Samuel, sweet, stupid Samuel, blood on his shirt, holding your hand, calling your name frantically, and the dry laughter of the preacher man, an offer you wouldn’t refuse even if you could. An offer of power, an image of the dead working the mines across the country, tireless, without pay, without complaint. And of you, watching the numbers tick upward in the newspapers. You laugh, too, with your last breath, and seal the preacher man’s deal with a trembling finger smeared in your own blood
and you stagger back.
“You can do it,” says William. Pale, immaculate, cold to the touch. He smells of expensive cologne, but under that, a sickly, fetid stink.
“So can you,” you say. He stills. “Can’t you.”
He blinks once, his eyes clear and colorless, and flicks a finger at the skeletons. They collapse in a rainfall of bones. “Good job, Ellis,” he says in a voice that carries to his men. But he’s not looking at them.
“Why did you need me?”
“This goddamn desert,” he says in a voice that is only for you. At the same time, he reaches for you, and you shrink back. “In the past few months, we’ve sent so many men to scout out the mines in this area. Not a single one who traveled south of the Rio de Lino and west of the Rio Grande made it back, even the ones who could bid the dead do their bidding. Devoured by this goddamn desert, torn apart by the coyotes, sent wandering in circles until they collapsed and died. But when I heard about your father’s death, and about you, it all clicked into place.”
The preacher man’s words echo back. He was mine before he came to seek his fortune out west, with all the rest of his brothers. Before he turned his back on me for my sister.
William smiles. “She has no love for men like us. But she wouldn’t dare hurt you. Not her own child, and his.” He hauls you to your feet, his grip tight on your arm. “Come, Ellis. Walk with me, and stay close. Let’s get a good look at the mine.” He gestures, and the rest of the men approach cautiously, treading among the fallen bodies, leaving a wide berth around you and occasionally making the sign against evil as they pass.
This man doesn’t care about the town. None of his pretty words to Madam Lettie about recompense, or about reopening the mine to reestablish commerce, matter. The town is just a field of bodies to use as he pleases. And he will use you, too. As a shield against your mother’s wrath, as a hostage to make the desert behave.
But his power is different from yours. He has only the preacher man’s blessing, and you have something else.
The desert change roars through you like a tide, a demand you can’t ignore to undo your skin and let your real self run free. This time, you embrace it.
COME, demands the desert, and you shatter, finally, fully.
One of the other men is the first to see what is happening to you, your skin peeling off in long slabs, shedding your human form for something uncontainable, something lightning-legged, bent-backed, and wild. All of the desert’s power you’d pulled into yourself courses through your limbs, back into the ground, silvered lines darting across the baked earth. All around, the piles of bones tremble and quiver, then rise slowly into the air, taking their forms once again.
“Monster!” he screams. Damn you, for there is only relief in your heart that he did not call you witch.
The desert rides you, and you are no longer your own. The winds kick up, blowing sheets of dust into the men’s faces. If your mother has her way, and you yours, you will bury them all here, deep in the mine, with the rest of the humans.
What about Marisol? a small part of you asks, but it is drowned out by your mother’s and your combined fury.
William has stumbled away, his hands out, and you can feel him fighting you for control of the dead. He’s much stronger than you, much more experienced. But your mother pours more power into you, and you fight back. The sandstorm grows, blinding the company men who are fumbling for their guns.
The desert’s dead are approaching when Samuel steps between you and William, his pistol leveled at you. There is fear, but his arm is steady.
“Samuel, no!” roars William, but there is no hesitation in Samuel’s eyes.
His pistol cracks, and you think of Marisol in that split second before impact, and then there is nothing.
The clack-clack clack of bones all around you. The preacher man’s voice is creaky, parched as he sings, his hands brushing over your stone-still chest. Another, familiar voice joins his, a woman’s voice like the whisper of scorpions’ legs through the bone fields, a gentle tickle laced with the promise of poison. The ground hums under you with your mother’s grief.
Your eyes are open, the evening sun glaring into your eyes, but you can’t blink. Every muscle is frozen in place, and it takes great effort to open your mouth.
“Am I dead?” you croak. You can’t feel your chest moving.
“Very,” says the preacher man. “But that’s nothing new.”
Slowly, you force your fingers to clench. “How long have I been… gone?”
“A few days. They tried to burn your body, but I wasn’t about to lose another like that.” His mouth twists into a parody of a smile. “When the flame wouldn’t take, they left you to the vultures.”
Fools, says your mother. The desert herself, the heat and mercilessness, wrapped like a vice around your heart. You wonder if you’ve been dead since the first night she called you into herself, that first time you gave up your body to become something more. As if I would let my creatures hurt you. Would that you could say the same of yours, brother.
The preacher man winces. It looks strange, with his empty sockets. “I indulged that boy too much. I thought I could keep him east, out of your territory. But his ambition overgrew his sense—”
He murdered my son!
“This child is my kin, too,” hisses the preacher man. “Don’t deny me that, sister. You’re the one who let them flee back to their town, with not a scratch on them to pay for their misdeeds.”
I would have those who harmed him pay accordingly.
“So would I. That may be the first matter we’ve agreed on in centuries.”
“Whose side are you on?” you say. The preacher man cocks his head.
“Mine. And yours, though you may not believe it.” He offers you his hand, and you take it, your body moving slowly. “I always was too fond of your father,” he says in a low voice. “And your mother never let me forget it.”
You wonder whose power is making this possible, his or your mother’s. You are hyperaware of the dead things around you, their potential energy, just as you are of all the creatures skittering and prowling the earth, and the ancient hum of the ground.
The preacher man leads you to the entrance of the mine, where boulders and broken beams cluster tight, blocking the way. “What do you see?”
You place your hands on the boulders and close your eyes, focusing. The lines of your mother’s power spread like a net through your mind’s eye. And far beneath, pockets of the dead, of fallen men.