Patrick sighed. He could see the hunger pulsing behind her eyes, that yawning gulf in her heart again. The way she clamored to fill it. He had a heart to match.
Riddled through, the both of them.
“Not this time,” he said. He wanted to explain how these copperswould cry and plead and piss themselves. How they’d reduce to the feeblest creatures. How the look on their faces as they died would dig themselves into the trenches of her brain, drudged up in dreams a year from now, ten years from now. “It ain’t your beast to slay,” he said instead.
“But it’s yours?”
“It is,” he said. He was a Colson. The Miners Union was his business.
“I need you to stay with Polly,” he’d said then. Polly had found a desk in the back offices. She was bent overThe Stewards’ Testamentand a stack of blank parchment.
Edith had given the rest of them blankets and assigned them a corner to keep to. They were handed bowls of stew by a young woman who carried a baby in a sling. She doled out the food with a blank expression, as though they were just more mouths to feed.
Patrick had given his meal to Nina. “Eat mine,” he said, then hesitated, his fingers brushed up against hers, and he felt the charge running over her skin. “Every lord, and every minister,” he reminded her. “They’ll all be beneath the heel of your boot soon.”
Then he left, feeling as though he was shedding one skin and taking on another. Transforming from man to wolf beneath the moon.
The fire Charmers had left the town center untouched, as was their habit. Still, ash stuck to the brick, the sills, the gables. The shingles and gutters were black with it. Through the window of the squat trading post, candlelight flickered.
Patrick and his father came to a standstill before it, puffs of breath beating out, their hands winding into their coats and taking an inventory. Revolver, rope, kerosene.
John shook out his arms like he was shaking off cobwebs. “Let’s see if they bite,” he said.
What most didn’t understand about the wolf was that it stalked the night in a perfunctory way. It mauled for its territory, no matter the neck. It tore flesh from bone without much relish; hardly any meat was taken for itself.
The door kicked off its latch easily, punched into the wall with the sound of a gunshot.
And already, they wailed.
Three coppers, just as Edith promised. All in their navy uniforms, their Belavere emblems, waistcoats unbuttoned and guts overhanging their belts. They flailed in their chairs. Their limbs, for a moment, taking flight from their bodies. One fell right off his chair, his mouth holed open, teeth wine-tinged.
Another shouted, scattered the playing cards he was holding. The third had the wherewithal to reach for a vacant holster.
But their guns, all three of them, lay strewn on the oak countertop, where the Crafters would normally line up for an hour or more to give over more than half their stock, their harvest, their textiles.
“Not on your life,” John said as one of the men made to move toward it. John cocked the hammer of his own gun, lifted it lazily by his waist. “Take your seats, boys.”
Slowly, the mush of their brains finding order again, they resumed their seats, bodies turned toward Patrick and John. One of them held his hands up.
“We’re Belavere officers,” another blithered, the last refrains of a desperate man. “You can’t do this! They’ll come for you.”
“That’s the trouble with you coppers,” John said, taking rope from his pocket. “Got a short fuckin’ memory.” He threw his gun to Patrick, who caught it, moved toward the man closest. “You’re a swank’s guard dog now, but you were born a Crafter. And just when has the House ever lifted its head to the likes of us, eh?” He tied the first man’s wrists to his chair. “One more dead Crafter in the brink don’t mean nothin’ to ’em.”
“They’ll hang you,” another spat, but his great teeth chattered in his head. “They’ll hang both you bastards!”
“A quick death,” Patrick said in return. “Nothin’ like the ones about to happen here tonight.”
The copper shriveled. John grabbed his wrist, but the man yanked it back and tried to stand.
A shot rang out, blistered the insides of Patrick’s ears, but the bullet sailed where he’d meant it, right into the copper’s shin, and the man fell, squealing and flailing.
“Nowhere to run, boys,” he said. “This is where it ends for you. May as well speak with your God now and make peace with him.”
John pulled the man, crying now, back onto the chair, tied his hands behind his back.
“I always wonder,” Patrick said as the last copper was tied to his chair, “what goes through a man’s head when he walks through his town, sees it burnin’, sees the kids in the street dyin’, and doesn’t lift a finger.”
They all three sat shaking so much that their noses ran, the tendons of their neck seeming to break through the skin.
