Conspiracy of Ravens Read online

  As they topped the last hill, the ranch house came into view, pretty as a picture under the hot afternoon sun. Two familiar figures stood on the porch: the Captain, his rifle slung over his shoulder, and the tracker, Jiddy, who resembled the bear he occasionally shifted into when the occasion warranted it—although Rhett had never witnessed that act personally and had only heard rumors. And thinking back, there were plenty of moments among the Rangers when it would’ve been right helpful, having a bear along. Say, when they’d been circled by murderous werewolves. But that was a problem for another time. As for now…

  “Rhett Hennessy. I’ll admit to a bit of curiosity regarding whether I’d ever see you again, son,” the Captain called, all friendly-like.

  Rhett inclined his head. “I’m a Durango Ranger, Captain. I reckon as long as there’s something out there that needs killing, you might have a use for me.”

  “For you, but not for them. I recognize the woman, but who’s your other friend, Rhett? Jiddy tells me he’s more than he seems.”

  The bearlike scout nodded sternly, doing his best to look tough despite the tobacco stains dribbling down his gray shirt.

  “This here is Earl O’Bannon, Captain, I’ll leave him to tell you his personal reasons for being here. There’s trouble east a bit, the sort of thing only Rangers can handle.”

  The Captain nodded slowly. “And the woman?”

  Rhett held out the bloodstained hole in the side of his shirt. “Tried to kill me and followed us on foot out of Burlesville. I’ve washed my damn hands of her. Says she wants to be among people again.”

  “We ain’t people.”

  “I told her that. I’d recommend keeping her away from knives, if you catch my meaning.” He tucked his shirt back in to signal he was done with Regina. “What I’d like to know—”

  He was interrupted by a whoop of joy, and his heart just about jumped out of his chest. Soon Sam had barreled into him, and they were pounding each other on the back as only the manliest men did when being reunited after near death. For that brief span of time, every goddamn worry fled Rhett’s brain, and he was as happy as a pig in slop and grinning like a fool. Then Jiddy spat in disgust, and they pulled away for a more formal, punishing handshake.

  “I figured you for dead, Rhett.”

  “Kind of you to worry for me, Sam.”

  “Didn’t say I was worried. Guess I don’t get to keep your watch now.”

  “Well, if there’s one thing I’ve been missing while I wandered the desert in a state of near death, it’s the goddamn time.”

  “Rhett!”

  A flutter of skirts broke their banter, and then Winifred was hugging Rhett with one arm in a cloud of that damn rose soap she liked.

  “Howdy, Winifred.”

  He pulled back and frowned. She had a crutch under one arm, which was what made her hug even more awkward than it should’ve been. Below her long skirts, only one foot was visible, clad in a man’s boot. The other one…flat out wasn’t there. Which meant nobody had yet figured out how to reattach it.

  “Where’s Dan?”

  “Where do you think? He’s out looking for you, fool.”

  Rhett went red. “Nobody needs to worry for me. I’ve lived this long, haven’t I?”

  “You were alive, but we didn’t know if you were you or if you’d gone full animal. When you jumped out of that cave, I…” She pressed a hand to her chest and smiled. “It doesn’t matter. I have your things.”

  Rhett wasn’t fond of staring, but his eye was drawn to the girl’s face, which still wore the faded greenish yellow of old bruises. Stepping away, he held her by the shoulders. One of her fingers was sitting funny, and she had the fretful look of a creature trying hard to ignore pain.

  “What happened to you, Winifred? Why’re you all beat up?”

  The Captain cleared his throat from the porch to get their attention. “Get settled in, Rhett. We’ll talk over supper. Keep the paddy with you. Woman, you can help out in the kitchen or hit the road to San Anton. This ain’t a charity house. And you already owe us one chit.”

  Regina nodded, but her eyes burned with a familiar defiance that Rhett knew well. She headed for the steps, but the Captain held out his Henry to block her path. “Around back, if you please.”

  Regina looked like she wanted to spit on his boots, but she just turned on her heel and marched around the side of the building. Rhett figured she’d be looking for more knives.

  The Captain inclined his head. “Go on, then. Can’t have you fellers standing around like new pups in the yard. See to your horses. And get rid of that clown suit before you put on your badge, for Pete’s sake.” Rhett’s head jerked up, and he wanted the Captain to repeat the bit about the badge, but Jiddy’s scornful stare stopped him.

  “Yes, Captain. Thank you, Captain.”

  The Captain gave the smallest smile and tipped his hat. “Glad you found your way home, son.”

  Rhett returned his nod and headed for the horse pens at a fast clip with Sam at his heels. It took a few beats before he realized that Winifred couldn’t keep up, so he stopped to stretch and find a pace that suited her. The coyote-girl could be annoying, but she’d done her fair share to keep him alive and hold his secrets; it was the least he could do to keep the poor girl from causing herself further harm.

  “I been seeing to your horses. That paint’s got right fat without anyone to ride him, but the appy mare’s been in a funk. I suspect she’s missed you,” Sam said.

  They were walking side by side with Earl and Winifred trailing behind. Rhett figured he hadn’t been this happy since his all-too-brief days with Monty at the Double TK. As the milling horses came in sight, he let out a long, high whistle. A host of curious ears perked up, but only one horse bugled a welcome, and that was the ugliest critter in the herd, a sand-colored appaloosa with a bottlebrush tail and bare black frizz of a mane. Ragdoll trotted to the fence with a black-and-white paint, fat little Puddin’, in her wake like an agreeable dog.

  Dashing tears out of his eyes with his wrist, Rhett ducked between the boards to rub velvety noses and subtly check on hooves and legs and the various things that could go wrong with a horse while a feller was flying around the prairie as a giant bird.

  “I told you I took care of ’em,” Sam said, and Rhett got the distinct impression he was being teased.

  Sam was in the pen, too, sneaking a handful of grain to his dappled palomino and fending off the muzzle of an unfamiliar horse, a blue roan with the sort of chrome Sam couldn’t resist.

  “New horse?” Rhett asked, fighting down his emotions.

  “Yep. Lost the black on the way home. Got all excitable, jumped the wrong way, and snapped a leg. This boy’s name is Blue.”

  Rhett had to bury his face in Ragdoll’s shoulder to keep his tears back.

  “I used to have a mule named Blue. Only had one eye. Now I reckon I know why he was so ornery all the damn time.”

  Sam muttered, “Holy crow,” and Winifred let out a chuckle.

  Rhett looked from one to the other. “What?”

  “You’d better come see what’s in the second-string pen. I swear, you got the devil’s own luck, other Hennessy.”

  Rhett followed Sam over to the pen where the Rangers kept the horses that didn’t see much use, all the while feeling a strange shiver creeping up his neck. He heard the bray of welcome before he saw it and couldn’t stop himself from running toward the bone-thin critter making the noise.

  “That’s your Blue, ain’t it?” Sam asked, his sunny-fine face split in a glorious grin.

  Rhett nodded, his arms strung around Blue’s neck as the mule danced in place and nuzzled his back like it was a new bale of hay. “How’d…what…?”

  “Feller just showed up one day, louder than life. Captain figured he’d pull a wagon fine, once we got some weight on his bones.”

  Rhett looked his ugly old mule in his good eye and shook his head in wonder. Everything he’d longed for in the desert, everything
he’d lost, everything he needed to be happy—was back in his possession. “Pinch me, other Hennessy. I reckon I’ve got to be dreaming.”

  “Don’t go being too happy. Jiddy’s been hoping you wouldn’t turn up and promising a fight if you did. Captain’s been assigned to see to a sand wyrm problem down near Lareda and is ready to set off. Those things are nasty, and he’s already warned us that we’re likely to lose good men. Winifred’s still hurt with no sign of improvement and Coyote Dan ain’t back.”

  “Those sound like problems for tomorrow.”

  “Then do us all a favor and get cleaned up. Because today, I promise you that you smell worse than that mule,” Winifred called.

  Rhett looked up to where the girl leaned on the fence, smiling. Earl skulked a bit behind, looking sulky and out of place.

  “Does he know?” Sam asked, tossing his chin at Earl. “About…” He paused, his face screwed up in puzzlement. “You?”

  “We’ve been lost in the desert for a week. Of course he knows. We’ve been fighting over his shirt, most of the time.”

  “Damn, but it’s good to have you back,” Sam added.

  Rhett figured he’d died and gone to heaven.

  Of course, such feelings never lasted long.

  Chapter

  5

  By the time the sun was moseying down, Rhett was a changed man. He’d washed and dressed in his own clean clothes, grateful beyond measure for a length of muslin to wrap his chest up properly. His old boots still fit, his socks were warm, and Winifred had found some salve for the quickly healing blisters and cuts that had hidden under all the dirt. She’d handed over his little leather bag of treasures, too, and the weight of it in his hand was a welcome comfort before he looped it around his neck. His too-long hair was crumpled under his hat, and Sam had offered him full run of his bandanna collection. The first thing Rhett did was roll one up and tie it around his gone eye, which made him a little less self-conscious about the face he showed the world. He’d thought himself ugly for so long that it was peculiar, now, to yearn for his old face, with both its eyes blinking back distrustfully.

  And yet.

  He liked what he saw a little better.

  For once, he didn’t want to smash a mirror when he saw his reflection. He looked like a dangerous young feller until you scanned down to the shiny Ranger badge pinned proudly to his collar. His hat snugly shaded his eye, his gun belt felt solid and sure around his hips, and he confirmed that his hands had indeed missed the grips of his pistols.

  Sam grinned as he handed over Rhett’s watch, still warm from the boy’s body. Even though Rhett knew that they could ever only be friends, that Sam didn’t feel the same pull he did, still he couldn’t help the thrill that jerked over his body when he slid the watch securely into his vest pocket, knowing it had been nestling close against Sam’s body all this time.

  Rhett checked to make sure no one else but Earl was in the bunkhouse. Spreading his feet and throwing his shoulders back, he snarled at the mirror and let his fingers hover over his gun.

  “You sure you want to mess with me, feller?” he snarled.

  Quick as a blink, he pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the mirror, looking every bit the outlaw but knowing he was one of the good guys. A damn fine feeling, that. And yet he suffered a peculiar yearning to see his other self in the mirror, to know what skin he wore when he let his humanity fall away and soared into the skies. Not a vulture, Earl had said. But that left a damn lot of birds. Maybe, like his human body, knowing what he truly was, deep down, was more important than seeing it on the surface.

  “You ready?” he asked Earl.

  The Irishman had been quieter than Rhett had ever seen him, all through their shared ablutions. Now water glinted in the feller’s redder-than-red hair as he tucked in his rust-red shirt and slung on some old, stretched-out suspenders and a pair of cast-off butternut pants that were still just a little too big. Earl’s old pants were, as Winifred said, not fit to help birth a horse.

  “Not looking forward to this talk,” Earl grumbled. “I’d always heard the Rangers were heroes. Guess I figured they’d hear my story first off and ride off into the sunset to save me friends. Who knows how many men are losing fingers and toes and breakin’ their backs while we fuss with our britches and wait for supper? I don’t like it, Rhett. I don’t like it a bit.”

  “It’s not yours to like. Captain’s not a man to work on another feller’s timetable,” Rhett said, bristling. “If he missed a meal every time somebody wanted to tell him a story, he’d be dead of starvation.”

  “What if he’s not moved to my cause?”

  Rhett wanted to bark in the Captain’s defense, but truth be told, he didn’t know the older man well enough to venture an explanation of his actions. “Captain’s a fair man,” was all he could say. “If it needs doing, I reckon he’ll do it. So let’s stop pussyfooting around and get on.”

  When he stepped onto the bunkhouse porch among his friends, he hooked his thumbs through his gun belt and heaved a mighty sigh. Winifred looked up from the steps and cocked her head.

  “You need a haircut.”

  “I do not need any such thing.”

  Sam stood, yanked off Rhett’s hat, and eyed him closely, making Rhett squirm. “You’d look right good with it cropped close.”

  Rhett exhaled and stared at his feet. “Reckon I’d better have it cropped close, then.”

  Winifred snorted and sent Sam to borrow some shears from wherever the Rangers kept such things while she shoved Rhett toward a low stool. He sat, hat in his hands, feeling ridiculous. Back in Gloomy Bluebird, the fine men of the town had gone to a barber to have their hair trimmed and their throats scraped raw, and of all his particular troubles, Rhett was glad he would never require a stranger’s straight razor to his neck. Winifred pulled the bandanna from over his eye and slung an old serape around his neck.

  “You’ve lost weight, Rhett. And you didn’t have much to lose to start with.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been mostly eating dead things.” He waited a beat, feeling awkward, before deciding to hell with it. “So who beat the shit out of you?”

  Winifred chuckled and fussed with his hair a bit, running her fingers through it experimentally and making queer shivers run over Rhett’s shoulders.

  “The mountain, I suppose. You jumped and turned just in time, but then you were gone. I was left up there alone. We tried a dozen ways to get me down, but Dan couldn’t find any harpies or rocs, and there was no rope long enough. In the end, I threw down all our things in a bundle and figured I’d have to do it myself. So I changed. I supposed my coyote bones were lighter, that I would heal more easily. But I couldn’t jump.”

  “Too scared?”

  She shoved his head playfully.

  “No. Turns out coyotes have more sense than humans. I suppose we’re the only species that gets suicidal. That body simply wouldn’t jump, no matter how much this one willed it. So I turned back, tossed the spike out of the Cannibal Owl’s basket, crawled into it, and…”

  “Jumped?”

  “Rolled, more like. Might as well have jumped, for all the damage I took on the way down.”

  Sam hopped onto the porch holding a sharp pair of silver shears and a puppy grin. “Beat to hell by the time she fetched up at our feet in a broken basket. Bruises, cuts, fingers pointing every which way. Dan was just about beside himself. Poor feller still figured he was going to find a miracle and get her down in one piece.”

  “None of us left that night untouched,” Winifred said softly, and Rhett turned his head away before she could touch the cheek under his gone eye with pity.

  “Well, get on with the cropping, then. Supper bell’s ringing soon, and as long as it ain’t Delgado’s beans, I reckon I’ll want to be there.”

  Sam and Earl watched as Winifred hobbled around, her crutch under her arm, snipping here and there. Tufty bits of frizzy black fell around the serape and rolled around Rhett’s boots like tiny tumblew
eeds. An unfamiliar breeze stirred around his ears, and he felt altogether too exposed for someone wearing a man’s full complement of clothes.

  “And what about your foot?”

  The shears snipped in warning, brushing his ear and making him flinch. “Captain gave me a pretty box to keep it in. Nobody knows how to attach it. That doctor in Burlesville just laughed at me.”

  “We stopped there. Dwarves got a funny way of showing their thanks.”

  “It’s that way with the Rangers, a lot of the time.” Sam rubbed his own well-shined badge. “We do the best we can, and it’s never enough for some folks.”

  The supper bell rang, a softer sound than when Delgado had been the one beating it with a stick. Rhett tried to stand, but Winifred held him down with one hand while she finished her work. He let her, mainly so he wouldn’t knock her over, wobbly as she was.

  “And we’ll see the truth of it shortly,” Earl added, standing to face the lantern-lit ranch house. “So tell me: Why does it feel like I’m walking to the gallows?”

  “The Rangers only hang horse thieves,” Sam said helpfully. “The human ones, at least.”

  “And who among us hasn’t stolen a horse?” Earl shot back.

  Sam cleared his throat and stood. “Well, don’t go reminding him of that, first off.”

  “There.” Winifred took a final snip with her shears and whipped the serape off Rhett’s shoulders, shaking out the hair.

  He stood, rubbed a hand through his short scruff, and replaced his eye kerchief and hat. When he hurried inside to check the mirror, what he saw matched what he felt like. A rough creature of harsh lines and edges, of dark skin and darker eye. The Shadow.

  The Shadow wanted revenge, but more than that, just now, the Shadow wanted food.

  The new cook was a grouchy thing named Conchita, a hunched and grandmotherly Aztecan woman in a fringed jacket with gray hair pulled back tight in a bun. When Rhett went to sniff the pot for evidence of Delgado’s bean recipe, the old woman smacked him with a spoon.