“We will, or we won’t last the night.” Cedar spaced his words like hammer strikes. “The mules are near dead. The horse too. We won’t last long enough to dig our own graves. We stop in Des Moines.”
“I say otherwise,” Alun yelled. “And so do my brothers.”
As if called to battle, the other two Madder brothers strode through the snow alongside the stopped wagon, both carrying geared-up shotguns against palms and shoulders.
Near freezing to death did a lot of odd things to a man’s sense of reason. It was said some went raving mad, tore their clothes off, and ran through the snow naked while their blood turned to ice.
Maybe the cold had frozen up the Madder brothers’ brains.
Maybe Cedar didn’t give a damn about that.
“Do not stand against me, Alun Madder, and think you will win,” Cedar said. “And do not think I will stand here and waste time fighting you instead of finding our path to salvation. If you have some device or matic you’ve bolted together that can change the weather or give us speed, I’ll wait for you to bring it out here; otherwise I am going to find that city.”
“A city of devils,” Alun said.
“Good. I expect they’ll keep the fires warm.”
Alun scowled and returned to puffing smoke out of his pipe.
That was answer enough.
Cedar turned his back on the brothers and their guns and pushed through the snow down the next slope.
They could shoot him in the back for all he cared. He wasn’t going to stand still in the middle of a blizzard and argue his heartbeats away.
After what seemed a long time, the mules let out hoarse brays, and the crunching hiss of the wagon’s sled runners scraped through the snow behind him again.
Good. They were still following him.
The spell of warmth around him gradually wore away and the cold sank through skin down to bone. Hands, face, and feet went numb, but he pushed on.
It seemed all the world was ice and death. There was nothing but putting each foot down, one after another, breaking through to solid ground for the horse behind him, who left a path for the mules and wagon.
Cedar lost all sense of time to that rhythm, and soon the Pawnee curse showed him other things riding that storm. The Strange were thick in that wind. Ghostly fingers and teeth clawed at him, catching at his coat, his feet, his hat.
Angry. But not solid enough to draw blood.
He could kill the Strange, even in this ghostly form they took. It would make the world a much better place without them and eventually, if he killed them all, he might again regain a normal man’s life. The curse he carried forced him to hunt and kill the Strange. All the Strange in the world. He suspected he’d breathe out his last days before that was done, and still not be free of the curse.
But he was too exhausted to fight them today. He ignored these Strange that plucked and wailed and bit. Life was all that mattered now. And life, for all of them, meant moving west.
Wil, beside him, growled. Cedar looked down, surprised to see his brother out of the wagon.
Wil’s ears were flattened against his wide, gray-and-black skull, his copper eyes the only flecks of color in the snow. Wil saw the Strange too, likely smelled the moldy green of them as Cedar smelled them, likely saw the flash of eyes and heard the trebled laughter warbling through the air.
The Strange couldn’t do serious harm unless they took on a shape, a form, a body. As Cedar had learned firsthand, dead people were the clothing preferred by the Strange, though there were times they could inhabit other bits and matics.
He wasn’t going to give them any corpses to waltz about.
“Don’t,” Cedar said to Wil. “There is no time to chase them. They’ll lead you to your death.”
Wil growled but stayed close, snapping at the swarm of Strange and holding them off as daylight drained away and the shadows deepened.
“Mr. Hunt,” Miss Dupuis called out. “Please, Mr. Hunt. You must stop!”
The heat in her tone finally soaked through the cold that gripped his thoughts. Cedar stopped. Wil’s teeth were dug in the cuff of his coat, and he was pulling backward, whining.
For good reason. They had reached the bank of the river. If Cedar had walked even three steps more, he’d have slid down the steep embankment and landed in the water.
The Madders behind him were talking—no, they were arguing, loudly—about ice and rivers and speed and something else Cedar couldn’t hear except for the smattering of curses and the phrase “that devil,” followed by words that must have been their mother language of Welsh.
“We’ve found the river,” Miss Dupuis said.
Cedar lifted his free hand and rubbed his stinging eyes. His vision was blurred by the snow, his hand lifeless in the heavy gloves.
The river was not flowing. It was a frozen ribbon that wound off to the northwest, black and dusty as an old chalkboard.
“Good,” he croaked, his mouth and throat on fire. He needed water, he needed rest; but there was no time for either with night fast approaching. “Town won’t be far.”
“We’re going to step back, Mr. Hunt,” Mae Lindson said, “so the Madders can come through.”
Cedar jerked at her voice. When had she climbed out of the wagon?
“Cedar,” Mae said again, her tone stern, as if trying to pitch her voice over a fever snuffing out his senses. He supposed she wasn’t much wrong to do so.
Along with the cold confusing his head, his ears were filled with the eerie voices of the Strange, calling him. Pleading for him to follow.
“Just take a few steps to the side,” Mae said. “The Madders are bringing the wagon down now.” She pulled on him and he followed her guidance, stopping with her near a leafless tree while Wil paced a tight circle around both of them.
“You’ve been walking for hours,” Mae said. “And you are nearly frozen.” Her hand was firmly in his, holding tight to him, even through her thick mittens and his gloves.
The magic she had placed on his skin seemed to warm again at her nearness. Or it could just be his natural response to her. His want for her.
“You need food, you need water, and you need sleep,” she went on, as if he were not really listening.
“We’re all tired, Mae,” he said, gazing down at her.
She looked up at the sound of his voice, a smile playing across her pale lips.
Her yellow hair was tucked up beneath a wide-brimmed blue wool hat. She wore a thick red scarf buttoned up under her leather coat, and red mittens she had knit to match the scarf. Her face was heart-shaped, her cheeks rosy and softly arced.
Life had left the echo of hardship across her features, a tightening at the corners of her eyes, a furrowed line across her forehead when she frowned, but here, bundled against the cold, with the wind plucking pink from her cheeks, and her wide brown eyes for him alone, she was a beauty who caught at his heart like no other.
“Yes, we are all tired,” she said, “but only one of us just tried to walk off a cliff.”
He gave her back the smile and felt his lip crack and flash hot with blood.
“Here, now.” She reached into her pocket and produced a handkerchief. She dabbed it to his lip, though the blood there had already frozen.
“You need water, Mr. Hunt, rest, and food,” she repeated. “Maybe we could build a fire—”
Her words were smothered by the earsplitting racket of limbs cracking and brush breaking.
Alun and Cadoc Madder stood at either side of the mules that were still hitched to the wagon. They were leading the two reluctant animals down toward a more gentle incline than the one Cedar had been about to step off of.
Seemed the Madder brothers couldn’t go a day without doing something to “improve” the wagon. Cedar secretly, and not so secretly, suspected it was just the deviser madness in them needing something to meddle with.