Wolves (47 page)

Huxley is about to ask how long it takes to kick in, but Davies puts the sack over his head again and a moment later Huxley hears him climb back into the wagon's bench and snap the reins. The horses whicker and the wagon starts moving again.

“Mr. Huxley?” Lowell's voice says, quietly. “Are you still there?”

Huxley closes his eyes against the pain. “Yes. I'm here.”

He loses track of time. Perhaps it was fifteen minutes, or maybe it was an hour, but he realizes that the pain is gone. No … not gone. Just blanketed. Just sitting under a warm blanket, like a blanket that has been sitting next to a fire for a good long while. The emptiness in his gut is fuzzy and unmemorable, and bad things seem far away.

There is a moment when his chest feels warm, and all his skin extraordinarily soft, and he tries to think of what it reminds him of, the sensation. And he thinks that it is those perfect spring and fall nights when the air temperature was just so, and the humidity was gone, when he would lie next to Charity, both of them bare-chested, and her skin against his was this very same sensation—not cold, not hot, not sweaty. Just smooth and warm. Perfect.

Perfect … 

Chapter 5

When Huxley comes to, it is daylight.

It is warm. He can feel it on his face, and he realizes that the sack is no longer over his head. The air is crisp, but not uncomfortably cold. And in the sunlight, he is okay. The pain stretches and yawns, awakening with him.

The burns. I've been burned.

Fuck, my wrist … 

He grimaces and feels some portion of the flesh on his face crack, near the corner of his mouth. It makes a painful, brittle sound and he feels wetness oozing out of it. He keeps his eyes clamped closed for another few minutes, wishing like hell for more of Davies' whiskey laudanum, but he won't ask for it. He won't ask for it, and he isn't sure if he wants to take it again if it is offered. He does not want to sleep again. He wants to be free. He wants to figure out how to get out of this situation.

The sunlight blazes on the other side of his eyelids.

He squints through them, dazzled by the early morning.

There is the smell of smoke, but Huxley only registers it when he sees it rising from a meager campfire, over which Black Heart Davies stands in a brooding posture, his back turned to Huxley and the wagon.

He took my hood off
, Huxley reasons his way through it, observing that his hands are still bound together, still lashed to the side of the wagon.
But I'm not free.

He looks to his right and he can see Lowell there, his hands also bound, no hood over his head. Now, in the daylight, with his vision returned to him, Huxley can see the horrible shape the boy is in. He is huddled in the cold with his chin against his chest, the fingers of his bound hands turning blue from lack of circulation. His eyes are pinched shut, like he is straining to sleep, his eyebrows knit. He is covered in blood. Old and brown and scabbed over. It is caked in his fingernails, in his cuticles, in the folds of his knuckles.

Brie. Brie didn't make it.

“Lowell,” Huxley says, huskily. He clears his throat.

Lowell's eyes open. He looks across the wagon with a confused glare. The look of someone snatched from sleep that was difficult to find in the first place, someone that views the world as a sudden intrusion and cannot make sense of things just yet. He blinks a few times through his glare, and then his eyes clear as memory and logic come back to him.

Huxley can almost watch the moment when Lowell remembers where he is, and how he came to be there, and everything that had come before. It is like watching his face age a decade in only a few seconds. He goes from a boy to a hard-bitten young man right before Huxley's eyes.

He wonders if any of that bitterness is for him.

Some of it must be.

Lowell's eyes drift to the spot over Huxley's right shoulder.

Huxley turns and finds Davies standing there, as he had in the darkness of the previous night, with his elbows propped up on the side of the wagon. He watches Huxley and the boy with an intense, measuring gauge, as though every twitch and expression that flies between the two is being catalogued and recorded for some mysterious purpose.

“You two,” Davies says after a moment, wagging a finger between them. “What is your relationship?”

Friend? Guardian?

Captor, perhaps?

Huxley looks at Lowell because he does not know how Lowell sees him. He does not know where the relationship between them stands in the eyes of this boy-turned-man. Lowell meets his gaze in turn, cold and wild.
You have been bad
, the gaze seems to say.
But you've also been good. You've been cruel. But you've also been kind.

Rather than put a word or phrase to describe their relationship, Lowell simply tells Davies what has happened. “He and his people killed my parents. But he saved me from being killed. And he kept me alive. Didn't let people kill me, or capture me. He also forced me to be strong. I've had to hurt people. But they were people that needed to be hurt.” Lowell looks at him. “He's helped me survive.”

Huxley does not know whether the words crush him down or elevate him.

He wants to weep for the boy that never was. Beg forgiveness from the young man that now is. He wants to tell him to leave and never look back. If it hadn't been for Huxley, Lowell wouldn't have needed saving in the first place. Huxley allowed it to happen. Lowell's adopted parents were dead because of Huxley. He had created the problem to begin with.

No, Lowell. I did not save you.

I did teach you how to survive. But at what cost? When does survival outweigh humanity?

But you are young, and I am old. You still have a chance. But I am damned.

Huxley says nothing in response to Lowell's words.

Davies looks between them again, then takes a laborious breath. “Huxley. You've done evil on my watch. You've killed people that didn't need to be killed. No matter what you think about the Riverlands and the council. And your boy here … he's an associate. We don't just kill the man, we kill the associates. Just like Cartwright and his gang. You can't just chop the plant off at the ground. You have to pull it up by the roots.”

Yes, you do, Black Heart Davies. I know it better than you think.

“Listen …” Huxley begins.

Davies looks at him sharply. “Huxley would you give your life for this boy? Would you let me put a bullet in your brain so that he could walk?”

Huxley is confused. He looks rapidly back and forth between Davies and Lowell.

Lowell is confused too.

Davies is watching.

“I don't …” Huxley stutters.

“Just answer the question,” Davies says. “Looking at everything exactly as it stands right now, will you—
right now
—willingly accept your execution so that this boy can go free?”

This is some sort of trick
, Huxley thinks as his mind scrambles for an answer, but there is no endgame that makes sense. Why would Davies even make the offer? He could just as easily shoot them both in the head right where they were sitting in the wagon. Truth be told, he should have already done it, so why are they still alive? Is he delivering them to the Black Hat who's in charge of tracking them? Or is there something else going on here?

It doesn't matter. The question still hangs in the air, requiring an answer.

So how do you choose? Your own flesh and blood, or some strange orphan? His daughter was snatched away from him. But Lowell was orphaned by him. Dragged into a bloody mess. Forced to do things no boy should ever be forced to do. Should he have to pay for that?

But his daughter … 

Somewhere, she is being held. Perhaps her masters are kind to her. Or perhaps they are cruel. Maybe she had forgotten about her father, maybe she had given up. Or maybe she lies awake at nights and wonders where he is, and why he has not come for her.

The thought of it wrenches his heart out. He does not need to ask himself what he feels in that moment. It is clear. It is sharp. It rends and crushes all at once. If he were standing it would've brought him to his knees … 

“I can't.” Huxley shakes his head, feeling the tightness in his throat. The gumminess of the spit in his mouth. “You're asking me to choose between him and my daughter. I can't make that decision.”

Davies looks at Huxley with a different expression, as though just now discovering another facet of Huxley that needed to be examined, some surprise aspect that he had overlooked before. He taps an index finger against the side of the wagon a few times, thoughtfully. “And if your daughter was free? What then? What would be your answer then?”

Huxley looks at him.

Well, then there would be no more excuses. Then it would merely be Huxley's life for Lowell's. And Huxley's life is miserable and damned, and Lowell's life has just begun. There is hope for him.

There could be no more excuses.

Now it was a question of right and wrong.

“Yes,” Huxley says. “Yes, I would.”

“Then you will,” Davies says, and Huxley sees that he has a knife in his hand.

For an instant, a thousand questions flash through Huxley's mind.

Davies slides the knife deftly between Huxley's wrists. The blade is sharp and slips through the bonds with a few quick sawing motions. The pain of the rope on his wrist makes Huxley want to cry out, but there is the irrational fear that if he makes a sound, Davies will suddenly remember that Huxley is his prisoner and then he will not free him.

Then the ropes fall away, taking scabbed burns with them.

Huxley looks at Davies, then at his unbound hands. “What are you doing?”

“Atonement,” he says, without much inflection. “The way I see it, everyone must pay their tally. I am merely the collector. All the evil that men do in their lives runs up their tally. And if someone does not make them pay for it, then there is no justice. If there is no justice, there is no law. And if there is no law, then we are only animals, hacking away at each other.”

Davies moves to the end of the wagon, where the gate hangs open. He gestures to Huxley with a wave of his hand. “Come here.”

Huxley exchanges a glance with Lowell, then stands up with some effort, his bones creaking, his muscles protesting. He shuffles uncomfortably to the end of the wagon, then slides awkwardly down from it.

Davies leads him to the fire where there is a small tin can full of some strangely colored liquid, steaming by the fire. Huxley can see leaves and bits of other things floating in the top of it. It gives off an odd, earthy, herbaceous smell.

“Kneel down,” Davies says, then pats the outside with his bare fingers a few times to test the heat. The heat is apparently tolerable. He picks up the can. “Hold out your arm.”

Huxley hesitates, then he does it.

Davies looks at him, the can poised at a slight angle over Huxley's arm. “This is going to hurt. A lot. I put some laudanum in the mix, so the pain will get dulled after a minute or so, but for a minute, it'll be agony. Grit your teeth and don't move your arm around.”

Huxley takes a breath, bites down on it, then cringes.

Davies pours the liquid over the burn. It's not scalding, but it feels like it is. He pours it until the water is mostly gone, then he dips his fingers in and draws out a paste that has formed at the bottom of the tin can, which he spreads over the burned areas, including Huxley's face. Then he wraps it loosely in cloth that Huxley isn't sure is clean. But he doesn't argue.

Davies inspects his work when he is done. “You learn a little bit of this, a little bit of that, when you're on the roads by yourself. That should keep the wound from infection. Hopefully. No promises.” He sits back on his haunches and props his elbows on his knees. “You wanna know why I cut you free, why we're talking right now?”

“Atonement,” Huxley says. “For yourself?”

Davies considers by looking into the sky. “No, not quite. My time will come to atone for the things I've done. But that time isn't now. No. I was talking about the people that think they'll never have to pay their tally. They think the collector doesn't come to their door.”

“The Murphys.”

Davies wipes the poultice from his fingers and looks at the fire. “There's some history between the Murphys and me.”

Huxley gives silence, letting Davies fill it.

“Not so much with Councilman Murphy himself,” Davies continues. “But Mrs. Murphy … she has some dirt on the councilman that I report to. She has blackmailed him somehow and uses him to move me around like a pawn for her own ends. And I resent it.” Davies' jaw muscles bunch rapidly. “The burned church. The fact that I burned a whole group to get at one person—that's what the story says. That's the story
I made up.
But the truth is, I didn't know why those people had to die. There were no warrants to be served. I couldn't tell you the name of a single person that died in that church. I suspect the preacher or someone else in the congregation had spoken out against the Murphys in one way or another, because the church was on Murphy land. I never did find out the truth behind it. But I know it was Mrs. Murphy that was behind it. She wanted those people dead for some reason.” He rubs his hands together slowly, thoughtfully. “And I did it.”

Davies goes quiet for a time, hands still rubbing together.

“What do you want from me?” Huxley asks, slowly and deliberately.

Davies takes a breath, looks up from the fire at Huxley. “I want you to get your daughter back, Mr. Huxley. This councilman's wife is a blight. She's an opium-addled psychopath. If there is any redeeming quality to this system of government the Riverlands has set up, she is ruining it. Their family is wealthy on the backs of slaves, and they have been since the beginning. She wants her husband to be chairman, and she's doing everything in her power to make it that way.” Davies interlaces his fingers. “You've shown your rage across the entire Riverlands. You've left a trail of destruction behind you. You demonstrated your anger in a selfish and scattershot way, directing it at the guilty and the innocent alike. Now, direct it at those that deserve it.”

Huxley looks at the ground, wondering how much of that rage is still in him.

But anger is a virulent weed. No matter how much you pull up, there are little pieces left behind. Little tendrils that grow back and take over again, if left unchecked. You can never truly be free of it.

“You realize I'll probably be killed,” Huxley says hollowly.

Davies raises an eyebrow at him. He speaks gently, like a doctor with a kind bedside manner, explaining a terminal illness. “Your life is already forfeit, Mr. Huxley. Living is not in the cards anymore for you. The only question is, what are you going to do with the remaining few days that you have? And I suspect that if it means your daughter's freedom, you'll find a way.”