Page 83 of Spring's Arcana
“Thatbothers me.” Nat couldn’t think of what else to say. Staring your own moral relativism in the face left little in the way of polite conversation or stones to throw at other people’s glass houses. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
“But itis. I could wear another body. I could look like gat-damn Gary Cooper, pardon my French, ma’am, but I keep this form because back then on the range, most of my boys looked just like this; plenty still do. They didn’t ask for much, still don’t.” He moved slightly, rolling his window down a little. The familiar wind-rush rode a trickle of fresh cold night air into the cab. “Just a place to stand. Not in the way of things, but on your own ground.”
Wear another bodysounded kind of gruesome. “So nothing ever really changes?” It was easy to talk to this guy, she realized.
Terrifyingly easy.
“Things change all the time.” One of his fingers lifted, brushing the truth aside like a windshield wiper. Snowflakes began to star the truck’s pale, glowing hood, vanishing almost immediately. “Buffalo get murdered, railroad comes out west, cities grow up, a man marches on a bridge and the whole world shifts a little. Trees get green every year, but it ain’t the same green.Theydo the changin’, we do the catchin’ up.”
Theyprobably meant… well, humans. Worshipers? Believers? Or, in Dima’s terms, the rubes. “But spring was here before.”
“Oh, yeah. But your mama’s people weren’t. Now they’re here, and so are you. You’re native-grown. Child of the times, Marisol’s little sister, Flora’s cousin, Eostre’s elder, related to White Deer Woman. Many names. Y’all might meet some of your other forms someday.” He shrugged. The road looked like it went on forever, but the sky was a lowering lid now and a spatter of sleet touched the windshield. “I ain’t like my daddy. You ain’t gonna be like Maria.”
The only thing worse than his calm certainty was the reliefpouring through her atthatparticular assertion. The snow mixed into sleet, turned to fat driving-hard drops, and he flicked the wipers on.
It was probably time for a subject change. Nat swallowed the lump in her throat. “You keep saying ‘your boys.’”
“Oh, Calamity’s got the girls.” Ranger laughed, a nice mellow sound. “She’d skin me alive, I took one.”
Calamity. Well, there was a name. “Does… did my mother have them? Followers?”
“Force of nature don’t need ’em, not the way I might, or New York Jay might. Though they’re nice enough, everybody can use a little extra pep every now and again.” The truck slowed; a white stone fence post loomed in the darkness and they banked, taking a turn so smoothly she barely felt the deceleration. “Here we are.”
The headlights splashed across a small blue ranch house, touched the edge of a red-painted barn with white trim. Split-rail fences stood patiently under cold rain fast mixing with snow again. There was a line of cedars marching along one side of the house, probably a windbreak; it even had a wide white wraparound porch.
“It’s pretty.” And it was; she could even see window boxes covered for the winter and large pots that probably held ornamental plants in the summer. “What’s in the barn?”
“Horses, of course. Andthehorse. But that’s for tomorrow.” He parked neat as you please near the porch front, where the cracked driveway turned into repaired wooden steps. “I gotta ask you, though…”
Here it comes.Nat braced to pay penance for the sin of thinking maybe it would be a relief if her mother died. “What?”
Dmitri might say atonement was for the rubes. Maybe a divinity of gangsters was a sociopath who didn’t need or want guilt, and Mama had sent Nat to the sisters and priests to keep her from turning out that way.
“Well, it’s been a long time.” Ranger paused, cutting the engine and pulling the key free, scratching at his forehead under the hat brim. “Do you—now, you can tell me no, ma’am—but do you play Scrabble?”
What?“I never have,” Nat admitted. Mom didn’t like games she couldn’t easily win, even if she could be persuaded to play gin sometimes, and Leo preferred chess to just about anything else. “But I’d love to learn.”
NIGHT DRIVING
He fucking hated the sticks, but at least on the long straight roads Konets could open up the engine and scream along blacktop, headlights a violent white smear and the wheel-yoke vibrating against his fingertips. And at least he could nestle a bottle of Southern Comfort in his lap while he smoked and pressed the accelerator even harder.
No little girl in the passenger seat, hugging her backpack and radiating that tempting scent of prey. No disdainful little silences, none of her cold shoulder, none of her visible, vibrating unease.
When she relaxed he had to keep the window open and the smokes burning, because the scent of small white flowers and fresh green threatened to make his face crack into a grin. Masha’s breath had been almost torrid, heavy with black mud and callused hands against a plow’s handle; her daughter was gentler.
Still, there was a little fire in the girl.You’ll just be mad you didn’t get to it first.
Dima snarled, the yoke slipping and the tires grabbing as he passed an arthritic red pickup truck on one of the ruler-straight roads, probably scaring some cowshit-covered rube into cardiac arrest. There were a surprising number of prowlers out at night in the country, even in foul weather—nothing else to do but drink, drive, and tip large sleeping mammals left out in cold fields, after all.
So high and mighty, her hands in her pockets like even a cigarette lighter was below her notice. No matter that it was an honor any of his nephews or uncles might kill for, a way to summon the luck of the best thieves.
In a mood like this he could easily visit one of his silent ones, the nephews who took payment in gold for the biggest thefts of all. Rifle, garrote, knife—those were acceptable, and then there were thecrème de la crème,the ones who could make it seem an accident. A slip in the shower, a gas leak, the prick of a hypodermic between toes, there were a thousand and one ways to remove an obstacle and collect payment for the theft of a life.
Even among Friendly’s followers—or Ranger’s—there were those who paid him secret homage, and normally Dima was gleeful at the thought. But it stood to reason they could report back to theirothermasters, and the thought that the fucking cowpoke with his drawl and his aw-shucks façade was probably making a girl laugh right now, or holding her hand, or doing any of a hundred other things did not please Dima Konets.
Not at all.
He drifted into the oncoming lane, staring at bright diamond jewels. The approaching car swerved, lifted as if it meant to fly amid silver flashes of freezing rain, and he caught a glimpse of the Cold Lady walking along the shoulder, her fishbelly skin bright but her great shock of dark hair blending into the night.
