Dayna K Smith - [BCS276 S02] - Hangdog (html) Read online

  Hangdog

  By Dayna K. Smith

  Usually by this part of the Disputed Territories, Grinn would’ve been silent for days, riding along admiring the snowflake sand pearling the sunlight. The pretty wind patterns carried on the weather flows from over in Georgia, or even Vicksburg, leftover magick residue from Sherman’s Daedalus guns. Reminded Grinn of the lavender-gray sight she had when she was in wolf shape or what scent might look like as it sifted through everything, flowing and forming the world. With Buddy around, reeking her irritating peppercorn-and-camphor scent, the sand became just another reason for a sensitive werewolf nose to sneeze.

  “Makes sense you’d call us a pack and not a ‘whack,’ but a bunch of bunnies ain’t called a bunch,” Buddy said, still fussing with her buckles. “Doc says they’re a ‘trip’, unless they’re hares, then it’s a ‘husk’, which seems like someone’s trying to be spooky, you ask me.”

  Grinn stuffed escaping strands of hair into her braid, grumbling, “You would find a way to chase your tail even sitting on a horse.”

  Then a distant howl sounded, raising Grinn’s hackles. All six horses pricked ears. Buddy cut off mid-ramble, eyes silvering with panic.

  “Hush,” said Grinn. “We train ponies to deal with calm wolves, not wolves stinking with fear. I can’t keep four from running off, I only got one ass to sit on ‘em.”

  “Doc said run from a strange howl,” said Buddy.

  As if responding, the howl resounded. Even Grinn’s found family in Little Water had pack codes, signals; this howl asked no question, offering only regret.

  “I know what Doc said,” said Grinn, aiming her palomino towards the howl. For good measure, she coaxed the rest of the horses to follow with a growl. “But that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Gotta see what the trouble is.”

  They found him dangling from what was left of a tough old willow. Grinn’s nose couldn’t have missed the poor fucker, the clean den-smell of hidden wolf beneath the bitter futility billowing from him like wet-leaf smoke.

  Waving Buddy back, she eased along the dry creek bed from behind. Her choices displeased the palomino, but she could take this other wolf if it came to claws. He was a long fellow, sure, broad-shouldered with shaggy brown hair, but Grinn’s height and heft near matched him.

  Anyway, he wasn’t breathing.

  Then his crushed windpipe healed; a sickly, out-of-season-ice crackle. He wheezed, trying to writhe up the rope despite his bound hands.

  He panted, “I hadn’t done a goddamn thing.” Must’ve heard her approach. A fresh puff of futility, a stutterless heartbeat. Truth.

  Grinn circled to face him. “Then what the hell happened?”

  He blinked wide dark eyes; said, “They heard my neck snap, took me for dead. Rode off. Six to one. Figured, better let it go.”

  That was a lie. “Sounds lazy to me,” Grinn said.

  Those eyebrows made an impressive glare, but he didn’t flash his eyes. Sour, but not gonna beg or bite. Her kinda person, really, wolf or otherwise.

  Decision made, she dismounted and hooked his knees on her shoulders, hugging his calves. As she stood, taking his weight, he gasped.

  “Don’t squirm,” she said, reaching up awkwardly to saw a claw through the belt binding his wrists. He shook his arms, pried off the slipknot, and toppled over.

  Grinn grabbed for him, but he’d curled in the dirt, already pulling his fallen boot on. Fairly dispassionate for a fellow straight out of a tree. Curiosity bit down on her and didn’t let go.

  A frost of cheap stalwart-spells patched his soldier-issue boots, only one toe puncture from a claw; so, he’d volunteered early for Union service, done a lot of walking since the war, and usually chose when he shifted.

  Fingertips caked in browned blood but a spotless shirtfront; someone had pulled his claws. They’d grow back. The point was pain, and power. Doc collected clippings for spellwork and such, but she’d rant for hours about ethical witchery, how prying live claws was bad dabblery.

  Whoever’d strung him up knew what he was and hadn’t taken kindly. Cut him loose, sure, but invite him to share a fire, especially minding Buddy? Not much scent to trust, over the nostril-stinging, fear-soaked noose.

  Meanwhile, the lone wolf cracked his neck, rubbed vanishing bruises, and walked off.

  Hell. Could at least aim him right. “Fort Daedalus is thataway,” Grinn called.

  He changed direction without looking back.

  If he’d thanked her, she would’ve heard it.

  It became real clear real quick that night would fall sooner than Buddy’s harangue on abandonment and common courtesy would reach a middle, so Grinn whistled their mounts and the ponies into a sprint. Buddy shut up to stay a-saddle. Served her right. Gods, Grinn hadn’t volunteered to play elder sister, nor missed being the younger, but Buddy could do her the courtesy of sticking to who was which.

  Supposed to be well past Storm territory by now, over halfway to the whistle-stop kiss-and-greet with the only livery anyone in the Little Water pack trusted to sell their stock, but they’d lost too much ground at a pace little better than walking backward. Grinn didn’t miss lone-craze, either, but she longed to race until the night unspooled, leaving the fleetest creatures in the dust. Forced to fret over laming a horse—or Buddy—in the unfamiliar dark, Grinn gritted her teeth and chose a place to halt.

  While the horses grazed nearby, Grinn and Buddy bedded down in a pile of bedrolls and blankets out in the open, which was generally Grinn’s favorite part. Buddy made a godsdamn pointy bedmate.

  Though, to be honest, Grinn’s thoughts stuck her worse than Buddy’s shoulder blades. The fellow in the tree, his shirt still had all its buttons. Couldn’t tell someone’s morals by their laundry, of course—lucky for Grinn. Just the same, ending up lone hadn’t been Grinn’s fault, or Buddy’s, back when they’d each hit bottom woe.

  Anyway, he hadn’t asked to come along, or for anything.

  “I’m still cold,” Buddy said. She’d gotten the message about arguing but had resolved to sulk.

  “You sure are a loud sleeper,” Grinn said. The desert air smelled green. Grinn glared at the hidden stars. Since the war, storms had gotten tricky. Something about gun magick and a lot of death. Grinn had seen just enough of what arose in the rains to practice strict avoidance, for all her wanderings. They’d better only get rained on.

  Grinn startled. From miles away, that echoing sound could’ve been thunder, a scream, or a shot.

  The horses shuffled. Buddy said, “You’re letting all the warm out.”

  “Shift, then. Quit making noise,” Grinn hissed, nose to the wind.

  Buddy scrunched her face to force fur out. New to the whole idea, she hadn’t yet caught the trick of a moonless, partial shift. She hummed, loud.

  “I said quit,” said Grinn.

  Buddy became a horse. As a filly, she perfectly matched the rest of their string. She neighed.

  “What in blazes? Change back!” yelled Grinn, scrambling from the hooves. That irritating peppery scent popped like firecrackers going off. Grinn had always assumed Buddy’s particular smell-print was strong enough to cover up the familiar undercurrent of fellow-wolf—she’d never considered the smell wasn’t there and Buddy was something not quite the same. Hell, the first full moon after Buddy wandered into Little Water weeks ago, she turned into a gangly russet wolf with the rest of the pack, and there hadn’t been reason to ask if she had other shapes up her sleeve.

  Buddy shivered into what Doc would call a centaur. “Agh! How did I do that? What do I do now?”

  “I thought you said it was a wolf that bit you!”

&
nbsp; “It was dark!”

  The rustle in the brush closed in. No time for speculation. “Switch all-person,” Grinn said, calling claws.

  Scrunching her face, Buddy ended up all-horse instead.

  “Gods damn it,” Grinn hissed. The newest sorrel blinked apology.

  A pistol shot split Grinn’s back.

  Buddy shrieked, rearing, but the passel of assholes now roping off their ponies knew their business. Grinn scrabbled for her shoulder wound, grinding her face into the blankets.

  “Thought I heard two of them,” said an unfamiliar, frayed male voice. “Who in their right mind runs horses solo?”

  Grinn punched her chest, thumping the bullet out like the last sweet in the jar. Silver haze crept into her vision, and her eyes watered from the awful twist of her sealing wound, but she tracked a couple figures advancing.

  She lashed out. Her fangs ached to rip soft throats—but she already knew how gullet tasted, the crunch of windpipe and the spray of a torn-open scream. Never again. Claws, though, she could apply without guilt, and did so.

  She slashed open one thief’s shoulders with both hands—he fell prone, arms too weak to catch himself. The next stumbled to avoid stepping on him, and Grinn sank all claws into the flesh around her lifted knee, yanking that thief off her feet. A meaty arm wrapped around Grinn’s neck, but she bent, reached back, rent through leather, flannel, hamstrings. Her roar knocked somebody flat, and her hands tore scrub and muscle as she swung every whichway.

  The tussle had barely begun when the mounted thief answered his own question, “A hubrit-ical Little Water wolf does, that’s who.” A revolver clicked. “You might not mind lead, but these bullets, friend, are ac-o-nite.”

  Grinn came back to herself, kneeling on somebody’s neck. Sweat stung her eyes; two more figures lurking near the horses maybe, the long thin shine of a rifle? Couldn’t smell straight over the big-talker’s bootshine-blacked pistol and the rank sweat of improvisation. Hunters, they weren’t. And plain human to boot. With aconite, didn’t much matter.

  “What, no silver?” Grinn growled.

  “Shoot, digging up fancy weeds is one thing. Silver ain’t cheap. I consolidate my wealth.”

  Another gunshot. Grinn’s body hitched, expecting pain and poison. A horse screamed, crashed to the dirt. Two voices cussed in harmony. A trip of rabbits or a husk of hares scattered.

  “Bud!” Grinn cried, risking the frightened ponies’ stagger. She hit her knees, palming the gush of blood, getting kicked and not giving a damn. “Shh, you’re all right.”

  “Dammit, Rissa,” yelled the rider. “What’d you cost us two hundred dollars for?”

  “He bit me!” Rissa yelled back.

  Grinn whined over the quivering horse’s neck, gentling the poor creature through its dying. Didn’t take long. Gods, what would she tell everyone? It was Salva all over again. No family—no pack—deserved a death-hounded stray like Grinn. Nighttime chilled her bent neck as the horses gave her a wide, superstitious berth.

  “The hell he did,” the rider said, voice gone jealous-lover sooty. He dismounted and spat the blood off Rissa’s injured hand. “See? Ain’t even broke the skin.”

  The stiff horseflesh under Grinn’s hands wasn’t shivering back into a human body.

  Wasn’t Buddy.

  Poor horse. She patted it stupidly. In fact, all she smelled was horse, no tickle-itch whiff of Buddy at all.

  A rifle butted Grinn’s shoulder. “Out of the way,” Rissa said.

  Grinn complied, sipping air for wherever Buddy was hiding. Hopefully she’d turned into something more useful than a naked thirteen-year-old. Having once been one herself, Grinn knew it could be worse, but Buddy was no scrapper, and—wolfsbane bullets.

  Rissa, in order to baby her imaginary bite, dumped a trussed-up figure on the dirt alongside Grinn—the fellow from the tree. Tied up again, and even worse for wear. Grinn felt strangely proud that she’d judged his character right; if he’d bitten hard enough to draw blood, it would’ve either killed Rissa with the fever or turned her into a wolf against her will. Either way, he would’ve stolen a life. Last ditch, nigh unforgivable—but possibly a more effective escape technique.

  Low, Grinn joked, “It’s like you’re not even trying, man.”

  He reeked of rotten-apple sweet blood, and he didn’t respond. Through a mess of missing buttons, aconite poisoning white-veined his gut. That distant earlier noise had been the fellow’s pitiful luck running out.

  “Shoot her, too, Lloyd?” Rissa asked. It figured that Rissa was a little short of fellow-feeling after this violence, but it stung Grinn to be on opposite sides from another brown girl.

  In answer, Lloyd of the stage-villain gun dug a set of honest-to-gods shackles from his saddle bags. Rough ironwork lined with silver; smelled like a mean winter.

  “You had silver lying around?” Rissa asked. “When we were starving back near Omaha?”

  Grinn sagged. Doc said silver kept a wolf from changing form because silver’s inner moonlight made a cage instead of a key. No, Grinn said; silver hobbled you because it hurt like hell. And unlike a brand, it never cooled down.

  “Your friends ain’t dead,” Grinn stalled. She heard their beating hearts behind her, even some pitiful groans. Skittering prey, clanking manacles, but no Buddy. “I can carry twice my weight, if you don’t use those.”

  Clamped on, the chains wrenched Grinn’s arms, burst the tender shoulder scar. Silver-weakness crawled towards her neck, dulling her heart, searing muscle.

  Lloyd bent close, pressing his cheek to hers, mocking. “A biddable hound’s a better investment than those idjits ever were. Comprendy, sennerita? Ghost storm’s coming,” he added, and everyone shut up.

  Rough hands hauled Grinn standing. Her right wrist screamed; the left manacle, on the other hand...

  Good thing she’d curled up in anticipatory cowardice. Otherwise, shitkicker Lloyd would have known his blacksmith had cheated him. One of her manacles was tin.

  Ragged rain hissed by the time they reached what the locals called Hornet’s Warren. Rimequartz formations squeezed most of its abandoned caves down to coffin-small, but this hollow ran about twenty paces deep, pinched like an hourglass in the middle. Rissa tossed Grinn and the fellow from the tree into the rear bulb of the hollow, then set up camp for her and Lloyd on the other side of the notch between the wolves and the cave mouth—and the coming Storm. The blue rimequartz shards geode-riddling the cave walls buzzed like a tuning fork: sure sign that soon the rain wouldn’t be water anymore.

  Sharp and sudden, Lloyd whistled at Rissa like an ill-behaved dog. “Don’t you set that fire near the storm,” he bellowed. Though where the hell else Rissa should set it besides the overhang of the cave mouth remained a mystery. “Quit taking initiative and get out here.”

  Rissa chucked the flint in frustration, kneed the kindling further inside, and stomped to obey.

  The fellow from the tree slumped against Grinn, resigned, and she whimpered in solidarity. Guilt bubbled chalk-bitter on her tongue. She did tenderness alright, but not without the use of her arms. She murmured, “How many wolves get stuck with pain that doesn’t heal in minutes? Got the worst kinda luck, ain’t you. Positively beset. Hangdog, that’s the word.”

  With a handsome hitch of a half-asleep smile, he mumbled into her neck, “That’s rich. I feel fine.”

  Intimate territory, a wolf’s throat—vulnerable to teeth, richest in scent. A spot to guard, or attack. Or nestle in, apparently. All at once, it felt like they’d woken up together. Grinn gave up catching her breath; held it instead.

  Hardly the context for a dip in the butter, Buddy would’ve said, because Doc would’ve said; the melted-butter smell of surrender wafting from the lone wolf’s hair made Doc’s stupid saying suddenly make sense. He dragged his nose up Grinn’s bicep. The picture of a fretful Buddy wrestled with Grinn’s uncommon temptation to sink into this steady shared ember, twine together, and fall asleep for days.
/>   “You, uh, really don’t feel fine,” Grinn told him. Fellow must’ve been born a wolf, to be unfamiliar with drunkenness. He didn’t have the teetotaler look.

  “I don’t?” Hooded brown eyes blinked, and he swayed upright. “I don’t,” he agreed. He wet-hound-shook his head, saying, “Oh, it’s you. You’re tough.” Inexplicable smugness sloughed to woozy horror. “What the mouth is coming outta my hell?”

  Grinn missed the last part, bristling from the echo of Salva’s long-ago last coherent words: You better toughen, girl. She tried to force her wolf past the silver, as if she could defend herself from a memory; pain dry-scraped from her eyes, her gums, every fingerbone, enfeebling her whole body for an awful moment.

  “Oh, hurts,” Grinn said, panting, human. “I mean, that’s gonna hurt soon. You’re drunk, puppy. Congratulations.” As long as he could talk, as long as those white veins kept off his heart, and as long as that bullet got out, a little poisoning was painkiller. ‘Course, that was a lot of as-long-as’s.

  Incredulous, he giggled at his lichen-white belly wound. “Figures. Fucking Lloyd, stuck to my shoe. Used to be pack. Montana.”

  Grinn swallowed a flip remark about troublesome pack humans, considering the closest hers would ever resort to torture was saddling her with Buddy. Comparing Doc to Lloyd was hardly fair to anybody involved.

  “Now you’re as alone as I am, Calamity,” the fellow said, misting up. Ah, he couldn’t get north without crossing the Storm belt. Even the rail barons had given up laying a successful path through the snarled energy; abandoned spurs littered these parts like shed fur. Grinn herself usually scraped along the belly of the weather. Once, she’d ridden past a puddle from the Storm’s wake and swore someone she’d thought never to see again had been reflected behind her. Impossible, she told herself, and had told herself over and over as she’d ridden away like Satan had her by the tail.

  “Name’s Peregrina,” she said. Wincing, she corrected, “Grinn.” All this thinking about Salva, rattling her habits loose. Why bother with the whole mouthful when nobody said it right anyway, and rolling those soft Spanish R’s made loss ache from her throat to her belly? She closed her eyes to listen outside. “And even you ain’t as alone as you are.”