Tin Swift

CHAPTER ONE


Cedar Hunt stared down at his blood-covered hands. Glossy and dark, fresh and plentiful, the blood dripped between his fingers, slicking his arms and snicking to the dirt between his boots. More than just covering his hands, the blood tasted sweet and thick on his tongue and coated his throat as he swallowed.

Not the blood of a beast, the blood of a man.

“That’s enough now, Mr. Hunt,” a woman’s voice said, steady and low.

He looked up. Realized he stood beneath a sparse forest canopy, evening light dabbing gold across branches and leaves.

Dabbing gold across Rose Small too. She had on her bonnet, the tips of her hair swinging just above her shoulders to catch that dusky sunlight and wear it in shades of amber. Though shadows lay low over her face, her blue eyes shone through like a sun-filled sky. But her mouth, so often curved in a smile, was tucked down in a tight frown.

She motioned with the shotgun held low at her hip. She didn’t have her long-shot goggles on. Didn’t have to. Cedar was only a few paces in front of her.

“I’d sure prefer it if I didn’t have to shoot you tonight, Mr. Hunt, but by God and glim I will.”

“Rose?” Cedar whispered.

Why was the girl pointing that gun at him? They’d been traveling together more than a full month across Oregon and were just into Idaho, he, Rose Small, the widow witch Mae Lindson, his cursed brother, Wil, and the three Madder brothers. He hadn’t once come to his senses with any of them standing at arms against him. Not even when the moon had taken him full into his curse.

“Glad you’ve a mind for talking, Mr. Hunt,” Rose said. “Even better your ears are working.” She lifted the gun. “But I’ll still plug you if you don’t step away from that man and head back into the wagon.”

He’d known what he had done the moment he’d seen blood on his hands, tasted it on his lips. He’d killed a man. In daylight.

And he’d done it as a man, not a beast, with no thrall of the moon to blame his actions upon.

He looked down. The dead man wasn’t very large nor very young. He had the look and the smell of someone who spent most his days riding and hunting bounties on men’s heads and most his nights gambling away the noose money.

“Who?” he rasped.

“I’d ask his name,” Rose said, “but don’t think he’ll say. He broke into our camp and tried to kill a few of us, Mae included. You…” Her voice faded off. Then she sort of huffed a chuckle. “Never saw a thing like it. And I’ve seen things. Strange things.”

Mae. Of course. He’d never stand idle if she was in danger. But to lose his mind to this kind of rage was not at all like him.

“Did I change?” Cedar couldn’t remember the wolf coming upon him. Couldn’t remember sliding down that slick, hot stroke of pleasure to stretch into the fur and claws of the beast that the Pawnee gods had cursed him to wear on the three days of full moon.

Reason left him when the beast was in control and his thoughts reduced to hunger, hunt, and killing the Strange. He searched his memory for how the dead man had come to be broken, his blood pouring down Cedar’s throat.

Nothing came clear.

“You didn’t change,” Rose said. “Not in skin anyway. But I’m not sure how much of a man’s mind you were in possession of. Didn’t use a gun to kill him, Mr. Hunt. You used your bare hands. Broke him once and just kept right on breaking him.”

She paused to let that soak in good.

“So,” she said brightly, “now you need to be moving on. We want you locked up in the wagon for safekeeping. Yours and ours.”

Cedar took one last look at the man. “Someone should search his body. See if he carried a reason to be following us. He was following us, wasn’t he?”

“The Madders said maybe for a week or so. They’re off seeing if he had company.” Rose started walking, her boots crunching through the dry autumn underbrush.

Cedar started walking too, staying well ahead of her trigger finger.

“Don’t know as to why he thought killing us was worth the effort,” she said. “We don’t have much to steal. We aren’t causing any trouble.”

Then she grinned. “You don’t suppose we’ve gotten famous, do you? Maybe someone heard how we took apart Shard LeFel and his matics? Wrote us up in a newspaper somewhere?”

“Folk are rarely hunted for their good deeds,” Cedar said. “I don’t think we’re famous.”

Sure, he had mistakes in his past that might put a price on his head. But Rose had never been outside of the little town of Hallelujah, Oregon, until now. Mae Lindson might be a witch, but she wasn’t the sort of person to go about causing harm.