Silver threads from the lacework shot out of the cage and sank like roots seeking Jeb’s lifeblood, digging deeper and deeper until they caught hold in his heart.
Jeb stiffened and no longer struggled against the rope.
“Now, Mr. Shunt.”
Mr. Shunt fitted the wrought iron key into the neatly hidden slot in the silver cage. Then he turned the key counterclockwise: once, twice, thrice. The bloody dragonfly’s wings slowed and slowed with each turn. Until it was still.
And then Jeb Lindson’s heart beat no more.
Mae clutched the soil beneath her hands. Moonlight poured through the window, tarnishing her world with pewter light. She held her breath as Jeb’s heartbeat went silent beneath her palms. “No,” she whispered, “don’t leave me.”
The cold scent of winter, of death, drifted up from the soil and filled her with a bone chill. He was gone. Her husband, her lover, her soul.
Mae pulled her hands out of the basket. She wrapped her arms about herself and rocked and rocked until the fire died and the hearthstones beneath her had gone cold. She did not cry. Tears were for sorrow. And sorrow would wait until anger had its due.
In the deepest dark of the night, long before the dawn could grant light’s mercy to the world again, Mae placed her fingers into the ashes of the fire and sang a much different song, wove a much darker spell, and vowed revenge upon her husband’s killer.
CHAPTER THREE
Cedar woke facedown on the floor, his left arm curled up and numb beneath him. Half-remembered visions sifted like sand through his mind. Though he tried to hold tight to them, only fragments of the night remained, wrapped in old echoes of anger, fear, and the moon-crazy hunger for blood.
He took a deep breath and pushed all that aside, wanting to forget, for another day, the curse that plagued him, wanting with a sure desperation to be nothing more than just a man. But all the wanting in the world couldn’t erase the beast within him. And every day he refused to slake the hunger, it took more to deny the beast’s needs.
He rolled to one hip to get the blood flowing back into his arm, then lay all the way onto his back. He groaned at the stiffness in his muscles and joints. The chain next to him shifted and rattled against floorboards—a comforting sound. He dragged his right hand alongside his neck, checking to see if the collar was still there. Loose, but whole. He had not run free in the night.
Cedar blew out the breath he’d been holding and stared up at the ceiling. The light of dawn slipped the edge of the shutter, a single shaft of yellow burning down upon the floor like a gold coin.
But no coin could be more precious than the humanity morning provided—stiffness, aches, and all.
Clearheaded and hungry, Cedar savored the sense of revival the change always left upon him. He felt like he’d just plunged naked into a river in the brace of winter and come out the other side into summer’s heat.
Except this time he’d also come out with a numb arm, an empty belly, and a headache banging away like a steam hammer.
Food. Water. Clothes. In that order. He knew the aches and pains would pass quickly once his most basic needs were tended. It was one of the only gifts to his curse—he healed rapidly during the full moon.
He should be healed and whole in just a few hours. And in that time, he’d go out to the Gregors’, and talk to them about their missing boy. He planned to find little Elbert. He planned to bring him home if he was still alive.
Cedar sat and hissed at the pain that clamored through his skull and arm. He used his right hand to pull his left up on his thigh, and something slipped from his left hand and clattered to the floor. Something metal. A cup?
Whatever it was, it didn’t move, and Cedar wasn’t aiming to move either, until the grip of his headache eased off some.
A trickle of sweat licked down the side of his temple and jaw, then hit his thigh. He stared at the red splatter mark. That wasn’t sweat. It was blood.
Cedar felt along the side of his eye and up to a lump and cut at the edge of his hairline. He sighed. Bleeding and hungry had to be two of his least favorite ways to start a day.
The cut and lump weren’t more than he’d had before, but would need cleaning and a cloth to stanch the flow.
The headache settled a bit, so Cedar got to his feet. Like he’d thought, the stiffness was already fading, but his arm had taken to tingling with a toothy vengeance. He walked across the room to his trunk and worked the lock, trying not to move his left arm much. He lifted the lid, dug out a handkerchief, and dabbed at the cut. The blood was already slowing.
Good. He did not much care for doctors, nor to aiming their attention at his pain.
As he turned toward the bucket hanging from the ceiling, a flash of metal on the floor caught his eye.
His brother’s watch. That must have been what slipped out of his hand.
What had he been doing with that in the night? He paced over and picked it up. Still warm, the watch didn’t seem to have suffered. Not a scratch upon it.
Cedar rubbed his thumb over it, smearing blood across the crystal face. He swore softly. The last thing he wanted to see on the watch was blood.
Two steps toward the hearth and he stopped cold.
The watch was ticking.
He tipped it toward dawn’s light. The second hand flicked from where it’d come to rest three seconds away from the twelve, and began its round. The watch ticked like a heartbeat. A cold chill washed over him. The Madder brothers had said it couldn’t be fixed. Yet as soon as his blood touched it, the watch repaired.
Or maybe sometime in the night he had dropped it, thrown it, done something to shake the gears and springs free.
That was the logical answer.
But he knew it was not the true answer. Something broken didn’t just fix on its own. Something had set the second hand tracking smooth and quick as a telegrapher’s finger, but he did not know what that thing was. He rubbed the handkerchief over the watch, clearing it of blood. And still the watch continued to tick.
Far off, the steam whistle blew. An engine grunted like an old drum beating, slow, heavy huffs that never seemed to come nearer. The railmen were working, feeding great gobs of wood and coal into the matics that winched and lifted and dropped: giant, ingenious beasts ripping the land apart and stitching it back together with iron and steel.
The Madder brothers were right. There was a change coming. Coming on that rail.
Cedar set the watch on the mantel, where it should have stayed in the night, and took up his coffee cup instead. He hefted the bucket of water off the ceiling hook, drank until his stomach stopped cramping, and did his best not to think too hard about the rail. That wasn’t his business. And he’d long ago learned it best to keep his mind on his own affairs.
He crouched in front of the cold fire and ate the beans and cornmeal and venison with the wooden spoon he’d left in the pot. It wasn’t the food he hungered for—meat and marrow and blood—but it was plentiful and filling.
Feeling more civilized, he searched the one-room cabin for his clothes and found them, folded upon his bunk against the wall.
Folded.
He shook his head. The change from man to beast was never clear to him, and things like this woke a powerful curiosity within him. Did he linger in some sort of half state, where his hands were still those of a man, or did the beast take him on full? Did he change back into a man but have no conscious thought and sleepwalk his way through half a night? When, exactly, did he find the time to fold his clothing?
He didn’t know, and there was no one to tell him. Staring in the mirror had brought him few clues.
The first change, four years ago, still held strongest in his mind’s eye. He remembered the fear, remembered the painfully satisfying stretch of his body and bones reshaping into lupine form. Remembered looking over at his brother, who, even in wolf form, still carried his own scent and copper brown eyes.