Revenge and the Wild (5 page)

Lavina’s shifty eyes settled, seeming convinced of the story. After all, Nigel’s word was as good as gold in Rogue City and its surrounding sister towns. The rest of the onlookers believed him as well.

Only Nigel, Alistair, the Wintu, and the old sheriff—who was dead now—knew how she’d really lost her arm. All everyone else knew was that one day Nigel went into the woods with Bena and came back weeks later with an armless white child. A great mystery had been solved. Some looked disappointed that it hadn’t been a more thrilling tale.

“How very generous of you,” Lavina said to Nigel.

Nigel smiled and bowed his head. “If you’ll excuse us,” he said, “I must get Westie home for her treatment.”

When they got back to the mansion, Westie went straight to her room and locked her door. Nigel’s muffled words came from the other side. “Westie, we need to talk about this.”

Ignoring him, she went to her desk, crushing several pieces of graphite between her metal fingers before she finally managed to scribble a note for Bena. She attached it to a telegraph bird and sent it on its way.

Nigel continued. “James and the Fairfields are staying at the Roaming Inn. I told them you weren’t up for guests after your episode at the docks. They were very understanding.” There was a long pause. “Please, Westie. Talk to me.”

She shut him out until he finally gave up. Beneath her bed was a loose floorboard with a groove just big enough to get her fingernail into. Inside the nook was a silver flask. It was empty, of course.
Having booze so close would’ve been far too tempting. Instead she kept it as a reminder of all she could lose. But on that day it reminded her of what she was missing.

She sat against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, twisting it in her hand until the sun went down. Her eyes and cheeks had gone raw from wiping them.

“I need a drink,” she said to the empty room.

She knew if she drank again she’d regret it the next morning—and possibly all the mornings that came after—but she found it difficult to care about that at the moment.

Changing out of her ruined dress, she put on a lace blouse beneath a striped vest, brown knee trousers, white spats over her boots, a leather holster that went over her shoulders and crossed her back to carry her parasol, as well as a leg holster for her knife. She’d learned long ago to pack heavy and never wear a dress in the Tight Ship saloon.

The saloon was anything but the tight ship it claimed to be. The floors, made from the rotted hulls of wrecked steamboats, were stained with blood and vomit. Bullet holes peppered the walls and pointed dirty fingers of light at the tables from the lamps outisde. It was a stinking tomb made worse by the sweat and bad breath that thickened the air during the last week of summer.

Westie took a seat at the table with the fewest gamblers and placed her bet, her gaze sweeping the room. A pack of werewolves in human form sat at the table beside her. They took turns pissing on chairs, marking their territory each time one would get up to buy a
drink. A banshee cancanned on top of the bar, giggling as a drunken goblin sang off-key and an old sprite sitting on a rickety stool looked up her skirt. It was a rowdy bunch of patrons that evening.

Westie held a tumbler of whiskey in her copper hand. The amber pool sparkled in the muted light as she swirled it in the glass. It seemed the pact she’d made with Nigel two years ago to stop drinking was void now that the cannibals she’d been hunting were down the road staying at the inn. She no longer needed Nigel’s training, money, or weapons.

But the thought of disappointing Nigel made her hesitate. She’d given him her word, and that was supposed to mean something. With her elbow on the table, she put her head in her flesh hand and tried talking herself into leaving, thinking about all the horrible—and downright stupid—things she’d done while drinking. Like how she’d earned the nickname Wrong Way Westie, because after a few drinks she couldn’t find her way home.

Only the memories of her drinking days weren’t all bad: the burn, the courage, and eventually feeling nothing at all. She wanted to feel nothing again. History told her that particular feeling was addictive, that she’d need to drink more and more each time to sustain it. Stepping off that wagon was easy, but getting back on was nearly impossible.

She stared into her glass, eyes burning. She’d love nothing more than to throw the tumbler across the room, but the idea of taking her pain home with her, sitting with it the rest of the evening, was too much.

Putting her lips to the glass, she tossed her head back, the whiskey warming her all over like a hug. She winced, shook her head, and stuck her tongue out.

Several hours, and tumblers, later Westie blinked. Hazy light flashed before her as if she were watching the landscape through the spokes of a moving wagon wheel. Two gamblers sat at the table with her. Both were leprechauns. The
T
scars on their wrists were thievery brandings, letting honest folk know they were fugitives.

Another gambler put his coins on the table to join the game. Westie looked up, spit whiskey all over her cards, and nearly fell off her seat when she saw James.

“Are you all right?” he asked as she coughed.

“I’m fine,” she said in a strangled voice, throat feeling like she’d swallowed a wasps’ nest.

He sat beside her with a drink in hand. He had an educated thirst, sipping bourbon from the top shelf. She snuck glances at him as he smiled at the dealer and placed his bet. He didn’t look like a monster—he didn’t look anything like the Fairfields at all. With full lips, a straight nose, and a spattering of light freckles across his cheeks, he was downright handsome. She couldn’t imagine him being a killer like his family.

Westie tried to put the Fairfields out of her head. She’d come to the saloon to forget about them, after all.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” James said to her.

She picked the cards in front of her up off the table and fanned them in her mechanical hand. “I do now.”

Westie tossed her coins onto the pile in the middle of the table.

One of the leprechauns, an old buzzard with jaundiced eyes, watched her. He ran a filthy hand through his yellow beard, his face more hair than flesh with the exception of a knobby potato of a nose and plump red lips.

“What?” Westie said, crushing her face into a glower. “Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?”

He looked back down at his cards, sitting so long in silence that Westie feared he’d gone and died until he piped up, voice loud enough to belong behind a Sunday pulpit.

“Aye,” he said in a charred voice, “too rich for this old bag o’ bones,” and tossed his tobacco-smeared cards facedown on the table.

The other leprechaun was much younger than his companion. He continued to glance between his cards and Westie’s mechanical arm. His sour stench reached across the table and rustled the hot whiskey stewing in her guts. He pointed at her arm.

“How do you move that thing?” he asked.

Westie’s vision twinned. She wasn’t sure which one of him to look at. “Wintu magic.”

Both leprechauns bristled at the mention of the natives.

It wasn’t true. Her machine was just a prosthetic attached to bone and nerves.

“The tart’s trying to distract you, fool. She’s taking all your money,” the old leprechaun said to the young one with amusement in his voice.

Westie looked at James through tricky eyes and a blue curtain of
smoke. “You fixing to play or not?” she said.

He smiled, tossing his offering to the table.

The smoke in the room, the smell of piss, and the drink that had gone to her head made Westie’s eyes water. The pungent sweetness of cigar smoke and the earthy smell of spittoons made her tongue feel thick and brought a salty taste to the back of her throat.

She yawned to keep back the vomit and moved her cards into her flesh hand, balling her mechanical one into a fist. The brass gears turned without sound, and clusters of thick copper wire moved like tendons.

The young leprechaun pulled at his flaking bottom lip, took a deep breath, and eased it out before laying his cards on the table and sliding his chair back in defeat. Westie fumbled with the coins, her clockwork fingers not as agile as the flesh and bone of her left hand.

“Hold on one moment, please,” James said. There was something about the way he talked, a slight drawl lingering behind certain vowels, that made Westie think all the prim talk was just an act. “You haven’t won yet.”

He splayed his cards on the table for her to see: queens.

Westie tossed her sevens onto the table and wiped at her eyes.

“Sevens?” James said with a skewed grin. There was a little white scar across his bottom lip, only visible when he smiled. “That’s brilliant. I was almost ready to fold. You have an excellent poker face.”

“Wait one blamed minute,” the young leprechaun said. He climbed onto his chair but even then couldn’t match James’s sitting
height. He took hold of the starched lapels of the boy’s coat. “You been cheatin’, boy?”

“Certainly not,” James said with a stubborn incline of his chin. “I play at the gentlemen’s club in the city.” He pulled his expensive coat out of the young leprechaun’s grip, smoothing the wrinkled fabric. “I have had adequate practice.”

Westie tapped a copper finger against the table. Another drink and another game were what the doctor ordered. She wasn’t drunk enough to feel nothing yet, and there was more coin to lose.

“Stop your bitching and play the damn game,” she said.

The young leprechaun snarled, revealing crumbling teeth and fiery gum disease beneath his pointed nose.

Westie rolled her eyes.

“Take off that fine coat and show me the cards you been hiding up them sleeves,” the young leprechaun said, tugging at James’s cuff.

“I don’t cheat,” James said, tugging back. “You’re just a shit card player.”

The leprechaun’s nostrils flared. “What did you say to me?”

“You heard me,” James said.

The music stopped as the young leprechaun slid a trapper knife from his boot. A crowd gathered. James froze in place. The dancing banshee shrieked as banshees often did, and ran from the room. Westie was on her feet and around the table before anyone had the chance to notice. The creature thrust his knife toward James’s face, but Westie was faster despite her drunkenness. She reached out, gripping the blade with her machine and twisting it until it
snapped. The leprechaun dropped what was left of his weapon and tried to flee, but she grabbed his wrist and hugged it in her copper grip. Her innards growled and she had to piss something fierce, but she held on. She stared at him a long stretch, noticed the muscles of his face twitch.

“Know what happens to creatures when they kill humans under the protection of Wintu magic?” she asked.

His chin quivered. He shook his head.

“First the skin bubbles and melts like hot wax. There’s a whole lot of screaming, a lot of pain.” She waved that part off. “Though there are laws against it, humans can kill creatures at their discretion. We’re not affected by magic, you see?”

The young leprechaun soaked up the bleakness of his predicament, and his eyes bloated with fear. He let out a whimper as she tightened her grip.

“I weren’t gonna kill him. I was just gonna cut up his pretty face is all,” the young leprechaun said.

Westie thought about breaking his arm to show it was no idle threat, but she had seen more than her share of brutality while she was out on the road. She dropped his arm and plucked a silver coin from James’s winnings.

“Of all the bets you make this evening, your best would be to walk away,” she said.

The leprechaun massaged the raw skin of his wrist and put his scowl on exhibit as he watched her roll the coin over the knuckles of her mechanical fingers. To drive home her point, she pinched the
silver coin between her thumb and finger and folded the piece into fourths as though it were a pocket square. The leprechaun’s flush started at his neck and rose to fill his face.

Westie glanced between the old and young leprechauns, then placed the folded coin on the table. “I reckon you fellows ought to be on your way,” she said.

They were gone before she’d finished speaking.

Now, about that drink,
she thought. She stumbled toward the bar and found an empty stool.

James followed behind her. “I don’t think the creatures around here like me much.”

She lifted a brow. “You don’t say.”

Westie let loose the belch that’d been stalking up her throat and reached down the front of her sweaty shirt to scratch an itch between her breasts.

“Thank you for saving me. Again,” James said.

“Maybe you ought to be the one wearing skirts.”

James grinned. If her jab bothered him at all, he didn’t show it.

“Another red-eye,” she called out.

Heck, the barkeep, walked over to her with his strange, bouncing gait. He was an abarimon, a rare creature to see in Rogue City, as they were typically found high in the mountains. They were difficult to distinguish from humans except for their faun-like legs and their jaguar speed. He poured thick black liquid into a cup and placed it in front of her.

She glared into the cup. “What’s this?”

He hooked his thumbs around his suspenders. “Coffee.”

“I didn’t order coffee. I want whiskey.”

There was a pulse behind her eyes. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Coffee wasn’t strong enough to stop her headache, and it sure as hell wouldn’t wash away her memories.

Heck planted his feet. Sweat dotted his bald pate. He looked afraid, like most did when Westie was in a mood. If she wanted her way, she could get it with one squeeze of her machine, and she had a reputation around Rogue City for being all horns and stingers.

“Look, Westie,” he said with the demeanor of someone skilled in the art of drunken negotiation, “Nigel does my daughter a great service with his medical inventions. He won’t be pleased to find I served you in the state you’re in.”

The reason for Heck’s descent from Shasta Mountain was to seek Nigel’s help for his ailing daughter when she could no longer breathe the thin air.

“Nigel and his damn inventions,” Westie mumbled, knocking her copper fist on the bar three times, cracking the oak, and spilling her coffee. “I don’t care. I want another drink.”

“Sorry,” he said before he walked away.

She let out a growl that sent the patrons next to her scuttling to the other side of the bar. When she stood from the bar stool, her eyes began to float and the wood planks of the saloon floor rose up in front of her. James reached out, catching her before she fell. His arms were strong for a skinny aristocrat.

“Let me help you home,” he said. Their faces were close enough
for her to smell alcohol on his breath and notice that his eyes were a pale shade of green.