“Aw, man,” Stewart said. If he’d been three steps closer, I would have kicked his ankle.
Felix Luray smiled. “See you at high noon, then.” He walked off through the tamarisk, toward the bluff and the vehicles, as Sebastian closed the distance between us and grabbed my shirt.
“He’ll kill you,” he said. “He doesn’t miss.”
I grinned at him, and flipped my eyepatch down. The world got a lot less bright, and a lot less complicated. “I’m counting on that. Besides, it’s not just Nikita in there.”
He blinked and let go. “Who else is it?”
“Bugsy,” Doc said, while I was smoothing my shirt.
“Oh,” Sebastian said. “How long ’til noon?”
Stewart glanced at his watch. “It’s a little past five.”
“Daylight savings, though,” Sebastian said, and I saw the trick. Because if I weren’t here at
solar
noon—high noon—for the gunfight, it’d be a victory for Felix.
“Sneaky son of a bitch,” I said, and looked down at my boots. “What are you thinking, Sebastian?”
He glanced over at me, light catching in his eyes, and thrust his fists into his pockets, looking peculiarly dapper despite the gawky pose and the mud smearing his blacks. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’ll figure it out by noon.”
“Right.” I dusted my hands together, and looked after Luray, and Nikita until they went out of sight behind the tamarisk. Then I shoved
my
hands into
my
pockets and turned away from the group, towards where Tribute had run.
“Where are you going?” Stewart asked.
I shrugged. “Gotta see a man about a horse.”
Tribute, Down the Well.
Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
I really hate spiders. I hate spiders almost as much as I hate dark, wet, airless holes in the ground—but at least there was gray light filtering in, though I was up to my chest in cold water and up to my knees in sucking, silty mud, with cobwebs wrapped thick as a mummy’s mask around my shoulders, face, and neck. That light would peel my flesh off my bones, but it was comforting even though I crowded back under the lid of the cistern, pressing Angel against the wall, both arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding her up out of the water not because the water would hurt her any, but because when you’re used to breathing, it takes a while to get out of the habit. Because the light was freedom.
The light was the way out.
The light was escape.
And I held on to that thought as hard as I held onto Angel, down in the filthy water with the spiders crawling through my hair. She was making noises, horrible noises, little sobbing, sucking gasps through the changed shape of her teeth. Oh, and she deserved it, poetic justice. Don’t tell me it wasn’t. I know what she meant to do to Stewart, and I know what she meant to do to me.
And I still felt bad about it anyway.
Heck, that’s my modus operandi. Screw the pooch and then feel bad about it.
Like feeling bad ever mended a broken heart.
Whatever. The fact remained, I hadn’t killed her when I should have, and she was my responsibility now. And she was young, young and tough, but I was older and stronger. Not as old and frail as Sycorax yet. No, not for a long time. But we start off more mortal, and become more . . . undead as time goes by.
It was a trivial thing to restrain her, even without using my right of command. And eventually, the animal sounds gave way to sobbing, and the sobbing became words. They weren’t coherent words, by any means, but they were words.
And I held her, and held her face out of the water.
Because I felt bad for her.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to be much use for conversation for a couple of days. Which meant I was going to be stewing down this hole more or less alone until nightfall—
“Tribute.”
Ow
. Angel clawed at my chest. I pinned her back against cement. Soft as I could manage, I murmured, “Watch the echo, Jackie—” It boomed, reverberations shattered by rippled water.
“—sorry.” He stepped back from the lip of the well and lowered his voice, but I could still see his shadow on the water, the sunlight falling around his shoulders in long, dust-touched rays. Angel whimpered; I wondered if she’d bitten her lip. “I need your help.”
Well,
hallelujah
. “Help?”
“Don’t rub it in, Tribute. Bugsy’s riding Nikita, and I’m going to have to fight them both.”
“Nikita? The Russian? You named them?”
“Stewart did.”
Which explains that. “You made them real.”
“Apparently.” His silhouette shrugged, disarraying parallel rays of light. “It worked. James—the Englishman—got him. The assassin, I mean. Unless the widow getting herself killed broke his immunity—oh, hell. I don’t know, King.”
“I saw. Did you check the body?”
The shadow moved again; he was lifting and turning his head. “Stewart did. Is doing it now. And Sebastian’s doing something about James’s wrist. But that doesn’t change the fact that at high noon, I’m going to have to shoot Nikita or get shot, and no matter what happens, Luray’s going to double-cross us. Or Bugsy is. Luray’s oath might just hold
him.
”
“Wait a minute. Tell me what happened, Jackie. Word for word.” The cold water sucked at my chest and swirled between my legs. I ordered Angel to stay in the corner, and came as close to the light as I dared.
He took a breath deep enough that I heard it echo down the shaft, and slowly, without too many self-corrections, related what had been said. I stopped him mid-recital.
“You laid a claim on Los Angeles? In your own name?”
He shook his head. “I said ‘our.’ Us. All of us.”
“Good,” I said. “Because if it was you or Stewart, it’d just bind the cities closer together, and we need to break them apart. And now that Angel belongs to . . . us . . . we have as much leverage there as they ever had, with Stewart. Vegas lies in so many shadows—”
“It
is
the shadow,” he corrected, and I couldn’t deny it. “The shadow and the mirage. Not real.” Something prickled in his voice that made me wonder whom he was quoting.
I swallowed my pride, and I swallowed my fear, down there in the dark with the walls pressing in on me. It wasn’t like a coffin. Not really. More like a very unpleasant hotel room; once the sun went down, I had a way out. And there was something I could offer him.
Much as I’d rather pull out my fingernails with pliers. “Jackie.”
He must have heard it, because he hesitated before he answered. “Tribute?”
“You’re sure Luray has something up his sleeve, man?”
“So far, he’s batting a hundred percent.”
Yeah. I nodded in the dark, though he couldn’t see me. “If you’re calling up loas and ghosts and guardian angels, man—about time you called up mine.”
One-Eyed Jack and the Voice of the Underground.
Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
“Jesse,” I said, as what Tribute was offering came plain. “You want me to call up your brother.”
“I want you to cut him loose,” Tribute said, and I didn’t think the discomfort in his voice was just the daylight and cold water. “Think of it like a séance. Ouija board.”
“Good Pentecostal boy believes in Ouija boards?”
“He doesn’t believe in vampires either,” Tribute pointed out, tiredly. “Will it comfort you if I call it glossolalia?”
I snickered. “What’s he going to think of being cut loose?”
“He’ll be so happy, he might have something helpful to say for once. But mostly I was thinking of the symbolism. Using Felix’s own magic against him.”
“All right,” I said. “I need liquor—”
“The Englishman carries a flask,” Tribute said.
“How do you know that?”
I couldn’t see it in the darkness, but I could hear the smile. “I used to watch a lot of television.”
“I’ll be right back.”
James did indeed have a flask, and he hadn’t even drunk all of it while Sebastian splinted his wrist. I came back to the wellhead, the rest of the group accompanying me, and shook a few drops on the earth beside the cement pad.
“Jesse Garon Presley,” I said. “A word, if you don’t mind?”
I expected a ghost, of course, but the ghost of a newborn baby. Not a slender blond young man with a quick sideways grin and a forelock that tumbled down in his eyes and had to be tossed back, a gesture so reminiscent of the American that I glanced over at Sebastian to see if he noticed.
Of course he didn’t; we never quite know what we look like from the outside, do we?
“I’m Jesse,” the ghost said, and his voice had every bit of the drawl that Tribute had lost, or maybe shed on purpose. “What ch’all want?”
I heard a little splash from the well, as if Tribute flinched back a bit or took a couple of steps away from the sunlight. The spies watched, captivated; Doc shifted uneasily from foot to foot until Stewart nudged him with an elbow that went right through his ribcage, and then he settled down with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
I handed James back his flask. He took it left-handed, and made it vanish without so much as stealing a sip. I caught that out of my peripheral vision; I wasn’t about to take my eyes off Jesse. “Your brother’s been helping us out, Mr. Presley—”
“Jess,” he said, and raked the forelock back again, with both transparent hands. The white Mojave sunlight fell through him, and when he reached out to touch my arm, half-curious, I felt a chill as sharp as the stroke of an ice cube down my spine. “And my brother ain’t no godly man, Mister—”
“Jackie,” I supplied, and took a breath. “Jess, you’re right. A godly man he’s not—hell, not even a man, these days”—I felt Tribute straining down in the darkness, as profoundly as if he leaned on my arm—“but he’s trying. And I’m no godly man either, but I’m just trying to protect myself and those who look to me from—”
“I know who,” Jesse said. “I ain’t stupid.”
“No.”
No, he wasn’t. The blue eyes were sharp, almost ferocious under the arched brows. He moved like a cat, an angry cat, a caged cat. Tail-lashing and ready to claw. His stare was direct and arrogant, self-possessed. Some ghost.
“Jess,” I said. “Tribute wants to let you go. Wants to cut you loose.”
His eyes brightened and his chin came up. “Really?”
“Really,” Tribute said, from the bottom of the well. “Jess, I’m sorry. I’ve got some amends to make—”
“You’ve got more than amends to make,” Jesse said. “I died and you lived, and what did you do with it? And what are you
now
?” He shook his head, his mouth twisting in disgust. “You’ve got a lot of work left if you’re meaning to do better. And I ain’t been too happy about watching your back these past twenty-five years, neither.”
Doc’s presence at my elbow was a welcome chill. Jesse stared through him as if he just wasn’t there, but I didn’t miss the way Doc’s fingers hovered over the butt of his gun.
It’s not like he had a choice
, I almost said, out of some weird loyalty to Tribute, but common sense made me bite my lip. Angry ghosts aren’t all that forgiving.
“Before you go,” I said, squatting down to pull a knife out of my boot, “I don’t suppose you’ve got any brilliant ideas about how to thwart Luray without shooting this man’s partner?”
Jesse frowned, and sucked his teeth, and turned his head and spat as I rested the steel point of my knife on the ground. “I hear the Colorado used to flood a lot, didn’t it? Down the Imperial Valley?”
“That’s why they built the dam,” Stewart said.
“Well,” Jesse answered, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, “that’s why they said they built the dam. You gonna cut that cord, Jackie, or am I going to stay sewn to my brother through all eternity?”
I sighed, and flipped my eyepatch up. What the hell; it’d been worth a try. The silver cord gleamed on the dirt under my knifepoint, winding Jesse and Tribute together. I severed it with a flick of my wrist.
By the time I looked up again, Jesse had faded out of sight. Just like the Cheshire Cat, his grin went last. “Well fuck,” I said, and stuck the knife back in my boot. “That didn’t do us any good.”
“Oh, I’m not too sure of that,” James said, without looking up from his inspection of the splint on his injured wrist. “Every little bit of symbolism counts. And it might make Tribute that much less useful to them.”
“And anyway,” Sebastian said at my elbow, where he stood half-inside Doc. “You don’t have to worry. I have a plan.”
The Russian Looks for an Angle.
Somewhere in Saint Thomas, Nevada. Summer, 2002.
The sun rose fast, and Nikita quickly found himself wanting nothing quite so much as a broad-brimmed hat. He squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand; from the top of the bluff he could see just the tip of a lime-caked chimney. There was no sign of his partner and friends moving below, as he knew they must be. Down there, there wouldn’t be any shade except the tamarisk, and they had no clean water. If they had any sense they’d stay crouched in the bushes as much as possible, and maybe creep around the side of the bluff to get a look at the opposition’s plans.
Not that the opposition had much in the way of plans.
Nikita wanted to smile a small, bitter smile, but his lips wouldn’t do what he demanded. Instead, he stood in the blinding sun, sweating out the underarms of his blacks, cleaning his gun, because Bugsy was using his hands.
It didn’t bother him as much as the persistent sense of his brains dripping into his collar, although the only thing staining his fingers when Bugsy let him wipe at the moisture was sweat. He also kept wanting to press his fingers into the socket of his left eye, just to make sure it was still in his head. He sighed, inwardly, and watched his body work, and considered what it would feel like to die. He wouldn’t permit himself to think that he might live; it was down to Jackie or him, and he didn’t want to live as Ben Siegel’s puppet, in any case.
At least the gangster wasn’t trying to make conversation.
The sun was only three fingers off zenith when Luray touched his shoulder and cleared his throat. Bugsy turned Nikita’s head and stared at the Mage through Nikita’s aching eyes. Blue eyes were not adaptive in the desert. It was good; the glare would blind him more than it would Jackie, and Jackie would have another small edge.