Bladestay, p.16
Bladestay, page 16
She struggled as she realized his intent, clawing for her weapon.
He tweaked his stronghold again, rocking her backward, forcing her to sit hard on her ankles; the edge of the blade touched her throat and Theo’s fingernails broke August’s skin on the inside of his wrist. It didn’t faze or hinder him, and she froze like that, her life held wholly in the movements of August’s fingers.
“August,” she said in a squeaking whisper.
And nobody saw it. Nobody noticed the soft spot that Theo found when she said his name, pleading mercy, that his grip softened, even if just for a moment, the edge of the blade releasing less than an ounce of pressure. It was small, so small perhaps, that Theo thought she might have imagined it.
“I didn’t understand why you’d lied to me about Lucas,” August said as Billy dragged her father over.
She gritted her teeth against the pain in her side, the dread of bleeding out, the horror of seeing her father swaying from a tree.
“I reckon I do now.” He tightened his fingers, pulling harder on her hair, tilting her head back more.
Billy shoved Harrison Creed, who had landed in a jumble of elbows and knees, several yards in front of his daughter.
His lips were blue, his eyes were red and bloodshot, and the noose was still around his neck. He gasped his every breath, the air through his swollen throat making a rasped, strangled noise. With his hands still bound behind his back, the side of his face landed in the cold earth. Harrison’s hazy eyes rolled in their sockets, his mouth swallowing air in panicky gulps. His legs squirmed beneath him, heels digging into the grass, trying to find any semblance of control of his own body.
“That’s it, Creed. Come back to us.”
Theo tore her eyes from her father to glance at Billy, whose face was all stoic, no emotion. She wished she hadn’t looked. It only made the pit of despair less manageable.
Harrison coughed and shuddered, his legs fading into slower movements as his brain drank the oxygen and settled his nervous system. He let out a groaning, growling noise that sounded like he was trying to say something.
“How long’ve you known, Sixer?” August asked as Harrison blinked back to awareness.
“Last night, tending to her wounds,” Billy said.
August made a noncommittal growl of a “Hm.” Then he said, “She killed Jester?”
Billy nodded without looking at her.
“Jesus,” August said in a way that straddled disbelief, respect, and grief all at once.
When her father finally had the awareness and clarity to recognize what was happening around him, his entire body went tranquil. He blinked at Theo. The muscles on his uncharacteristically unshaven jaw popped. When he glanced up and behind Theo, at August, a fire blazed in Harrison’s eyes in a way that Theo had never seen and Harrison had plenty of clarity to understand the means in which August Gaines planned to destroy him.
When he made a similar groaning, crying sound, this time he wasn’t trying to say anything at all. It was simply a noise of pure anguish.
Theo choked on a sob.
“You have been granted a second chance,” August said.
“No,” Harrison cried.
August ran flat side of the blade up Theo’s cheek, promising violence with a caress.
“Confess,” August said.
“I don’t know!” Harrison tried to yell, but it was only a hoarse whine. He directed his attention to Theo, his words quick and damaged.
“Theodora, I love you. You hear me, honey? I love you.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
He nodded at her, his cheek dragging against the dirt.
“Confess,” August said, returning the blade to her neck.
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” Harrison said. “Please just let her go.”
“Where is Blacksmith?”
Blacksmith was still alive. That meant Elliot and her brothers could be too.
“I’ll tell you after you get your hands off my daughter.”
“This daughter?” August said. “The same one you left defenseless in a jail cell when I came into town?” He dragged the blade down through Theo’s forehead, across her eyebrow, leaving a track of hot pain. He kept the blade there, hovering above her eye socket, intersecting her pupil. She looked again at Billy and noticed the white-knuckled way he was holding his gun, one hand holding his own wrist as if to restrain himself from getting involved.
If her daddy didn’t come up with some kind of answer, Billy was going to spark something that Theo didn’t believe anyone would walk away from.
“Okay, August Gaines,” Theo’s father said. “I’ll confess something to you.” His lips brushed the ground. “I don’t know where your godforsaken rock is, but I know something else.” Harrison glanced at his daughter for a moment before he said, “Your child is alive.”
August let go of Theo’s hair, clicked the straight razor shut.
“You mention my daughter again, I’ll cut the tongue out of your head.”
“No. Your other kid.”
August scoffed. “I only had one child.”
“Lucas told me he can’t have kids.”
“He was lying,” August said.
“Did you or didn’t you have an affair with Maureen?”
“You don’t get to speak on that. You got the story from a man who took everything from me, including the life of my three-month-old daughter, all because he was jealous.”
“You slaughtered your own wife just because she loved Lucas and not you.”
August laughed. “Is that the story he’s tellin’?”
Theo’s father coughed painfully into the earth and had no retort.
“Blacksmith is a con artist, Creed. You fell for it same as my whore wife, so—”
“Do you hear yourself?” Harrison said. “Your child is alive. Haven’t you listened to a single thing I’ve told you? Your first-born child is alive.”
August Gaines went still. His fingers twitched at his side. He looked over his shoulder at Theo, who had blood dripping down her eyelid and across her nose. She didn’t bother to wipe it away.
There was a loud ringing in Theo’s ears. She saw her father’s lips moving, but she didn’t hear anything after your child is alive.
The child in dispute—she knew who it was.
CHAPTER 29
Billy Boone was posted outside Bladestay.
It was his responsibility to hold the southern perimeter. His horse was tied to a nearby tree, and Billy paced mellowly nearby, scanning the surroundings as he fiddled with the cylinder of his revolver, clicking it open and flicking it back in place. It was partly nervous habit, partly deepening of intimacy a soldier should have with their weapon. He could load and unload the chambers without looking. He could draw it from its holster with the grace and prowess of a true gunslinger. Flea may be the most accurate shot this side of the Mississippi, but Billy was on his way to being the quickest in the entire Union. He had a natural athleticism, was uncommonly nimble, his mind never decelerated by drink, and he had great motivation: one day, he would challenge August Gaines to a duel. As far as he could tell, it was the only way to take the tyrant down. His gang was knit too tightly, too blindly loyal, and even if Billy did manage to take the life of Gaines, he doubted he would survive the following retribution. So, he decided, he would slowly sharpen and hone his skill until he was ready to take on August Gaines in a way that was true in accordance to the law and accepted by outlaws both. He saw the flaws in his own plan, but he had been making things up as he went for about six years now, and although his choices had their own collateral, he had also gone too far, too deep, to turn back and return home empty-handed. As he saw it, the collateral he’d caused wasn’t worth it until he had relieved August Gaines’s body of its head. Simply put, he’d committed to the long con the moment he’d truly realized what he was up against.
After Brody Boone lay slaughtered, Billy had heard something spoken between August and his silhouetted crew.
We win the war, August Gaines had said, and the Mexicans still lay claim to land on this soil. Fuck’em all.
Billy didn’t think he’d ever have the chance or ability to get close to Gaines based solely on the color of his skin, so he’d planned to track him down, to walk right up to him and put a bullet in his skull, consequences be damned. The early phases of his revenge plot were shaky and problematic, mostly because he had no idea the kind of precise monster Gaines turned out to be, partly because every idea he had would surely leave him dead alongside Gaines. He had a lot of time on the trail, alone, to ponder this. Time makes a man look his deeds in the face. He didn’t like what Time was reflecting, so by the time he caught up to Gaines (in Carson City), the August Gaines he’d witnessed just outside Ruidoso was so opposite of Billy’s understanding of the man that Billy’s gears began to switch in another direction.
August Gaines was surrounded by outcasts. His closest ally, a man he called Spartan, was a runaway slave. Rook was Indigenous. Pathfinder was a brown-skinned man from New Mexico, just like Billy, and Pathfinder was far from the only one in the gang. Billy didn’t understand how these men followed a white man with an ideology such as his, but he was immediately and overwhelmingly curious to find out. When curiosity meets caution, they tend to draw things out.
The complexities of the world messed with Billy. The contradictions of mankind screwed with his formative years. He was a perfect victim for grooming, and although August wasn’t in the business of recruitment, he knew a ripe target when he saw one.
Billy didn’t know when it happened. How it happened. He only knew that, somewhere along the way, it did happen. He had developed a warmth for August—a respect for him. August treated Billy so well that Billy had a difficult time resolving this man against the one who so effortlessly murdered Brody. Somewhere along the way, it made sense, felt right, to allow himself to be carried away by a group of people who treated him like an equal.
So, as he sat outside Bladestay, waiting for any residents who might try to escape, he didn’t find it strange. He hardly thought about Brody with clarity anymore. He kept sharpening the tools he anticipated destroying Gaines with, but it had turned into a sort of rote obligation, an undercurrent he knew he had to answer to someday—a way to stay loyal to Brody—but Brody’s death had turned into something nebulous, distant, and ultimately, something that used to have sharp edges but had now been dulled by years of the grinding of justification: Billy had slowly reduced the murder to a fluke in August Gaines’s character. This wasn’t emotional cowardice; this was mental survival. The mind creates walls, those walls are called justification, and those walls don’t behave like normal ones because those walls are far easier to build than they are to tear down.
Billy saw a flash of something through the trees.
He pressed his shoulder to a tree trunk and peered through the collection of spruce.
He saw it again.
He yanked the quick-release tie of his horse and leaped on his back in a practiced, elegant maneuver. His gelding was weaving and galloping through trees before he even had his feet in the stirrups. He took his rifle from the holster attached to the saddle at the horse’s shoulder, sat hard, and pressed the butt of the rifle against his own shoulder. The horse rocked back on his hind end and slid on his back hooves to an obedient halt, placing them purposefully close to the large girth of a tree trunk. Billy pressed his left knuckles against the tree, elevated his elbow up to create a level line with his forearm. He swung the barrel of the rifle down to rest atop the straight line of his arm and found his target fleeing about fifty yards away and counting.
Billy took a deep breath, wrapped his finger around the trigger, and moved the end of his aim in steady tandem with the movement of the fleeing rider.
“Whoa,” he muttered lightly to his horse, then continued to let out his breath steadily as he increased the pressure on the trigger. The rifle kicked him in the shoulder and his horse hardly flinched.
Billy saw the rider tumble from his horse.
He jammed his feet in the stirrups as he returned the rifle to its holster. His horse leaped forward, from standstill to canter, from canter to gallop in the matter of four strides.
When he reached the rider’s mount, the horse was carelessly munching on vibrant, knee-high grass, the reins caught behind his ears.
Billy opted for one of the six-shooters, thumbing the hammer back carefully as he picked his way through the forest where the rider had been thrown by Billy’s bullets. Billy had strict no-kill orders on any man until August could determine whether that man was Lucas Haas or not, but shooting a moving target from over fifty yards away was a beggar’s choice.
A blur caught the corner of Billy’s eye, but not quick enough.
A body slammed into his, and together they tumbled from the height of the horse and to the ground.
Billy landed with the loss of the upper hand. His attacker had him pinned quickly, the revolver knocked from Billy’s hand. Billy twisted and jerked his body, swinging a free hand, grazing his attacker’s jaw. The man on top of him hit him back, and his knuckles did more than graze Billy’s temple.
It jolted and doubled his vision.
The man had all his fingers around Billy’s neck. Blood was blocked from entering his brain, and his vision went from double to blurred beyond numbers in horrifying rapidity.
Numbly, Billy’s hand searched for the knife in an inconspicuous holster that sat perpendicular against his spine. He wiggled his fingers between his back and the matted grass, vision going from gray to black by the time he unbuckled the holster. He didn’t remember closing the gap between holster to his opponent’s neck, only came to an awareness capable of recalling after the blade had disappeared into the man’s throat. Billy pulled the knife out, releasing a geyser of the carotid, covering Billy in a hot, coppery shower.
He pulled the knife out and stabbed again.
It didn’t take long for the body to go limp, and Billy kicked and shoved it off him. He rolled on his side and coughed, spitting out someone else’s blood.
Dragging himself onto his hands and knees, he caught his breath as he looked down at the man.
The man was young, shockingly so, not even old enough yet to be called a man—couldn’t be older than fifteen. The boy had auburn hair, a straight nose, and a bold jawline. He was holding his erupting neck. His eyes were a dark blue. Billy knew this because they were looking directly into his.
Billy sat back, tenderly rubbing his own throat as he watched the light dim from the boy’s eyes. He had killed men before, but never one who was younger than him. It didn’t feel as devastating as he thought it might, but Billy didn’t yet understand that these things stay with you, that his mind was already constructing a wall around this, shock acting as a cocoon around trauma. He didn’t yet comprehend how a single thing can layer upon itself, only to weigh something impossible years later.
He only knew that he was wearing the paint of victory and he had no intentions of washing it away, not until it had dried on his skin and everyone was looking at him like the madman he felt he had finally become.
CHAPTER 30
August was saying something, but Theo couldn’t stop thinking about another thing, and when she forced herself to hear the words coming out of August, she discovered that those things were the same.
“Elliot,” August was saying. “He was my boy?”
Harrison: “He wasn’t Lucas’s.”
August’s glance snagged on Theo’s.
“I’m sure,” August said, unconvinced. “Then where’s this supposed kid of mine?”
Harrison’s lips spread into a grin, and Theo’s insides churned at the glum victory that she had never known her father to possess. “I reckon,” Harrison said, “that your kid is on his way back to Bladestay as we speak, with the complete force of the US Marshals.”
Theo’s eyes were scanning the ground in front of her. Her mind was on the brink of figuring it out. A syrupy drop of blood landed on a thick blade of grass. She watched it crawl downward, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake.
Then understanding came. Her chest ached so deeply, and she knew that kind of pain was unique to a heart breaking.
“Daddy,” Theo said. “Elliot was the one who went for Clayton Creek?”
Her father nodded. “It’s going to be okay, honey.”
“No,” she whispered. Nothing was going to be okay. She lifted her eyes to Billy.
His face was pale. His eyes were unblinking. He knew it too, knew he had entered Bladestay showered in the blood of her best friend, of August Gaines’s son, blood of which Theo held no denominator, but how could that matter when she and Elliot had so many more important things in common, such as how both of them inherited sins that weren’t theirs to reconcile.
Theo pushed herself to her feet, holding her side.
Pathfinder and Flea appraised their guns on her, but August held up a don’t-you-dare hand.
August noticed the horrified trance that Billy had fallen into.
His hand hovered there in the air, his gaze on Billy.
“Sixer,” August said.
“August,” Theo said.
August took the revolver from its holster but didn’t raise it from a resting place against his leg.
“Was that Elliot’s blood you’d bathed yourself in?” He pulled back the hammer.
“What?” Harrison said, rolling onto his back to get a better view of Billy.
Theo didn’t have the stomach to stand up to August right now, but she saw no other way to diffuse this.
“I—he—” Billy tried.
August raised the gun to Billy. “You had one job with one rule, you goddamn—”
“August!” Theo yelled as she limped heavily to him. “What are you doing?”
“This don’t concern you, Youngblood.”
