Rose shifted against the doorframe. She’d kept the gun holstered and instead held a little bottle with a mix of cayenne pepper, water, and oil. She’d bargained the pepper from the Madders and boiled it to a wicked concentration. Rose said it would stop a man dead in his tracks if he got a face full of what was in that bottle.
Cedar didn’t savor the idea of being the man she tried it out on.
“Cedar Hunt.” Mae’s voice trembled, exhausted as if she were indeed carrying all the world on her words. “Let your debt be paid. Let your ties to those who walk the earth and stars fall away in peace. Let your soul become unburdened, unbound, and return again to the true shape of spirit and flesh.”
She blew out the candle and the smoke rolled toward him. He inhaled.
For a moment, he felt lifted, as if he stood beside himself instead of set solid in his own skin. For a moment, the beast seemed a great distance from him, as if pulled away by a retreating tide.
An explosion blasted through the night.
Pain, hot and claw-sharp, dragged him back as if the beast tore into his flesh, muscle, and bone, and clamped down with brutal jaws.
He opened his mouth to yell, to gasp for air.
And the pain was gone.
He sat, shackled, on the burlap. He was not bleeding. He was not injured.
And he was not cured. The beast was still inside him.
The Madder brothers outside the wagon cussed and laughed, congratulating themselves.
Rose stomped back into the wagon. He hadn’t heard her leave.
“They blew a hole the size of a barn into the ground. Scared the horses half to death. If we hadn’t ground- tied them, we’d have lost them in the night.”
“Dynamite?” he asked.
“No, they heated up the boiler so high it blew. Bits of metal and wood everywhere. Such a waste. They think it’s a matter of hilarity.”
Mae wiped the back of her hand over her eyes and leaned back against the crate, all the strength out of her.
“Did it work?” Rose nodded toward Mae.
“No,” Cedar said, “I don’t believe it did.”
Mae frowned. “It should have. It should have worked. The explosion. Was there an explosion?”
“Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Lindson,” Rose said. “It was just a bad turn of luck the Madders are all fired up with stupid tonight.”
“The Madders?” Mae said. “That was reckless. Inexcusable. To break the spell…”
Cedar watched as her face heated with anger. For a moment, for more than that, he wondered just what an angry woman who also happened to be a witch was capable of doing to a man.
“It’s done,” he said. “Let it be for now. We all need sleep.” He lifted his hands, the chains clinking. “I’ll be of no harm to anyone this night.”
Mae pressed her lips together, and then her anger was replaced by something more resembling confusion. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry yourself,” Rose said. “After some sleep we’ll be coming into new supplies tomorrow. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hunt?”
Cedar nodded. “If we want to get over the mountains before winter locks the passes, we’ll need to make Vicinity by nightfall.”
“There might be herbs we could buy so you could try that spell again,” Rose said.
“I don’t think…” Mae licked her lips and shook her head. “I don’t think herbs will help.”
“Don’t you worry, Mae.” Rose took Mae’s hands and helped her to the door of the wagon. “There’s nothing but bright skies and sunshine for us tomorrow.”
Cedar admired Rose’s outlook, though he didn’t share it. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. Wil lowered his ears and growled softly at the Madders’ laughter.
It was terribly convenient that their device had exploded just when Mae was so close to breaking his curse. A curse that happened to make him hunger to hunt the Strange. A curse that made him an undeniable benefit in the Madders’ quest to find the strangeworked Holder.
If Cedar were a suspicious man, he might just think the Madders had broken Mae’s spell on purpose.
CHAPTER TWO
Stump Station wasn’t much more than a collection of shacks built precariously into the pockets and wedges on the east side of the Bitterroot Range in the Idaho Territory. So barren and out of the way, even the vultures risked starvation.
It was the perfect sort of place to attract those members of society who preferred to remain unnoticed by others. Hard men and rangy women who spent most of their days waiting for the right wind to carry them up to the glim grounds where they could harvest their fortune.
Glim, more precious than diamonds or gold, used to power ships on air, water, or land. Used to heal the sick, cure the blights, turn the tide in wars, and make anything and everything stronger and longer lasting. Glim was even rumored to extend a man’s life well beyond his years.
Rare and desired, glim. And as hard to locate as Hades’ back door.
Some said glim could be found underground, or out at sea. But the only place glim was known to occur with any regularity was above high mountain ranges, and up higher still. Above the storm clouds, floating like nets of soft lightning, the glim fields were capricious and fleeting. Difficult to find. Deadly to harvest. Most ships couldn’t launch that high, last those storms, or lash and land without killing those who flew them.
So it was no wonder glim fetched a pretty price in the legitimate markets, and a king’s ransom in those markets less savory.
Captain Hink counted himself among his own kind out here in the rocks. Outlaws, prospectors, glim pirates, soldiers of luck, fools, and the foolhardy, brothers all.
Not that he wouldn’t drop a brother at a thousand paces if he jumped his claim, stole his boots, or touched his airship, the
But then, he supposed any of the rock rats who ported, docked, or launched from Stump Station would do him the same.
“Problem, Mr. Seldom?” Captain Hink asked as his second-in-command ducked through the canvas tarp that hung in place of a door in the tumbledown that Hink called home.
Seldom was a wiry-built, redheaded Irish who looked like he’d snap in half if he sneezed too hard. Most people thought he got his name from how often he spoke. But Captain Hink knew he went by Seldom for how many times he’d lost a fight.
Hink figured he and Seldom didn’t much resemble each other. Hink scraped up a full six foot, three inches, and had shoulders that took the sides off doorways if he wasn’t mindful. Yellow hair, skin prone to tanning, and eyes the gray of a broody sky set in a face that women had never complained about, Hink might have been considered a catch if he’d grown up in the social circles of the old states instead of as the bastard child of a soiled dove.
And whereas Seldom looked old for his thirty years, Hink looked like a man in his twenties, and that was no lie.
Seldom stabbed one thumb over his shoulder, stirring the wool scarves around his neck and jostling his breathing gear, which hung at the wait near his collarbone. “Mullins.”
Captain Hink put the cup of boiled beans that passed for coffee up here in the stones down on the edge of the map spread across the buckboard that served as his desk. He leaned back in his chair, enough so his Colt was in easy reach.
He wasn’t expecting Les Mullins to come in and shoot him dead. But he wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what the captain of the big, and recently crashed and burned,
