This time, Sebastian was sure who got the bad guy, because Stewart was turned around the other way, watching his and Nikita’s backs. “That’s another M16,” Sebastian said, and dropped down into the tamarisk to pop the spent magazine out of the Sig and slap a new one home. “I’m going to fetch it.”
“Be careful,” Stewart said, straining his eyes into a gray, growing light that illuminated nothing. “I just got line of sight on James for a second—they’re on the other side of the church. I’ll be behind you.”
Sebastian gathered himself and ran for the gun.
Rounds slapped into the hardpan uncomfortably close to his heels, but he dove into the bushes and rolled sideways, Stewart beside him, and heard Nikita return fire, and lifted his head—
—to find himself staring into the three-leaved flash suppressor on the muzzle of an automatic rifle. His gaze traveled up the barrel, past the fingers curled supporting the weapon and into the eyes behind it.
His quick, startled breath was interrupted by the sound of a round being chambered, echoed a half-dozen times.
“Gentlemen,” a smooth, English-accented voice said, “seeing as how my acquaintances have you outgunned, would you be so kind as to stand up, please?”
Sebastian was amused to notice that Stewart gave him exactly the same exhausted, exasperated look that Nikita would have done, just before he laid the rifle down, raised his hands, and stood up slowly into the gray pre-dawn. Sebastian followed a moment later, reluctantly allowing the ugly, blocky, comforting Sig to dangle limply from one finger as he did.
Tribute and the Angel of the Morning.
Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
Jackie sat back on his heels as I got up, trying real hard not to show just how much I wanted to taste that blood soaking into his collar. The sky wasn’t even indigo any more—it was solid gradations of charcoal and silver, bright enough to silhouette the feathery stalks of the tamarisk. There was a lot of gunfire north by northeast—judging direction by the bright stain on the sky—and the scents were all confused, tangled up in each other. Blood and gunsmoke, enemies and allies, the American saying something I didn’t quite catch, and Stewart answering. Some of our boys still alive, anyway, and then I wondered when and how they’d gotten to be our boys. Or when I’d gotten to be one of
us
.
“What’s the plan?” I asked Jackie, and Jackie shrugged as the Englishman cleared the pistol he was carrying and reloaded.
“Fuck if I know,” Jackie said, and a figure sort of solidified beside him. He jumped, and turned on the balls of his feet, a swivel without breaking his crouch. “Doc,” he said in relief. “We felt the dam—”
“It took John with it,” Holliday said, and pressed his fist against his immaterial lips, white-faced in pain. “Washed him down the river. You should have seen the ghost of that river come pouring through. All that power shaking off the chains—”
“Damn.” I scrubbed my freed hands across my face and felt the blood crumble and pill and drop away. “So we’ve beaten them? Does that mean we can go home?”
“That’s the bad news,” Jackie said. “They don’t stay beaten. And there’s still the assassin to deal with.”
“I’ll do it.”
The Englishman glanced at me, caked mud on the knees of his impeccable suit, and the brim of his bowler dusted with tamarisk pollen. “What about Bugsy and the Mage?”
“What happens if we kill them all?” I was looking at the Englishman when I said it, but I was talking to Jackie, and Jackie knew it. “If you’ve broken the dam, you’ve broken their power base, haven’t you?”
“There’s still Vegas. And the California connection. We’ve got to—”
“Own it,” the Englishman suggested, chambering a round.
“Yes.” Jackie nodded. “Otherwise they’ll just be back.”
“So how do we own Los Angeles?”
He sucked his teeth out loud—unattractive habit, as my mother would have said—and cocked his head to one side. “Same way they wanted to own Vegas?”
“Build a dam?”
“Control the genii.” He shrugged, ducking as another spatter of gunfire marked the dawn. “You killed—” Whatever he was about to say didn’t quite make it out of his mouth, because I quick put a forefinger to my lips and cupped one hand to my ear, turning into the breeze. The assassin was talking—
—was talking to the American. And the American was—
“I think the bad guys have the drop on our friends,” I said quietly, and glanced at Jackie. He passed the look along to the Englishman, and said “James, can you get a look at what’s going on up there?”
“James?” I asked, but Jackie waved me irritably to silence as the Englishman half-stood, peering through the tamarisk, and dropped back down.
Huh. James.
He made a face. “It looks like the assassin and some bully-boys have Sebastian and Stewart surrounded.”
Jackie scowled. “Nikita?”
The Englishman shook his head. “No sign.”
“He’s by that cottonwood,” Doc said, and shrugged when Jackie turned the scowl on him. “I saw him coming in. Can’t feel a thing any more.”
“Huh,” Jackie said, as if remembering something. “I don’t suppose you know where Bugsy is, do you?”
“As a matter of fact—”
I was sort of looking forward to hearing the answer. Unfortunately, that was when the wind shifted sharply, bringing me a scent I really could have done without.
Angel.
And not a nice, safely dead Angel, either. Ah, no. Because she reeked of shit and decay, and my blood layered over her. Of course, and stupid of me not to think of my blood all over the place when I killed her, the bullet wounds, the cracked lips and hands, the saturated coat.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
You don’t usually get a chance to make two mistakes that bad.
I was just turning, croaking a warning to Jackie, when she knotted her fist in my hair and
pulled
. I was off-balance, crouched, and we’re not exactly all there when we first turn. But hell, we’re strong.
She sent me flying, tore a hank of hair out of my scalp. I sprawled, crashing through tamarisk. It cushioned my fall more than not, and as I shook blood out of my eyes I rolled and scrambled up, narrowly missed by someone’s burst of gunfire. One bullet seared my back, but it didn’t punch through, and I wasn’t about to get distracted by a scratch.
I popped up, got a look at Angel with one hand knotted in Jackie’s hair, holding the Englishman at arm’s length by his obviously broken wrist—she must have wrenched his gun away—and took a breath. and yelled her name.
“
Angel!
”
Another spatter of bullets, and I ducked and got lucky again. This time one slammed into my shoulder and the other one creased my cheek and shredded my ear, but neither of those would slow me down. I popped my head up again, got a fix as Angel lifted her head, turning to the sound of my voice.
Yeah.
Just like Sycorax did me, long ago and far away. Just like Sycorax did me. “Angel! Put those men down.”
A yelp—Jackie. She didn’t dump him gently, but she dropped him, and the Englishman, too. I crawled, not toward her, but toward the assassin and his men.
Russian
, I thought,
I hope you’re as good at picking up my cues as you are at picking up the American’s
.
“Angel!” And I felt her, felt her response the way I might feel it in my hand. I didn’t need to look to see what she was doing. I
knew
. “Angel, kill the assassin’s men!”
I felt her leap, heard the rattle of the M16s, heard her land and bodies breaking around her. The men screamed; one of them kept firing, and I hoped the spies and Stewart had the sense to get their heads down and keep them there. I felt the bullets strike her body, tear her flesh, felt the blood fill her mouth and heal her wounds, heard someone cursing, and got ready to throw myself into the fight like that—
No need.
I prairie-dogged over the tamarisk, ready to pile into the assassin with everything I had. I was half a second behind the Englishman. His little semiautomatic snapped: perfect stance, firing with his left hand, his right one dangling, shattered, the arm pressed against his chest. He’d lost his hat somewhere, but that didn’t matter; even from fifty feet with the growing daylight searing my eyes, I could see the narrowed concentration of his squint.
Pop pop. Pop.
The assassin still looked damned surprised when he pitched over backwards, two red circles on his chest and one right between the eyes, and the Englishman mostly looked tired when he looked down and slowly lowered the smoking gun. Nobody moved for either one of them. Everybody just kind of stared.
I didn’t see Angel, but I could hear her feeding, down there in the bushes, and it was just as well they obscured the sight. Judging by the way the American and Stewart were backing away, it wasn’t even as pretty as I was picturing.
I stood for a second, looking from Jackie to the spies to Stewart to Doc, and swallowed hard. There was still a Mage and ghost unaccounted for, unless there was something the rest knew that I didn’t.
And my skin was starting to itch as the sky grayed towards gold. I needed to find that wellhead, and find it fast. And take Angel with me, unless I wanted to kill her all over again. I squared my shoulders and took two steps toward the spies and Stewart, and the sound of her slurping and crunching.
“Where’s Nikita?” the American said.
Felix Luray walked out of the tamarisk, a hand on the Russian’s arm, and said, “John Henry Kinkead.”
Jackie’s head came up and he pivoted on his heel, and Stewart turned with him and planted the other boot wide, a cowboy’s swagger a boy raised up in a shotgun shack could never miss. “John Henry Kinkead,” Jackie said calmly, hooking his thumbs over the waistband of his leather pants. He lifted his chin, looked Luray in the eyes, and curled his lip, one hand raised and back, forestalling the Englishman, who was taking very careful aim. “
Junior
.”
Felix tipped his head and the Russian moaned between his teeth, leaning against Felix’s grip on his arm—and against something else, something immaterial that bound him tight. And I saw that he still had his gun, holstered in front, to the left of his belt-buckle, for a quick cross-body draw.
The American started to move; Stewart put a hand on his shoulder, and shook his head. The slurping sounds of Angel feeding, paused, and I heard her make a low, uncomfortable whine. The prickle on my skin told me I had seconds left.
God help me. I looked down at her face, at the blood smeared across it, for far too many of those seconds, and charity failed me.
And then I wondered how she died, the first time. I wondered what she dreamed, and fought for, and destroyed herself for. And maybe charity failed. But pity didn’t, quite.
“Angel,” I murmured, and she was beside me, flinching, crouching, hands over her face. I pitied her. I couldn’t help it. How much better than her had I been, when I was mortal?
Not much. Not at all.
“What do you want?” Jackie asked, calm and swaggering, a redneck prince. Not far off, the Englishman covered Luray, still as a dog on point.
Luray skinned his lips back from his teeth. “I challenge you to a duel, John Henry Kinkead . . . Junior.” The little catch there interested me. So Jackie
wasn’t
who Luray had thought. “High noon on the high street, winner take all.” And he nodded to the Russian, and said, “My champion against yours. Or, for that matter, you.”
The itch on my skin was turning into a burn. “Come on, Angel,” I said. “Follow me.”
And hoping Jackie would understand, hoping I’d get a chance to learn how it played out, I abandoned him there and ran with Angel, aiming for the smell of water lapping in the underground.
One-Eyed Jack Bets the Ranch.
Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
“I’ll go,” Stewart said in my ear, as Tribute crashed away through the underbrush and the sunlight grazed the top of the canyon wall. “I won’t lose my nerve in a gun fight.”
Sebastian shot him a searing look. “Don’t believe for a second that my partner would turn, Jackie.”
But I didn’t need Sebastian to tell me something was wrong. The frantic look in Nikita’s eyes, the way his hand twitched toward his holstered pistol, the way he leaned away from Felix Luray’s long-fingered hand with its iron ring—
Casually, I reached up and flipped the patch off my
otherwise
eye. And grimaced, because Nikita’s aura of guncotton and roses was tainted with something else, a swirl of rot and money and clotted blood that reminded me of the brambles wound around Tribute’s adder-black soul.
“Bugsy,” Doc said in my ear like a curse, and trailed his fingers over the butt of his gun.
And Felix Luray smiled, uneasily, as if he’d heard a ghost.
I squeezed Stewart’s elbow before he could protest, and stepped forward. “What’s your percentage, Felix? What do you hope to accomplish here? You’ve lost: we’ve taken down your dam, we’ve killed your would-be genius. You’re not holding any cards. Why am I going to let you force one of my friends to shoot another one of my friends?”
And the Mage said what I’d been more than half afraid he’d say. “Double or nothing.” He held up one hand. “If you handle the gun yourself.”
The sun was swelling over the rim of the canyon now, a blinding bright slice that spilled long shadows across the tamarisk and the cracked earth underfoot, revealing shells chalk-white as broken bones. “So if I face your champion, Magus, you swear you’ll leave Vegas alone?”
“I so swear,” he said.
“And you’ll honor—” I hesitated, and looked at Stewart. Stewart frowned. But I couldn’t think of what else to say, although I saw the problem even before Sebastian cleared his throat. “—
our
claim on Los Angeles.”
“If you step into the street yourself, Jackie.”
I felt the flare of the truth, felt the oath take hold, saw it ripple out around him like the shockwave from impact. I looked into Nikita’s eyes and said, “I’ll do it. Personally.”
The Russian’s lids flickered shut; I read relief in his slack features even as Sebastian shot me a glare that could have blistered stucco.