man. In daylight.
And he’d done it as a man, not a beast, with no thrall of the moon to blame his actions upon.
He looked down. The dead man wasn’t very large nor very young. He had the look and the smell of someone who spent most his days riding and hunting bounties on men’s heads and most his nights gambling away the noose money.
“Who?” he rasped.
“I’d ask his name,” Rose said, “but don’t think he’ll say. He broke into our camp and tried to kill a few of us, Mae included. You…” Her voice faded off. Then she sort of huffed a chuckle. “Never saw a thing like it. And I’ve seen things. Strange things.”
Mae. Of course. He’d never stand idle if she was in danger. But to lose his mind to this kind of rage was not at all like him.
“Did I change?” Cedar couldn’t remember the wolf coming upon him. Couldn’t remember sliding down that slick, hot stroke of pleasure to stretch into the fur and claws of the beast that the Pawnee gods had cursed him to wear on the three days of full moon.
Reason left him when the beast was in control and his thoughts reduced to hunger, hunt, and killing the Strange. He searched his memory for how the dead man had come to be broken, his blood pouring down Cedar’s throat.
Nothing came clear.
“You didn’t change,” Rose said. “Not in skin anyway. But I’m not sure how much of a man’s mind you were in possession of. Didn’t use a gun to kill him, Mr. Hunt. You used your bare hands. Broke him once and just kept right on breaking him.”
She paused to let that soak in good.
“So,” she said brightly, “now you need to be moving on. We want you locked up in the wagon for safekeeping. Yours and ours.”
Cedar took one last look at the man. “Someone should search his body. See if he carried a reason to be following us. He was following us, wasn’t he?”
“The Madders said maybe for a week or so. They’re off seeing if he had company.” Rose started walking, her boots crunching through the dry autumn underbrush.
Cedar started walking too, staying well ahead of her trigger finger.
“Don’t know as to why he thought killing us was worth the effort,” she said. “We don’t have much to steal. We aren’t causing any trouble.”
Then she grinned. “You don’t suppose we’ve gotten famous, do you? Maybe someone heard how we took apart Shard LeFel and his matics? Wrote us up in a newspaper somewhere?”
“Folk are rarely hunted for their good deeds,” Cedar said. “I don’t think we’re famous.”
Sure, he had mistakes in his past that might put a price on his head. But Rose had never been outside of the little town of Hallelujah, Oregon, until now. Mae Lindson might be a witch, but she wasn’t the sort of person to go about causing harm.
The Madder brothers were a mystery when it came to their moral standings and past deeds. They liked to spin tales fantastical of things they’d done, places they’d been, but none of those yarns pointed clearly to shady doings.
“Could be nothing to do with us,” he finally said. He rubbed his thumb over his lips, wiping away the blood there, and resisted the urge to lick it off his fingers.
Core-deep inside him, the beast shifted, letting him know it was still hungry. If there was no Strange blood to spill, it seemed just as happy with the blood of a man.
He straightened his shoulders against the chill of dread that slipped down his spine.
The beast was growing stronger. Hungrier.
“So he was just desperate?”
“Could be,” Cedar said. “Saw an opportunity to plunder his way westward. Plenty of folk do it.”
“Land pirates?” Rose sounded excited about the prospect.
She’d seen violence. Killed without a flinch men and Strange creatures that crawled up out of nightmares. But even death and much darker happenstances hadn’t been able to shake Rose Small’s sense of wonder in the world.
Cedar hadn’t yet seen a thing that could dim her spirit.
“Just a rustler, more like.” He paused. Turned to her. “We should search him.”
Rose hesitated. Cedar gave her time to look him straight in the eyes. She held his wild gaze and measured his sanity.
Looking at him like that, when the beast was so near the surface of his reasoning, was something most people couldn’t do.
But then, Rose had a bit of the wild in her too. Wasn’t a metal she couldn’t shape or a device she couldn’t jigger with her fast-thinking mind and clever fingers.
“Not that I don’t trust you, Mr. Hunt,” she said. “It’s just…” Her mouth tugged a crooked frown. “You tore him apart. With your hands.”
“Rose,” he said softly, resisting the urge to put his hands behind his back, where she wouldn’t see the blood. As if that could hide his sins from her. “Whatever happened, it’s done.”
She bit her bottom lip and those springtime eyes searched him like she was peering through the shutter of his soul. “I’ll keep the gun where it is, just the same.”
Cedar walked back to the body. He glanced at the surrounding forest. Didn’t see anything out of place. Well, except for the dead man. Not many bugs had found him yet, so it’d been just a few minutes at most since he’d killed him.
Snapped his neck, to be precise.
Cedar knelt and turned the man so he could study his face. A heavy black beard spread chin to temple. All his unwhiskered skin seemed to be covered in grime. His eyes were rolled back in his head and blood dripped a line out the corner of his mouth. Cedar picked up each of his hands. All the fingers were still attached, calluses and scars where you’d expect them to be on a man who rode the range.
He’d carried two guns, one thrown off in the brush about ten feet east, the other still in the holster. The weapons weren’t nothing fancy, but they were well tended. He’d been good with his guns.
Not good enough to draw more than one before Cedar had killed him.
With his bare hands.
Cedar searched pockets, coat, and shirt. Handkerchief, tobacco pouch, rolling paper, and a knife. Not a lot else. Not a single coin on him, not a scrap of a letter, not a photo of a loved one.
“You done pawing that fellow to death?” The voice was so near him, Cedar started.
Alun Madder, the oldest of the brothers, crouched down on his heels near Cedar. Cedar was not a small man, but Alun took him on width.
Built like bull buffalos, the Madder brothers were all heavily bearded, wide-jawed, and accustomed to a life of mining, drinking, and brawling. When they weren’t fighting, they had an uncanny knack with metal, matics, and odd devices.
Cedar owed them a favor for helping him find his brother, who he had thought was long dead. They’d been true to their part of the bargain, and so he was holding true to his.
Riding east to return Mae to her witch sisterhood before her ties to them and the magic of the coven sent her clean insane. Riding east so maybe those same witches could break the Pawnee curse Cedar and his brother carried. Rose, he supposed, was just looking to see the world wide, though he knew she cared for Mae and wanted to see her set to rights.
And on the way he would uphold his promise to hunt for the Holder, a device made of seven ancient metals cobbled together into a weapon of great power.
The Madders said even uncobbled, the Holder could cause ruin, rot, destruction.
If that was true, then the brothers’ priority of gathering it up—wherever it was the pieces had landed—and getting it out of the hands of the innocent was a worthwhile cause.
“You’re of a quiet mood, all of a sudden,” Alun Madder said. “This man someone you know?”
Cedar pulled a cloth out of his back pocket and wiped his bloody palms and arms until they were mostly
