Page 93 of Spring's Arcana
“You sound like a fuckin’ rube.” But there was no heat to the insult; Dima was just keeping up his end of the conversation. His pacing didn’t alter, but his left hand dove into a pocket, closing around a warm, worn handle. “How many, you think?”
Ranger considered the question. “Enough,” he said, finally. “Don’t take it the wrong way, but I’m glad you’re here.”
“If you’d let me drive her, they would pass by.” None of the starving ones would catchhim,after all. No, Konets was too spiky a morsel to tempt the scavengers, even in the old country.
Even in his youth.
“So you’re protecting her.” Ranger’s full, sculpted mouth twitched. It was as close to a laugh as he’d dare.
Dima shrugged. His footsteps halted, and he drew out the black-handled straight razor, his fingertips gentle. The pearl-handled one was meant for other work.
He wouldn’t use a silencer for the gun, though. Not out here. He set his mug down on the tiny wicker table, its warmth slowly leaching from his palm.
“Ways away yet.” The other man stretched, feline-supple, and brought his booted feet down with a thump. “But I suppose we’d best get ready.”
“You may sit on ass if you like.” Maybe Dmitri even hoped the other man would. “But when little Drozdova come back, best if none of the bastards are here to greet.”
The Cowboy unfurled, his broad shoulders swelling under thefringed jacket. He pushed his hat back a bit further, steely gaze roving the far hills. The sun, that ancient enemy of all darkness, drifted even farther into the west; shadows on the ridge turned fully knife-sharp and ink-glistening. They flitted from one spot to the next, following the trail of a tempting, tender, delicious thing not yet grown into its full strength.
It might even be a kindness if he let them rip the girl’s fragrant flesh and absorb her wine-sweet blood. It would certainly put Masha’s plans all awry. She would wake to find Baba at her bedside, perhaps with the scavengers pressing close, and though the old snow-riding beldam could make it painless, Dima had the idea she wouldn’t.
Not this time.
Ranger’s spurs were silent as he drifted down the stairs. He didn’t draw yet, watching the shadows as they crept closer, in their blind witless way. Like maggots in a wound or hyenas pulling down a sick antelope, they were simply doing what they were made for.
And, Dima thought, neither he nor the Cowboy were any different. Nothing ever changed, certainly not rubes and divinities least of all.
He eased the gun free with his right hand, its finish dull matte instead of stupid-shiny to present a target. The razor flicked free in his left, its blade giving a venomous flash as it blurred through a complicated pattern, and he hopped down the steps himself, his stride lengthening on cracked, gravel-scattered driveway. He headed for the lengthening darkness near the barn; his breath plumed in the sudden chill.
When the starving ones drew closer living air would freeze as soon as it left his mouth, falling to shatter on iron-hard ground. But he was a creature of cold in unheated prisons, of shivers quelled by sheer will, of tubercular coughs and clinging to impossible, grinding life.
The space in his chest where a steady pulse should beat held only a vast icy emptiness, and the numbness was kind.There’s nothing I can do,Baba had said long ago, while he writhed on a cheap stripedcotton mattress and raged against being brought to this new continent.Unless…
“Then do it,” Dima muttered, as he had once before. “Get on with it, bitch.”
He melded into the barn’s shadow. It was a tepid bath, and he had never shivered when clasped in such gloom.
Much of a thief’s best work was done in the dark.
Ranger stood in the middle of his driveway, his hat pushed back and his hands dangling loose. The idiot could draw them onto the battlefield, yes. He might even do a great deal of damage, thinning their numbers while the day lasted.
But it would take the ruthlessness of an old steppe wolf to cut off their retreat, to destroy them utterly. And if the sun sank before the girl returned, Dima would hunt them through midnight, through nightmares, through the empty hours between 3:00 and 4:00A.M.when the elderly often loose their hold on life, giving way with grateful sighs as the Cold Lady smiled at them.
Sensing opposition, the shadowy scavengers thickened, swirling around Ranger’s house. Drowsing beasts in the barn’s warm safety made low sounds, but Dima was silent as cancer breeding in bones, as a thief-of-lives waiting for the target to arrive home, as a feral cat slinking through a waste-lot in search of some refuse to consume.
“Y’all can leave,” Ranger said, quietly, the words falling into a flat silence as the iron-colored clouds thickened and a pale winter sun dimmed. “Or y’all can die. Your choice.”
There was no answer. For the scavengers had no mouths.
ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
The ride back to Ranger’s was a bone-jarring gallop, the black horse slipping and sliding, melting into a motorcycle at odd moments, throwing itself across small streams once the desert faded and they were back in rolling prairie again. The sun was a low bloody coin disappearing behind the distant bruise-shadows of western mountains, and Nat was fully occupied clinging to reins or clutching handlebars, her shoulders aching every time the big beast veered. Sparks struck from its iron-clawed shoes sent up tiny acrid puffs—very possibly brimstone, though she’d never smelled it before—and she was sure it was doubling back once or twice, running alongside a deep swift cold stream chuckling with sharp menace.
Just waiting for her grip to loosen. Just waiting for her to fall.
Sheets of icy water thrown up on either side, her tailbone bruised as the beast landed stiff-legged, bolts of pain zipping up her back, her teeth clicking painfully together over and over again—even the worst bus ride was a cakewalk compared to this. No fluid union, no sense of connected togetherness, just an endless rattling, jarring, thumping as her head bobbled and she clamped her knees to elastic, heaving sides.
Finally, the song of hooves rang on concrete instead of dirt and rock; Nat was almost tossed from the saddle as the horse shook himself angrily, shrinking into a motorcycle again. His whinny became a scream of defiance, but Nat’s fingers had cramp-tangled in the reins and her knees, while numb, still stuck like glue to his sides. He rattled over washboard road at a punishing pace, pavement breaking away on either side in great frost-heaved chunks; nobody had driven here for a very long time.
