The Sioux’s face was sad. “Believe me, old chap, I dearly wish we could roll back the clock to the way things were. You’d like to roll it back a week. My people would like to roll it back four hundred years.”
“Ouch,” said Grey, wincing as if actually punched. Looks Away spread his hands.
“However the world is the world, old fellow,” he said. “If it’s moved on, then surely we need to dig in with our spurs and ride to catch up.”
“A cowboy metaphor,” said Grey. “Nice.”
“Apt, though.”
“I guess.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots. They had been brushed, but there were lingering stains on them. The blood of monsters. He paused, holding the second boot between his fingers and letting it dangle. “I should tell Jenny about her dad.”
“It’ll hurt her. He seems to have embraced his new nature. Maybe all that was Lucky Bob is gone now and only the manitou remains. Either way…”
“I know, but it doesn’t feel right to lie to her. Even lying by omission.”
Looks Away cocked his head and appraised Grey. “You’re a strange man, my friend.”
Grey said nothing.
“Down in the cavern, Veronica said some things…”
“I know,” said Grey as he pulled on the second boot. He stood up. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
But Looks Away shifted to stand in front of the door. “I rather think the time is past to be coy. If we have to accept that we’re in a world where demons and monsters are a fact of life, then I suppose we need to be open to other possibilities. Prophecies come to mind. Mircalla and then Veronica. What is it exactly that they are talking about?”
Grey sighed and turned away. “It’s nothing. Ghost stories and bullshit. Let it go.”
“Really?” Looks Away said, stretching the word out. “A vampire-witch and a ghost take the time to make cryptic pronouncements about you and I’m supposed to dismiss it out of hand? Sorry, old chap, but we’ve come too far together for that to be possible anymore. The woman I loved was killed. The woman you seem to be falling for was very nearly killed. We’re preparing to go into battle against a necromancer who can raise the dead and arm them with the world’s most advanced weaponry. You — or perhaps your ‘destiny’—seems to be tied to all this. So, no, I will not let it go. Bollocks to that. There’s not one chance in ten trillion that I am going to let it go.”
“We don’t have time for—.”
The Sioux scientist leaned back against the closed door. “Make time.”
Grey sighed and sat back down. For nearly a full minute he said nothing, but instead stared mutely at his callused hands, watching his fingers knot and unknot. Finally he sighed out the ball of tension that had formed in his chest.
“It was the Battle of Ballard Creek. No, don’t worry, you won’t have heard of it. No one has. It wasn’t what historians would call an ‘important’ battle. It wasn’t even an important massacre.” Grey shook his head. “Except to me. It’s real damn important to me. You see I was leading a platoon of Union soldiers on a reconnaissance mission in Mississippi. We’d had intelligence reports that Confederate troops were building some kind of super cannon. It was supposed to be able to fire shells twice as far as anything we had in the north. The brass in Washington were afraid that it was something that could change the course of the war. My platoon was one of a dozen that were sent to find the testing ground.”
“Ah. I heard those rumors, too. It was a lie, as I understand.”
“Sure. It was a deliberate leak. The CSA intelligence division leaked a dozen different versions of the story and then monitored who reacted and how. It was all a pretty sophisticated plan to identify double-agents in their own network and to ferret out our spies. They put a lot of scalps on the walls with it, too.”
“So, what was Ballard Creek?”
“We were following one of the leads, but because of some local flooding we took a different route than the one I’d been ordered to take. That meant that we slipped past the ambush that was waiting for us without ever knowing we were stepping out of the trap.”
“Lucky break,” said Looks Away.
Grey gave a sour grunt. “That’s what we all thought. The Rebs knew they’d missed one of the teams — my team — and they put a lot of men in the field looking for us. My commanding officer managed to get word to me and told me to get my platoon the hell out of there. Easier said than done, though. The wood and swamps were alive with search parties. So, I decided it was safer to go to ground. By that point in the war there were a lot of abandoned and burned out farms. We found one way back in the bayous and we moved in. We were very careful to hide all traces. Wiped out our footprints with leafy branches, ate everything cold so there was no cooking smoke. We did it all the right way. We hunkered down and waited. And waited. I sent scouts out every couple of days. Two came back, two didn’t. When our supplies started getting low, I decided to see if I could finagle something. We were all in civilian clothes, and I can do as good a New Orleans’ accent as you’d want to hear. So I went riding to a local town to buy some supplies. My men had enough food for two weeks, and I hoped to be back with a wagonload of supplies in ten days at the most. I wore an eye patch and kept one arm in a sling, and I was able to spin a good story about being with one of the CSA divisions that had been nearly wiped out a few years back. It was convincing enough because there are a lot of wounded soldiers around and I fit right in.” He paused and sighed. “And that’s when things started going too well. I met a widow woman, a beautiful young lady who was running the general store in a small town near Ballard Creek. I had to play my role, so I acted the part of a battle-weary officer. All courtly manners. Understand, I needed to win her confidence because I wanted to buy supplies in bulk, and I couldn’t risk too many questions. She was such a lovely person. Gentle and beautiful and sad. Her father and two brothers had been killed in battle. Her husband had died at Manassas, and their only child, a little girl, had died of a fever. She was all alone in the world. Her name was Annabelle Sampson.”
“Ah. What happened?”
“Ah, what do you think happened? We became close. We, um…”
“You fell in love with her?”
Grey sighed. “I don’t think I realized until then how lonely I was. There had been girls here and there, but there was never time for anything that mattered. Nothing deep. And she’d lost so much…”
“I’m not judging you, Grey. I can’t think of a more perfect formula for love. Loss and hurt, loneliness and an uncertain future. That’s fertile ground for passion.”
“It went deeper than passion, Looks. I loved her. Really. Like they talk about in books. You can mock but it was real.”
Looks Away’s eyes were filled with ghosts. “I will never mock love, my friend. I may be many things, but a fool is not one of them.”
“Thanks for that,” said Grey.
“How did you lose her?”
“I lost her because I’m a goddamn fool,” admitted Grey. “I stayed in town for every one of the ten days that I told my men it would take me to get the supplies and get back. On the eighth night with Annabelle I told her the truth. By then we were already living together. It was like that. Fast for both of us, but right for both of us.”
Looks Away nodded.
“I expected her to be shocked, but she confessed that she knew it almost from the start. She said that there were little things. That was pretty damned disturbing, as you might expect, but Annabelle said that she was sure no one else knew or even suspected. Even so, it brought me to my senses. I realized that I was wasting time in that town when I had hungry soldiers waiting on me to get back. So that night we packed up her wagon and I set out at first light. I promised to come back for her as soon as I’d gotten my men out of the area. I swore to her that I’d be back.”