The Legend of Diablo

Chapter 3-1

“Are you certain?” Jane scrutinized the young lieutenant, Kade Fewings, as he shuffled on stocking feet in the dust. He couldn’t seem to meet her eye and merely nodded at the ground.

“It was her, for sure. The outlaw Hettie Alabama. She went and killed both Uxbridge and the captain.”

Jane let her stare rest on Kade, then slowly lifted it off him to inspect the charred spot on the ground where Captain Crenshaw’s greasy ashes stirred in the wind. “Your captain was clearly a victim of her infamous mage gun. Tell me again how she killed Mr. Uxbridge?”

He grimaced to where the Division man’s body was being loaded onto a cart. “Uh…strangled him. Just…strangled him.”

“Why didn’t she shoot him, like she did with Captain Crenshaw?”

Kade swallowed. “I…I don’t rightly know. That woman’s crazy. She’s a bloodthirsty criminal. A murderous witch—”

“There’s no need for invectives, Mr. Fewings.” She lowered her voice. “I’m asking you candidly what you saw, or what you think you saw, not what the Division would have you write in your report.”

He glanced around nervously. “I…I don’t know what you mean, Miss Pinkerton—”

“Agent,” she corrected automatically.

“—but it’s just as I said. She and those bandits attacked our expedition. They took everything and killed two of our finest. Then she went and cursed the others with a silence spell so they couldn’t tell anyone what they’d seen.”

The Division men sitting against the wall of the saloon looked dejected, angry, indignant. And she couldn’t get a word out of them. Not without killing them.

How convenient.

“And you managed to escape from this particular curse?” she asked blandly.

Kade fumbled for the talisman in his pocket. “I earned my anti-influence charm a month back,” he said with nervous pride. He held out the piece of feldspar for her to inspect. The charm was the Division’s ultimate badge of loyalty. “It kept me safe from their curse.”

Jane handed it back. “Thank you, Lieutenant Fewings. Those are all my questions for now. I’m sure you need to attend to your men and their…morale.”

He hurried away, shoulders hunched. Jane knew she made men nervous with her stare, though she didn’t apply truthtelling spells or any other influence magic on anyone the way Uncle thought she did. She’d simply found silence and unflinching eye contact were far more effective tools for her trade.

“I didn’t know the Rogues used silence spells on their victims,” Professor Gallagher said. It annoyed Jane that while she was the one who wore the Pinkerton master sorcerer’s badge, the professor’s mere presence as a man lent her more authority to ask questions. Just one more reason she needed to keep him around, since no other agent was likely to accompany her on this personal investigation.

“They don’t. Bullets are always cheaper than geises. They wouldn’t waste magic on a Division troop like this.” She glanced back at the soldiers as she and the professor walked a short distance away. “There’s definitely a silence spell on them—that’s not unusual for men working under the Division. But if I were a betting woman, I’d say that Lieutenant Fewings followed Division protocol and silenced his men after their encounter with the Blackthorn Rogues.”

“Why? What could have happened that they’d possibly have to hide?”

“The Division is a rabbit warren of secrets, Professor. And they guard them with the lives of their people.” She walked the perimeter of the tiny town, the professor at her heels.

“I may not be a high-caliber sorcerer, but even I can tell that lieutenant couldn’t have performed so many silence spells at once.”

“His sorcery ranking certainly doesn’t indicate it. But considering their cargo, he doesn’t need to be.”

“You think he juiced? I thought the Blackthorn Rogues took the canister.”

“Juicing can hold for weeks with conservative use. He could easily have juiced before arriving here.” She glanced around. “In fact, I’d say he did so on purpose. This wasn’t a Fielding expedition stop. It was a trap. There are far too many soldiers for this to be anything else. Still, he’d need more magic than I could detect on him.”

“So he could’ve juiced off the engine.”

“My understanding is that the expedition engines are one-way: they don’t have leads out to ensure that the men traveling with the canisters don’t try to juice themselves or otherwise steal from the Division. If this were a trap, the smart thing would have been to juice all the soldiers here to fight the Rogues. Unfortunately, the Division is more greedy and suspicious than it is smart.”

She scanned the area around the town, looking for what, she wasn’t sure. Scrubby, tough grasses clawed their way up from crumbly, parched dirt; a snake skin waved from a branch where it had caught; a flower that had been crushed underfoot reached toward the sky as if seeking one final kiss from the sun—

There. Something glinted in the weeds.

She found the shards of glass within a hard stone’s throw from the edge of town. The spherical shape of it suggested it hadn’t come from a whiskey bottle or a broken window pane. She picked it up. A thin brass band inscribed with some mixture of protection and binding spells jingled around it. Even broken, though, Jane felt a slight, sickly pull from it.

“What is that?” Gallagher asked warily.

“I think it’s a Fielding canister.”

“So small?” His eyes widened. “Did the gang use a spell to shrink it?”

She cut him an arch look. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She inspected the rest of the glass pieces. “It was only a matter of time before the process was miniaturized.” Whole, the bottle would be about as big as her fist.

“Do you think that belongs to the Blackthorn Rogues?” he asked.

“They wouldn’t leave something we could use to track them lying around.” She gathered the pieces into a handkerchief and scratched a protection circle in the dirt. She sat down within it and laid the glass shards in front of her, then spat in the circle and exhaled a hot breath over the flask. She murmured a short spell. Her Vision lit up, and she followed the faint trail of power indicating the flask’s path in the past few hours. Sure enough, it led toward the Division men.

“This belonged to Fewings,” she concluded, wiping the protection circle away. A faint headache pounded at her temples. “It’s likely he juiced to perform that silence spell, then threw this flask as far away as possible.”

“But what about this attack would the Division want to keep a secret?” Gallagher asked, confused. “Didn’t they ask us here to investigate?”

Technically, no, but Gallagher didn’t need to know that. She glanced back toward the knot of agents. “I have a feeling if we tried to interrogate the lieutenant further, we’d have more bodies on our hands.”

“So you’re not even going to ask him about it?”

She stared hard at the glass bottle. “I’m not convinced this is directly related to Hettie Alabama or that it’ll help us find her, and we have to stay focused on the case. Besides, when it comes to the Division, there are some questions you learn not to ask.”

Even so, all this effort to silence the entire troop smacked of more than the Division’s usual paranoia. Something strange was afoot.

“Blackthorn’s Hell” was the name of the Rogues’ base of operations wherever they camped, but in the past few months the ghost town they’d moved into had become home. Drained of magic and ore and bypassed by the rail lines and telegraph, the nameless town had been abandoned for decades before Hettie and her crew arrived. The buildings were dilapidated and dusty, but most of the walls and roofs were intact and provided the shelter they needed. While many of the Rogues had homes, and in some cases families, those who had nowhere else to go lived in Blackthorn’s Hell.

Hettie remained in the saddle until the men had unloaded the Fielding canister into the old hostler’s barn with the others. Once the juicers got their share of magic in a civilized and orderly fashion, she dismounted and handed the reins to a young man who’d appointed himself lead hostler. With over two hundred men in her employ, people who carved roles for themselves in her outfit were valued.

Walker waited for her, scowling, hands on his hips. She stifled a weary sigh, walked past him with barely a glance, and headed straight for her quarters, located in one of the rooms of the defunct saloon.

“You gonna tell me what happened out there?” His boot steps shook the ground at her heels.

“What’s to tell?” Her voice was rusty, her throat dry from the long ride. “We had a good day.”

“Since when is two dead and a fistful of trigger fingers a good day?” They entered the saloon, which the gang only ever used for meetings. She marched up the stairs, exhaustion settling into her bones.

“Did any of ours get hurt?” she asked blandly.

He hesitated. “No.”

“Then it was a good day.”

In her room, she pulled off her duster and hat, then tugged off her gloves. Blood crusted under her nails.

She sat to pull her boots off. Walker glowered as she continued to ignore the angry questions in his face.

He began, “I can understand you being mad at Crenshaw—”

“He was a Division dog.”

“—but you didn’t have to kill him. He wasn’t worth a year of your life.”

She cut him a look, irritated. “You don’t get to make that decision. Not for me.”

Walker set his jaw. “What about the snipers?”

“What about them?” She pulled off her blood-spattered boots and tossed them into the corner of the room. “Would you have preferred I slit their throats? You knew the plan. If I hadn’t taken their fingers along with their guns, you’d all be dead right now. I couldn’t take chances.”

“Did Diablo tell you that?”

His tone grated on her. “What, you suddenly don’t trust him? Or is it me you don’t trust?”

Walker’s broad shoulders sagged. “Of course I trust you.” His voice softened. “Whatever you do, I’ll always trust you. But what happened today… We’ve talked about this. You can’t keep adding years to your body—to your life. And I don’t mean just the men you kill. Every minute you’re in that time bubble counts on your life. How much extra time did you put on yourself finding out about Crenshaw’s habits?”

More time than she probably should have, but the Division captain’s attitude had grated on her. Not that it was any of Walker’s business. “What’s the matter? Don’t like older women?” She stripped her short jacket and vest off. “Or do you miss the pretty young thing I was four years ago?”

“This isn’t about that, and you know it. You only have so much time on this earth, and…” He pursed his lips. “It’s not like you to be so reckless, Hettie.”

Dammit, she hated it when Walker got soft on her. “I did what had to be done to protect the people I care about. What I did wasn’t reckless; it was necessary. If you can’t stomach it, I’ll make Duke my second, and you can go preach to the masses.”

“Stop.” He stepped closer, not touching her, not doing anything but pinning her with the hard, cold blue of his eyes. “Stop trying to push me away. I know you’re hurting, and not just from Diablo’s curse.”

Hettie clung to the fury banked beneath her cold demeanor. Some days it was the only thing keeping her from crumbling again. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not. You’ve been riding hard and burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, from what I can see. Worst of all, I don’t even know when you’re doing it. You could hare off to God knows where, getting yourself in all kinds of trouble—”

She dropped into the time bubble, then ran for the chamber pot and heaved, emptying what little she’d had in her stomach. The day had been too much already, and she didn’t need Walker of all people lecturing her about her choices.

When her breathing evened out, she glared over her shoulder. He could say whatever he wanted about Diablo’s abilities, but he gave her plenty of opportunity to calm down without anyone watching.

“Guilty, guilty, guilty!” Rok resolved on the chair back in a cloud of ash.

She spat the foulness out of her mouth. “What do you want, birdbrain?”

“The tab comes due when you do,” he reminded. “Pay the piper at the toll bridge.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The damned bird was always hounding her about what she owed for the favors he granted. Whatever her bill was, it didn’t matter: she was bound for hell. What more could they possibly take from her? She whipped her balled-up socks at him, and he squawked indignantly before flapping away in a puff of dust.

She emptied the chamber pot and scrubbed her face and teeth. She glanced into the dull mirror, checking her pale, haggard complexion, the fine lines around her hard eyes and frowning mouth. Only when her tears had dried did she reposition herself in front of Walker and drop the time bubble.