A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

Before she could protest, he’d already slipped his remaining gun’s butt into her empty hand. The doubled weight was yet one more shock, though it also somewhat steadied her, like being fit for chains.

“But . . . you’ll be left unarmed.”

“Hardly. It’s a dirty joke, considering all that time I put in, ’cause turns out? I don’t need either of ’em. Never did.”

He waggled all ten fingers in front of her eyes, making the air itself snarl and buzz. The sound was far-away lightning, or something raked almost to tearing—big and small at once, and far too close for comfort.

“And I’m to be your back-up?”

“You, Ed, that Pink in there: cannon fodder, more like, considering what the Sheriff and me got to throw around. Still, ain’t like you don’t want to be here, is it?”

“No. But if you’re truly trying to convince yourself you don’t need us at all, why couldn’t you’ve just handed him his hat back in the Hoard? Without any extraneous help from us pitiful hexless folk, that is.”

Again, she saw that weird appreciative flicker cross his face. For you sure do like to have your wounds pressed on, don’t you, Mister P.? Which only makes a sort of sense, seeing how they’re all that’s left of the man you thought you were. . . .

“Also,” she continued, “I’d be pleased if you’d stop making grand ethical comparisons between us. ‘Instincts’ aside, the only man I’ve ever felt like killing is dead already.”

“And you don’t think you could bear to give him company, it came to that? One way to find out.”

Too quick to equivocate with, he steered her right-hand gun up, sighting it at one of Joe’s customers through the saloon window—a largish, shaggy man whose silhouette seemed so familiar that, addled as she was, Yancey felt a moment’s fearful clutch it might even be Edward Morrow. Chess wouldn’t allow that, though, would he?

“Easy ’nough,” Chess said, his tone surprisingly convincing. “Child could do it. Just make certain you got a bead, and . . . pull.”

“No.”

“He’s nothin’ to you, Missus—nobody is. What folk you had’re all halfway to rotten, ’less them that’s left decided they weren’t worth the burial.”

The inherent addendum, equally contemptuous, even in silence: I saw to that, with your conniving. The sting of it went from ear to hand and back up again, faster than telegraph-wires; before she’d formed the idea, Yancey saw her other barrel connect ’gainst his temple, tiny bone-thud impact dwarfed by the click of her thumbing the hammer.

“Goddamn no, is what I said.”

“Oh ho! Brave notion. And just what d’you think would happen, if you tried?”

Now it was her turn to grin, just shy of a snarl. “Care to find out?”

They traded glares, wind surprising cold around them, there in the noonday sun—’til a third voice intruded: “Hey! What the hell’re you two playing at?”

Yancey’s heart did a rabbit-kick. Oh thank God, it wasn’t him. A beat after that—this being the first time she’d sighted the man since their last night’s . . . converse, in the flesh or out of it—blood rushed to her cheeks, hot and quick. Mister Morrow seemed a tad thrown himself, probably for similar reasons, while Chess noted the back-and-forth, approvingly.

“Just making a point, Ed,” he said. “For what little that’ll help her, when the real shooting starts.” Adding, to Yancey: “’Cause we’ve at least established you’d shoot Sheriff Love or me, if only to prove you won’t shoot nobody else, on the off chance they’re guiltless. And also ’cause you’re halfway sure it wouldn’t do all too much, anyhow.”

Son of a . . . Maybe I will let fly, just to wipe that smug damn look off his face.

“I was beginning to like you, Mister Pargeter,” was all she allowed herself to say, at last. Which simply made him roll his eyes at Morrow, and grin all the more.

“Your error,” he told her, coolly. “But keep the guns; I fancy the look of you with ’em, if only for amusement’s sake.”

When he turned to go, however, Morrow grabbed his arm, hard enough he couldn’t. But it was Yancey he glared at, sending a fresh run of prickly heat from head to toe. “Out here playin’ Goddamn William Tell with real rounds for so long Joe had to tell me where you two were—and did you even once think t’tell Chess ’bout what . . . Grey . . . said, last night?”

“You’re the ones share a mattress. Did you?”

Morrow took it full force, blinking rather than flinching, while Chess, caught in the crossfire, looked one to the other like he longed to slap ’em both.

“What about what he said?” He demanded.

“You know how Pinkerton’s working with hexes already,” Geyer told Chess, all four of them up in the pistoleer’s suite—Morrow and Yancey arranged on chairs flanking Geyer, while Chess set up his usual back-and-forth pace in front of the window. “That hellion from San Fran to start with, Madam Yu, or Songbird—”

“We’