Conspiracy of Ravens Read online

  Nettie shook her head. “I do better alone.”

  “Where are you going then?”

  “I’ve been wandering.”

  “With an a or an o?”

  “With no goddamn thing. Aimless.”

  “Running to something or running away?”

  “Hellfire, donkey-boy. I got a talkative friend named Dan you’d like just fine. You could just talk each other’s furry damn ears off. I been wandering, with my wings and my feet, and the only thing I found so far is you, and that’s turning out to be one hell of a disappointment.”

  He cocked his head. “You’ve got friends, then? Where?”

  She surveyed the land, hunting for anything vaguely familiar, but it was all just the same brown dirt and gnarled trees and scrubby mountains perpetually arguing with the sky, which was currently stone-gray and drizzling. “I got no rightly idea.”

  “Well then.” The man dropped his knife and held out his hand—a sand-dusted, callus-hard, sunburned hand lightly furred on the back in orange. “The name’s Earl O’Bannon. Once out of Galway, most recent out of the Trevisan Railroad labor camp. I could use some friends, meself, and I could do a lot worse than you.”

  Her eye narrowed. “You trying to butter me up?”

  He chuckled but didn’t let his hand fall. “Oh, for certain. You’ve so many charms, lass.”

  That got her hackles up. She stepped forward, hands in fists. “Don’t call me a girl.”

  “But aren’t you one, then? You’ve got all the requisite parts—”

  Instead of shaking his hand, she punched the Irishman in the face. He wasn’t ready for it and stumbled back, landing hard on his rump and staring up at her in surprise that quickly gave way to anger. His face went red to the roots of his hair. Nettie was pleased that she’d finally managed to punch someone without hurting herself, and she gazed at her own rain-slick knuckles in admiration. She’d missed punching people, and her foul mood lightened considerably.

  “Now, as a rule, I don’t hit women, but you seem to be saying—”

  “The name’s Rhett Hennessy, and I’m a Durango Ranger, so if you want to get in a fight, you’d best prepare to die.”

  Apparently, he’d missed the bit about dying, as he popped upright and surged toward her with a franticness that spoke of desperation. “You’re a Ranger? You know where the Rangers are? Then you can help me! Oh, thank the gods that be you stole my bleedin’ shirt, la—” He cleared his throat. “Laddie,” he finished carefully.

  Nettie gave him a nod so he’d know he’d done right. And then she realized that in her pride, she’d managed to give him all the more reason to continue annoying the hell out of her. She shook her head and spit on the ground at his feet, although it was a sad little glob, for lack of water.

  “Don’t know where the Rangers are. Don’t know when I last saw ’em. Don’t know how to find ’em.”

  “Oh, yes, well, aside from your ability to turn into a great bleedin’ bird and view the world from up high, I’m sure you’re utterly without resources.”

  “Hellfire, you don’t give up, do you? You cluck like a hen that wants a wrung neck.”

  “I come by my stubbornness honest. Now, these here are the Aspero mountains, are they no? I was headed west, on the hunt for the Las Moras Outpost of the Durango Rangers.”

  She shook her head. “I ain’t been here before, but I been there, and this ain’t it.”

  “Would that be the Pecana River, do you think?” He pointed to a smudge of green on the dreary horizon.

  “What part of I don’t know sounded like keep on asking?”

  He scratched the orange stubble on his chin. “Anyone ever told you you’re a people person?”

  She growled and began to walk off to a spray of shrubs where she could transform back into a bird with some privacy. If she had to listen to him, she’d rather not have to understand what he said.

  With a squeak, he stumbled along behind her. “Look, lad. I’m sorry. I’ve the gift of gab and I’ve been alone for too long and if I don’t find your friends, the Rangers, over a hundred souls including me own brother will continue to suffer. They’re being tortured. Having fingers and toes lopped off willy-nilly by Trevisan and fixed by Grandpa Z and sent right back out to cut the lines and lay the rails.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  When she didn’t stop walking, he put a hand on her shoulder and yanked hard, dancing back to avoid the haymaker that they both knew would follow such a trespass. As she advanced on him, hands in fists, he yanked off a boot and hopped around on one leg as he held up a much-abused foot missing two toes.

  That got Nettie’s attention and made her step closer despite her dislike of the strange feller. He was a monster, a skinwalker, and that meant the stubs of his toes should’ve been open wounds, like Winifred’s ankle and the child’s foot they’d found in the desert, left behind by the Cannibal Owl. In Nettie’s experience, the peculiar healing power of monsters meant that flesh wounds grew over while open bones refused to heal. But this feller—and he was a monster, to be sure—his toes were neatly sealed over, covered with stretched, whole skin.

  Nettie grunted her interest. “How’d you do that?”

  Exasperated, he stuck his foot back in his boot. “Told you. Trevisan needs monster bones, so he takes toes and fingers, wherever they can be spared. Grandpa Z uses his mysterious Chine medicine to fix ’em so we can still work.”

  “What medicine?”

  He put his hands on his hips and looked at her like she was a damn fool. “You think he told us? Handed out a hymnal on Chine magic? They knock you out so you can’t see. You wake up, and it’s all healed. Grandpa Z and his girl won’t tell nobody, as then Trevisan might start lopping off bits of them, too, far as I can figure it. Those as has secrets in the camp hold ’em close.”

  Nettie worried at her lip, considering how to get what she needed with minimal annoyance. “Maybe we can help each other. You want to get to the Rangers, right?” Earl nodded, the eagerness and hope in his eyes making him seem barely a boy grown. “Well, I want two things: I want you to teach me how to remember what I see when I’m…” She wasn’t sure of the right word. What was she, really? “Flying. And if my friend’s still missing her foot, take us to this camp and get me to the old feller who knows how to heal lost limbs.”

  Earl pulled at his bedraggled mustache. “I can’t promise you either thing. I don’t know how to do something that comes natural, and there’s no oath on this earth that could compel me back to that hellforsaken camp.”

  “Promise me you’ll try to teach me, then. And tell me how to find the camp.”

  “I’ll do that anyway. Whole reason I need the Rangers is to convince ’em to go destroy Trevisan. He’s a demon. Or something. Never seen a creature like him, in his fine dandy coat and shiny shoes, but he does the devil’s work for sure.”

  Nettie stared hard into his eyes and held out her hand. When he quickly reached to grasp it, she tightened her larger hand around his. “Mark my words, donkey-boy. You cross me, and I’ll slit your throat and eat your guts before I ever find your heart. I don’t trust easy, and I’m not a kind person.”

  “Never would’ve guessed,” he muttered, but his hand only squeezed tighter. “When you’re alone in the desert, you’ll be needing strength more than kindness, don’t you think?”

  “Welcome to Durango, Earl O’Bannon.” She dropped his hand and rubbed her palm off on the red fabric. “I’m keeping your damn shirt.”

  She started walking toward the river, and he picked up his knife and bag and followed at a respectful distance. The drizzle had stopped, and the very land sizzled under the sun thus revealed by broken clouds.

  The desert was a great and silent place, but everyone within fifty miles must’ve heard Earl’s growled whisper, “Like hell you will, lad. Like hell you will.”

  Nettie smiled.

  Chapter

  2

  They didn’t speak again until they’d
drunk from the creek and set up camp. When Nettie began yanking already-dry twigs from the scumble of greenery, Earl followed suit until they had a respectable pile. He was completely hopeless, and after watching him rub two sticks together like a dumb child playing a broken fiddle, Nettie gave in and did all the work. He soon began singing off-key as he dried his hands over her crackling fire, and Nettie gladly snatched his knife and went out of hearing range to find something small and edible to kill. Rattlers were plentiful under the flat stones, and it wasn’t long before she had one skinned and roasting over the fire.

  “You afraid to eat snake?” she asked, watching the meat drip and sizzle.

  He shook his head. “I’ll eat anything as won’t bite back. Ate some bugs when it got bad. Bit before I found you.” He ran a thumb down his chest. “Never was a brawny lad, but I’ll take whatever meat I can get for these bones. Food’s not bad at the camp, you’ll understand, but it’s not plentiful for the workers, neither. Wasn’t good in Ireland, but at least then we all starved together.”

  Nettie said nothing, just poked the snake with a twig. She’d had some deathly belches since returning to this form and was looking forward to something fresh that wouldn’t disagree with her human guts.

  “So where are you from, then?” Earl asked, settling back on his elbows.

  She shot him a dark look. “Nowhere town you never heard of.”

  “You got family?”

  That earned a snort. “Do I look like anybody ever loved me?”

  He squinted as if looking for the right line to crack a nut. “If you’re alive, somebody must’ve, sometime. Me, I got a big family back home. Eight brothers and sisters, all smaller and hungrier than me. Mostly sisters. Mam could barely keep up. Me and me brother Shaunie thought we’d come over here, find some gold, and send back lace and velvet by the boatload. Ha!” He flung a rock out into the night. “No jobs for the Irish, back east. No way to get west for the free gold. Railroad lad said they paid well and kept you healthy and strong as you rode across the prairie to the land of milk and goddamn honey. If I ever see him again, I’ll bash his bleedin’ head in.”

  Nettie grunted and reached for the snake. It wasn’t quite cooked yet, but maybe he’d shut up if he had some half-raw meat in his open mouth. When she held it out and jerked her chin at his knife, lying between them on the ground, he picked it up and sliced off half for himself. She nodded; for a starving feller, he could’ve been more of a greedy sort for certain.

  For a while there, they just blew the night’s cooling air on their steaming chunks of charred meat. Nettie’s heart ached, a dull tug she recognized as missing Sam. Many a night they’d laid their bedrolls by a fire just like this, chatting in a friendly fashion side by side as they drifted off to sleep under the stars. Those days were the best ones of Nettie’s life. A job, the respect of men she respected. Cash money for breaking broncs or killing sirens. Something like hope. When she glanced across the flames and saw not Sam’s sunny smile and bright eyes but instead only a slight, vexful Irishman juggling half-cooked meat and chewing with his greasy gob open, she felt like she’d lost everything she’d ever had.

  She didn’t like anybody, not really. But she liked Sam.

  “Are your ears full of rocks, lad?”

  Her head jerked up, her eye slitted in anger. “More like muck, if you can call your constant yapping muck, but yeah.”

  “I asked you when you started changing.”

  She snorted and took a big bite of snake, considering. Might as well tell the truth. No point in lying, really. He was just a damn donkey. “Not sure. Might be days ago, might be weeks.”

  “But you’re…”

  “Go on and finish that damn sentence.”

  “Not a child,” he said carefully. “It usually begins around age five, say. If it’s going to. I still remember my first time. Gave me mum a merry chase about the garden. Me younger brother Shaunie, too. You’re clearly older than that.”

  “I’m different.”

  He looked her up and down. “Obviously.”

  Before she knew she was doing it, she’d leaped across the fire and had a finger poking into his bony chest. “Don’t test me, son.”

  Earl’s hands were up. “Christ, but you take offense easy. All I meant was that you’re some giant bird I never seen before, and you changed late. You got to stop going through life thinkin’ a person’s got ill intentions toward you.”

  She sat back on her haunches and glared at him. “Most folks take offense to me.”

  The wee man nodded. “And so you take offense first. Beat ’em at their own game.”

  “You go on and tell yourself whatever you want, donkey-boy. It don’t change the taste of beans.”

  He settled back, just to prove he could. “Well, then. If you’ll back the hell off, I’ll tell you the first rule of changing, if you’ll promise not to poke me or hit me again. But you’re not gonna like it.”

  Nettie returned to her side of the fire and brushed the sand off her dropped meat. “Go on, then.”

  “The first rule is that you got to know what you are.” He held up a hand when she opened her mouth. “Shut up and learn something, will you now? If you switch from one thing to another and don’t know what either one is, of course you’re bound to get lost. Like taking a wrong turn from a wrong turn. You got to know, to your bones, who and what you are.”

  As his words echoed in the night, gooseflesh pearled up on Nettie’s bare legs. Winifred had sung her a song, back in the Cannibal Owl’s lair. “Little one that I love, you are two creatures with one spirit. Reach down inside, deep inside, and find the golden core of you, connecting you to the earth and sky, the trail the moon leaves on water. Pull it like a rope, inside out, and know that you are perfect in either skin.”

  Without meaning to, she’d muttered the last line, barely more than a whisper, but Earl was smiling and nodding. “That’s about right, yeah. I figure it’s like…well, say, me own house and me grandmam’s house. I know ’em both, inside and out, and I know the way between ’em. I never get lost, and whichever I’m in, I know where I am.”

  Nettie’s chest constricted, her throat uncomfortably blocked. “I…”

  “Don’t know either skin too well, eh? Well, let me explain it to you, as I see it, from an impartial perspective, as they say. Me pap was a newspaperman before he passed, so excuse all the big words.” He set down what little was left of his snake, mostly the raw bits on a tail of bone, and gestured to her. “Right now, you say you’re a man named Rhett Hennessy, but do you really believe it?”

  Rage hit her first, but then a peculiar feeling tamped it back down. She’d punch a feller for calling her a girl, but she still thought of herself as a girl, didn’t she? And that was her own damn fault. Whatever her vision had shown her, when she was wandering the desert for four days with mesquite poisoning, in the end, it had told her that she was now a man, and she’d believed it. Agreed with it. She’d felt the rightness of it settle over her shoulders like a winter coat. So why’d she still think of herself as a she, a her? As what used to be Nettie Lonesome?

  “My name is Rhett Hennessy, and I’m a man,” she said.

  No.

  He said.

  He.

  “I’m a man.” That time, it was a little louder, a little deeper and he felt it down to his very bones.

  “You been fightin’ it the way you fight everything, haven’t you?”

  Rhett’s smile was a grim thing. “Fighting’s the only way I get anything I want.”

  Earl nodded. “Good for you, lad. Fight for this, then. Fight for yourself. And the other thing you are is…” A shrug. “Hell, a great big bird. Not a vulture, but close. Bigger. Not particularly pretty. More scary, to be honest. I don’t know what it’s called. But it’s the most dangerous-looking thing I’ve ever seen in the air, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Rhett nodded and held out his hand, fanning his fingers like feathers. “When I’m…it…I feel powe
rful. Like cracking bones. Like I always get to go first. Like I’m different.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a good feel for it, then. So I guess you might wish to transform while thinkin’ hard on what you are when you’re human. Think about something that ties you to this body and this earth. The first time I did it, I was thinkin’ about how me mam was going to tan me hide for mucking up the laundry. And I wanted so badly to be something else so’s I could hide. And then I was suddenly shorter and on four legs, giving her a scare and a chase and stomping her clean white sheets into the mud with me trotters. But I was focused on her, scared of her and then excited to trouble her with me newfound mischief. So think about how much I annoy you, or think of someone you actually like. Tie this body to that and that to this, eh?” He cocked his head. “Might explain why you keep hangin’ on to my shirt, even though you don’t understand much else as a bird. Because this form wants a shirt with a great yearning, you see. What else do you yearn for—in both bodies?”

  Rhett took a deep breath and considered. “Every million words or so, you make some good sense.”

  Stepping away, he turned his back to Earl and the fire and slipped the shirt over his head, placing it on the ground and stepping on it firmly. He reached inside for the golden cord and pulled, thinking about the shirt and Earl and how much he wanted to find Sam again. Every time, the change hurt a little less, and soon he was ruffling his feathers and opening and closing great claws on the rust-red shirt.

  “Hey, Rhett! Hey, lad! Looky here!”

  The bird made a hobbling turn on his talons and blinked irritably. It was that vexful man again, waving his featherless arms like a damn idiot.

  “Remember this: There was an old lady from Wheeling who had a remarkable feeling.”

  Rhett opened his mouth to tell the feller to shut up, but all that came out was an annoyed squawk.