The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (21 page)

"Perhaps it is time to put this bad blood behind you," she said. "This is why I have told you the truth. Because men can be as stubborn as buffalo following the grass. Sometimes they forget to look to see what is around them."

He shook his head. "I have to find Little Wolf and take him back to his mother. I promised her I would bring him to her before—"

"Cousin..." Walks Along touched his hand again. "My heart aches to tell you, but... you are too late. Her spirit walks with the ancestors. The wasting sickness took her soon after you left."

The news caught him off guard and his hands curled into fists at his sides. His aunt, gone? So fast?

"Even if you had taken the boy and gone straight back," Walks Along said, "you would have been too late."

He stared off at the ridge of the mountain where the morning sun was beginning to spill light like honey over the ridge top.

"Little Wolf is alone in the world now," she continued. "He will not find his way back here to us. Like the others, he is too changed."

"I will bring him back," he promised.

"He will not be happy here." She sighed. "He can no longer talk the talk of the Cheyenne. The way of the Human Beings is almost disappeared." She gestured at the poor camp behind them. "They have murdered us, stolen our homes, our buffalo, our hunting grounds and our children. They have ripped away all things from our children that make them Human Beings. When they come back to us, they are like lost buffalo calves standing alone on the prairie. They are buffalos, disguised as birds. But they are broken and do not know how to fly. But you..." she said, pointing at the glistening stepping stones jutting from the water. "You are like those rocks in the creek, going from here to there." She glanced back at her tepee, where Essie had gone. "And maybe she is what is standing on the other side."

* * *

"Do not! It only cuts deeper," Shyen Zu warned Little Wolf, who sat in the sweltering heat of a keeping room, tugging ineffectively at the filthy metal manacle on his ankle. "Many die of... of sickness here."

Releasing the metal with disgust, Little Wolf folded his arms across his knees, ignoring the bite of the metal against his skin where it had already cut him. He looked at the girl who'd been the only one here to befriend him and speak to him in a language he could understand. Her English was broken and simple, as his had been once, but she had saved him a dozen beatings already with her knowledge of Chen Lee's peculiar tastes. On the other hand, he'd taken a dozen beatings already for infractions of rules he still didn't understand. And frankly, hoped he never would.

There was a window in the keeping room that let fresh air in. Outside that window, he could hear the sounds of the street, where the world of Magic City moved along without him. Wagons, horses, the sound of trains pulling in and out of the depot. The lowing of cows in the stockyard, trapped as he was here in this prison, awaiting what?

He had no way of knowing how or if he would ever escape this place. Those men had sold him to Chen Lee, as if they had the right. He had seen money change hands. Now, he was no better off than Chen Lee's slave girls, sold into this life of misery. It was, he guessed, only a matter of time before he was used as the girls were by some customer with a taste for boys. But he would kill any man who tried. That vow he had made to himself the first night, shackled in the room next to Shyen Zu's, listening to her bed bang against the wall and the grunts of the man rutting inside her.

At fifteen, this life had not yet stolen her beauty, as it had many of the other girls'. She was much in demand because of that. Three or four men a night chose her from the window. Most of them were Chinese. Some were white, though even he knew that brothels were segregated by race. Chinese men could not use the women in white brothels, though the rules were slipperier the other way around. So the men, banned from the white brothels here in town, for violence against the girls or for other reasons, found their way here, to the bottom of the brothel barrel. No one knew or cared what happened to these girls. They were invisible. Like him.

This world, with its sickly sweet smell of opium, made no sense to him. No Cheyenne woman would ever be abused the way these women were. And no Cheyenne boy would find himself enslaved like he was. He would die bravely in battle first.

Beside him, Shyen Zu curled up with her head beside his knee. "You thinkee run? Escape?"

"Yes."

She shook her head. "No use. Better be good at what he want."

"Emptying piss pots and cleaning laundry?"

"
Shi
."

He pressed a hand across her back, meaning to comfort her, but she flinched at his touch before allowing it like a cat leaning into a palm. He could feel each of the bones in her back. She was like a fragile bird. "There are more of us than him. We could overpower him," Little Wolf said quietly. "Escape."

Shyen Zu stiffened at his suggestion. "I have thought this, too. But the others... they too scared."

"Are you? Too scared?" he asked.

She curled her hands into fists. "I am only one."

"Now we are two. Maybe there are more."

"He will catch—then kill us."

He did not doubt this. Yesterday, a worn-out-looking old woman named Gi Lan, whose hair was going gray, was locked in a cell without windows inside the house. A lit candle was all she took into the room with her, except for a small vial Little Wolf watched Chen Lee tuck into the torn bosom of her gown.

Before Gi Lan had turned from the door, she'd met his eyes. He'd expected to see something there... Fear, anger... even hostility. But what he'd seen as the door was closing on her was resignation. Nothing really, at all.

"Why is she in that room?" he'd asked Shyen Zu later.

Shyen Zu ran her hand, matter-of-factly, across her throat, in the universal sign for death.

"What? Why? Is she sick?"

The girl shook her head with a shrug because he didn't seem to know anything. "Once she a beauty from my province.
Jiansu
," she'd told him. She counted out twelve on her fingers for him. "This many when she come to San Fran-Cisco. Now, here. She too old." She counted again on her fingers to twenty-four.

Shock poured through him. Twenty and four? She looked closer to fifty.

"Men not choose her. Today she die. She must drink—" She searched her mind for the word, then made a face like she was choking.

"Poison?" Little Wolf supplied, appalled
.

"
Shi.
Yes. Chen Lee gives her to drink. Or he"—she demonstrated the wringing of her neck—"when the candle die. But she choose drink. Quick-quick."

"He's... forcing her to kill herself? But... why? Why not just let her go?"

Again, she stared at him in all his ignorance. "Go? Where? She no one. No use now. Finished. No good here. No—" She gestured lewdly with her index finger into the circle she made with her other hand.

Anger had curled through him anew. Was that to be Shyen Zu's fate as well? Or his? If he hadn't realized the danger they were all in before, he did now. And hours later, he'd seen two girls carry the thin, limp body of Gi Lan out of that room and toss her onto the back of Chen Lee's wagon. She would be buried somewhere out of town, without a word or a marker, like many of the children at his former school. She would be forgotten as easily as she'd died.

In the two days he'd been here already, he'd begun to understand that Shyen Zu was on the same road the other girls had already chosen—resignation. They had been sold into slavery young and knew nothing else.

Now she had dismissed the idea of escape with the shrug of her thin shoulders. But he was not ready to give up. He had escaped the school and he would escape this place. But if he did, he would find a way to take this frail bird of a girl with him. There had to be more for them in this world.

Somewhere.

Chen Lee burst into the room holding the stick with which Little Wolf had become so familiar, and roughly unlocked the manacle from Little Wolf's leg. He spat out a few unintelligible orders at Little Wolf, which he took to mean it was time to empty the piss pots again. Without warning, the cane cracked along Little Wolf's spine as he got to his feet and he cried out, grabbing the stick to wrestle it out of the old man's hands. Instantly, he knew that had been a mistake. One of Chen Lee's bodyguards stepped up and tossed Little Wolf against the wall.

Pain rocketed through his shoulder and it was all he could do to keep from crying out. But he kept silent, refusing to make eye contact with the man. Slowly, he got to his feet as the old man loosed a stream of Chinese oaths and what, he supposed, were warnings.

Yes, he would escape this place before they killed him. But first, he would count coup on Chen Lee, and maybe even take his scalp.

* * *

Red Moon loaned them one of his ponies for the trip and now Essie followed Cade and Náhkohe down the steep trail, her pony nose to tail with his Appaloosa. Essie was grateful to put some distance between her and Cade. They'd already ridden for hours and they'd spoken no more than a few words.

The trail that led down the mountain toward Billings wound past creeks and waterfalls, outcrops of granite and summer-browned meadows. They passed a series of small, mirrored lakes, littered with fallen trees where beavers had been at work. Overhead, a hawk circled lazily, following them out of curiosity as if they were just regular people passing by and not two lost souls with no idea what tomorrow would bring.

As her pony picked its way down a rocky slope behind his horse, she tried not to watch Cade, but her eyes strayed to him over and over.

She couldn't deny what had blossomed between them, but she wanted to. She wanted
not
to want him. Not to feel anything for him at all. As he, apparently, did for her.

Except for that kiss. That kiss hadn't felt like nothing.

As they moved through the forest, she tried to imagine her life after him. After this. How she would go back to her life as it had once been. Alone, perhaps for the rest of her life. If he was right, and she was truly marked as a ruined woman, then quite possibly that kiss they'd shared was the last one she'd ever have.

The thought sent an empty, sharp pain through her.

And lovemaking? Well, that would be finished, too. A fate that, until now, hadn't seemed so bleak. But now... just the thought of his kiss, the sweet slide of his tongue against her own, the press of his arms around her and the jut of his desire against her belly, made her understand that loss in a whole new way. Was it so wrong of her to want him? Just once?

She could be satisfied with once, couldn't she? Store that one time in her memory to pull out now and then, when she would recall each and every detail? It would be enough, wouldn't it, to have that memory?

Ahead, he bent over the horse's neck to study the ground, then slowed Náhkohe to a stop. Beside the trail, trampled paintbrush lay browning in the cool air.

"What is it?" she asked.

"We've picked up their trail again. Three sets of hoofprints. They weren't too worried about leaving a trail. Or at least, one of them wasn't. I wouldn't put it past Little Wolf to have deliberately moved off the path."

She looked off down the mountain. In the distance, she could see Magic City, otherwise known as Billings, perched on the prairie floor. From here, it looked like a collection of toy blocks some child had forgotten. But smoke from an approaching train drew her gaze farther north. A train that would, one day soon, take her away from all of this. From him.

She worried her bottom lip with her teeth. "How much longer 'til we get there?"

"Dark, most likely," he said, turning in time to see her shiver. "Cold?"

She nodded. She'd been cold for days. Even the afternoon sun couldn't chase away the chill that had settled inside her.

He pulled Náhkohe beside her, untied Walks Along Woman's blanket from behind his saddle and draped it around her shoulders. "You should have said something."

Not if my life depended on it
. Tugging the blanket close, she said, "What happens when we get there?"

He looked away at that. "You'll ride into Billings alone. I have a friend there. Ollie Warren. She runs the Lucky Diamond Sporting House. She'll help you."

"A... sporting house?"

"A house of sin," he clarified with a small grin. "They don't come any better than Ollie Warren. She'll see you get set up at a decent hotel and will get you on the next train out of town. She'll do that for me."

Really.
"A hotel? How do you expect me to go to any decent hotel in Billings, looking like this? I might as well wear a sign, declaring 'I survived! Just barely!'"

He chuckled at that. "Ollie will see that you have new things, get cleaned up. C'mon." He nudged his horse forward and she followed him down the slope.

"You make it sound so easy," she called after him. "But this... Ollie Warren doesn't know me from a woodchuck. What makes you think she'll help me?"

"Because," Cade answered, "she owes me."

Curious
. "And what about you?"

"What about me?" he asked.

"Where will you be as I'm collecting your favors from Ollie Warren?"