A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

Yancey had to moisten her lips. “A far larger glamour,” she suggested. “Same’s when you checked in, but bolder: hide in plain sight. Come as guests, then leave with the rest.”

Chess scoffed. “Or get found out and swung, whichever comes first.”

“Well, that’s where the hexation comes in, I’d guess.” Yancey stepped away from the wall, smoothing her blouse down, and the way the fabric tightened around her put a sudden dryness in Morrow’s mouth bid fair to confirm that Chess’s bed-play, however enjoyable, hadn’t entirely spoiled his original tastes. “Accounts of the Reverend’s exploits suggest he was capable of remaking whole towns, if he needed to—am I right in guessing you’re more than his match, in that direction?”

“I don’t recall him doin’ anything like that, and I was there. But yeah, for myself, I could probably cast up something damn enduring, long as it was simple.”

“All right, then . . . how ’bout you magnify the headiness of the spirits being served out—get ’em fuddled so extra-quick, extra-potent, the Good Lord himself could ride through on a white horse and they wouldn’t notice.” Her mouth slanted slightly, cutting a wry angle which came surprisingly close to some of Chess’s own favourite expressions. “I can assure you, you won’t have to exert yourself too strongly in order to end up with a full day’s head start, at the very least.”

“So your plan is for me to do all the work, in other words.”

“Why, yes, given you’re by far the more powerful, ’tween the two of us. Would that be too much of a problem?”

Sweet, tart, final: Chess goggled a half-instant at her, then couldn’t quite stop himself from exploding in more laughter—of a far more genuine variety, this time ’round.

“Oh, you really are somethin’,” he allowed, finally. “Must be some damn good friend of yours this lawman’s marrying, I suppose, for you to go to so much trouble keeping her bride-day blood-free.”

She already had one hand on the doorknob, but that turned her back, nodding. “Oh yes,” she said, “the very best imaginable. By which I mean myself.”

With no hint of preparation, it was like Morrow’s slap had been returned to him six-fold, and again, she seemed to know it.

For she paused, looking up from under her lashes—those clean grey eyes so deceptively mild, for the clockwork mind he now sensed lurked behind ’em—to say, lightly enough, “For all I’m the only one who knows what we’ll owe you, I’ll make sure my kin and kin-to-be welcome you kindly, Mister Morrow . . . Mister Pargeter. And I’ll expect to see you in the throng, tomorrow.”

She nodded over at Chess, who returned the favour, if begrudgingly. As though impressed, in the end, by his own inability to scare her—or her inability to be scared, even under such trying circumstances. And she was gone a second on, with a switch of skirts, a rustle of petticoats, the discreet click-to of door meeting jamb.

Chess looked back to see Morrow’s mouth hung far enough o

pen to catch flies, making him laugh yet one more time, long and loud.

“Oh ho,” he said. “Well, well.”

Morrow drew himself up, shrugging it off. “Well what?” He demanded.

“Might be you got sorta sweet on her, all those days I was sleepin’ it off.”

“Wasn’t that long, and you know it. ’Sides which . . .” Morrow coloured. “Well,” he wound up, “that wouldn’t make a lick of sense, if so. Would it?”

Chess shrugged, glancing over at the dresser drawer where his belt and guns lay hid; Morrow saw his fingers quiver, palms itchy like he ached to hold ’em, if only for practice—or comfort, of a kind.

“Rarely does,” he replied.

Night fell lead-heavy, uneasily abrupt, as though the sun might never rise again.

Hoffstedt’s Hoard lulled itself to sleep by degrees under its darkness, murmuring slumberous, a beehive awaiting the morrow’s stick. Elsewhere, the world’s newer terrors came clambering up through Mictlan-Xibalba’s widening crack: Songbird’s dog with human hands, sweatless empty men made from the wood of the coral tree, their wives carved from the chalky cores of bulrushes. Small female gods swarming in the moon’s darkness, like gnats; weeping women giving birth to jade-scaled monsters at the crossroads. Eddies of all kinds, flurrying back and forth across the desert—blood mixed with mud, poisons breeding. The drought which precedes a flood. Ash, falling from the sky.

And salt, too, snaking through the desert toward Hoffstedt’s Hoard—hotly calcinate, scorching to the touch, turning sand to glass. Salt, flowing from one more creature’s whitened footsteps like an awful road, drawing ever closer.

This glistering vision paused at the town’s limits, found a likely enough spot, knelt to make its prayers. Then settled in, to wait.

Chapter Six

Yancey Colder’s wedding went the way those things mostly did, from what little Chess had gathered on vague scattered report. Her and Kloves stood up before a mixed congregation in the clapboard-walled church, local preacher officiating, checking his Bible every few words—not even a pale shade on how impressive Ash Rook’d once loomed, intoning verse from memory, voice a crack-less iron bell. The vows went by in a babble: cleave together, sever never—have and hold, faithful always, by God’s grace, amen. Y’all take each other? Ring, kiss; done.

After, a crew of hotel workers hauled the pews back against the wall while others brought out tables bearing platters of cold meat, soup tureens, battered but polished pewter tankards brimming with ale, plus bowls full of sliced fruit in so much spirit Chess could practically smell it from here. Lionel Colder went ’round pumping hands like he was getting paid for it, ’stead of the reverse. Though Chess and Morrow stood a bit back from the press, they still caught him on the swing-by; Chess made sure his hand was where Lionel’s glamour-fuddled mind put it—his hex-guise as “Mister Chester Jr.” being a foot taller, to make him match with Morrow—and let Yancey’s Pa wring it back and forth with a will.

“Lovely, wasn’t it?” he burbled.

Ed, creditably grave: “Sure was, Mister Colder. Same’s I’d like my own to go, one day.”