To Dad, for years of westerns, action movies, and guns.

(P.S. You don’t have to read this book either. I just need you to read these next two sentences: Thanks for being everything I ever needed in a father. I love you.)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Also by Melissa Marr

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

Kitty saw the bullets tear into Mary’s belly, watched the red stain cover the flowered dress that she’d just stitched up for her closest friend, and her first thought was that there was no way she could repair that kind of damage. The dress was ruined. Close on the heels of that thought was: someone needs to kill the bastard that shot Mary.

They were supposed to be at a meeting, a peaceful, weapons-not-needed negotiation with representatives of a local monastic order. They were supposed to be collecting a payment. They were definitely not supposed to be dealing with trigger-happy monks, but reality had collided with expectations several minutes and a few corpses ago when the monks had pulled guns out from under their gray robes. Worse yet, as Kitty reached for her six-shooter, she heard the atonal mutterings as several of the monks started their prayers.

She slid the gun back into the holster. She’d much rather shoot than deal with the alternatives, but bullets and spells tended to mix poorly. Her partner, Edgar, tossed her a knife. Kitty caught it and kept moving, scanning the area as she walked. There were the two praying monks, two more that her brother, Jack, was dealing with, and the one she’d lost track of in the initial round of gunfire. She couldn’t shoot the praying ones, and Jack was handling his. It was the missing monk—the one who’d shot Mary—who had to die now. She needed to flush the monk out or lure him out. She stopped and turned slowly in a circle, watching for her prey and waiting for him to do the obvious.

Edgar’s expression was tense as he watched her. He never liked it when she was brash, and if she were honest, she’d be even worse if the roles were reversed. She averted her gaze from him and was about to move toward the shadowed interior of the nearest building when a bullet came from the building and grazed her shoulder.

“Found you,” she whispered as the second bullet hit the ground next to her.

The monk stepped out of the building; simultaneously, she charged him. The monk closed his eyes and joined his voice to the other praying monks, summoning their demon’s aid. He spoke faster, and Kitty felt the charge in the air around her as she reached him. It figured that he was the one who was accepting possession.

Kitty shoved the blade into the monk’s throat and twisted. As she stabbed him, she pushed her will into the monk’s body and concentrated on making her words manifest. The monk’s blood burned her where it splashed her face and forearm.

He opened his eyes, and Kitty could see the shifting colors that revealed that his demon was already sliding into his bleeding body. He couldn’t keep speaking his spell, but she hadn’t been fast enough to completely stop it. The last thing she wanted was a demon walking around in a bloody, dead-monk suit.

“Magic it is,” she said.

The monk took a step backward, trying to elude her. His lips still moved, although she couldn’t hear any words. She wasn’t sure if the whisper of the spell was enough, but she wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Speak no more.” She pulled the knife from his throat and jammed the blade into his left eye, before quickly repeating the action with his right eye. “See no more.”

He started to fall to the sandy ground as she withdrew the knife, pulling her will back to her, and letting his life spill out the wounds.

Kitty followed his body to the ground as she jammed the blade into his chest with all the force she could muster. “Live no more.”

As she pushed the knife into the monk’s chest, Edgar came up behind her. His shadow fell over the corpse, and she was briefly tempted to ask for help. She didn’t ask, and he didn’t reach down to pull her to her feet—probably because she had snarled the last time he’d tried.

Carefully, Kitty came to her feet, swaying only a little as the backlash from blood magic hit her. “I’m fine,” she lied before he could comment.

Edgar didn’t touch her, but they both knew he was close enough that she’d be in his arms in a blink if she started to fall. She wasn’t a waif of a woman, but Edgar was all muscle, more than capable of hefting her into his arms. That didn’t mean that she wanted to be hoisted into the air. It was a point of pride to her that she could stand on her own two feet after working magic.

Slowly, she turned to face him. “You have blood on your trousers.”

“True.” He stared at her, read her silences and her movements with the sort of familiarity that comes from too many years to count. “You aren’t ready to try to walk yet.”

Kitty pursed her lips. She was the only one of the Arrivals who could work spells like some of the residents of the Wasteland, but doing so made her feel like her insides were being shredded. Whatever had yanked the Arrivals out of their rightful times and places had changed her when it brought them to this world. She was too much like the native Wastelanders for her liking, but not so much like them that she could work spells without consequences.

After a moment she leaned against him a little. “I hate spells.”

“Is it getting easier, or are you hiding the pain better?”

“What pain?” she joked as the brief numbness of both the fight high and the spellwork receded. The agony of the bullet she’d ignored hit her, and the feel of the bloodburn on her face and arms added a chaser to the sharp sting on her shoulder. She could feel tears slipping down her cheeks, but she wasn’t stupid enough to wipe her eyes with monastic blood on her hands. Instead, she bowed her head, and a few curls that had come undone fell forward, helping hide the tears. As steadily as she could, she reached down and withdrew the knife. With exaggerated care, she wiped it on the monk’s gray tunic.

It didn’t buy her enough time to hide the pain. Maybe it would’ve done so with one of the others, but Edgar was too observant for her to hide most anything from him. When she stood, he had one of his dandified handkerchiefs in hand.

“There’s no shame in resting.” Edgar pushed her curls back and then wiped the tears and blood from her face.

“I don’t need to,” she said, but she put a hand on his chest. The pain would end. The wounds would heal. She just needed to wait them out.

Edgar didn’t comment on the fact that she was shaking. “Jack took care of the last two. You and I could wait here while I catch my breath.”

Kitty shook her head. Edgar was many things, but worn out after a tussle with a few monks wasn’t ever on that list. She wouldn’t be either, except for the impact of the spell.

“There’s no way Jack will agree to that.” Kitty shivered slightly as her body worked through the consequences of the magic. “These were the monks we saw, but there are others. Jack will want to travel.”

Edgar wrapped an arm around her, holding her steady as her shaking grew worse. “Fuck Jack.”

Kitty leaned her head against Edgar. “I’m fine. I’ll rest at the inn tonight and be fine by morning when we head to camp.”

Even though he didn’t argue, his glower left no doubts as to his opinion on the matter. If she truly couldn’t travel, she’d tell them, but she could make it as far as Gallows. What she couldn’t do was be responsible for conflict between the two men who looked after their group. She let herself lean on Edgar for another moment before stepping away.

When she turned, Jack and Francis were watching her. Francis’ face was carefully expressionless, and he held himself still, giving the overall impression of a cautious, slightly battered scarecrow. His long scraggly ponytail was singed at the end, and he had missed a smear of blood on his temple.

Kitty smiled at Francis reassuringly, before letting her gaze drift to her brother. No matter how difficult a conflict was, and no matter how many of them were killed or injured, Jack was always implacable. He was their leader, and to him, that meant focusing on the now. He looked much the same as he had for most of Kitty’s life: like a cross between a preacher and an outlaw. He had the lean frame that served him well in fights, and the baby blues that made him seem angelic enough to stand at a pulpit. Currently, his gaze was fastened on her studiously.

He cradled Mary in his arms, and Kitty forced herself to look at her brother’s eyes instead of at Mary. It was a scant comfort, not looking at her friend, but Kitty still had the childhood hope that her brother could somehow make everything right. He couldn’t, not usually and certainly not today.

She knew without having to hear the words, but Jack said them all the same: “She’s dead, Katherine.”

“I figured.” It hurt to even say the words, to admit the truth, but pretending wasn’t an option. Mary was dead. The only thing left to them now was waiting—and plotting revenge. Kitty walked up closer to Jack and brushed a hand over the dead woman’s hair.

In a procession of sorts, they started the walk back to town. Edgar and Francis kept watch on the windows of the burned-out monastery and any cover where enemies could hide. The monks had said that they were the only ones who stayed at their quarters, but they’d also said they wanted to break bread in peace.

The shadows were starting to gather, and Kitty wondered if they would all be safer staying at the monastery rather than tangling with whatever might wait in the shadows. This world held more threats than she wanted to think about, and more and more their group seemed to end up on the wrong side of them.

“We could wait here for the night,” she suggested. “Everyone’s tired, and the monsters have too much of an edge in the dark.”

“No,” Jack said. “We need to get moving.”

Edgar flashed a scowl at Jack that Kitty pretended not to see. Edgar knew better than anyone that she was weaker right now than she let on, but Jack had to think of all of them. She’d do whatever her brother decided.

Francis didn’t get involved in the decision; he never did. Instead, he glanced at her, assessing her injuries. She knew that he’d bring her some tincture, salve, or vile tea by morning. He was forever trying whatever remedies every snake-oil salesman sold—or mixing his own experimental treatments. A good number of his homemade concoctions were mildly useful, even though far too many of them tasted bad enough to make a person consider staying injured.

“Hey, Francis? I could use one of those muscle soaks when we get back to Gallows.” Kitty put a hand on his forearm briefly. When he stopped walking, she reached up to wipe away the blood on his temple. She reached up and patted his cheek fondly.

“We can’t stay in the inn tonight, Katherine. It’s not safe enough. We’ll head back to the camp.” Jack had stopped when she had. Her brother wasn’t going to admit that he could see how tired she was, but he would adjust his stride so she didn’t have to say it.

She smiled at him. She could make it as far as Gallows, but walking the extra miles to camp would be too much. “No,” Kitty objected. “We can stay in Gallows.”

“The inn isn’t safe enough right now.” Jack wouldn’t do anything he thought would endanger the group unnecessarily, even for her. “We’ll pack up when we reach Gallows and be on the road before full dark.”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“The brethren are likely to have others here. We can make it to camp tonight. The inn’s not—”

“I’ll keep watch for Kit,” Edgar interrupted. “You and Francis can take Mary back to camp tonight.”

At the same time, both Kitty and Jack said, “But—”

“Kit needs to rest.” Edgar’s voice was even.

“We should stay together,” Jack argued.

Edgar leveled a daunting look at him. “We’re almost to Gallows, Jack. Either we all stay there, or we divide. Whether she’s willing to admit it or not, Kit needs rest.”

For a moment, Jack looked at Kitty with the sort of penetrating gaze that made her want to lie to him. She didn’t often succeed at that, but she felt like a failure for putting him in this position. He didn’t understand how much any sort of death magic drained her.

Before Kitty could lie and say that she was well enough to travel tonight; that she didn’t want to abandon Mary; that she wasn’t exhausted from being shot, bloodburned, and backlashed, Edgar added in that absurdly reasonable tone, “Mary’s dead, Kit. You won’t do anyone any good in this state, and Mary won’t wake for six days.”

“If at all,” Jack added. She could tell his answer had changed as he’d studied the girl.

“If at all,” Edgar concurred.

Jack nodded, and they fell into silence as they walked. There wasn’t a whole lot to say. Either Mary would wake, or she wouldn’t. No one knew why any of the Arrivals did or didn’t wake after they’d been killed. Most everyone woke a few times, but there was no pattern to the hows or the whys of it. They got poisoned, shot, gutted, drained, or killed in any number of ways, but they often stood back up alive and perfectly healthy on the sixth day as if they’d only been sleeping—except when they didn’t.

It wasn’t until they reached the junction where they had to go separate ways that Jack suggested, “Francis maybe ought to go with y—”

“No,” Kitty cut him off. “You’re carrying Mary, and you have further to go. If you run into trouble, you’ll need him.”

“Be careful. Please?”

“Like Edgar would let me be anything else when I’m injured.” She tried for a reassuring smile.

“And you’ll come straight back to camp in the morning?” Jack prompted.

Kitty wanted to argue that he was being difficult, but she’d earned his suspicions—plus she was too tired to argue. She nodded. “Promise.”

Neither Francis nor Edgar said a word, but she knew that they’d both obey Jack if it came down to a direct order. And while she wouldn’t admit it aloud, she knew that they should obey him. There weren’t a lot of things she believed after all these years in the Wasteland, but the one truth that she held on to like it was her religion was that her brother was worth obeying. She’d follow him to Hell without a moment’s hesitation. For the first few years after they’d arrived here, she was pretty sure she had followed him to Hell. In the Wasteland, any number of impossible things lived and breathed. The one unified truth here was that the denizens of the Wasteland all thought the Arrivals were the most unnatural creatures in this world. Sometimes, Kitty thought they were right.

Tonight, though, they were simply a weary group of displaced humans. Kitty watched Jack carry Mary away, saw Francis scan the area for threats, and hoped that come morning no one else would be dead—and that in six days, Mary would be alive again.

CHAPTER 2

By the time Edgar and Katherine returned to camp the next day, Jack had already finished an extra patrol and begun debating going back out. It wasn’t that he was avoiding mourning; it was that he didn’t know if he should mourn. Until the next six days passed, he wouldn’t know if Mary would wake. If she didn’t, there would be a void in his life. They weren’t in love, but they’d been less and less likely to sleep in separate quarters over the past few months.

That was the only excuse Jack could give for putting Mary in his tent instead of her own. He’d given her the bed they’d often shared, and then he’d left the tent—and the camp—to patrol. Afterward, he’d slept on the floor for a few hours, and when day broke, he’d patrolled again. This wasn’t the first time she’d died, but it was the first time since they’d become … whatever they were.

He’d covered Mary’s body with a blanket as if she merely slept. He’d replaced her bloodied and torn dress with a nightdress, adding to the illusion of rest. Unfortunately, the glass of whiskey he held in his hand at this early hour unraveled the edges of the comforting lie that he’d tried to construct. She was dead.

There was no way to predict which deaths were permanent and which were temporary. Jack had spent many a week waiting by the bedsides of Arrivals who didn’t wake—but he’d spent even more time alongside the beds of those who stood up six days later and continued their lives here in the Wasteland with nothing more than a few lingering bruises. After twenty-six years in this new world, he’d found no pattern to it, no way to make sense of it. The native Wastelanders didn’t die and wake; that odd state was reserved for the Arrivals, those who had been born in another world.

Jack had just retrieved a second cup from his cupboard when he heard raised voices outside his tent. He’d known his sister wouldn’t be pleased. Katherine would have expected to find Mary in the tent she and Mary had shared, and Jack wasn’t the least bit surprised to see his baby sister scowl at him as she shoved open the tent flap.

“Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

“What were you thinking?” His sister stomped into the room, stopping beside the tiny table where he sat.

Jack gestured at the empty chair, but Katherine stood with her hands on her hips and her lips pressed into a tight line. When she didn’t move, he said, “Mary slept here most nights lately. It seemed right for her to wait here now.”

Katherine’s temper visibly deflated, and she sank into the chair across from him. “Damn it, Jack. You can’t ever let anyone help you, can you?”

He poured her drink and slid it to her. “So it would be easier on you?”

His sister let her breath out in a loud sigh. “No, but—”

“Let this one go, Katherine.” Jack concentrated on his whiskey, taking a sip and letting it roll over his tongue. It wasn’t precisely as bad as the swill they’d served up in saloons in California, but it wasn’t the expensive stuff either. He didn’t remember the last time he’d had truly good whiskey—or the money to buy it. The Arrivals worked mostly for the governor or for private citizens in the Wasteland. They weren’t ever flush with cash. That said, Jack took pride in the fact that they worked for the good of the Wasteland. The jobs they took were ones that bettered their world, paid next to nothing—and irritated Ajani, the power-grabbing despot who was steadily destroying the Wasteland.

“The brethren didn’t seem to take offense at anything before they opened fire,” Katherine said, pulling Jack’s attention away from whiskey, finances, and politics.

“I had the same thought when I was mulling things over,” Jack allowed. Even though death wasn’t always forever in the Wasteland, there were some things that were as predictable here as they’d been back in California. One unchanging truth was that meetings didn’t suddenly change from peace to bullets unless there was a reason—or treachery.

“So …?” Katherine’s fingers tapped in an impatient rhythm on the table.

“I’m going to see Governor Soanes; he’s still over in Covenant for a few days. The lindwurm job will wait till after …” Jack glanced at Mary. “I’ll see the governor, be back here before the sixth day, and then we’ll get back to work.”

“You know I’m not going to let you go to Covenant without me.” Katherine stared at him and sipped her drink as if she were calm.

But Jack had played poker with her, taught her the first of her tricks for handling the mood of a table, so he knew when she was digging in her heels. “Edgar won’t be happy if you go out without him the day after you were injured,” Jack said, “and I need him here.”

Katherine shrugged. “So tell him to stay here.”

“Spells leave you useless for a fight,” he said evenly.

“And you’re useless at spells. You need me on this one, Jackson. Just a shooter isn’t enough, or you’d be arguing more.”

Jack had tried to think of a better solution while he’d sat in the dark with his drink and his dead lover, but she was right. For most jobs, he had shooters aplenty. The Arrivals were all people who’d been on the wrong side of ethical at one point. Katherine had been a gambler and fancy woman, and Jack had been a gambler and shootist in his day. Early on, the first few people who’d come through to the Wasteland after Jack and Katherine were cut from the same cloth: willing to pull a trigger, but mostly as a consequence of the lifestyles they’d known or the skills they’d needed for survival. Most of those early Arrivals died—or joined Ajani. In more recent years, those who arrived were a mix of different sorts. Some were rough because of the things they’d had to do to survive, but more were folks whose moral compass was a bit unsteady. One of the few things they all had in common was that not a one of them since Katherine had been able to do spellwork.

Jack downed the rest of his drink. “Get your gear. I’ll tell Edgar.”

After a silent nod of acknowledgment, Katherine stood, walked over to the bed, kissed Mary’s forehead, and left. Once his sister was gone, Jack sighed. He did need her help, and they both knew it. He’d needed her to make the decision, though. Even after all of the years he’d spent raising her and the years they’d spent in this world, he could still be surprised by the choices she made. He’d expected that neither one of them would cope well being trapped in camp while they waited to see if Mary woke, but he couldn’t always be certain when it came to Katherine’s opinions or reactions.

A short while later, Jack and Katherine were ready to set out across the Gallows Desert. It was a two-day journey to Covenant if all went well, so they’d packed water, bullets, and provisions. They only took one bedroll, which Jack currently carried, as they’d have to sleep in shifts.

As they’d approached the gate to exit camp, Edgar looked directly at Jack and announced, “If she’s killed, I’ll have to shoot you.”

“I know.” Jack nodded at him and stepped outside the gate to give Edgar and Katherine a moment.

Katherine, however, huffed at her on-again, off-again lover and walked past both him and Jack.

If Jack thought for a moment that he could trust anyone else to keep order in his absence, he’d have taken Edgar along on the journey, but no one was more competent than Edgar at handling the group in Jack’s absence.

The trip across the desert and past the tiny town of Gallows was spent mostly in silence. That was one of the great joys of spending time with his sister: unlike some people—many of them women—Katherine had no patience for idle chatter. Aside from the essentials, the siblings remained quiet that day and much of the morning. As they traveled, they saw collapsed mines, starving Wastelanders, and scars on the ground from carelessly set-off explosives. Jack had already seen enough of Ajani’s footprints on this world over the years, but the destruction left behind by Ajani’s greed reaffirmed his deep-seated hatred of the man. The use of explosives in mining meant that able-bodied men were injured regularly in pursuit of riches that they’d never craved before falling under Ajani’s influence.

As Jack understood it, until Ajani had taken over the mines, mining was largely handled by those born to it. The native miners used only natural methods, as if teasing the ground to give up treasures. They never took more than what was necessary for the production of weapons or tools. They didn’t strip the grounds for the sake of stockpiling.

Then Ajani bought out, stole, or simply took over most of the mines. Now people not meant for work underground tunneled into dangerous areas, creating unstable ground on the surface, and were far too often killed in tunnel collapses. Boomtowns like Covenant had sprung up, growing too fast and resulting in dens of chaos and violence. Then, as soon as a vein was exhausted, the town died.

It was no wonder Garuda, the Wasteland’s most important bloedzuiger, hated Ajani with a depth of passion that rivaled even Jack’s. There was nothing wrong with progress, with the evolution of a society, with developments in technology, but when avarice directed progress, the natural order of a community was destroyed. Lives were lost, and the Wasteland itself was being decimated.

When Jack and Katherine entered Covenant the next day, he wasn’t sure if the uneventful journey was a blessing or not. He’d half hoped for some sort of fight to help relieve his mood, and he knew his sister wouldn’t mind a bit of outlet either. At least the exertion of travel was better than waiting next to Mary’s body.

“Not a monk in sight,” Jack said as they walked toward the governor’s quarters.

“No one else knew about the meeting, Jack. If it wasn’t the brethren, that means the governor …” Katherine’s words trailed off.

“I know, but that doesn’t make a lick of sense.” Jack gave voice to the thought that had plagued him for much of their hike across the desert. He’d weighed it out in his mind, trying to find a reason why Governor Soanes would send them into a trap. They’d worked for him from almost the time they’d arrived in the Wasteland, hunting down those who broke laws or those who were skirting close to breaking them. In some cases, they’d delivered warnings; in others, they’d executed more final orders.

“Maybe it’s personal. The brethren haven’t ever been very tolerant of the law,” Jack mused.

“Could be, but why? We haven’t taken them to task for anything.” Katherine had obviously been pondering some of the very same thoughts he had. “If Soanes had word of a threat, he should’ve told us. If he didn’t, the brethren are playing their cards awfully close to the vest.”

“Just keep your eyes open,” Jack murmured as they approached two of the governor’s guards who stood on either side of the door to the squat, faded building.

The guards hadn’t expected him, but they’d known Jack long enough that they simply nodded in greeting. One of them gave Katherine a far too friendly look, but instead of her usual harsh words or occasional physical demonstration of exactly how much she did not like being leered at, Katherine merely smiled.

Jack opened the door, and as she entered he asked in a low voice, “What was that?”

“Groundwork if we need another pair of eyes,” she answered just as quietly.

The thought of needing spies in the governor’s office wasn’t one that set well with Jack, but he was, regrettably, already suspicious enough of the governor that he didn’t object. Once they were inside, they waited while the next guard sent his partner in to inform Governor Soanes of their presence.

As they walked into the governor’s office, Jack studied the Wastelander who had been his boss of sorts for years. He was a man who’d grown increasingly larger and slower from too much time behind a desk. Unlike a lot of the residents of the Wasteland, Soanes aged at the rate Jack associated with people back home. When they met, not long after Jack arrived, they’d been close in age, but after twenty-plus years, the governor looked like he was old enough to be Jack’s father. The Arrivals did more work for him than anyone else, and Jack had believed they’d had a common goal: preserving order as much as they could, helping divert crises even as Ajani worked to amass wealth and influence. Now Jack had to wonder if the governor had changed his stance.

“Jack, Kitty,” the governor greeted. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

The problem, however, was that the squat man didn’t appear to be at all surprised by their presence. His words and his expression were at odds, and Jack couldn’t tell whether it was simply because the governor was good at hiding his surprise—or if he was lying.

CHAPTER 3

When Kitty had walked into Governor Soanes’ office, she’d had to stamp down the impulse to start trouble as a test of his mettle. He wasn’t in any shape to fight, a detail that irritated her even in her most generous moods. She had no love for Ajani, the man who caused most of their problems, or for Garuda, the bloedzuiger her brother called friend, but at least those Wastelanders were able to defend themselves in a conflict. Soanes, however, had the look of something bloated. His gut protruded like a woman at the end of pregnancy, and his face had the look of a dog she’d had as a girl: jowls flapping about like the skin had started to stretch. Yet, much like that dog, he seemed more lazy than dangerous. The idea of him exerting himself to send the brethren after the Arrivals seemed to go against his persona.

“The brethren attacked us,” Kitty said as she dropped into one of the pair of chairs in front of the oversize desk where the governor sat. She twisted sideways, bending one leg and draping the other over the arm of the chair. Her dust and sand-coated boots would leave a mess behind, but it was in keeping with the demeanor of pure cussedness that she adopted around Governor Soanes. Since that day over two decades ago when she’d left home to follow after Jack, she’d learned to play a number of roles. When she was with Jack or Edgar, she felt like she could sometimes set all of that aside, but this was business. In dealing with Soanes, Jack would undoubtedly be polite, so Kitty would be brash.

The governor gestured to the empty chair beside Kitty, but Jack pointed to his holster and said, “Unless I’m disarmed, I’m more comfortable standing.”

Soanes nodded, but a slight frown crossed his face before he turned his attention to Kitty. He asked, “Did you … eliminate the monks?”

“Eliminate? We were supposed to be negotiating with them in peace; that was the order, wasn’t it?” Kitty flashed him a smile that was as falsely friendly as his always were.

And right on cue, with a warning tone in his voice and a hand on her shoulder, Jack said, “Katherine …”

“No, no. Kitty has a point,” the governor placated. “The objective was a peaceful negotiation.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked but didn’t spill him to the floor. “To clarify, I see you here, so I’d surmised that the monks are no longer a problem. I chose my words poorly.”

“They killed one of ours.” Jack didn’t let any emotion into his voice, but if anyone knew him, they’d hear the emotion all the same.

“Dead dead or temporarily dead?”

Before Kitty could reply, Jack’s grip on her shoulder tightened in a restraining way, and he said, “We won’t know for a few more days.”

He squeezed again, this time with a couple of quick pinches, and Kitty took that to mean she was to speak now. “The brethren’s attack was unprovoked,” she started. “That kind of thing doesn’t usually happen without reason.”

“What my sister means to say is that we were wondering where you got your information before you passed it on to me.” Jack still sounded even-tempered, but the hand that was on her shoulder felt like a steel grip.

“Now, Jack, you know I can’t answer that,” Soanes said.

“Actually, that isn’t what I meant, Jackson,” Kitty said. “What I meant to say was that it seems suspicious that a peaceful meeting led to bullets and magic.” She came to her feet and stood beside her brother, positioning herself beside him rather than in front of him in case there was violence. She didn’t imagine that the governor was particularly adept with any weapons he might have concealed within his reach, but that only made him dangerous in a different way. An armed fool could be more dangerous than an experienced shooter.

“If you have some information that would make this clearer, I’d be mighty relieved to hear it.” Jack stared directly at the governor. “I’ve fought for the good of the Wasteland for half my life.”

“And we’re grateful for that, for all of you, but that doesn’t mean I can violate the responsibilities of my office by telling you things that are brought to me in private.” The governor tilted his head back so as to stare up at them from across the expanse of his desk. “If all of these years together aren’t reason enough for you to trust me, I’m not sure what else to say.”

For a long moment no one spoke. Kitty waited for Jack to make the call. That was how it worked: he made the decisions, the rest of the Arrivals—herself included—obeyed his decrees. Someone had to be in charge. In their little group, that person was and had always been her brother. It wasn’t a task she wanted for herself, and she certainly wouldn’t give her allegiance to anyone else.

“You’ll follow up,” Jack half asked, half demanded.

“Of course!” Governor Soanes beamed at them. “You’ll let me know if that death is a permanent one, I assume, and you’ll take care of the monks?”

“We took the job,” Jack said. “We’ve never left one unfinished before.”

“I never could abide by demon summoning.” The governor’s expression was one of blatant disgust, and for the first time Kitty thought he was being completely honest. He might be hiding things, probably more than even she suspected, but his feelings about the brethren were crystal clear.

A few moments later, Kitty and Jack stood outside the governor’s office.

“I’m not ready to travel,” she admitted. The thought of trekking back out to camp today was daunting. “A cold drink and a long nap would go a long ways to making the trip back to camp easier.”

“If we stay here tonight, we’ll still be back the day before Mary’s due to wake,” Jack allowed.

The siblings walked toward the tavern. They’d discuss their thoughts on their visit to the governor, but not here where there were too many witnesses—all of whom were undoubtedly well aware that Jack and Kitty were the two Arrivals who’d been in the Wasteland the longest. Even if they did talk, however, there wasn’t much to say. The governor knew they had doubts, and he’d answered in a way that was typical for this world: retreating behind the idea of tradition as if that were the only answer he could give. Admittedly, it was sometimes the answer, but politicians were politicians in every world. He’d not disclose everything he knew unless he had no other choice. A different man might have gathered evidence before presenting his doubts to the governor, but Jack was as direct as politicians were cagey.

They’d almost reached the tavern they usually frequented while they were in Covenant when Jack tensed. “Stay out of this, Katherine,” he murmured low enough that only Kitty would hear him.

She followed his gaze to where a tall man who looked a lot like a better-dressed, longer-haired version of Jack was hitching up the Wasteland version of a horse to the rail outside one of the less savory taverns in Covenant. Not coincidentally, it was also the tavern Kitty preferred.

“Daniel,” Kitty greeted in her friendliest voice. “Did you come to your senses or are you still an idiot?”

“I came to my senses years ago, Kitty.” Daniel stepped away from his animal. “Ajani gave me the life I deserve. He’d give you everything.”

“Except the things that matter,” Kitty corrected.

Daniel shrugged.

“Are you alone?” she asked, looking around the quickly emptying street. None of Ajani’s other lackeys appeared to be in sight, but that didn’t mean that they—or Ajani himself—weren’t nearby.

“The boss isn’t here, but if you wanted him, I could send—”

“No,” she interrupted. Before she could say more, Daniel lunged at Jack, and the two men were throwing punches.

Kitty sighed. Daniel had been one of their own, one she’d trusted and liked, but he’d left when Kitty had ended their ill-thought-out relationship. As far as she saw it, they’d been friends who sometimes went to bed together. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Daniel thought he felt something more for her, and he’d also been there to spy on the Arrivals.

As a result, Jack had the dual provocations of overprotectiveness toward her and intolerance for deceit. The result was that the two men couldn’t seem to cross paths without fists flying. They’d killed each other repeatedly early on after Daniel had left, but these days Daniel never drew his weapon. Jack, of course, couldn’t see his way clear to shoot him if he knew that Daniel was refusing to use bullets. Her brother was honor-bound to the point of foolishness. She wasn’t.

“You have ten minutes, Jack, and then if he’s still upright, I’m shooting him.”

For his part, Daniel was a good fighter. Once upon a time, she’d enjoyed watching him in action. Since he’d become one of Ajani’s top people, he’d shown himself capable of a type of creative violence that was disquieting to her. Currently, he was fighting fair—and well.

Kitty drew the revolver on her left hip and flicked open the chamber. She tapped out two bullets and replaced them with a pair of Francis’ toxin-filled rounds.

“Thought you said ten minutes, Kitty.” Daniel glanced at her and grinned. “If Edgar is telling you minutes are that brief, maybe I ought to remind—”

“Watch yourself, Danny.” She pulled back the hammer and grinned at her former bedmate.

“At least Edgar is worthy of my sister,” Jack snarled as he hit Daniel with even more force than before.

Daniel staggered back as Jack landed another blow. He locked eyes with Kitty as he wiped the blood from his mouth. “I don’t think you’ll do it.”

Jack shook his head and muttered something, but Kitty didn’t hear it over the crack of her gun.

The bullet hit Daniel in the upper thigh. Kitty wouldn’t shoot a Wastelander so casually, but Daniel was—like all of Ajani’s group—impervious to death. Even if he did die from the wound, he’d wake back up. Unlike the Arrivals who stayed with Jack, Ajani’s people didn’t ever stay dead.

She pulled back the hammer as she debated where to shoot him the second time, but before she fired again, Jack said, “Katherine! Enough.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just because you don’t shoot him anymore doesn’t mean I can’t.”

“And that’s the other reason Ajani wants you. You’re bloodthirsty.” Daniel ripped off his shirt to wrap around his wound. He still looked damn good with less clothes, and he knew it. She barely resisted smiling at the familiar warmth in his voice as he asked, “A little help?”

“Go to hell.”

“Didn’t we already do that?” Daniel asked quietly.

When neither Kitty nor Jack replied, Daniel looked down and wrapped the shirt as best he could around his bleeding leg. He tied the arms of the shirt into a knot, using them like straps to fasten the makeshift bandage. When he looked up, he had a far too friendly expression on his face, but all he said was, “Burns like fire, Kit. Something Francis cooked up?”

Jack shook his head at the two of them, touched his lip gingerly, and looked at the blood now on his fingers. “Come on, Katherine. There’s no need to stand around with a go’damned lickfinger.”

The look Daniel was giving her was the same one he’d used years ago when he wanted to talk privately. Kitty glanced at her brother and said, “I’ll be right in.”

Jack gave her a pointed look. “Don’t kill him … or do anything else stupid.”

Daniel laughed and waved Jack away. “Give the others my best.”

But Jack was already heading into the inn. Once he was gone, Kitty squatted down beside Daniel. She sighed. “Jack would let you come home. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Are you over Edgar?”

She forced herself not to flinch away from Daniel’s attentive gaze, to keep her expression mild, but it didn’t change anything. “What’s between you and me has nothing to do with Edgar. You were my friend.”

“Are you offering the same sort of friendship we used to have?” he asked baldly. “I hear that he’s still banned from your bed. Tell me we can pick up where we were, and we can call it whatever you want.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll stay with Ajani.” Daniel sighed. “Living like you and Jack isn’t something I’m going to do just for the hell of it, Kit. I like comfort, and I like money. The only thing I want that I don’t have in Ajani’s employ is your friendship.” He paused, but she couldn’t say anything he would want to hear. “Ajani wants you because of what you are, but he has no idea who you really are. Honestly, Kit, I think it would kill me to see you with him. Worse than seeing you with Edgar.”

“I’m not with Edgar,” Kitty insisted. “We’re friends, but not …”

“You’re with him enough to refuse me.” Daniel gave her a rueful smile. “None of the others Ajani has gathered can work spells. It’s still only you, and he is going crazy over it lately. He rants like a child denied a favorite toy. Be careful.”

Over the years Kitty had gotten very good at hiding her feelings, but she failed in that moment: her surprise was as obvious as her doubt. “So you’re my spy now?”

He shrugged. “If that’s all you’ll let me be … I’m not working for the Arrivals, but there’s not much I wouldn’t do to protect you. Lately, I’m not so sure the boss is firing on all cylinders. Something’s up. I just thought you should know.” Then he held a hand out to her. “Help me up?”

“I’m the reason you’re down,” she objected, but she took his hand all the same and stood. Bracing her feet, she tugged, and he pushed off the ground with his uninjured leg and other arm.

When he was on his feet, he used her hand to jerk her toward him.

Before he could kiss her, she’d raised her gun and pressed the barrel against his stomach. “Don’t make me shoot you again.”

His answering laughter was so familiar that she smiled in spite of herself.

“I could stay here tonight, Kitty,” he said. “Edgar wouldn’t have to know. Hell, no one has to know. It doesn’t even have to mean anything.”

For a moment, she considered it. She wasn’t sharing Edgar’s bed, and she didn’t owe anyone any explanations. It wasn’t like she was able to catch a disease or get pregnant, not here in the Wasteland, but no amount of rationalization would change the fact that Daniel worked for Ajani. Weakly, she said, “I just shot you.”

“True,” Daniel murmured. “There would be positions we couldn’t—”

“No,” she interrupted. She stepped away from him and glanced toward the tavern, as much to look for Jack as not to look at Daniel. “Edgar would forgive me for a meaningless fuck, but you’re not meaningless.”

“Thank you for that.” Daniel squeezed her hand. “Be careful, and—as much as I hate saying this—try to stay with Edgar or Jack. I’m not sure the boss would follow the rules anymore if he saw an opportunity to take you.”

After Daniel released her hand and limped away, Kitty stood watching him. They’d once been friends, but that didn’t mean she understood him … or truly trusted him. In his life before waking up in the Wasteland, Daniel had been a drug dealer. He lied as easily as he breathed.

In this, though, she believed him. For the first time in a lot of years, he’d sounded like the man she’d once cared for. Whatever flaws he had, he’d just put himself at risk, and taken a bullet to the thigh to warn her. She could only hope that Ajani didn’t find out.

CHAPTER 4

Jack was trying not to notice that their return trip across the desert was slower than the trip to Covenant had been. Maybe it was simply a result of not wanting to return to camp and wait. They’d know within the next two days if Mary would return to them, and until they knew, it was hard to focus on much else—or hurry back to camp.

Unfortunately, the world didn’t pause for death. The monks were still out there; the job remained unfinished. Jack had an uneasy feeling after their conversation with Governor Soanes—and seeing Daniel hadn’t helped matters.

“How did Daniel know we were in Covenant?” Jack prompted.

“Damned if I know.” Katherine’s expression became closed, and he knew she was hiding something. If she’d been anyone else, he’d be mistrustful, assuming that she was passing information to Daniel, but although his sister was guilty of a lot of things over the years, none of them was treachery.

He waited.

They were over halfway to camp when she said, “I think he was there to talk to me, but I don’t know how he knew we’d be in Covenant.”

Jack nodded.

A few more minutes passed before she added, “He says Ajani is coming off the rails lately. He wanted to warn us.”

“Warn you,” Jack corrected. “Should I ask if he left after you spoke?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask, Jack,” she snapped. Then she sighed. “Do you know how Danny knew where to find us?”

“I don’t.” Jack trusted the rest of the Arrivals. Mostly. Melody had spent some time with Ajani last year, and Jack suspected she still had some contact with his people. She was the most likely source of any information leak; on the other hand, it wasn’t too hard to guess that Jack would be going to see the governor after Mary’s death. Anyone in Gallows could’ve seen them and sent word to Ajani. Hell, Daniel might’ve been in Gallows and heard it himself, for all they knew.

“Was the governor expecting us?” Jack mused.

Beside him, Katherine sighed again. “It sure seemed like it, but I can’t say for certain. If I had any real answers, I’d share them. All I know right now is that the monks were supposed to be looking for peace, but they weren’t; that Soanes wants them dead; that Daniel thinks Ajani is unstable; and that if Mary doesn’t wake up, we’ll have a new Arrival to deal with on top of the rest of the bullshit.”

“What happened to women being the gentler sex?” Jack shot her a pretend grumpy look; he couldn’t stand seeing her look so defeated. “Shouldn’t you be offering some sort of comforting reply?”

Katherine rolled her eyes, but her lips curved in a small smile. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make him relax a little. She was able to hold her own against most of what the Wasteland threw at them, and she was the only one from their world who could do spellwork, but the emotional stuff threw her into maudlin moods, and Jack wasn’t an idiot: he knew his sister still had feelings for Daniel. She shot him often enough to prove to everyone she didn’t, but it wasn’t particularly convincing.

“I’ll figure it all out, Katherine,” Jack promised her quietly. “And whether or not Mary wakes, we’ll get through this too.”

He wished yet again that he’d had the sense to tuck her away in some school back east instead of letting her stay in California with him. If he’d put her where she’d have been safe, she wouldn’t have been brought to the Wasteland; if he’d thought about her safety instead of giving in to his own arrogant belief that he could keep her safe, she’d be in a better world where she could have a proper life. Instead, she was trapped here in the Wasteland, dealing with monsters and death, scuffling in the dirt and blood, and knowing as well as he did that there was no end in sight. He looked over at her and repeated, “I’ll figure it out.”

Unfortunately, the following day, when they were back at camp, Jack had no clearer idea of what to do. They’d know by the next day whether Mary’s death was permanent or not. In some reserve of hope that he still clung to after all these years, he hoped that death in this world would mean waking up back in a better one. He didn’t much care whether that better world was the one they’d once known or some sort of afterlife where the Arrivals would find peace. He told himself Heaven was a child’s hope, but if so many impossible things were real, believing in Heaven, in a forgiving God, seemed a little more possible.

His beliefs had dwindled over the years, but as he sat near Mary he whispered a prayer. Then he decided to do something he’d never done before. While Katherine slept in her tent that night, Jack went to the only other person he’d ever met who was capable of standing up to her.

Edgar looked up as Jack entered the tent. Not surprisingly, Edgar was sitting at his table cleaning his weapons. Before coming to the Wasteland, he had been a hired gun for a thriving crime syndicate, so he was as fastidious about weapons maintenance as Jack was. Edgar wasn’t quite the dapper killer he’d been when he arrived in the Wasteland, but he was still an unusual man. His word was binding; his kills were calculated. The job was business, nothing more, nothing less. His willingness to shoot was only tempered by a sense of loyalty, and Edgar Cordova’s loyalty was very narrowly assigned: Katherine was his beloved; Jack was his boss. As to which of the Reed siblings outranked the other when they were at odds, it varied, depending on what Edgar thought most sensible at the time.

“I need your help,” Jack started.

Edgar resumed cleaning the pistol in front of him and asked, “With what?”

“I hate asking you to stand between Katherine and me,” Jack started.

“But you’re going to.”

Jack stepped farther into the tent. It was as practically laid out as the man who slept in it, utilitarian but with a few unexpected exceptions. In his room in every one of their personal quarters, Edgar had a device that allowed his trousers to hang so they wouldn’t wrinkle and a clothes rack for his shirts and jackets. Beyond his clothing contraptions, Edgar’s tent was very basic. A plain dark wood partition concealed the toilet; a weapons chest stood to the side; and in the middle of the room was a bed. Jack stopped at the small table where Edgar sat.

“She’s having a hard time with Mary’s death,” Jack said.

“She always does when one of us dies.” Edgar wiped down the barrel of the pistol and set it aside. “So do you.”

“True.” Jack didn’t want to talk about his own reaction. Of all the people in this world or the last, Edgar was one of the few he didn’t keep at a distance.

“I want to wait alone with Mary,” he admitted. “I need you to keep my sister out of my tent.”

Edgar shook his head. “Kit won’t be happy.”

“I’ll tell her I ordered you to do it,” Jack offered.

The look Edgar gave him would make more than a few people piss themselves in fear, but Jack knew him better than that. If Edgar were genuinely angry, he wouldn’t waste Jack’s time or his own with scowling.

Once they returned to Jack’s tent, Edgar took one of Jack’s chairs and positioned it outside. As Jack went back inside to wait, Edgar said, “If Mary stays dead, I’m letting Kit past me eventually. You can have until midday.”

Jack nodded and resumed his vigil by Mary’s body. Now that Edgar stood outside to stop Katherine from coming into the tent, Jack would have privacy. None of the other Arrivals were particularly close to Mary; it wouldn’t require any special measures to keep them out. Edgar cared only for Katherine; Francis likewise had a brotherly fondness for Katherine. Melody was too self-centered to be close to much of anyone, and if Hector had emotions, no one knew about it. Part of Jack’s reason was simply a need for privacy if he needed to mourn. The rest was a desire for space in order to think about what might come next for the group. Over the years, the group had fluctuated slightly in number, but right now they were at their lowest. Aside from the emotional toll it would take on Jack and Katherine, losing Mary could cause problems if the next Arrival chose to work for Ajani instead of staying with them.

He sat beside Mary, thinking about what came next, but not finding any answers—or signs of returning life. It wasn’t unheard of for the Arrivals to wake a few hours shy of midday or even at dawn, but it wasn’t typical. Jack knew that, but he hoped all the same. Hours passed in silence, and more than a few prayers passed his lips. He hadn’t realized he’d even remembered them that well until now.

When morning came, Katherine’s cussing and Edgar’s calm words broke the silence, and Jack felt a moment of guilt for keeping Katherine out. His sister wanted to be there for him, and he knew she’d been close with Mary, but the cold truth was that he didn’t want his sister there watching him. He didn’t love Mary, had never known the sort of love Katherine and Edgar shared, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was capable of it. What he did know was that Mary had loved him, and right now he wanted to be worthy of that love.

“If you come back, I’ll try to love you,” he promised.

Mary didn’t stir.

For several more hours, Jack alternated between praying and making promises to the dead woman in his bed, but by midday, she was still motionless.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, and then he left his tent.

Edgar looked up at him when he walked out. Beside him was Katherine. They both opened their mouths to speak, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m going on patrol.”

His sister reached out to him, wrapping her arms around him, but all he could say was “I’m sorry,” even though the words weren’t any more use to her than they had been to Mary. Yet another of the Arrivals was dead, and in the next few days, someone else would appear in the Wasteland to replace her, and Jack would once again try his best not to fail that person. And all the while he would try to convince him or her not to join Ajani—even though that was the only surefire way Jack knew of to keep the newest Arrival from permanent death. That was the ugly truth of it: if they worked for Ajani, they’d be truly free of death. Unfortunately, they’d also be indebted to the one person in the Wasteland whom Jack would willingly die or kill to destroy.

CHAPTER 5

When Chloe opened her eyes, she was stretched flat on her back, staring up at an odd-looking sky. She wasn’t sure where she was, but she was sure that it was not Washington, D.C. Although she hadn’t seen the whole of the city in the few months she’d lived there, she could pretty much guarantee that there were no sand dunes or fields of what looked like cotton in the heart of the nation’s capital.

All she could move was her head. From her neck down, her body was tingling. She tried to move her legs, to sit, but all that happened was a weird jerking, as if her body was trying but couldn’t complete the movements. She could feel the trickle of sweat rolling off her skin like small insects crawling all over her, but she couldn’t move to wipe it away.

She tried to stave off panic by studying what she could see around her. To her right was a barren stretch of desert surrounded by a sturdy but peculiar-looking metal fence. A rutted road of dirt and sand cut between the desert and the field. The cotton plants had tufts of white on them, but they didn’t look nearly as prickly as real cotton plants.

Above her, the sky looked … wrong. It was mostly blue like skies were supposed to be, but the sun was high above her as if it were midday even though sunset streaks of reds and purples were painted across the blue. She frowned as she looked to her left: there were two moons visible in the sky.

The more she looked, the more she suspected that she had to be hallucinating—except it had been a long time since she’d even smoked a joint much less taken anything that would result in full-color hallucinations. She’d broken her sobriety last night, but that seemed unlikely to have led to something this severe. It wasn’t like she’d been sipping some sort of potentially toxic moonshine. She’d been in a bar where even the well liquors were high end.

The ability to move seemed to be slowly creeping downward. Chloe wiggled her fingers and stretched her arms. The pins-and-needles feeling was a welcome sensation. She fingered the pendant she wore on a chain around her neck. Her aunt had given it to her for five years’ sobriety—which she had ended last night.

The last thing she remembered was having an obscenely overpriced drink in a suit-filled bar. It wasn’t her usual sort of digs, but it was the first place she’d seen after she’d found her fiancé, Andrew, and her boss humping like feral bunnies. She’d walked out of her apartment, the apartment he had moved into only a month ago. She hadn’t even slammed the door. She’d left them there fucking in her home and wandered for a few hours until the warm light of a bar beckoned. It had been a long time since she’d even come close to breaking her sobriety, but it was either that or go home to a bed she couldn’t sleep in now. The images of walking into the bar, of ordering several drinks, of ignoring Andrew’s calls: those were all clear. After that, it was all a blank until she woke up wherever she was now.

“I told you she was bound to be out here,” a man’s voice said.

Chloe turned her head to see a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a western TV show, dressed in patched brown trousers and a plain button-up shirt.

“Don’t be smug, Jack.” The woman who came to stand beside him was wearing a strange skirt that was hitched up above her knees in the front but hung to her ankles in the back. The strange cut of it exposed a pair of what looked like battered red leather boots that laced up to the knee. The peculiar skirt was topped with a snug, low-cut blouse that exposed far more bosom than even the most daring swimsuit Chloe owned.

The woman held out a hand to Chloe. “Name’s Kitty.”

“This is a very vivid hallucination,” Chloe told her.

“And that’s Jack … short for jackass,” Kitty continued as if Chloe hadn’t spoken. She kept her hand outstretched. “Come on now. Standing’s going to hurt no matter when you do it.”

When Chloe didn’t respond, the woman reached down, gripped Chloe’s hand, and hauled her to her feet.

Chloe’s legs weren’t quite as reliable as her arms were. She wobbled and had to close her eyes against a wave of dizziness that was followed instantly by the pressing need to vomit. Kitty held her steady as she did just that.

“Hush,” Kitty murmured. “It passes soon enough. What are you called?”

“Chloe.” She kept her eyes closed as she marshaled the strength to stay upright. After a few moments she opened one eye tentatively to see the two strangers watching her.

The man held out a neatly folded square of cloth.

“It’s clean,” Kitty said.

After Chloe took it and wiped her mouth and chin, Jack bowed his head slightly. “I’m Jackson, but everyone calls me Jack.”

The woman holding her upright interjected, “Except when we’re calling you—”

“This is my sister, Katherine,” Jack continued. “She’s not nearly as vulgar as she appears.”

“Kitty, not Katherine,” the woman corrected. She smiled and cajoled, “Come on, Chloe. You’ll get your bearings soon enough, or you’ll succumb to madness. Either way, it’ll be easier after you get past the travel sickness and rest awhile.”

“Travel sickness …” Chloe echoed. “I’m just hungover, and you’re a hallucination … or a coma dream.” She glanced toward the pasture, where she saw what looked like an elephant-size iguana. “This is all a coma dream.”

“Of course it is, sweetie.” Kitty’s arm tightened around Chloe’s waist. “Why don’t we head back to the camp? You can catch some sleep, and then we’ll talk about everything.”

After a moment’s pause, Chloe decided that there weren’t a whole lot of options before her. She could go along with the people in her dream/hallucination, or she could stand around staring at the giant lizard while she waited for reality to right itself.

“I’m not dead, right?” Chloe asked.

Jack flashed her a grin before saying, “Well, no one’s ever accused Katherine of being an angel.”

“And jackass here isn’t as much a devil as he’d like everyone to think,” Kitty added in a soft, consoling voice. “It’ll all be all right, Chloe. We’ll go back to camp and rest a bit, and soon enough you’ll feel right as rain.”

CHAPTER 6

They were only a mile outside camp when Jack noticed the unfamiliar tracks and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to carry the disoriented woman. She’d been chattier than most, rambling about concussions and brain tumors affecting her perceptions and then explaining that she must be in a hospital filled with drugs that were creating elaborate hallucinations. She finally fell quiet when Jack lifted her into his arms and walked faster.

Katherine picked up her pace without question.

Jack did his best to think about getting them to camp safely—without thinking about the last woman he’d carried into camp. Mary was truly dead. Thinking about her didn’t change anything. The new one—Chloe, he reminded himself—was lighter than Mary. It was harder each time to remind himself that they were all individuals, people, not simply replacements for the Arrivals who’d died.

He knew that this one—Chloe—was from a later year than most of them, possibly around Mary’s time period. Her clothes were different. She wore the tightest pair of denim trousers, of jeans, that he’d ever seen. A blouse of some sort of delicate material was covered by a soft leather jacket that narrowed at the waist like a woman’s dress would. With such revealing clothes, any man would’ve noticed her. Jack was neither a saint nor a preacher; he definitely noticed her charms—and immediately felt guilty for it.

As Jack, Katherine, and Chloe reached the perimeter of the camp, Jack saw Edgar leaning against the barrel that served as a stool at the guard point. He looked at them with his usual methodical assessment.

“Kit,” Edgar said with no obvious inflection. Then the taciturn man glanced at Chloe, who rested half asleep in Jack’s arms. “Jack … and …?”

“Chloe.” The girl lifted her head from Jack’s shoulder and looked at Edgar. “I’m not sure of anything else today, but I’m definitely Chloe.”

Jack lowered Chloe’s feet to the ground, but he kept an arm around her waist. She wavered a little as she stood, but despite the exhaustion, shock, and lingering travel sickness, she was upright. In truth, she was doing remarkably well. “Go with Katherine, Chloe. You’re safe here.”

Without any of her usual sass, Katherine stepped up to Chloe’s other side and wrapped an arm around her middle just under Jack’s arm. “Lean on me,” she offered.

Once Chloe shifted her weight onto Katherine, Jack lowered his arm and released the woman into his sister’s care.

Edgar lit a cigarillo. He was studying Katherine as intently as he always did when she returned to camp after a patrol. Katherine continued pretending not to notice, but neither of them persuaded anyone—including themselves. If anything ever happened to Edgar, Jack would have no idea how to look after his sister. He was tempted to lock the two of them in a room to sort themselves out, but he’d tried that once before with less than grand results.

The two women slowly tottered toward Katherine’s tent. Once they were inside and Katherine closed the tent flap, Jack turned to Edgar. “She’s the new Arrival.”

“I figured, but you don’t usually cart them in like that,” Edgar said, holding out a second neatly wrapped cigarillo.

Jack shook his head. “Can’t. I need to do another patrol, and the stink of that makes it harder to scent what’s around me.”

Mutely, Edgar pocketed the cigarillo.

“You’ll stay at the gate?” Jack prompted.

Edgar took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke before he answered. “I don’t shirk my duties, Jack. I’ll talk to her after my shift.” His tone was mild enough, but he was undoubtedly already tense after Katherine had insisted on going out with Jack. Typically, Edgar patrolled with Katherine; he stood night watch when she was in camp. Right now Katherine was struggling. She never coped well when one of the Arrivals died, worse when it was someone like Mary, whom she’d called a friend.

Jack nodded. It was the best he could hope for, all things considered.

“What’s she like?” Edgar asked.

“The new Arrival? Hard to say.” Jack pulled his attention away from the tent. “She kept calling us hallucinations.”

Edgar snorted. “Another Francis. Did she tell you her ‘real name’ was Dewdrop or Star?”

Jack grinned. “No. Near as I can tell, she isn’t from the same years as him. She feels … newer than anyone else has been.”

Each new Arrival wasn’t from a later time than his or her predecessors, but they were from a general window of time. Jack and Katherine had lived in the late 1800s; Mary had been from almost a century later. No one had come from a time earlier than Jack’s, and everyone else was from the 1900s. The areas weren’t the same either. Edgar was from Chicago; Melody wouldn’t give the same answer twice on where she was from. Francis thought he’d been in somewhere called Seattle when he’d been brought over to the Wasteland.

Jack and Katherine had been the first, and Jack had spent more than a few nights wondering if they were all here as a result of something he’d done forever ago. He had no idea what that something could’ve been, and he’d thought on it often enough the past twenty-six years. He’d also spent years trying to figure out a pattern to the times and places, but he’d had very little luck. All he knew for sure was that those who arrived in this world needed someone to help guide them, and he’d taken that task as his own. The transition to this world was hard. If he could have spared everyone from having to make it, he would.

For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the tobacco in Edgar’s lit cigarillo. Neither he nor Jack mentioned the fact that they’d been expecting Chloe—or someone like her. Nor did they mention the worry that she’d attract Ajani’s attention too soon.

Jack had been waiting for that peculiar itch under his skin that always heralded a new Arrival; he’d wondered more than a few times if Ajani felt the same thing, but there was nothing to indicate that Ajani was anything more than a Wastelander who’d found the Arrivals particularly useful as employees. For Jack, though, there was a pull to a particular location, generally near to where the last of their group had died. Even without a sense of it, Jack would know to watch for the Arrival. Mary had only been dead a little over a week, but the replacement almost always arrived within a month. That was how it went: when one of them finally died, someone else arrived in the Wasteland. The only oddity was that Chloe had arrived much sooner than they usually did.

Edgar interrupted Jack’s musing when he asked, “Do you need me to do anything?” His tone said what his words didn’t: he had no special thing in mind, but if Jack did, he’d be obliging. That was one of the joys of dealing with Edgar: there wasn’t a lot of guesswork where he was concerned.

Jack pondered the question. Sometimes he had a better sense than others about what to do about the new ones. With Edgar, Jack had known almost instantly that he needed to keep the man away from any weapons until Edgar had determined that the Arrivals weren’t a threat to him. With some of the others—people long dead now—they’d had to keep weapons out of reach to keep them from harming themselves. Chloe didn’t fit into either of those categories.

“Not right now,” Jack said. “Maybe take Katherine out tomorrow so I can talk to Chloe without her hovering and badgering.”

Edgar nodded.

“I don’t know if she mentioned it, but Daniel was in Covenant.” Jack kept his voice pitched low.

“She hadn’t mentioned it yet.” Edgar’s characteristic calm failed a little; his nostrils flared and his lips pressed together tightly. In a blink, though, the expression vanished, and he asked in a deceptively calm voice, “Anything interesting happen?”

“Katherine shot him,” Jack started, and then he summarized what he knew of the meeting. He paused a moment before adding, “He warned her that Ajani is crazier than usual of late. I trust my sister, but she’s far too forgiving where Daniel is concerned.”

“I’m not.”

“Likewise.” Out of habit, Jack flicked open the chambers of his revolvers. Neither the silver bullets in the right gun nor the cold iron ones in the left were much use against demons, but there were plenty of other monsters in the dark.

Silently, Edgar held out one of the shotguns that they kept at the perimeter for patrols—or for any attempts at infiltration. Jack took it, cracked the barrel to check that it was loaded, and ignored Edgar’s small snort when he did so. They both knew it was loaded, and they both knew that neither one of them would be able to walk into the darkness without checking for himself. Trust didn’t outweigh habit.

“I’ll be back within two hours,” Jack said, and he left camp. When he could, he patrolled on his own. The rest of the team usually worked in pairs, but Jack needed his space, especially in the wake of a death. They all dealt with defeat in their own way. Some of them didn’t seem to react to the losses at all, but Jack suspected that he and Kitty felt each death more powerfully because they had been here the longest. So many people had arrived, become part of their family of sorts, and then died.

Jack couldn’t make sense of it, wasn’t sure what came after this life—or if anything they did made a difference. The others all looked to him for answers that he no longer even thought he might have. All he knew was that whether it was in the world he’d once known or here in the Wasteland, the only time he thought there might be some great divine deity out there was when he was alone with nature. So he patrolled in the Gallows Desert, watching for demons or monks as he trekked across sand and rock under constellations that were nothing like those he’d seen in the California desert.

CHAPTER 7

In a house far from the stifling heat and pervasive sand, Ajani rested in a darkened chamber. It wasn’t his most comfortable home, but it was opulent enough to be tolerable as he recovered from his latest endeavor. Somewhere nearby, an indoor waterfall splashed and murmured in soothing tones. He kept his eyes shut and tried to concentrate on the relaxing sounds, on the steady inhalations of breath, on anything but the raging headache that made him feel as if dying would be preferable to this pain.

The headache had lessened some in the hours since the new Arrival had come through to the Wasteland. Ajani no longer felt like his body was being reorganized inside, and the vomiting had stopped. As long as he didn’t move, the nosebleed would stay away too. Better, however, didn’t mean well. Opening a gate to the other world was somewhere between magic and science. It felt like magic, like turning a body inside out and squashing it into space that didn’t quite want to hold body-shaped things. Regardless of whether it was magic, science, or something in between, it hurt like the devil.

Sometimes it seemed that the headaches had grown worse over the years. Other times, Ajani suspected that he’d simply become less tolerant of pain. It didn’t matter, though: great men had always suffered for their causes. He would suffer for his, and in time, the natives would thank him for his sacrifices and those back home would know that he was a true visionary. He might not have discovered the path to a new world in the same fashion as most explorers had, but like the rest of those good men who’d expanded the queen’s empire, he’d made sacrifices. He was shaping an entire world for her empire instead of a mere island or continent. Numerous mines employed teams of natives extracting precious metals and gems from the ground to be delivered to the queen.

There were no interesting artifacts here, as there had been in Egypt, and he had no desire to gather too many exotic species of animals. He’d collected a few in a private zoo, but jewels and metals were far more useful than lindwurms or cynanthropes. He wasn’t sure how well he could transport creatures either. Moving living beings through time and space was difficult as it was. It was a remarkable victory that he’d accomplished this much.

The distance between worlds seemed so vast when seen from the ground. Wide swaths of darkness, sprinkled with stars, the distance between them so unfathomable—until a man realized that the dark distance was like fabric. With the right tools, the fabric could be bent, fashioned into waves, and then pierced like a needle through folded cloth. A tiny hole—a doorway to another world—could be opened, and vast spaces could be crossed in a moment.

The consequence, unfortunately, was that it left him exhausted and sick. When he’d been in England, a place as removed from the Wasteland as possible, he’d learned that he could open a doorway rather by accident. Egyptology was the fashionable thing. The queen had been expanding her empire, and everyone had grasped whatever heathen artifacts they could. Ajani was no different.

Only a third son, grateful not to be his father’s heir but not interested in pursuing a life of service either, Ajani had been at a loss—until he’d bought a mummified body. With the body came canopic jars, shabti, and a coffin text. The text was scrawled in the margins of a torn page from a book that had been tucked under the jar. While holding the canopic jar, he’d read that text aloud.

I am lord of eternity in the crossing of the sky.

I am not afraid in my limbs,

I shall open the light-land, I shall enter and dwell in it …

Make way for me … I am he who passes by the guards …

I am equipped and effective in opening his portal!

With the speaking of this spell, I am like Re in the eastern sky,

like Osiris in the netherworld. I will go through the circle of

darkness, without the breath stilling within me ever!

And a doorway had opened. The universe folded as the words created a tunnel leading from his rather comfortable sitting room to somewhere he couldn’t see.

If Ajani had known what waited, he might have hesitated, but he’d been well in his cups by then, and despite plenty of practice in the art of drunkenness, he’d failed to observe any of the logical principles he’d typically have employed. Fortunately, it was not the netherworld he found when he stepped through the portal. He’d ended up in the Wasteland, a godforsaken world filled with heathens and monsters, deviants and demons, and no aristocracy at all.

So Ajani had done what any of the queen’s best men would’ve done: he began to work to correct the shortcomings of the Wasteland, to bring its inhabitants the benefit of the superiority of the British Empire, to guide and rule the natives of this primitive world.

Reminding himself that what he did was for the betterment of the world was at least some small consolation today. Yesterday, he’d brought another useful soldier to this world. Today, he would wait for his body to repair the cost of yesterday’s success.

CHAPTER 8

That night, Kitty looked after Chloe as the new woman worked through the fevers that accompanied arrival in the Wasteland. The unexpected benefit of this was that it gave her an excuse to avoid Edgar. He’d stopped outside her tent when he’d finished his shift, but he wouldn’t come inside without invitation, especially when she was tending a new Arrival.

Kitty had done this so often for so many people that it was almost routine. Unfortunately, being used to a thing didn’t make it any less wearying. She sat at the same bedside where Mary had once thrashed in the throes of her arrival fever; she dipped her cloth into the same white basin and watched over another woman who would wake in an unfamiliar world.

The first few days were hard on the body. By midday the next day, Chloe’s worst bout with the fever had passed, but she was still resting. She’d woken only briefly, which was fairly normal. The transition between the world the Arrivals had known and the Wasteland left every one of them exhausted. Now that the worst was past, Melody could watch Chloe for a couple hours. Francis would take over when he finished his shift. Usually Kitty would take the opportunity to catch up on the sleep she’d missed the first day—and the sleep she would miss again tomorrow. By the end of the third day, Kitty would be stuck in her tent waiting for Chloe to wake. It wasn’t a rule per se, but she preferred that the new Arrivals awoke to the sight of either her or Jack. Everyone else went along with her plan, even if they didn’t always understand. The others had never woken up alone, utterly lost and unsure of absolutely everything; they didn’t understand the shock of it all. Jack did.

When he and Kitty had arrived in the Wasteland, they knew nothing about the world around them, nothing about the people or creatures in it, and even less about how they ended up in this place. After twenty-six years, they knew plenty about the world, the people, and the creatures. They shared the knowledge with new Arrivals and helped their transition. It was the right thing to do.

Today, though, Kitty wanted to be somewhere else—not resting, not dealing with Mary’s death or Chloe’s arrival. The group had been living at this campsite for more than a week since the situation with the brethren. What Kitty needed was a break: time away from everyone’s watchful gaze, space away from the horrible anticipation that followed every death.

She changed into something less suited for work, and then after verifying that Edgar was nowhere in sight, she made her way to the gate, where she found Francis twisted into one of his contorted positions that seemed like they should be impossible. He was trying another of his plant-based creams, so his entire visage was tinted blue. Unlike most of them, Francis burned a bright red even with the sun protection the rest of them used. He’d developed it, and it worked well enough for everyone else. He just burned more easily. Kitty couldn’t help but smile at his blue face.

“I need to head into Gallows,” she said.

“Alone?” His gaze flickered over to her only briefly before returning to dutifully watching the expanse of desert.

Kitty sorted through a few of the weapons that were kept at the gate, buying herself time, trying to decide how much she had to admit. There was no way to pretend she wasn’t going to a tavern dressed as she now was. Her skirt was of a lightweight fabric and tied up in the front with a series of ribbons, giving her freedom of movement and exposing a lot of leg from the front. The back of it had no ties, so it brushed almost to the ground, and the degree of detail made abundantly clear that, despite the fabric, this wasn’t a dress for walking in the desert. Sand would collect at the hem, and unless she was careful, plants would snag it until it looked like a rag.

She dropped a few throwing knives into her bag and settled on, “Jack’s already out there, so we’ll catch up before I head into town.”

She wasn’t completely lying. She suspected that her brother would catch up with her; whether or not that would be before or after she reached town, she couldn’t say. It depended on when he found out she’d left.

“If Edgar asks, you know I have to tell him.” Francis didn’t look at her this time. “If Jack comes back without you—”

“You sound like you doubt me.”

“I smoked an awful lot of weed when I was back home, tripped a lot too, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.” Francis continued to scan the desert.

She sighed.

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t play along,” he said quietly. “You take the dying harder than the rest of us. Go out, and have fun. Don’t get killed, or Edgar and Jack will … honestly, I’m not sure what they’d do. They don’t like you going out alone.”

“They go alone.” Kitty tried not to sound angry, but her brother was out in the desert alone right now. Edgar undoubtedly had been earlier. They acted like she wasn’t capable of protecting herself, yet she was the only one of the group able to work Wastelander magic. She had been here just as long as Jack, longer than Edgar. Long before any of the others had arrived, she and Jack had fought and killed creatures that didn’t even exist in the world they’d once called home. “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to go alone.”

Even as she said it, she thought about Daniel’s warning, but he was no better than Jack or Edgar. Everyone acted like she was some sort of frail creature that needed sheltering—at least they did until they needed spellwork or bullets. They were fine with her fighting skills, but only when they were fighting along with her. It was maddening.

Francis held out a gun, which she accepted and slipped into a holster that she’d already fastened under her skirt, high on her leg where it was easy to access but hidden from view.

“They go out alone because they’ve been here the longest,” he said.

“I’ve been here as long as Jack and longer than Edgar,” she corrected.

“True point.” Francis’ voice was bland as he asked, “What years were they born?”

“Shut up, Francis.” She wasn’t going to say he was right, but she used his own phrase—“shut up”—which Mary had been fond of as well. She’d picked up the words and habits of later-born Arrivals over time, even though some of the things they said and did were still perplexing to her. She would admit, though, that Francis had a good point: Jack was a lot less willing to evolve; he clung to his old notions as if there was a chance they’d all be going back someday. Kitty had tried to move forward over the years, but both Jack and Edgar retained some of their more irritating attitudes from home when it came to her safety.

“Just be careful.” Francis uncoiled his lanky body from the barrel that he used as a chair of sorts and gave her a one-armed hug. “Seriously, Kitty: don’t get killed.”

“I’ll be fine,” she promised. “I just need a little fun.”

Several hours later, Kitty was trying to tell herself she was having fun, but reasoning with drunks with guns wasn’t the sort of evidence that was helpful in convincing herself to believe that lie. The tiny outpost town of Gallows was the best she could do this far into the desert, and all things considered, it wasn’t a bad little town. She’d had more than a few fun nights in Gallows. Mostly with Edgar, or … She stopped herself before she could think of the Arrivals she’d called friends over the years.

After pushing that thought away, she looked at the scrawny drunk beside her and started, “Be sensible, Lira. You don’t want to—”

A face full of wine interrupted her attempt at calming words.

Kitty swiped an arm across her face; the sickly-sweet scent of cheap wine was almost as irritating as the wet hair that now clung to her skin. She started counting in her head, willing herself not to lose her temper.

The bartender dropped behind the bar, and the drunk to her left started to raise her gun.

Kitty punched her.

“Thanks.” Lira grinned, as if she hadn’t just doused Kitty with wine.

For a moment, Kitty considered resuming her counting, but the moment was brief. She’d planned to spend one night pretending life was normal, and she was stinking of wine she hadn’t drunk, knuckles stinging, while the woman who’d started the argument smiled at her like they were friends. Admittedly, she’d known Lira for years—the quarrelsome woman was one of the shift managers—but a few conversations and arguments didn’t make them friends. More to the point, friends didn’t throw wine in a person’s face.

“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 glass-maker 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.

They were a little over a mile away before Jack spoke. “I’m sorry about Mary … and about keeping you out while she … while I waited.”

“Her death wasn’t your fault, but next time, tell me that you’re kicking me out instead of making Edgar do your dirty work.” Kitty knew that Mary had been important to her brother too, but he wasn’t weeping. He’d taught her years ago that tears were for the weak. Maybe that was why he didn’t want her in the tent. She knew Mary had been in love with him, but she had been pretty sure he hadn’t reciprocated those feelings. If he had, he hadn’t told Mary—and he still wasn’t telling Kitty.

Jack didn’t reply to her, so Kitty tried to lighten her tone and added, “Now, if you’re looking to apologize, we can talk about you ruining my evening. That was your fault.”

“After wine bathing and lindwurm dancing, I can see how you’d be disappointed to leave,” Jack drawled. “Out of curiosity, what number did you make it to before you decided not to hit me?”

She didn’t bother telling him that she was glad that he’d shown up to help. She didn’t even admit that if she could’ve invited him to go out rabble-rousing, she would’ve because she knew he needed to let off steam more than any of the rest of them. Instead, she rolled her eyes and answered, “I’ll let you know when I get to it.”

Jack laughed, and they headed back toward camp in a more comfortable silence.

When they were almost at the gate, Jack suggested, “I could be there when the woman wakes.”

Kitty smiled. “Because you’re so good at dealing with weeping women?”

“Don’t know that this one’s a crier,” Jack mused.

“Chloe. Not ‘this one,’ Jackson. Her name is Chloe.” Kitty didn’t admit that she’d done the same thing in her mind, tried to not-name the new arrival. Names made people real. Sometimes, that was the part Kitty wanted to avoid: them being real. If they weren’t real, maybe their eventual deaths would hurt less.

“Right.” Jack nodded. “I don’t think Chloe will be a crier.”

“Let’s just hope she’s not the sort to side with Ajani.”

Jack grimaced, but he didn’t comment. They both knew that the possibility of Ajani wooing Chloe away was a very real one. Sooner or later, he’d come around. Until he did, they’d just do what they could to help Chloe get settled. It was all they could do—well, that, and worry.

They’d been in this exact same situation well over a dozen times since they’d arrived in the Wasteland. If Kitty were truly honest with herself, she’d admit that this was what she needed—not losing herself in drink or in the company of a Wastelander. What she needed was this togetherness with the only person who could possibly feel the same worries, think of the same deaths, remember the same long-gone faces. She needed her only remaining family.

CHAPTER 9

After leaving Katherine at camp, Jack fled. He felt foolish for offering to be there for Chloe, especially when there was work to do. The monks and the demon they’d summoned still needed finding. Morning would be soon enough for following up on Edgar’s temper and Francis’ gullibility. Jack had brought Katherine home safely, but he knew—and he suspected that Edgar did too—that she’d simply needed a break. Chloe’s arrival was hard; Mary’s death was still fresh. His baby sister tried to hold her emotions in, but she’d reached her limit. She’d confronted the governor, shot Daniel, patrolled with Jack, and then she’d nursed Chloe through that first horrible day of transition sickness. Unless someone forced her to rest, she’d spend the next few days helping Chloe, who would feel like she had some combination of poisoning and madness. For all the things Katherine did that made him crazy, he couldn’t ever fault her for the way she cared for the new Arrivals.

We all cope in our own ways.

Katherine had gone looking for trouble, and Jack was walking alone in the dark. For him, peace was best found in open spaces. The desert breathed around him as he walked away from camp. Sometimes he felt like he could get lost here, like he could let the sand and sky swallow him whole. It was like being back in the world where they’d all been born, back where things made sense. Despite what some of the others thought, he was certain that they weren’t going to be swept back en masse to the world they’d once known. Aside from the obvious problem of not knowing what year they’d be dropped into—our own year? the current year?—there hadn’t been more than one person to arrive in the Wasteland at a time, except for Katherine and him. Whatever brought them through did it slowly and did it solo.

The shadows shifted around him as he walked, and he was struck by the strange futility of the way they made their living here. Governor Soanes had recruited them when it was just him and Katherine, and they’d grown into a motley unit of sorts when the others arrived. After all these years, he felt like killing the things that went bump in the night was no different from his brief stint as a U.S. Marshal in the West: a lot of fuss for very little progress.

Ajani actively recruited the new Arrivals when possible, offering them positions in his private militia. Instead of using their ability to awaken after dying for some measure of good in their new world, Ajani harnessed it for personal gain. Jack did his best to keep his people out of Ajani’s sight, but they all had to deal with him eventually. The man had been steadily causing problems in the Wasteland, ignoring more and more of the traditions, pack rules, and bloedzuiger etiquette. What he couldn’t buy, he stole. Those he couldn’t convince, he killed. Frustratingly—for reasons Jack couldn’t figure out—Ajani’s people didn’t ever stay dead. Once they joined Ajani, they lived forever. So far. It gave him an almost godlike status with some of the Wastelanders—and made him seem impossible to kill.

But Ajani wasn’t likely to be leaving trails in the desert. Hell, he wasn’t likely to dirty his custom-made shoes by walking in the desert, and following the trail before him was what Jack needed to deal with tonight. When he had returned to camp with Katherine earlier, he’d found more of the tracks he’d sighted yesterday when they found Chloe. These were even closer to camp. If they’d been genuine tracks, the wind would’ve swept them away. The drifting sand wasn’t like mud; it didn’t hold prints. The fact that these were repeatedly near camp and anchored in the sand meant that someone was inviting his attention.

Jack squatted down to look at the prints. They’d been made by boots with a sturdy heel and deep tread. If not for the slightly deeper indentation on the inward curve and the smaller size, he could think they were his own prints. Aside from troublesome humans, the only desert-dwelling monsters likely to wear shoes were bloedzuigers. Any two-natured thing would be traveling on paws in this landscape, and neither demons nor spirits left prints.

Warily, Jack followed the trail until he found the creature who’d laid out the invitation in the sand. Gaunt, sallow-skinned, with lips too red and eyes too pronounced, Garuda was the first bloedzuiger who had sought Jack without malice years ago when he was new to the Wasteland.

Garuda looked him over the way discerning diners examined their meals. “I see that you are staying healthy.”

Jack made a noncommittal noise and studied the area around them. The bloedzuigers had to observe traditions, Wasteland etiquette, as it were, and until those traditions were respected, he and Garuda couldn’t get to whatever business prompted the invitation. Jack didn’t see anything, but he watched the darkness and waited.

Garuda folded himself into an improbable position on a rock, legs and arms bent at inhuman angles, looking rather like a praying mantis. He tilted his head and stared into the shadows at Jack’s left. Jack followed his gaze as a second bloedzuiger launched itself at him. Reflexively, Jack drew and fired on the slavering creature before it reached him.

Jack turned to Garuda. “Really? A newborn?”

Garuda shrugged.

A third bloedzuiger came at Jack from behind him, moving quickly enough that he didn’t notice until its teeth had already closed on the heavy leather of his jacket. Venom slid over the material.

Jack stabbed his knife into the soft flesh under the creature’s chin.

It let out a shriek and clawed at the hilt of the knife with one hand while swinging at Jack with the other. In time, it would become a proper predator—if it survived that long. For now, though, it was nothing more than a mass of spindly limbs and dripping fangs bound to obey its master.

It looked at Garuda for instructions.

Garuda motioned it forward with a careless wave of stick-thin fingers. The gesture was elegant for their sort, but it still resembled the waving of insect legs.

The bloedzuiger went to its master and stood motionless as Garuda withdrew the knife and tossed it toward Jack.

He moved so it fell to the ground at his feet. “Thank you.”

The bloedzuiger grinned and pointed out, “You missed.”

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