CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Shard LeFel tightened his grip on the Holder he held
tight to his chest as if it were a babe made of glass. In his other
hand was a spiked chain looped around the witch’s neck. The same
chain noosed the necks of the wolf and the boy.
“Well done, Mr.
Shunt,” Shard LeFel said, watching the other wolf twitch and bleed
at his feet.
Mr. Shunt bowed
slightly, and then bent toward the wolf who struggled to breathe.
He splayed his spiked fingers, itching to dig out the wolf’s
heart.
“Leave him,” Shard
LeFel said. “He will be dead soon. I’ll not have this interruption
stop my return.”
Mr. Shunt hissed,
then seemed to compose himself. He straightened. “Yes, Lord
LeFel.”
Shard LeFel handed
the chain to Mr. Shunt and walked through the open door into the
car his collection of matics had once filled. Empty now. But he
could hear them out on the battlefield, the magnificent screech and
hiss and thump of the devices killing the Madders. Music. Sweet and
fitting for his last grand night in this mortal world. Fitting to
send him back to his own lands and immortality.
An explosion rang out
and then a ragged howl of a voice lifted above it:
“Mae!”
Shard LeFel paused
between one step and the next. “Could it be?” He glanced over his
shoulder at the witch, whose eyes were wide in fear, her voice
silenced by the leather gag in her mouth and the barbed-wire chain
that left beads of blood around her throat every time she
swallowed.
“I believe that is
your husband, Mrs. Lindson, come back from the grave. Such a pity
he is too late to save you.”
He continued through
that car and to the next. The door opened before him and one of the
Strangework bowed, and stepped aside to allow his
entrance.
Shard LeFel strolled
over to the center of the room, where the door lay like a coffin on
a pedestal.
“Three hundred years
of exile,” he said softly. “And now, finally, I shall cheat this
death, cheat this mortal world, and mete my revenge upon my brother
in the lands from whence I came.”
He placed the Holder
at the very top of the door’s frame, pressing it down into a hollow
carved perfectly for the device. The device pulsed, moonlight
caught there in echo to a faintly beating heart. But Shard LeFel
knew it would take more than moonlight to open this
door.
It would take three
lives.
The three Strange
against the walls shifted, a slight moan escaping their lips as the
Holder found its place in the door. Each of the Strange was
attached to the door by wires and tubes that ran from its neck,
wrists, and feet and fed into the door.
Shard LeFel meant to
savor his moment. A decanter of threehundred-year-old wine and a
crystal goblet awaited his celebration.
“Mr. Shunt, see that
our guests are comfortable,” LeFel said. “Then open the sky for
me.”
Mr. Shunt gave the
witch’s chain to the first Strange who clung to the wall at his
left. The wolf’s chain he gave to the Strange at the far end of the
car, and the boy’s chain he gave to the final Strange standing
nearest Mr. Shard LeFel.
Then Mr. Shunt walked
across the floor to a crank set near the door. He turned the crank,
and the ceiling of the train car drew aside like a curtain pushed
back by a hand.
Shard LeFel uncorked
the wine and poured it into the decanter. “And unto this world, I
bid my most final farewell.”
Moonlight streamed
thick and blue-white into the room, striking the Holder and the
door. Light from the Holder poured flame into the runes and glyphs
and symbols the Strange had carved into the doorway.
And from outside the
train car, bullets rattled the night.
“Beautiful,” LeFel
said. “And now all that is needed is the key.” He glanced at the
boy who slept curled and chained at the Strange’s feet. He glanced
at the wolf that panted in pain. He glanced at the witch who stood
wide-eyed with fury, tears tracking her cheeks to wet the leather
gag.
“Mr. Shunt, begin
with the boy, then the wolf, then the witch.”
Mr. Shunt bowed, his
eyes bright, his teeth carving a sharp smile. He walked to the
Strangework who stood above the boy, and inserted one of his bladed
fingers, like a key, into the Strange’s chest, where a heart should
be. He twisted his hand, and the Strangework shuddered. Mr. Shunt
withdrew his finger.
The Strange
changed.
It spread its arms
wide and the front of its body split open, revealing gears and
sinew, pulleys, pistons, and bone that worked in dark concert to
expose spikes and edges and blades lining every inch of it. A
living, breathing iron maiden, remarkable in its ingenuity of both
form and function.
Mr. Shunt picked up
the sleeping boy and deposited him deep inside the gears and
spikes, pressing him back, but not far enough to prick his skin.
Not yet.
Then he moved to the
wolf, who was too injured and too drugged to fight. Mr. Shunt
shoveled him inside the spiked guts of the Strangework
there.
And lastly he walked
to the witch.
“I will not miss this
wretched land.” LeFel sipped the wine, savoring the heat and flavor
of ancient blooms across his tongue.
“Nor will I mourn its
destruction.” He sipped again, and pressed one of the jewels on the
bent cane in his hand, releasing the pure silver blade cased within
it. A blade that would carve out his brother’s heart.
“Mr. Shunt,” LeFel
said. “It is time to spill the blood of our coin.”
Rose Small watched as
Cedar Hunt ran, limping hard, to the train car where Mae must be
trapped. She ducked behind the thin stand of trees, put her back to
a fir trunk, and pushed her goggles out of the way as she
reloaded.
The Madders were
still out there, standing in the open in front of the trees, firing
off those blunderbusses and shotguns, shrouded in smoke and fire
and moonlight, and laughing like wild jackals.
The matics were
coming. Five of the most amazing devices that would each have
struck her dumb with awe if they weren’t so hellbent on killing her
and the Madders. Rose chambered the bullets, her hands trembling,
her heart pounding, then glanced out from behind the
tree.
The full moon set the
devices into full contrast, even at a distance. She didn’t know
how, but the matics were working in conjunction with one another.
Through the smoke and blasts from the Madders’ guns she could see
one of the doglike beasts was down and twitching, and the other
stood stock-still, steam gushing up out of it like a geyser. But
the others, the Goliath with steam-hammer arms, the battlewagon,
and the huge, spiked wheel, were bearing down faster than the
Madders could shoot them dead.
And if that weren’t
enough, the railmen from up a ways had come into the fight with
more guns than an army. She like as not figured one of the train
cars up the line had to be an arsenal of weapons.
Rose swallowed hard
and tasted the oil and burn of spent black powder. She didn’t
reckon there was an easy way out of this alive.
She fitted the
goggles back over her eyes and fired cover shots at the hulking
Goliath that hammered an arm down so near the Madders, one of the
brothers fell flat from the impact. The big beast reared back,
screeching and clacking. It was recharging, ratcheting up its
firing device to slam its arms down again.
Rose shot at the
thing, aiming for what she prayed were vulnerabilities: tubes,
connecting valves, and gauges.
But the matic did not
slow. It rolled this way on strange tracked feet that chewed over
the terrain as if it were riding on rails.
The Madders used her
fire as a chance to run back behind the screen of trees with
her.
“Do you have a plan,
Mr. Madder?” she yelled to Alun as he skidded to a stop behind the
tree to her right, both his brothers half a tick behind him,
grinning and breathing hard
Bullets zipped
through the night air. Needles and dirt sprayed down around
them.
Rose leaned out again
and fired off the last of her shots at the railmen, who were
holding ground behind the metal monsters.
“Plan to kill the
matics and crack LeFel out of his fortress,” Alun said. “Reload,
Miss Small. The boys are going to need cover.”
Rose was already
reloading. She glanced up at the Madders. Bryn and Cadoc were
gone.
Just then the rapid
fire of what sounded like a hundred guns tore flashes of light
through the night.
“That’s the
battlewagon,” Alun yelled over the peppering recoil of bullets.
“Figure it has a twenty-five- or thirty-shot cartridge.” He reached
into his pocket and pulled out his pipe, then sparked a wick with a
tiny striker, and puffed until the tobacco caught.
Rose’s heart beat
harder than a hammer. She’d heard tales of the rapid-fire guns used
in the war, but she had never seen such a device, and didn’t want
to become intimately acquainted with one now.
“That one’s done,”
Alun yelled into the sudden pause of gunshot.
“Fire, Miss Small.”
He clamped his teeth down on the pipe stem and leaned out from
behind the cover of the tree. He sent off a volley of bullets. The
battlewagon had extinguished its cartridge and must be reloading.
But how much time would that take?
Rose Small shouldered
her shotgun and aimed back at the field. The battlewagon was indeed
reloading, but the hulking Goliath rumbled toward them on its
tracks, hammer arms pulled back and ready to tear down the trees
they stood behind. Rose took aim at the Goliath, but nothing seemed
to stop it.
“Look low,” Alun
yelled.
Rose lowered her
rifle.
Another matic, the
huge spiked wheel, was rolling their way, rattling over dips and
tree stumps, one hundred yards and closing fast.
Rose fired everything
she had at it. So did Alun. But they didn’t have nearly enough
firepower to stop that thing.
Alun was no longer
laughing. He was cussing up a lung. He pulled something from his
pocket and lit the wick of it with his pipe, then lobbed it at the
rolling matic.
A ground-shaking
explosion rang out, but the wheel kept coming.
Rose was out of
bullets. She pulled her handgun and stood her ground, setting off
shot after shot at the spiked wheel. Bullets didn’t stop it.
Bullets didn’t even slow it.
Fifty feet out.
Thirty. Twenty.
Rose turned to
run.
And in front of her
rose a monster out of nightmare.
Mr. Jeb
Lindson.
Rose froze and stared
into the eyes of a dead man.
“Move!” Alun
hollered.
Rose threw herself to
the side.
Jeb
yelled.
Just as the spiked
wheel bashed through the trees. Limbs cracked and crashed to the
ground with skull-splitting impact.
Rose tucked up tight
behind a boulder and covered her head with her arms. She peeked out
just in time to see the wheel come to a crashing stop in front of
Jeb Lindson, the forward-most spike pulling back like a cannon
ready to fire.
With inhuman
strength, Jeb Lindson swung the huge round tickers attached to the
chain around his wrists. He slammed them into the matic. Metal met
metal, crashing and sparking. Steam gushed into the air as the
wheel matic faltered under the blow. Jeb didn’t wait for it to
fall. He lifted the giant chain and ball and smashed it into the
matic again, busting seams, popping rivets. The wheel matic
exploded, hot scrap and ash raining down out of the
air.
Then the big man went
walking. Toward the rail. Toward Mr. Shard LeFel’s train cars,
where his wife, Mae Lindson, was held captive.
Rose smelled hair
burning and patted at her shoulders. Her hair was on fire! She
pulled at the base of her braid, dragging her hair forward over her
shoulder. A very bad mistake. The fire licked up the side of her
cheek. Rose yelled and slapped at the fire, blistering her palms.
She snuffed it out just before it reached her ear, and sat there,
for a second or two, trying to get back her breath and her
courage.
The night filled with
bullets again. The battlewagon was rolling closer, firing another
deadly round off into the night.
Blinking back tears
of pain, and swallowing down her fear, Rose scrambled for her gun
and prayed she had enough bullets in her pockets to end
this.
Mae Lindson had no
weapon except her magic. It would take her voice to curse or bind,
or draw upon magic of any kind. And she had no voice.
Jeb yelled out in
agony. He was alive, trying to find her. Trying to save her. But
that monster Shard LeFel was right. He was too late. There was no
time left.
Time.
Alun Madder had given
her a pocket watch. She knew it carried a speck of glim. Could she
use it as a weapon?
As Mr. Shunt turned
his back to stuff Elbert inside the gory clockwork of the Strange,
Mae worked to get the pocket watch out of her coat. They had bound
her hands together in front of her, but she could still move
them.
The Strange that held
the chain around her throat was hypnotized by Mr. Shunt’s work. If
it noticed what she was doing, one hard tug on her chain would
crush her neck.
Mae fingered the
watch into her hand, then slowly pulled it up to her mouth. She
tugged at the leather gag, but it wouldn’t move. Over the top of
the pocket watch she whispered, more song than word, more breath
than voice, calling on magic, begging magic to come to her, hoping
the glim would work as an amplifier, a cupped hand, a bullhorn, to
call the magic and make it stronger. She begged magic to not so
much break a curse but interrupt it and hold it away for one single
minute, for one single man: Cedar Hunt. And then she pressed down
the watch stem, stopping the watch, and stopping Cedar Hunt’s
curse, for just one minute.
Cedar Hunt gasped for
air and pushed himself up onto his knees. He didn’t know how, but
he was a man, even though moonlight filled the sky. He saw the gun
on the platform beside him. The gun Mr. Shunt had shot him with. He
picked it up and pushed onto his feet, nearly blacking out from the
pain. He staggered through the train car toward the child, toward
his brother, toward Mae.
Rose Small looked for
Alun Madder. He was sprinting over the matic Jeb Lindson had
reduced to a pile of rubble, and headed straight at the Goliath, an
ax in each hand, his pipe cherry bright in his mouth. The
battlewagon trundled over the terrain, headed right for him,
reloading a cartridge as it picked up speed.
It was suicide. There
was no cover, no way Alun would survive a rapid-fire round from the
matic.
“This way!” Alun
Madder yelled. “Quickly! The boys will take care of the
men.”
Boys? Rose heard
Cadoc and Bryn let out a hoot from down the rail. The two younger
Madder brothers had clambered up inside the big rail-matic scraper
with bulletlike wheels that leveled the land. Somehow they’d
powered the thing and were now riding it down over the bank of men,
Bryn looking like some kind of bug as he worked the levers in the
cab—his goggles reflecting moonlight and gunfire. Cadoc,
wild-haired and laughing as he hung by one hand and one foot off
the side of the beast, unloaded shot after shot into the rail
workers’ rank.
The railmen returned
fire on the big ticker, but bullets pinged off the huge metal
scraper. The rail matic powered forward relentlessly, smashing flat
roots and stumps and anything else that got in its way, big screw
wheels covering the ground with ease.
The rail workers were
outgunned. Those that could turned tail and ran from the nightmare
scene. The rest were crushed where they stood.
Alun was at the foot
of the Goliath. Far too nimble for a man his size, Alun Madder
ducked low and jammed both axes into the bottom links of the
matic’s wheel track, then followed that up with another lit bomb
that he lobbed up into the beast’s chassis.
“Run, Rose,” Alun
Madder yelled. “Run!”
The matic hammered
down with a mighty whump and the earth
itself bent beneath its blow.
She couldn’t see
Alun, didn’t know if he had been injured or killed by the hammer.
The other two Madder brothers were driving the rail matic up behind
the battlewagon, on a clear collision course that would crush the
mobile gun.
They were crazy, all
of them. Plainly suicidally brained. But she didn’t take the time
to ponder further. She ran. Toward LeFel’s train cars, toward Cedar
Hunt and Mae Lindson. To save them if she could. Before it was too
late.
Mae Lindson threw her
hands up to ward off Mr. Shunt, but he slapped the watch out of her
hands and then, for good measure, struck her hard across the face.
Stars filled Mae’s vision as the barbed-wire chain around her
throat tightened and bit.
She couldn’t
breathe.
The hot, wet heat of
the Strange surrounded her as Mr. Shunt shoved her into the
clockwork monster behind her. Spikes scratched, slashed, clamped.
The heat and oil inside the Strange caused every open wound on her
body to sting as if salt had been rubbed in it. She tried to
scream, but had no air.
“Now, Mr. Shunt,”
Shard LeFel said. “The blood. Turn the key and open our door so
that I may see to my brother’s end.”
Mr. Shunt spun so
quickly, his coat billowed around him like dark wings. Then he was
at the Strange door where Shard LeFel stood waiting, hunger
twisting his hauntingly beautiful features.
Mr. Shunt triggered a
switch. And the Strange that held the boy, Wil, and Mae began to
close. Mae pushed at the creature swallowing her whole, but it was
like pushing against a bear trap. Spikes pressed into her back, her
legs, her shoulders, her arms. Sharp agony drew a ragged scream out
of her throat as her blood was sucked up and pumped down into the
tubes that ran to the door, mixing with the blood of the howling
wolf and the screaming child.
The door began to
open, hot white light pouring through the cracks and shattering the
shadows of the room. And in that light, Mae saw her
death.
Cedar Hunt lurched
through the empty train car, blinking blood and sweat out of his
eyes. His lungs felt heavy and full of blood. He cocked the trigger
back on the gun and stumbled into the next car, parceling his
breath so as not to pass out.
He lifted the gun and
shot the first person he saw—Mr. Shard LeFel, who stood bathing in
an unholy light coming up from the floor of the car. The shot
caught Shard LeFel in the shoulder and knocked him flat on his
back.
Cedar cocked the gun,
fired again, this time aiming for the tall, skeletal figure of Mr.
Shunt. He missed.
And then, just as
sure as a watch running down, Cedar was no longer a man. He was a
wolf again. He lunged for Mr. Shunt, jaws, claws, and rage. Mr.
Shunt was made of blades and hooks, razors and pain—too fast to
catch his throat, too slick to snap his bones. Cedar tore at flesh
that tasted of rotted blood, but could do no true damage to the
Strange.
“Mr. Shunt,” Shard
LeFel yelled as he regained his feet and strode back up to the
doorway. “Kill them. Spill their blood now!” Shard LeFel used the
bladed cane to help him stand on the edge of the opening doorway
beneath him, one boot at the threshold.
Mr. Shunt skittered
away from Cedar’s hold and flicked a lever on the device at the top
of the doorway. The device lit up.
Screams of agony
filled the room.
Cedar could not kill
the three Strange creatures in time to save Mae, Elbert, and Wil,
and he had no time to choose between them. Little of a man’s
reasoning filtered through the pain now. His mind was all wolf, and
the wolf would kill the one Strange in front of him.
Cedar jumped over the
door, past Shard LeFel, crashing down on Mr. Shunt before he could
trigger another lever in the device.
Cedar snapped at
Shunt’s face, caught scarf and a hank of hair. Mr. Shunt unhinged
and slipped free, then pulled up the gun that had fallen from
Cedar’s hand. Mr. Shunt aimed that gun at Cedar’s
head.
Then the train car
exploded—walls bashed apart as if a boulder had torn through
them.
“LeFel!” A great,
hoarse bellow shook through the night.
Jeb Lindson had come
calling.
Another wall
shuddered from the impact of the huge matics Jeb swung like a child
swings a stick.
Mr. Shunt turned the
gun on Jeb Lindson. And squeezed the trigger.
The shot took Jeb
straight through the middle of his head, leaving a trail of smoke
spiraling up out of the hole.
Jeb smiled, bloody,
charred, torn apart, and shredded so that he barely resembled the
man he once was. He picked up one of the huge ball tickers and
pounded it into Mr. Shunt, knocking him flat before turning toward
his true goal, Mr. Shard LeFel.
Shard LeFel raised
his cane. “You will not stand in the way of my revenge! You will
not stop me!” He lunged. The silver blade pierced Jeb’s ribs, clean
out his back.
And the big man let
out a huge wet chortle.
Shard LeFel’s eyes
went wide with horror.
“Can’t kill a man
more’n three times, devil,” Jeb Lindson said. “Said it yourself.
You plain can’t kill me no more.”
Mr. Shunt seemed just
as shocked as Shard LeFel and stood, weighing his options. Cedar
barreled into Mr. Shunt and tore into his neck, shaking and
breaking it. Then Cedar ripped Mr. Shunt apart, limb from limb,
stringing bone and guts and metal out of him like pulling the meat
out of a crab, until Mr. Shunt stopped moving, stopped twitching,
stopped ticking.
It took no more than
a minute before Mr. Shunt was reduced to a mess of cracked bits. It
took a few seconds more before Cedar could reclaim enough of his
mind to realize Wil, Mae, and Elbert were still trapped. Trapped by
the Strangeworks.
Cedar attacked the
first Strange, sinking teeth into its head and throwing himself
backward, twisting off the head with the strength of his
jaw.
The Strange wriggled
and shrieked and sprang open like a popped seed. From that bloody
mess, the little child Elbert tumbled out onto the
floor.
Cedar paused just
long enough to be sure the child was breathing, then ran to the
next Strangework.
“No!” Shard LeFel
screamed. “Release me. Fall to the ground and worship
me.”
Cedar glanced at him.
The door was closing, and Shard LeFel was not walking through it.
Jeb Lindson was there instead, big hand wrapped around Shard
LeFel’s throat, holding him one-handed in midair above the door.
With a vicious smile, Jeb Lindson lowered Shard LeFel just enough,
the tips of his boots slipped into the door, before he yanked him
up again.
“Only gonna do one
thing, devil,” Jeb said. “Gonna kill you, me and this dead iron.
And it’s only gonna take me the one time.”
Jeb used one hand to
smash the ball matic into the Holder at the head of the
doorway.
The Holder exploded
in a roll of thunder and a blast of lightning. Seven distinct bits
of the device flew straight up into the night and then whisked
across the starry sky faster than anything on this
earth.
Cedar was on the next
Strangework, biting, killing, twisting, destroying, until it
disgorged his brother, Wil, who was broken, bloody. But he still
breathed.
Cedar Hunt wasn’t
done killing yet.
He threw himself at
the last Strange. And this time, it was Mae who fell from the
monstrous creature, Mae who took a hard, shuddering breath, pulling
the gag from her mouth and the barbed wire from her
throat.
Jeb Lindson lifted
Shard LeFel away from the closed doorway in the floor, his huge
hand crushing LeFel’s windpipe. Jeb Lindson laughed and laughed,
his ruined face drooping with the effort to smile as he dragged
Shard LeFel behind him over the rubble of the train car and down to
the ground outside.
Shard LeFel
scrabbled, reaching for the door, reaching for the stairs, trying
to scream through a throat that could do no more than
gurgle.
And then Jeb stopped
laughing. “For Mae,” he breathed. “My
Mae.”
Jeb pounded LeFel’s
face methodically with his fists, breaking his beautiful features,
snapping his elegant neck, cracking his graceful back, then every
other bone in his body, before crushing his skull and digging his
brain out with his knuckles. Just for good measure, he pounded the
bloody scraps of Shard LeFel with the metal ticker, until all that
remained of him was pulverized into a fine mash.
“Mr.
Hunt?”
Cedar looked away
from the bloody spectacle.
Rose Small stood on
what was left of the platform, her rifle smoking, her goggles
pushed up, little Elbert hugged close against her hip. She was
dirty, singed, a little bloody. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her
smile so brightly.
Rose assessed the
damage to the railcar. “Don’t know if you can jump down, and I
wouldn’t advise you to drop too close to Mr. Lindson. He’s of a
powerful single purpose right now. Can you make it here to the
platform next to me?”
Cedar took a step,
looked back at Mae, who had somehow pulled herself up on her feet
and was walking, a bit dazed, toward Rose. Cedar nudged Wil until
his brother gained his feet and blindly followed him. The door in
the floor was closed, the white light gone. Cedar knew he’d need to
break that door, maybe burn it down, but could not summon the
effort, nor could he begin to think of the method to do
so.
He was suddenly very
tired, very much in pain, and very hot. All he wanted to do was lie
down and lose himself to the soft, luxurious promise of sleep. What
was wrong with him?
He glanced at the sky
behind Rose Small. It was no longer dark and star-caught, but
instead blushing with pink. How had dawn come so soon? Rose was
helping Mae to sit, and looking over both Mae’s and Elbert’s
injuries.
Dawn was on its
way.
Rose glanced over her
shoulder and smiled. “That’s good, Mr. Hunt. You’re almost there.
Mae and Elbert are torn up pretty bad, but they’re mostly whole. A
fair bit better than I reckon they should expect to
be.”
The slide of dawn and
the grip of pain blurred Rose’s words and made her seem far away.
He wanted to go to Mae, to touch her and know she was safe, but he
could not move. So he listened to Rose Small’s words and knew they
meant safety and tending. Cedar lay down to rest. Then the moon
drained away, taking the wolf with it and leaving him free to be a
man once again.
Rose Small did not
avert her eyes as Mr. Hunt slipped his wolf skin and stretched out
into his bare naked self. It didn’t take long at all for him to
turn from wolf to man, and he made no sound, gave no indication
that it hurt.
He simply was looking
at her from a wolf’s eyes, then rolled his shoulders, stretched his
legs, arched his back that had three bullet wounds clean through
it, and was kneeling in his man form. Near as she could tell, he
fell asleep right there. The wounds in his back started mending
some, even as she watched, though they leaked a strange black
oil.
She looked over at
the other wolf, who regarded her with eyes the color of old copper.
He limped over and laid himself down next to Cedar.
“I’m supposing you’re
not just a wild animal,” Rose said as she took a step toward Cedar.
“But seeing as how everyone here is still bleeding, I think we’ll
need to find some water and shelter before folks in town come
looking for what all the noise was about.”
She shifted the pack
on her back, sliding her arm out of one strap. The wolf closed his
eyes, and seemed to fall asleep just like Cedar.
“Well, don’t that
beat all?” Rose knelt and pulled her blanket roll off the bottom of
her pack and unrolled the wool blanket—one that she had bought from
Mae—over Mae and little Elbert.
At that touch, Mae
seemed to come to, brushing back her hair with bloody hands, and
fixing Rose with a clear-eyed stare.
“Jeb?”
“He’s here, as much
of him as can be.” Rose nodded to where Jeb knelt, unmoving, above
the gory mash that had just a moment before been Mr. Shard
LeFel.
Mae moved the blanket
so that it was wrapped around Elbert, and handed the boy to Rose.
Then Mae walked down what was left of the train-car stairs, toward
what was left of her husband.
“Husband?
Jeb?”
Jeb raised his head.
“Mae?” The word was a sigh, almost unrecognizable from what was
left of his mouth.
“I’m here, my
love.”
Jeb struggled to
stand, finally pushed onto his ruined leg and broken ankle,
steadying himself with will alone.
Mae was smiling as if
an angel had just descended from heaven and landed there in front
of her.
“Oh, Jeb.” She
stepped right up to him and put her hands in his, while he looked
down at her, love and devotion shining from his eyes.
“My Mae,” he said.
“To have and to hold.”
Mae nodded. “Yes,
love. Always.” She glanced at his shackles, running her fingers
along the cuff of one of his hands, looking for a way to release
him, while he looked at her in adoration.
Jeb held perfectly
still as she worked her hands around the shackles, but no matter
what she did, she couldn’t find a way to release them.
Finally, Jeb pulled
one hand out of hers and gently placed a single finger beneath her
chin, tipping her face upward.
“Mae,” he said again.
“My wife.”
Even though her face
was tipped, her eyes were closed. The gloss of tears ran a clean
line through the blood on her cheeks. She took a deep breath and
finally opened her eyes.
Sorrow and pain cast
fleeting shadows across her features as she studied the shredded
remains of the man before her. Then she smiled.
“It’s going to be all
right, my love,” she said, her voice hitching. “You’re going to be
just fine. We’re going to be just fine.”
The sky grew
brighter, the sun pressing just below the horizon’s
edge.
Jeb shook his head
and softly drew one thumb across her cheek, as if he had done so a
thousand times before, wiping her tears away. “It is too late for
me. Has been for some time. We know that.”
“No,” Mae said.
“Don’t say that.”
“What should I say,
my Mae?” he asked.
“That you’ll stay
with me. Always.”
Jeb cupped the side
of her face in his bloody hand. “To love and cherish,” he
said.
“I do love you,” she
said. “I will always love you.”
“The vow,” he said,
his voice soft, sad. “Say the vow, my beautiful wife. To love and
to cherish.”
Mae searched his
face. “To love and to cherish.”
“Until death do us
part.”
“Until death do us
part,” she whispered.
Jeb took a deep,
shuddering breath. “I love you,” he exhaled, “always.”
He bent to her, and
she stood on tiptoe. They kissed gently, husband and wife for one
last moment as the sun burned bright over the horizon.
Sunlight poured down
over them, cloaking them in a golden veil while they kissed. Then
Jeb Lindson faded away, shackles falling to the earth, until he was
nothing but dust that glinted on the wind, gathered up and carried
in a rejoice of morning birdsong, to the sky.
The widow Mae Lindson
stood for a long, long while, face tipped up to the glow of the
eastern sky, her eyes closed as if she could not yet find the
strength to look upon the world now that her husband was no longer
upon it.