Jack’s spurs made a discordant jangle as he headed down the stairs. He strode through the kitchen, where Grinnwald was still bleating at Li Ang, who probably didn’t give two shits in a rabbit hole about whatever the fat woman would say. He touched his hat to the Chinoise girl and vanished out the back door, into the howling wind.
Chapter 24
Her fingers trembled. The outer envelope was from the firm of Hixton and Bowles, the solicitors she had engaged for all business pertaining to her identity as Miss Catherine Barrowe, neophyte schoolmistress. Her father’s solicitor, Hiram Chillings, would have forwarded this letter to the Hixton office to be sent to Cat. Which meant it would have traveled from Damnation to Boston and back again.
It was worn and stained from the journey, but Robbie’s familiar hand was on the outside of the folded inner envelope, and the charmseal tingled as she broke it. It had not been opened, and she had a flash of Robbie biting his lower lip as he sealed the outer sheet in his own peculiar manner.
Dearest Kittycat, it began, and she had to blink, furiously. “Oh, Robbie.” The locket burned against her chest, so she drew it out and held it with her fingertips, spreading the letter’s pages as much as she dared on the tumbled bedding.
Two knocks on her bedroom door. “Catherine?”
Dear God. She froze, staring at the unlocked barrier between herself and Jack Gabriel. Would he turn the knob and seek to come in? Well, should she expect any less of him?
He spoke further, but she looked away at the shuttered window, filling her head with the moan of the poison wind. When his footsteps retreated, she returned her attention to the letter.
What I have to set down will no doubt shock and frighten you, but it will also explain why I do not, under any circumstances, want you anywhere near this deadly blight masquerading as a town. I have limited time, but what I do have I will spend here in this boardinghouse, scribbling to you. Dearest Cat, best little sister, I will not be coming home. I am sorry for it—I know how Mother and Father will vex you for news of me. But dear God, Cat, do not wish for my return. The way is closed for me.
I thought I was so lucky, finding a claim. It was a black crack in the hillside, and a lightning-struck devilpine showed me the way, due west of Damnation and in those cursed hills. No wonder they call this town what they do. I should have listened.
There was something there, Cat. Something in the dark. Then, two scored-through lines, unreadable—the nib had scraped the paper cruelly.
Was the bed shaking? No, it was the sobs wracking her frame. She read through her tears, her nose filling, doing her best to weep silently. Halfway through the letter she rose and tacked drunkenly across the floor to her bedroom door, throwing the lock and retreating to the window, where dawnlight was strengthening as the wind’s moaning receded.
The thing in the claim is terrible, and it has a hold on me. It lives inside me, filling my head with whispers and already I have done such things—but that’s not fit for you to hear, Kittycat. I shall soon be dead, but not before I have rid the world of one more evil. It will take all the strength I have, but what will give me the will to strike is that you shall be reading this in the future, and you’ll know you can be proud of me. At long last.
It’s just a damn shame I had to come all the way out here to become such a beast as a brother you do not have to be shamed of.
My charing is beginning to sear the flesh underneath. It’s only a matter of time before that cursed sheriff notices, or the damn chartermage. The chartershadow here—don’t faint, I am bargaining with the Devil to fight the Devil, you remember that old game—will at least take payment for a weapon to fight the thing. I traded my locket since he wouldn’t take the gold from the claim. Wise of him, perhaps. Mother would just die, wouldn’t she. Avert!
In any event, Cat, keep this to yourself. Let Mother and Father think me the wastrel and the fool. I can do what I must bravely, because I know you will know. You were always better at pleasing them than I, and this is my punishment. I should have listened when you begged me not to go. I wish to God I had.
I love you, Kittycat. You are best and brightest. Polish your Practicality, and do well. I regret I will not ever see your dear face again.
It was signed with a simple scrawled R.
Cat read it once more, and once again. The front door slammed—perhaps Mrs. Grinnwald, perhaps Mr. Gabriel. Who knew? She rested her forehead on the windowsill, white-painted wood cool and slick against her fevered skin.
Oh, Robbie.
She cried as she had not since her mother’s last breath had rattled from a wasted body. Father had succumbed the day before, and in her bitterness Cat had railed at her brother. For it was Robbie’s leaving that weakened Mother so badly, and Father…he had not spoken of it, but he was not right without his son. For all Robbie did not please them, he was the heir to the Barrowe-Browne name.
They had thought he would return. So had Cat…but the silence had grown so unendurably long. Why had this letter not reached her before?
She was somehow at her bed again, her face pressed into the linens still bearing the frowsty smell of shared breath—Li Ang’s, and Cat’s, and little Jonathan’s. “Robbie,” she keened into the muffling, mothering darkness, and there was no answer bus n smelt the poison wind slowly dying…
…and a distant rumble of thunder in the hills.
Chapter 25
“There you are!” Russ Overton looked like hell, his hat sideways and his jacket askew, stubbled and red-eyed. It wasn’t a surprise—Gabe looked like hell too, he supposed. “God damn you, Gabe, where the hell have you been?”
Heaving bodies over the circuit-line and destroying a woman’s faith in me. “Around.” He lifted the glass, took another belt. Coy eyed him speculatively, but wisely kept himself over at the other end of the Star’s bar, polishing some glasses with what passed for a white cloth in Damnation. “Time to ride the circuit, Russ.” And so it was. Since the simoun had died, and the bruise-dark clouds over the hills had loomed closer. There was thunder, and the breathless sense of a storm approaching.
Approaching? No, it’s damn well here.
“You’re drunk.” Russ halted in amazement, scooping his hat from his head and running his fingers through his waxed hair. It didn’t help—the sharp tight curl in it was coming back something fierce. He was pale under his coloring, too, and his bloodshot gaze was a little too stare-wide for Gabe’s comfort.
“Not yet.” The Star was a dim cave this early, the dance floor empty and the upper balcony full of shadows. And Gabe had the wonderful, marvelous thought that perhaps he could well get drunk. “Not enough, anyway.”
Everyone else in the building was asleep, including the fat, snoring Vance Huggins in the corner, who used the Star as his philosophical office every night. As long as Paul took a cut, he was welcome to, and Tils held his peace for once.
“Gabe, we have a problem. A huge problem.” Russ stepped close, grabbed Gabe’s shoulder. “It’s the marm. The goddamn schoolmarm.”
Jack Gabriel set the glass down very carefully, and Coy, perhaps sensing a feral current in the charged air, ducked through the low door behind the bar, into the cellar’s darkness. A spark of mancy popped and fizzled to give him lee to see by, a charter-rune sketched on a small glass disc he kept chained like a pocketwatch, so he didn’t have to mumble a catchphrase to light it. His ruined mouth wouldn’t shape many phrases, that was for damn sure.