“Good girl. Fate is with me, as you will soon be unable to deny. I realized something quite profound yesterday. You see, Dredd did something useful for the first time in his miserable life. He took action. Just as I am now taking action.”
I had recognized Fallon’s ruthless arrogance the last time I’d been in his company, on a train bound for Chicago, but he hadn’t sounded insane that evening. Tonight he did, blatantly so. There was an agitated, unhinged quality to his voice not present during our previous interaction. My thoughts spun, fixating on one-syllable words in the extremity of my fear.
Bad.
This is badbadbadbadbad.
Help me.
Oh God, helpmehelpmehelpmehelpme.
“You and Dredd’s whore wife thought you could escape with her bastard, didn’t you?” He issued a clucking noise of reprimand and the ice chunks in my gut multiplied. “She didn’t escape and neither will you. But I am not going to kill you quite yet. There’s something I’d like you to watch, first. They should be ready any second. I told them to give me five minutes…”
He halted. We were over fifty paces from the main house but close enough for a clear view as flames leaped to existence around the entire structure. My eyes bulged, unable to process the sight. I screamed behind his palm, struggling and thrashing, with fewer odds of escape than a rabbit in the jaws of a steel trap.
“Gasoline would be preferable, of course, but that won’t be in widespread use until 1913. Fortunately, alcohol burns almost as well. The structure is wooden, a further advantage, as is the dry air. They’ll be engulfed in less than two minutes by my best estimation.”
He released my mouth and wailing cries tore free.
Celia – Jacob – Birdie – Grant –
Every one of Marshall’s ancestors in Montana lay sleeping inside that house.
Every last Rawley in Montana.
Fallon let me scream, keeping me tightly restrained, my arms pinned; he knew I was no threat to his plans at this point. No one could hear me from this distance. I watched black stick figures swarm the house, men on foot and horseback – Grant’s ranch hands trying to tame an inferno already blazing beyond control. Drained, destroyed, I finally fell silent and Fallon’s hold on my torso relaxed ever so slightly. The second he did I jutted my head backward in the vain hope I would connect with his face. He grunted, stumbling sideways, and flung me to the ground; I had underestimated his strength once again.
“You’re a fighter,” he whispered, pinning me supine with one knee on my chest; his head and shoulders created a silhouette darker than the night sky. Stars turned cartwheels at the edges of my vision. “And probably a hell of a fuck. I don’t have time just now but I’ll teach you a thing or two when we meet again.” He bent and licked my cheek, his breath rough and elevated; he was excited by all of this. “We’ll meet again, I promise you.”
And then he struck my temple with a small, blunt object.
Axton found me in the gray light of dawn. It was almost surreal, regaining painful consciousness to the sight of his face just as I had a year earlier, when I’d first arrived in the nineteenth century; only this time I wasn’t numbed by the anesthesia of amnesia and disbelief. I blinked at the bits of char and ash drifting and twirling in the air around his head. There was a beat of deep silence between us, a speck of eternity during which our gazes held fast.
I saw his eyes and I knew.
“Ax…” I moaned.
I knew.
He bent and collected me to his chest, which heaved with deep, choking sobs. I clamped my teeth around the material of his canvas jacket; I wanted to cover my ears, to block out everything he would proceed to tell me in the next minute. I wanted to scream at him to shut the fuck up; I wanted to run out into the foothills and never return. Axton rocked us side to side, gripping the back of my head the way he would an infant’s fragile skull.
“Ruthie, oh Jesus Christ, Marshall disappeared.” Choking over the words, wishing he did not have to speak them. “He just up and disappeared and there was nothing I could do…”
Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up…
Later, I would not remember the brief span of time during which I knelt with Axton in the tall grass, the charred shell of the Rawleys’ house visible in the distance, smoke drifting in lazy blue-gray curls from the ruins. I would not remember struggling to my feet and running headlong for the creek, sobbing as I fell to my knees, begging time to sweep me away. I would not remember my vicious struggle to remain there in the cold water when Axton tried to haul me out, I would not recall his words or mine – I only knew later because I made Ax tell me everything.
Marshall disappeared because Jacob died in the fire, the baby I came to the past to save.
Jacob is gone.
The Rawleys are gone.
My baby is gone.
OhGodohGodohGodohGod…
I wished I was able to forget the journey on horseback to Howardsville and the subsequent endless train ride, with its multiple connections, to St. Paul, Minnesota. Hollow and iced-over, my insides echoing with despair, I was aware of little but clinging to Axton, the only security left to me in this world. I slept most of the way as the train cars rolled east. When he whispered, “We’re here,” I refused to open my eyes and behold the depot of the St. Paul railroad station, where Malcolm Carter awaited our arrival. Midmorning sunshine glared on my eyelids and I hated its brilliant light; I wanted to scream the sun out of the sky, to watch it plummet toward the horizon in a fiery plume of destruction.
“C’mon, Ruthie, we can’t
