“And until then?”
“Delay, child. For as long as you can. I have other plans to set in motion; impossible things, under any other circumstances. But here, now, between the crack and that woman’s ‘New Aztectlan’ . . . yes. I think they can be done.”
“And if I do . . . what’s in it for me?”
Grandma stepped back, blinking—the first purely human expression she’d worn. “Do you bargain with me?” she asked, then snorted again. “Bilagaana! You do not know even to respect the dead.”
“Mayhap, but since you’re not my dead, I owe you no particular restitution. Where I come from, we expect to be paid for our labour, ’specially if it could get us just as dead as you.”
“What is it you want, then?”
This, at least, required no thought at all. “Sheriff Mesach Love, under my grip. Close enough for me to dig my muzzle in, ’fore I plug his dead heart.”
A slow smile spread over Grandma’s ugly face, darkly gleeful. “Ah, you are brim-full with hate, little dead-speaker. But in this, our wants coincide—for where the Enemy goes, your enemy shall surely follow.”
“A preacher and the Devil—someone else’s devil, anyhow.” Yancey shook her head at the very idea. But Grandma gave only a shrugging hmph, unimpressed as any town biddy.
“Nothing worse, in this whole world, than a bad man who knows his Bible. So Asher Rook once said, faithless blackrobe that he is, opening his prayer book only to find fresh curses. And as for your Sheriff Love—if he was an honest enough man before Bewelcome’s fall, now he dances to the Enemy’s tune, knowing all along his newfound power comes from nothing good. But like you, he does not care who he treats with, so long as he gets what he seeks. And in the end, this will be his undoing.”
“How so?”
“When he fought with your red boy at your wedding, the town itself was levelled, your husband and kin cut down. You yourself might have died, or either of the Pinkerton men. But did any blow one monster dealt the other do lasting damage? No, because each draws from the same source. It was as though they fought themselves.”
A sudden understanding lit Yancey’s brain, from ear to ear. “Was the Enemy brought Love back, not God at all . . . he said as much, when Chess quizzed him on it. So—if there was some way to turn him back, to undo what Rook preached on his homestead, with Chess’s syphoned-off hexation as connivance—”
“I knew you would see it, eventually.”
“Not being stock-stupid? Thanks, ever so. But . . .” Here the flash gave out, leaving her once more in darkness. “What I don’t know is how that even could happen, let alone how to make it come about.”
“Of course not, for you are no Hataalii. How fortunate, then, you have at least spilled your blood to feed one.”
The clear implication being: Chess Pargeter could, given enough incentive—enough sacrifice. Just like he helped Rook turn Bewelcome to salt, he could now turn it back, on his own hook; get him there, pray into him extra hard, see what happens. Unless . . . no, wait . . .
Something was scratching at her, some piece too jagged to fit. And then, all of a sudden, it dropped straight down into her mouth.
“Doctor Asbury says Bewelcome’s a dead spot; no magic gets in, or out. Same for the Weed, and since that’s what Chess gets his mojo from—”
Again, that fierce smile, darker by far than the lips which shaped it.
Your doctor does not know everything, Grandma said, without using her mouth, for extra emphasis. Not even the half. Like too many bilagaana, he thinks this world works by machinery alone—that it may be solved like a puzzle, written down, re-written. Between the two, you would do better by far to follow our Enemy’s counsel.
Yancey bowed her head. “All right, then, ma’am; I’ll do that. Thank you kindly.”
The hex-ghost considered her a moment, and Yancey thought she could almost see something close to af
fection in those stone-obdurate eyes. But perhaps it was simply a reflection from one light source or another—strange things moving under the surface, a fish’s maw in a murky pond, invisibly toothed. For the dead did not give up their secrets, ordinarily, without great pressure—more than Yancey had thought she’d brought to bear, so far.
But then again, perhaps the pressure just was great, all on its own, without Yancey doing a thing. Perhaps things really were just that bad for everyone, whether dead or soon-to-be.
By God, she sure hoped she was wrong, even as the insight bloomed. But the look on Grandma’s face said otherwise.
Since you do not wish me to claim kinship, I will not, she replied. But you should wake now, child. Things are already moving toward their conclusion.
Above them, the dark sky had begun to boil, cones forming along the horizon—sheet lightning dervish-dancing attendance with such frenzy it threatened to let loose a near-mythic deluge. Yancey shivered in the ever colder wind, though Grandma did not.
And that feeling itself, nervishly incontrovertible, was what began to shake her free of the dream at last—to bring her steadily upwards, fingers clutching, legs kicking like a swimmer’s.
Yancey’s eyes opened, gummed deep with sleep, to find Geyer pulling her up and out of bed, while Morrow himself knelt to wrestle her boots back on—and oh, it was a cold joke indeed that never in a thousand years, before the Hoard’s collapse, would she have thought to find her rooms full of strange men. The strangest of all, naturally, being Chess Pargeter, who stood peering out the window with both arms tight-crossed. It was still night by all appearances, maybe the earliest sort of morning, with that gathering storm from her dream-consult casting watery shadows, as though the walls themselves wept.