A hollow opened up in Chris’s ribs. She had never worn emotion so clearly, but the one she wore now was disgust. Silence grew like a slow, lethal infection. Every scrap of Chris’s turncoat hide wanted out. He should just go. Watching her look at him like a
thing
was more than he could stand. He controlled this; he’d worked on it in the wilderness until he could.
But for the sake of what they’d shared—for the man he’d been and the dreams he’d only just started to foster—he needed to try one more time.
“Peltz and his men are in a gully to the southwest. I’ve seen the camp and where the guards are stationed. I can help you plan.” He stood slowly, the joints in his knees feeling soldered and stiff. “I don’t know what I’ll be like in battle, so I’ll understand if you don’t want me with you.”
“You’ll help us?” Ex asked.
“Whatever you need.”
“With conditions, I’m sure,” Falco said. “What’s the catch, skinwalker? You do this for us and you get to stay?”
Chris looked at Rosa’s tense face, seeing no hint of Falco’s question there. She already had her answer. There would be no bargains or threats this time.
He could not let those women suffer.
“No conditions. I’ll go, if that’s the way of it. And I’ll leave the medical supplies.” Chris swallowed, his guts roiling with emotion. The meat he’d eaten was going to make him sick. “I only ask for my personal possessions. There’s a book I was given that I wouldn’t want to part with.”
Rosa bowed her head.
“Sounds more than fair,” Jameson said.
Shaking his head, Falco crossed his arms over his chest. “No way. He can’t be trusted. We’re better off going on our own.”
“You may be willing to go in there blind,” Ex said, “but I’m not. I say we take a vote.”
Her brief show of emotion gone, Rosa pushed away from the bar. “A vote? Since when?”
“I say we vote too.” Rio stood, a rifle cradled in his arms.
Chris wondered how much ammunition the kid still had. Valle’s ammo stores were dangerously low. Perhaps they didn’t have enough for a successful strike, which made his own involvement more important. Any natural skills would be an asset.
“I think you forget where we are. Valle de Bravo is still mine to lead.” Rosa straightened her shoulders. She stared down every man before settling her cold gaze on Chris. “If I say this skinwalker takes a long hike into the desert and never returns, that’s what happens.”
Chris’s insides had gone numb. “Is that what you’ve decided,
Jefa?
”
She held his gaze and for a moment—a moment that caused him as much pain as an outright exile—she hesitated. The woman he treasured and respected was still in there, just so hurt that she was hard to recognize.
“Let go of me, damn it!” Brick burst inside.
Jolene hauled on his arm with one hand. “You need to rest, you jackass!”
“Where is Singer? Why the hell isn’t anyone giving me a straight answer?”
Prodded along by Jameson, Brick slumped into the nearest chair, which groaned under the weight of his big, strong body. He wore no shirt, but his chest was wrapped in huge swaths of fabric, all dotted through with dried blood.
“Rosa,” he said, his gaze imploring, “tell me where my sister is and what you’re doing to get her back.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“My plans haven’t changed.” Rosa found it hard as hell to say that with any semblance of authority.
The whole town was in shambles. Most bravos showed signs of doubting her leadership. And why not? Someone must have given them up to Peltz, and she hadn’t seen it coming. The results of her lack of foresight broke her heart.
“What about the doc?” Ex asked.
That was the question, wasn’t it? She was tired of the weight, tired of the responsibility. Mere power was no longer enough of an inducement to carry these burdens alone.
Rosa lifted her shoulders in a weary shrug. “Take your vote.”
The bravos fell quiet, eyeing her with surprise, but she didn’t change her mind. Falco did it quickly, when once she would have protested his leap at assuming authority. But after tonight, after everything she’d lost, she didn’t care.
Mierda
, they could invite the family of skinwalkers to join them. Maybe
she
should be the one to move on. Nothing would ever be the same in Valle again. She had suspected it from the first, that Chris Welsh would break everything she’d built. Just not in the way she’d expected.
The numbers came out with a three-vote majority in favor of his participation. They didn’t all hate and fear skinwalkers as she did. Maybe they were right. There was no question she was biased, but she’d had good, sound reasons for her beliefs.
Now Rosa wasn’t sure of anything.
She glanced at Ex. “There’s your answer. Talk strategy with him, based on the location and terrain, then get ready to roll out at midnight. I want to give them a chance to get good and drunk, celebrating their victory.”
“You don’t think they’ll move camp?” Falco asked.
“If they do, then we’ll find it.” She felt half sick standing there.
Dios
, she needed to get away. “You can use him to track if necessary.”
“I’m not a bloodhound,” Chris said, his tone bleak with pain.
Rosa ignored him. There was just no way she could deal with him along with everything else. She needed to chop the heartbreak into tiny, digestible pieces and process the loss a little bit at a time. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to function.
While the men talked, she stepped outside into the evening quiet. The burned buildings filled the air with the scent of cinders and hot ash, and the stacks of bravo dead made a mockery of their rituals. There had been no respectful gathering for Viv, Wicker, and Ingrid, nobody to speak thoughtful words over their passing. It was meaningless anyway; in this world, it was hopeless trying to carve out a corner where people respected rules. This wasteland knew neither mercy nor justice. She had been a fool to suppose otherwise.
The wound in her side burned, but at least it gave her a distraction from emotional distress. She strode away from the
taberna
toward the watchtower, slowly climbing up to relieve the young bravo on duty. He eyed her with a question in his gaze, and she shrugged.
“They’re planning the raid to get our women back. I thought you’d want to sit in.”
His fierce expression said he did, and he clambered down quickly. Rosa was alone with the desert until Ex came to join her. By lantern light his features were fiercely drawn, as if he choked back terrible emotion through sheer force of will. She knew all about that.
“Are you ever going to forgive him?” he asked.
No point in pretending to misunderstand. That would do a disservice to their friendship. “I don’t know if I can.”
“He’s pretty wrecked, Rosa. The ground’s been cut from under him too.”
“So you believe he didn’t lie when he came to us, claiming to be human?”
Ex faced her, arms folded. “He’s still human. He’s just something else on top of it. And if you want the truth, so am I.”
There should have been shock and betrayal, but she’d felt too much of that recently. Now she felt only numb astonishment. So Chris had been right. The test
didn’t
work
.
“I’ve never seen you shift.”
Looking at Ex, she realized this explained a lot about him: his silence, his reticence, his slight distance from the rest of the town. There was no reason to tell her now, if he had managed to keep his secret for so long.
“I control it,” he said quietly. “Not the other way around.”
“Even when you’re—”
“An animal? Yes.”
“Did you change last night?”
“No. I was afraid I’d catch friendly fire.”
He probably would have. Chris was lucky as hell he hadn’t been shot in the confusion. She felt queer and sick, imagining him as a bloody heap on the ground. Hell, maybe she’d saved his life by running him out of town.
“What are you?” Odd as hell, but that seemed like a reasonable question.
“A wolverine.”
Rosa rubbed her eyes. Ex had to know that in confessing, she had the right to exile him too. But he didn’t look worried. Instead he folded his arms and steadily regarded her. Nothing about him was any different. He hadn’t assumed a satanic cast or suddenly sprouted horns from his forehead. He was still Ex. Perhaps their long friendship explained her lack of fear. She found it easier to believe his ability to control his affliction.
Or maybe that was the wrong word. Maybe it was an
ability
, like being able to shoot or sew.
Maybe.
She simply couldn’t look at him and see a monster. It helped that she’d never seen his altered form, never watched him rip out a man’s throat. This new knowledge was just an idea she needed to wrap her head around in the abstract—no violent, incontrovertible proof.
“When did it first happen?” In asking about the past, she was violating the first rule of Valle.
“Not long after the Change. I . . . lost my wife and son. Do you remember the failed shifts, early on?”
Rosa gave a jerky nod. Those months had been a nightmare of twisted bodies and half-animal corpses. She’d lived in fear that could happen to her brother. So many failed skinwalkers lay dead in the streets, their anatomy ripped apart by the sudden flow of magic across the world. At the time she’d pitied them, but José’s fate had changed her beliefs.
“
Sí
. I remember.”
“I succeeded in shifting. They both died, trying to—” He broke off and turned away, gazing out over the desert. The terrain rose and fell in rough waves. Tiny patches of shadow from the saguaro broke up the nighttime landscape.
Instinct urged her to touch him on the arm in comfort. He was still human. Ex spoke and thought and hurt. If she accepted that what he could do didn’t alter the fundamental human core of him—that he hadn’t
let
it—then she had been wrong. So wrong.
“I’m sorry.” Inadequate words, but they were all she had.
“After that, I traveled. It wasn’t until I found Valle that I even considered staying in one place. I was trying to outrun the memories.”
That she understood. With a nod, she encouraged him to go on, sensing he needed to lighten his load. She had played mother confessor before, but never for Ex.
“But I wasn’t sure I
should
stay,” he said.
“Because of our policy on skinwalkers.”
My policy.
There was no getting around that. She’d made the rules and the others went along.
“Yeah. But I figured if I kept to myself, I should be able to hide it, as long as I wanted to stay. And then . . .” He shrugged. “Eventually I didn’t want to leave anymore.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I see a lot of myself in you. I tried like hell not to care about Valle because loss hurts so fucking much. Sometimes it feels better to shut yourself off, but Allison . . .” His voice tightened to the point of silence. Ex looked out on the desert. The silhouette of his Adam’s apple bobbed in the shadows. “She still smiles. She taught me that I haven’t been living, just going through the motions.”
So this confession wasn’t for him, after all. It was for her benefit. “A lesson for me to learn here,
amigo?
”
Ex shook his head, sharp features still twisted with pain. “After what she’s been through, she still had the courage to reach out to me. To try and make a connection. I didn’t want to give a damn about her, but she was relentless. So now I . . . care, and she’s gone.”
“And you don’t want to see that happen to me and Chris?”
To her surprise, he laughed. “Fuck, Rosa, you really think I’d meddle in that? No. I’m telling you this because I’m done hiding. I’m done cowering and trying to pretend I’ll never get hurt again. So if you want to banish me, you go right ahead. It comes down to trust, doesn’t it? Either you know me as the man who’s stood by you all these years, or you don’t. That either means something or it doesn’t.”
Ex was her friend. She cared for him, but without the blinding intensity of her need for Chris. Maybe that distance made Ex’s decisions seem less like a betrayal.
“You’re welcome in Valle,
compadre
. You always will be. And we’ll get Allison back, I promise.”
If that was true for Ex, who laid a claim only to her deepest friendship, then she owed far more to the man she’d professed to love. She didn’t know much about love, akin to struggling over rocky ground blindfolded with her hands bound behind her back. In such circumstances, she was destined to fall down repeatedly and bloody her face. Such a challenge had never stopped her from getting back up again. Not once. And she wasn’t about to start now.
Though Ex wouldn’t admit as much, Rosa knew why he’d opened up. They had been emotionally crippled in the same way, curled into themselves like hermit crabs. They’d both needed someone a little braver and more determined to get them to open up. Maybe that explained why they hadn’t become lovers. Without that external courage and resolve, they would still be shrinking from the light.