Cyrus was speaking, faithful, dependable Cyrus. He was a man of few words, and most of those he knew were culled from The Bible. He read with passion and in the dim, candle-lit tent his oddly deformed features only served to enhance the already deep tones of his voice. He read from Psalms, and then he led those gathered into song.
The Deacon pulled his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and nodded. There had been sufficient time for the braziers to be lit. The circle should be solid. It was time. There was no turning back. Along the back of the tent, the sisters had set up a rickety table. On that table a kettle rested. It was large and cast in iron. The Deacon had mixed the refreshments himself. Soon he would call for them to drink – to toast their lord – to wash away their sins.
He closed his eyes and saw the flash of serpentine coils. He heard the deep, insistent rattle of warning. He shivered, just for a second. The pouch throbbed against his chest. The Deacon smiled. He heard the last strains of The Old Rugged Cross rolling across the tent…and he stepped from the shadows, raising his arms on high.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Off beyond the outskirts of town, in the direction of Deadman's Gulch, Provender Creed stood beside his horse. The beast was skittish. It dug at the dusty earth with its hoof, tossed back its head and snorted. Creed rested a steadying hand on the animal’s neck, and then tangled his fingers in its mane. 'Gentle, girl, gentle,' he soothed, whispering to the horse until it settled some.
Creed shielded his eyes against the glare of the bright, nearly full moon, and watched as the camp gradually filled. The big tent where they'd held Ma Kutter’s funeral was lit within by kerosene lamps and candles. Voices rose in song; only the vaguest hint of the melody reached him. Creed frowned when he realized he was humming along.
He didn't know what he'd expected to find. He didn’t even know what he should be looking for. Since the first night the damned crows had flooded Rookwood, things had slipped a little further south each passing minute.
He thought about the woman. He’d never found a trace of her, and the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. No two ways of looking at it, that was strange. The Deacon’s men had rolled her out of that camp in a flat wagon. There should have been sign of where they dropped her, even if they took the time to dig a shallow grave and shovel some dirt over her bones. Buzzards should have circled. There should have been flies, and stink.
Creed had seen death more times than any good man should have, and despite checking everything for a good ten mile radius around the camp, the woman was nowhere to be found. It didn’t make a lick of sense. It wasn’t as though she could have gotten up and walked out of there herself. He couldn’t shake the damned image of her pale face, nor the way the Deacon had dragged the child from her. It was seared onto his soul. A whole lot of things didn’t make any sense, and they were worming away under his skin.
He tied his horse to a small tree with a break-away knot and slipped closer. He moved low and fast, constantly alert, checking over his shoulder, to the left, and to the right. He didn’t want to risk being spotted from the camp, but he wanted a good view of what was happening. He’d seen Brady coming in at the last, and suddenly the distance between himself and the Deacon’s big tent seemed a lot farther than it had by the light of day. The strange scent of incense carried to him on the breeze. Even as thin as it was the aroma was intoxicating. He shook his head and tried to clear the slight fog it caused, but it didn’t make a lick of difference.
He kept to the shadows and moved quickly toward the perimeter, scuffing his feet as he ran. He slowed up, dropped to a crouch, and scanned the camp. The Deacon’s odd little crew came and went about their business. None of them looked his way. They were all, every last one of them, wrong in some way, damaged, broken. Had the Deacon gathered them to him out of the goodness of his heart or did he simply attract misfits and freaks? Creed licked his dry lips. There wasn’t an ounce of moisture in his mouth. He looked up at the sky and the rising moon, and then started running again.
Twenty feet closer to the camp he slowed again, and as he lifted his foot to cross a fallen log, a searing pain tore through his chest, cold and so sharp it bit like fire. He gasped in pain and stumbled back. Creed clutched at his chest with his hands. It took him a moment to realize it was the locket, and that as he backed away from the log, the pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun.
Creed stood hunched over in the shadows, hands on knees, gasping for breath. Wincing, he straightened up. He clutched the locket through his shirt and felt the smooth curve of it in the palm of his hand. There was no hint of cold, no trace of pain. Very slowly, he moved toward the log again. Tentatively, he reached out, holding his hand above it. He felt the locket grow suddenly icy. He backed away.
'What in the Sam Hill . .?'
He took the chain and tried to lift the locket over his head. It slipped through his fingers before he could work it up over his chin, and it fell back beneath his shirt collar. He grabbed it again, and again, but each time it slipped through his fingers, or tangled in them, and somehow ended up settling against his skin as though it had taken root and become a part of him.
Creed turned to the camp again. The music had shifted. He heard a deep, baritone filling the night with the strains of 'The Old Rugged Cross.' He edged closer until he was just short of the log, and hunkered down to watch. He didn’t know what the locket was warning him against, but he knew, on some deep, primal level, that it
Provender Creed licked his lips.
His skin prickled. He looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see a dark winged shadow there. He was alone. It didn’t matter. Suddenly the incense, the crow men and everything else that had happened over the last few days took on darker and more sinister overtones. He glanced up into the trees, but there was no sign of birds. He swept his gaze along the perimeter of the camp, but nothing moved. Every living thing for miles was inside that tent – except for a lone cowboy named Provender Creed.
He shivered. Days ago he would have said it meant someone had walked over his grave. Here, now, he was sure of it.
In the camp, the last strains of 'The Old Rugged Cross' faded away. For a long moment, the silence was broken only by the canvas flapping in the breeze. He watched the dancing shadows playing across the backlit surface of the tent, straining to see if he could make anything out of them. He thought he could see where the altar stood, and where pews stretched to the right and left but beyond that it was impossible.
A tall dark blotch moved toward the center of the tent, the shadow image of The Deacon, hands upraised to the heavens in a sustained supplication. Creed knew it was the man’s shadow from the way he moved. It was something Creed noticed. The way a man carried himself was the kind of thing he tucked away without thinking about it. If you studied how a man walked, it could tell you a lot about him, enough to keep you alive if it came right down to it and Creed had a knack for surviving. The Deacon moved like a man so sure of himself he’d walk into the pits of Hell and have the balls to tell the Devil to turn down the heat. The thing about men like that, men so blinkered by their own holy importance, was that more often than not they underestimated their enemies.
A few minutes after stepping to the center of the tent, the Deacon raised his voice, coming close to reaching the volume of the entire gathering when they belted out their hymns.
Creed listened, for what good it did. The words made no sense. He’d attended church services as a boy, and before the old preacher had died, he’d stopped in from time to time to pay his respects to him and Him up there. He wasn’t exactly God-fearing, but he was hardly a stranger to the Word. What he heard now sounded almost like it could have been from the Old Testament, the thunder and lightning vengeful God stuff, it was damned loud, for sure. He listened as the strange words rose. He felt them deep in his bones, resonating with his meat and the belly of the earth beneath his feet. He felt an icy tingle from the locket.
