The Arrivals (7 page)

“Lord, save me from fools,” Kitty said, and then she punched Lira too.

Years ago, she’d have stepped out of their way and let the two drunk fools shoot each other to their hearts’ content, but Jack’s oft-quoted admonishment echoed even in his absence:
It’s our calling.

“Calling, my ass,” Kitty muttered as she took in the sight of several skirmishes in the bar. Now that the manager was out and the bartender wasn’t trying to keep order, the patrons were behaving like naughty children. She could step in, but Jack wasn’t there to nag her, and she was feeling contrary. So she lifted her own drink in a toast and put her back to the bar to watch the show. Sometimes, being in a bar brawl made her almost feel like she was back home—if she could ignore the fact that this world was filled with magic and creatures that could step right into storybooks. People were people, even if they weren’t always human. Trouble was trouble, even if it was started by monsters. That was the truth of it.

She made a game of silently predicting the winners of various fights until the smell of smoke made her look around the room. The fire wasn’t coming from any of the empty barrels that stood as tables. The wall tapestries were all fine. The wafting smoke was drifting in from outside.

“Down!” she yelled.

Both of the front windows blasted inward, and red-tinted glass rained over all of them.

The chaos inside the pub stilled. Patrons who’d been ready enough to cosh each other over the head two minutes ago suddenly helped the folks they’d been fighting.

The bartender crouched behind the bar, so only his eyes and the top of his head were visible. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

One of the cooks crawled along the floor, shoving a bucket of unidentified bits of uncooked meat toward Kitty. “Here.”

She shot a frown over the crowd: they were watching her like she was all that stood between them and disaster. She wasn’t. Any one of them could step up, but they didn’t, and they wouldn’t.

For all Jack’s preaching at her, and despite all the straight-up weird shit she’d seen in the twenty-six years or so since she’d left the normal world and California far behind, she could count on humanity’s basic predictability in a situation. The moment
real
trouble started, most people hid. Now that they needed help, she was everyone’s best friend. If she were a softer soul, it would bother her. Okay, maybe it still did, but not so as she’d be mentioning it anytime soon.

Kitty sighed, but she twisted her damp hair into a knot and snatched up the bucket. “Stay inside.”

Without waiting to see if they listened, she clomped across the floor and pushed open the half doors that hung in front of her. She suspected that the lindwurm that had vanished from Cozy’s Ranch had found its way into Gallows.

Luckily, the beast that sprawled out in the street was a juvenile, more smoke than fire. It rested on its scaled belly with its legs splayed, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t move quickly if it was so inclined. Kitty hiked up the edge of her skirt and tied it off so it wouldn’t tangle around her legs when she had to run.

“Lookie here.” She eased to the side. The lindwurm’s head snaked to the left, keeping her in sight.

She tossed a slimy piece of meat onto the ground in front of it. In a whip-quick movement, it snatched the snack with a long thin tongue and then slithered toward her.

“That’s right. You just follow Miss Kitty,” she coaxed.

One big opal eye tracked her as she backed away from the building. It didn’t rush her or exhale fire in her direction—although a little plume of smoke drifted from its oversize nostrils.

She kept backing away, tossing handfuls of meat toward the lindwurm. After a few tense moments, it slithered forward a little more.

She wouldn’t want to try this with a full-grown lindwurm, but the young weren’t as agile or as surly. It was likely hungry, and once it’d had enough to eat, it’d nap. All she needed to do was lure it out away from buildings without getting herself cooked in the process. The sands that stretched around Gallows were the reason this was lindwurm-farming territory: farmlands like back home would’ve been reduced to nothing but prairie fires here.

A few more pieces lured the lindwurm farther from the buildings, but it wasn’t moving far or fast. She couldn’t tell it to wait while she fetched more meat, and a quick glance around made it obvious that no one was coming to bring her a backup bucket. Lindwurm herding was the sort of task that required help, and while she’d done it solo before, more often than not it had resulted in waking up after a few days dead.

“Any decent folks care to offer a little help?” Kitty called.

Not surprisingly, doors and shutters stayed closed.

The lindwurm was getting bored, and she was low on meat. It exhaled a small puff of flame, and she darted to the side.

“Seriously?” she grumbled. “Getting toasted was not my plan for the night!”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have gone out alone, Katherine.” Jack’s voice was uncommonly welcome just then. She didn’t need to look at him to know that his mouth was already pressed into a stern line that ruined what was an otherwise handsome face and that his pretty baby blues were ruined by a you-disappoint-me look.

Kitty hid her sigh of relief at seeing him by picking a fight with him. “I didn’t feel like dealing with you
or
Edgar, jackass. I wanted to relax.”

“Clearly,” Jack drawled, angling to the right of the increasingly restless lindwurm. “Upsetting lizards seems like a fine way to spend an evening.”

“Not my fault.”

“It never is,” Jack said. He paused only a moment before adding, “Reins and collar look intact. You could’ve—”

“I’m not a wrangler.”

“Yet another good reason not to go out alone.” He glanced her way, and once she met his gaze, he prompted, “Ready?”

“Go.” She tossed one of the remaining scraps of meat to the left.

As the lindwurm twisted its neck to snatch the treat, Jack hoisted himself atop the scaled beast. He wore the same grin he wore in a fight or anything remotely likely to get him injured. He was too dour most of the time, spewing rules the way she spit out cusses. In an adventure, though, he was all smiles.

“Hitch up your skirt and run,” he yelled.

The lindwurm’s tail lashed around at him, drawing blood, but it didn’t roast him. An older beast would’ve. All that this one did was buck and slash. So far, Jack was only getting the edge of its temper.

Kitty ran toward the butcher’s shop, shoved open the door, and tore down a fair-size bit of mutton. Slimy meat in hand, she raced back to the lindwurm.

It stilled again as it spotted her.

She held the mutton aloft—and away from her body—as she walked closer to the lindwurm. “I hate this part.”

“Be ready to bolt,” Jack reminded her.

As the lindwurm tasted the air, scenting at the meat she held in front of her, she said in as flat a voice as she could muster, “He decides to cook his dinner, and I’m going to be crispy.”

“You’d get a few days off.”

Kitty tossed the mutton before the lindwurm got any closer to her, and it pounced on the meat as soon as it landed in the sand.

While it gnawed on the mutton, Jack took hold of the reins that were fastened around the creature’s back and steered it into the sand fields. Kitty followed on foot until they were far enough away that any belches or coughs or intentional flames would all be too short to ignite the pub or anything else. If she was able to get on its back, she could’ve done the same, but no one with half a brain would try to mount a lindwurm without having a partner to distract it first—or without being too bold for one’s britches.

Jack slid to the ground now that the lindwurm was out of range of the shops. Once he came to stand beside Kitty, she ripped the ruffle off her skirt and started to wrap it around the gash in his left bicep.

“You should’ve told me you were going out,” he chastised. He put his right hand on her shoulder as she bandaged his other arm. “Or told Edgar. You know better.”

She yanked on the two ends of the ruffle. “You’re welcome, Kit. Always glad to help, especially after I’ve been a jackass and pushed you away to let myself drown in guilt. Sorry I can’t let you be there for me. Really.” She knotted the bright red ruffle on his arm and lifted her gaze to meet his eyes. “Sorry your dress got trashed too, Kit. I’ll buy you a new one to replace it. I’m really glad you’re not hurt, and oh . . . thanks for finding the missing lizard.”

“Are you done?”

Kitty sighed. “You’ll feel better if you argue with me, Jack.”

“What’s to argue? You’re right, even if I’m not going to say any of that womanish stuff.” He plucked a dirt-and-wine-coated curl off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I know you’re a grown woman, but you’re still my little sister.”

She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, counting silently to herself before she said something else she shouldn’t.

After a few moments, she stepped away. The riffraff in the pub had started to wander outside, and she wasn’t going to fight with Jack
or
get all sappy with him in front of strangers.

“That beast’s not going to get home by itself,” Betsy said from behind her. “And you can’t leave it here.”

Kitty rolled her eyes and started counting again. Dealing with the absentee proprietress wasn’t going to help her mood. The woman hired half-incompetent staff, and then treated the tavern like her own personal prowling grounds. It didn’t do a lot to inspire respect in Kitty.

In a blink, Jack stepped past her and smiled at Betsy.

You can take a gambler out of the saloon, but you can’t take the charm out of a gambler,
Kitty thought
.
Once upon a time, she’d had to rely on her charm too, but since they’d ended up here, she’d grown to prefer bullets to smiles. Still, old habits were more useful than new ones sometimes. Kitty affixed the falsely guileless smile she resented wearing and turned so she was by Jack’s side. Family stood together. That truth had been a guiding force in her life since she was a child.

“Surely we can leave it here while we go on out to Cozy’s Ranch to see if this is one of his.” Jack gestured at the resting lindwurm and smiled.

Betsy laughed. “And hope that Cozy’s going to be quick about it? You’re pretty, Jackson, but I’m not young enough to be swayed by pretty.” She gave him a hungry look and added, “At least not
just
pretty.”

Jack ignored her invitation and flashed his grin. “Worth a try.”

“Not really.” Betsy shook her head, but she winked at Jack before she called out, “Lindwurm special until the beast is gone. Half-price pints.” Then she went back into the pub, calling for brooms and a glassmaker as she went.

In moments, most of the patrons had gone back inside—all but a small group of miners who had been an eager part of the fracas earlier. Like all of the native miners here, they were stocky, squat people with no whites around their pupils and large, batlike ears. The popular theory was that they’d developed their diminutive stature, overlarge ears, and solid black eyes as a result of countless generations working in the earth—a theory that made just enough sense to lessen the sense of unease Kitty felt when she looked at them.

“I don’t suppose you have any lindwurm-strength chain nearby?” Jack asked.

Two of the men stepped past their brethren. The first glared up at Jack and said, “Maybe.”

The second got to the heart of the matter: “Are you accusing us of something?”

Kitty walked toward him, using the fact that he was eye level with her hips to her advantage. With the way that her skirt was hitched up in the front, the miners were seeing a lot of leg. When she was close enough that the miner had to look up at her or admit that he was distracted by her bare skin, she stopped.

When he lifted his eyes to hers, she said, “We’re simply asking for chain. Do
I
look like I have a lindwurm chain hidden on me?”

The miners stared at her intently with their unsettling eyes, and after a few moments, they conceded that she was in need of some chain. Neither Kitty nor Jack commented on the chain they’d retrieved, which matched the links still fastened around the lindwurm’s neck. Kitty and Jack had agreed a few years ago that those who had been so adversely affected by Ajani’s enterprises merited a bit of selective blindness. The miners topped that list.

“I don’t suppose you could handle taking it out of here?” Kitty asked, directing her offer to all of them rather than any one specific miner. “If it took a day or so to reach Cozy, I’m sure he’d overlook the delay in exchange for not having to fetch it home.”

The answering rumble of assents was all she needed. Cozy was a surly bastard, and he was all too willing to ignore centuries of traditions to line his pockets with Ajani’s money. Like a lot of the lindwurm farmers, he’d raised his prices so high that miners couldn’t afford to rent, much less buy, lindwurms. Ajani levied steep taxes on the farmers if they did business with anyone other than those he authorized—and that didn’t include miners. Years ago, the miners had refused to sell their family mines to Ajani, but he’d retaliated by systematically denying them the tools to ply their trade. The resulting conditions meant that the people who’d made their living in the mines for generations, who’d been the only ones to do so and had physically evolved for that work, were now starving. It also meant that they occasionally liberated a few lindwurms that they couldn’t legally rent.

Kitty smiled at the miners, happy to have found a solution that benefited them. Wrestling with the beast hadn’t been fun, but she couldn’t blame them for not stepping in. What mattered now was that no one was hurt, Ajani would lose a little profit, and the miners would remember that she had lent them the lindwurm—even though it was one they’d already stolen.

Situation resolved, Kitty linked her arm through Jack’s as they strolled toward camp. The dirt and dust that were inevitable in the Wasteland seemed thicker than usual—or maybe it was just that they clung to her more because of the wine.