slopes to the forest in the hills. A chilly breeze flows down over the brush, filled with the smell of pine and a note of rotten meat. Those are the woods where the Parson had waylaid me. A couple flagstone steps lead to the grass below, leaving the house exposed to western winds without a porch. I step out into the light, squinting against the low-rising sun and limping on my snake-bit leg. The pain is more the nature of an ache, but it sets me hobbling along the uneven ground.

  I find Ripper tied to a shelter around the corner of the house. He’s taking a long pull of water from a trough, but pauses to give me a nicker of greeting. That aging chestnut and I’ve run together since the War. After Chattanooga, we seemed to be of like mind on our futures with the Army, so we lit out together. His back is bare, and I choke back a breath of panic before I find my saddle and bags hung up inside the shelter. I reach inside and release that breath. My fingers touch a suede pouch bulging with the silver coins.

  The mission is alive.

  I lean against a post of the shelter as Ripper gives me a shoulder of indifference. I consider the house and finally take a moment to think. Where is Folger? For the matter, where’s his wife? The house is hand-built and tiny, almost embarrassing in its half-assed carpentry. Two rooms and a stick-built shelter. Where are the Folgers?

  “I found him grazing a half-mile east of the hills,” Folger’s voice calls from behind me.

  I spin around to see him approaching with a hunk of metal in his hands.

  “Again, I’m obliged,” I mutter as I put a hand on Ripper’s shank. “Thought he’d been eaten, or worse.”

  Folger screws his brow into a question, then chuckles. “No horse eaters in this part of Wyoming, Mister Odell.”

  “Eh. Call me Lin.” I’d have to watch my mouth with him. The world of Godpistols is sometimes hard for common folk to accept without a firsthand encounter.

  “I’m happy just to help,” he replies, pulling a cloth from his hip pocket to rub over the object in his hand. “Sure you ought to be walking on that leg?”

  “Probably not. But your wife―or whatever you call her―knows her craft well enough, it seems.”

  Folger nods with a fool’s grin.

  “I meant to thank her, but she ain’t here.”

  His grin melts into something less foolish. “She’s resting.”

  “So you said before.” I turn to the shack. “I’m sorry. I figured this was your home.”

  “It is. I see you’re confused. Kate is a wonderful, peculiar woman. Brilliant, beautiful, gifted with a singular sense of world-hewn savvy and innocent wonder at the majesty that surrounds this place.” He swirls a hand around his shoulders. “And as is the way with Nature, such gifts are often countered by handicaps. Her condition is rare, but not unheard of in the circles of medicine. I should know; I’ve spent hundreds of dollars searching for any recourse.”

  His gaze wanders to the ground.

  “What’s her condition, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “She has an aversion to sunlight. Causes her endless pain and a nervous paroxysm. Which is why we keep our bed underground.” He nods to the house, and I finally notice the cellar doors. “I brought you here, Mister Odell, and as such I suppose I’ve made it your business to know.”

  Aversion to sunlight. I’m anything but surprised to hear it, though I get the uneasy notion that Folger might, in fact, be completely unaware of his woman’s true nature.

  He continues, “It’s a queer kind of life, I suppose. Certainly one the folk in town use to fuel endless rumor, as if it were necessary.”

  “Gold Vein?”

  He nods.

  “You say the town’s an hour out?”

  “As the crow flies.”

  “Would you know a man by the name of Holcomb?”

  Folger squints at me and nods. “I do. Blacksmith and farrier. Keeps a shop at the end of the street. Your acquaintance?”

  “We have business.”

  He works at his slab of metal with new vigor, his lips clamped tight.

  “What is that thing you’re putting a spit-shine to?”

  A new grin finds his mouth. “This? Brand new plates. Well, new to me, at any rate.” He holds it up, cradling
it like a newborn.

  “Plates?”

  “For my press.” He turns and nods for me to follow. We round the corner to the back of his shelter where I find his cart. It’s a sad, rain-beaten thing. A stained length of canvas lies unfolded along its back. Folger pokes his head over the cart and smiles. “Got these from a fellow passing through Broad Creek. Said he scavenged them from a wagon train that fell prey to natives. Picked over for anything of use. I suppose the Comanches have little use for press plates.”

  “Is that what you do? You a paper man?”

  He shrugs. “As much as I can muster in these parts. I apprenticed in a shop in Baltimore when I was sixteen. Old man pressed books in French translation from Europe. By the time his eyes failed him, he was ready to hand the enterprise over to me. I did what I could with what I was given, but…”

  “The War?”

  He nods gravely. “Maryland was never given a chance to choose sides. Lincoln swallowed us up and made us his personal arm’s length. Every stitch of business went to the army or Washington or one of maybe four men who had friends in both. By the time we buried the president, I had little choice but to find new readers west of the Mississippi.”

  I give the plates in the wagon a polite glance and try to look interested. “That a fact?”

  Folger replaces his plate and reties the canvas.

  “You have a cart,” I offer,” but I don’t see no horses.”

  “Noticed that, have you?”

  “I have. I’m guessing you’re in need of one?”

  He leans against his wagon and peers up at me over shy cheeks. “My animals both took ill over winter. Been sitting on this cargo for months, now. I can make it into town on foot easy enough, but I have a paper to publish and precious few options.”

  I turn back to Ripper and sniffle. “You found my horse up in the hills and figured God sent the damn thing, I’ll bet.”

  “Well, as much as I’ll accept what you call God as a sense of blithe circumstance.”