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Starbuck said.

Whether we find any there or not, I’ll also take you to that place you like in Launceston when we get back. Because you’re very good hounds, Atticus said.

Starbuck replied, and that was true. Chasing butterflies and wombats and fighting crime were all great, but what made me happiest was that Atticus was feeling good about life again. I wanted that for him because he deserves it. He is my best friend.

Also by Kevin Hearne

THE LAST GODDAMN thing Rhett Walker wanted was another adventure.

He’d made Sam a promise—that he would ignore his destiny and settle down—and he was hell-bent on keeping it.

From time to time over the last few years, he’d felt things pass nearby, dangerous and magical things that needed tending to. And he’d felt that familiar tug in his gut, that internal sense of the Shadow urging him to ride out into the sunset, guns a-blazing. And he’d ignored that and gone out back to milk the cow, facing no threat more dire than a pernicious billy goat who knew exactly when to sneak up on a feller while he was carrying a pail of frothy milk through a frost-crusted yard.

Did he feel bad about it? Maybe a little. He was the Shadow, and the Shadow was a legendary monster hunter sent to protect the innocent. But none of those tugs were as big as his three greatest foes had been: the Cannibal Owl, Bernard Trevisan the necromancer, or El Rey. And so, he’d let the monsters go on with their monstering and stayed close to home, close to Sam. It felt like penance: Sam was a vampire now because Rhett had shirked his duty and let a monster kill him, and now Rhett would stay home and let the monsters kill somebody else. Even if many an afternoon found him awake by Sam’s side, eyeballs wide open and watering and seeing nothing but the pitch black of their sealed-up room in the pueblo complex, his hands in fists as he fought the Shadow for the right to run off and get himself killed by a stupid goddamn monster and, even worse, disappoint Samuel Hennessy. The Shadow always wanted to go, but Rhett Walker knew he had to stay.

This tug he was feeling right now, though? It was the worst one yet.

And it had taken the form of a peculiar little fuzzy insect, striped gold and black and round as a grape. It perched on Ol’ Bess’s speckled hide as Rhett milked her and seemed to stare at him with eyes as black as crystal, whisker-brows twitching at him.

“What the hell do you want?” Rhett asked, but not unkindly.

In response, the critter fluttered its veined wings and took to the sky, buzzing toward the barn door as if in invitation. Rhett figured that was just him putting people things on animal doings and went back to pulling teats, enjoying what seemed to be his only truly private moment. Every morning, right after Sam yawned wide to show his vampire fangs and settled down into the bed he’d made to sleep for the day, Rhett kissed him on the forehead and went outside to go about his daytime chores. Cows, after all, did not like being milked at midnight, and so Rhett spent a quiet, thoughtful hour in the barn they’d built beyond the ridge of pueblos. He milked the cows, checked any young things that needed watching, gathered eggs, kilt snakes, and generally enjoyed the freedom of a complete lack of human or monster intrusion. As soon as the sun hit the ridge, Snappy the rooster would start his caterwauling, and Winifred’s demon daughter would wake up, and pandemonium would ensue. But this quiet time, his cheek to the cow’s warm flank, was as close as he got to feeling peace.

And now here was this bug—a bee? Is that what a bee was? And it buzzed right back over to him and bomped against his cheek, soft and inquisitive as a kitten’s paw.

“Well, that’s a bunch of goddamn nonsense,” he replied.

The cow sighed against him, and he kept milking, but the bee kept buzzing at him. Not in a threatening way. More like a child who wanted something and would keep tugging on a feller’s sleeve until he gave in. With his usual dogged stubbornness, Rhett filled the pail and left it in the communal kitchen with a cloth over the top, then collected the eggs in his pockets and shirt. The bee followed him all along in a patient sort of way, like it was willing to give him his hour of peace in good faith. Finally, when he’d done all his chores and heard the rooster getting all puffed up for his big crow, Rhett buckled on his gun belt, checked his knife’s edge, and let out a huge yawn.

“Whatever you want, it had better be good,” he told the bee. “It’s getting on my bedtime.”

As if understanding him perfectly, the bee buzzed right out the open door.

Rhett watched it hover, just outside, waiting. He put his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on his heels.

“Look here, bee. I made a promise I wouldn’t go out hunting monsters. A promise I kept for four years now and don’t intend to break. And what’s more, I been awake since dusk, and daylight is no longer my fond friend. I ain’t a one to go following strange critters into trouble.”

But the bee just waited, gilded by the sun’s reaching rays.

“Well?”

With a little swoop that reminded him of a shrug, the bee took off.

Rhett tried to turn around but instead found his feet moving of their own will, as if he were being towed along behind a horse instead of a bitty little bug. The Shadow had not been this insistent in—hell. Four years. Not since El Rey. A feeling started up, a warm and growing thing, pressing tight against Rhett’s heart, urging him to go, to leave, to do what needed to be done.

To kill what needed to be killed.

After throwing a guilty look back toward the locked door behind which Sam would sleep, insensate and still as a corpse until dusk, Rhett followed the bee out into the dawn.

OF COURSE, it wasn’t long before Rhett had decided the bee was a goddamn idiot.

“I got to get my horse,” he told it, angling for the pen where his paint gelding, Puddin’, waited for him, ears perked up where he stood at the gate beside Rhett’s usual mount, Ragdoll, who was halfway into her pregnancy and frachetty for it and kept shoving Puddin’ aside as if Rhett would even attempt to cinch a saddle around her enormous belly.

But the bee kept on buzzing toward the northwest, like it knew any damn thing.

“I ain’t walking,” he warned it. “I told you I’m tired, and I taken too many silver bullets to the buttmeat over the years. You don’t got to wait for me to groom, but I’m by God gonna saddle my mare.” Quieter, to himself, he muttered, “And slip a brush and a pick in my saddle for later, as I ain’t that kind of monster.”

The bee buzzed up in his face like it was telling him off, and it reminded him so much of Winifred getting on to him about something or other that he almost laughed. But there was no time for frivolity; not only was the bee threatening to sting him, but as soon as Otter Paws or Dan or Winifred’s mischievous daughter tumbled out of bed and moseyed out to the barn, Rhett would have to explain why he was following a bug’s orders and was headed off into the north, where there wasn’t a damn thing, to his knowledge. And that was gonna be awkward.

As the bee expressed its anger in Zs, Rhett caught Puddin’, which wasn’t hard, and walked the gelding back to the barn as quick as he could, ignoring his winged friend as he tossed on his blanket and saddle and tightened his girth and rammed his Henry repeating rifle home in its holster. He rarely bothered with a bridle these days with such a sweet little pony and just rode in his halter. The moment he was in the saddle, he said, “Well, go on, then,” and the bee buzzed off like a shot.

If he’d been riding Ragdoll unencumbered by her next spotty foal, he would’ve just hopped on her back without a currycomb or a handful of grain, and the old bitch would’ve kept her ears pinned for the first hour at least, and her trot would’ve been a rough and jouncy thing. But little Puddin’, a fat black-and-white paint pony Rhett still thought of as his brother’s horse, just loped along pretty as you please. The bee was faster than it looked, and whatever business it had was definitely up north. If they kept up at this pace, they’d be into the foothills by noon, and Rhett knew after four years of scouting this area that
there wasn’t a goddamn thing of interest up that way. But he also knew from his time as the Shadow that monsters tended to pick lonesome places to do their foul deeds, places where passersby weren’t too likely to witness and report on any evil.

Even though it had been many years since Rhett had played the Shadow, much less been a Durango Ranger, he kept to the habits of a fighting man, and they’d served him well. His knife was sharp, his saddlebags were always full of jerky, and his bullet pouch thumped against his hip. His guns were loaded, the last shot in each barrel a silver bullet, just in case. The little leather bag on its cord around his neck snuggled close to his heart under his rust-red shirt, carrying a lifetime full of memories in the form of teeth, buttons, quarters, and sand, mementos of all the folks Rhett had lost. Whatever this bee was leading him toward, he was ready.

Or he thought he was.

When the sun was high in the sky, a little village shimmered into being where no village had any right to be, almost like an oasis. Framed by mountains and edged in the green of a creek’s path, the houses still smelled of fresh wood, and the fields and orchards planted around them were swollen with vegetables and fruit.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Rhett muttered.

The bee kept on, and Rhett slowed his horse as they reached the first buildings. He’d seen a town like this once—Reveille, a trap of a place built to feed the unholy appetites of a siren. But that town had been empty, and this town was busy with folks going about their morning chores with an unusual amount of cheerfulness. Fresh laundry hung on lines, and fat chickens pecked at corn, and children filed by, carrying their slates and following a teacher with a kind look about her face. Even the street dogs looked well fed. The bee led Rhett past all these sights, past so many curious glances, and finally stopped in a verdant pasture filled with bright flowers, Queen Anne’s lace and jolly white daisies and purple pincushions and crimson Turk’s caps nodding like teardrops of blood. Bees buzzed everywhere, making a mighty hum, and Rhett’s stripey-assed leader was soon lost in the tumult of fuzzy bodies buzzing around a semicircle of golden domes made of straw and placed upon old stumps. A figure in sprigged blue calico was curled on the ground amid the hives, the bees bumping around and over it but not quite touching it.

His senses on high, Rhett pulled his gun.

“What the hell are you?” he asked, voice low.

When the woman looked up, he knew that she was no monster, for all that her eyes glowed with rage and ferocity and heartbreak, her brown cheeks glossed over with tears as bright as snail tracks shining in moonlight.

“They took my child,” she said.

It was then that Rhett knew he’d been right to follow the bee.

NOW, TOUCHING strange women wasn’t something that Rhett did on the regular. In fact, other than carrying Winifred’s daughter Frederica around like a piglet, he hadn’t touched a woman at all, not since Cora had left him and his mama had died. He wasn’t even really comfortable with Winifred putting a hand on his shoulder while she cut his hair; it made him jumpy as a rabbit in a shadow. So, he dismounted and hooked his rope over Puddin’s saddle horn. He shoved his gun back home in his holster and just kind of stood over the woman, feeling helpless and out of his depth, then squatted down so’s to be on her level, then reached out, almost, then stood up and paced a bit. No space near her was comfortable, and not only because of the frantic bees. She carried her sadness wrapped around her like a shawl woven with rage and hopelessness. And Rhett didn’t know how comforting a body even worked if that body wasn’t Sam.

The woman stood too, and the bees drew protectively around her, hovering, buzzing, orbiting without really settling. She seemed to accept their presence with the same grim stoicism she showed Rhett. Her skin was the warm brown of a fine Morgan horse, and her oiled black hair was tidily contained by a colorful wrap of fabric. Everything about her seemed comfortably sensible, from her faded and much-mended blue calico dress to the sturdy man’s boots on her feet. Her body was older than Rhett’s but looked like it had known more backbreaking work, and her eyes seemed a good deal more ancient. She wasn’t a girl, and she wasn’t a fool. Her mouth was a grim thing, and it wasn’t smiling as she returned his stare with angry interest.

“Goddammit,” Rhett finally said. “Who did it?”

She didn’t mince words or simper or whine. “The oracle’s servants. From up on the mountain.”

“Well, what the Sam Hill is a oracle?”

She cocked her head at him like he was an idjit.

“Don’t know what the oracle is? Damn, child. It’s like a religion—but worse. The oracle lives up top the mountain, like a fortune-teller, and folks come from all around to make their offerings and learn their future. When we settled out here, it seemed like just another peculiarity. Every town has their witch, don’t it? But this town seems to thrive on it. You ever seen bees in these parts, ever tasted such sweet honey? It don’t seem possible. But here we are. And then three women came down from the mountain one night under a full moon, barefoot and carrying candles with flowers in their hair, and they took my little Valerie away, and when my husband tried to stop ’em, they kilt him.”

Rhett shook his head, trying to make sense of the woman’s story, which didn’t make a damn lick of sense.

“They kilt him?”

She nodded, eyes going wet all over again. “He said he wouldn’t let them take the child, and the head girl said it was the will of the goddess or some such bullshit, and when he put hands on her, he fell over dead. She said if I touched her, I’d die too—a wicked, green-eyed, red-headed thing. I tried to save him, my Elijah, but them girls went away, taking my baby. Turned out he’d been bee-stung and swole up like a tick. Couldn’t breathe.” She wrapped her arms around herself and put her chin on her shoulder. “Both my man and my child in one night. He’s gone forever, but the child…well, the child lives. For now.”

“What about the sheriff? Are there no good men here?”

She snorted. “We got no sheriff. No trouble, before this. No one here will face the wrath of the oracle, of her women, of their gods. These people love their soft life. They save the whitest calves, the blackest roosters, the most well-formed lambs with the bluest eyes. They put out thimbles of milk and round berries and flowers at little altars and whisper prayers and beg for mercy. They’d sacrifice my child gladly to keep their hands clean and their jam jars full. I didn’t know it before, but I know it now.” She cocked her head to look at him more carefully. “And why the hell do you care about a stranger’s troubles?”

Rhett scratched his head under his hat and looked up toward the mountains, the way she’d pointed. Puddin’ stole up behind him and rubbed his nose on Rhett’s back, and he absentmindedly leaned into it so the horse could get a good scratch off him.

“Well, I reckon I got to go fetch your child,” he said, frowning and trying not to fall over from Puddin’s vigorous ministrations.

“And why would you do that?”

This time, he met her eyes, stepping away from the gelding so he wouldn’t look silly while he did.

“Your story don’t make much sense, and neither does mine, but I reckon I was brought here to help you. Whatever’s up on that mountain calls to me, tells me I got to get over there and find your child while I can and kill whatever monster took her so it don’t happen again.”

“It wasn’t monsters. It was women,” she said, her voice dripping with fury. “Three white women who should know better.”

“Even humans can be monsters.”

The woman spit in the dust. “These are not normal women.”

“Be that as they may, anyone who’d take a child from her mother and kill your man is the sort of monster that needs to die. So, I reckon it’s mine to kill, and I’d best get on with it. You got anything else you can tell me about this place, or that mountain? They got lots of kids up there, or will I know your get?”

The woman stepped closer and really looked at Rhett for the firs
t time, and he flinched under her scrutiny and hunched his shoulders and pulled his hat down low over the kerchief he wore over his gone eye. He wasn’t a man who liked being looked at, not only because he’d spent most of his growing up being told he was ugly, but also because sharp eyes would start to pick out his more feminine features and come to conclusions about what was in his britches and start asking questions. Even after years of Sam telling him he was perfect and handsome and his scars were like a road map to his heart, the ol’ softy, Rhett still figured most folks weren’t ready to see past what he was on the surface.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Kit Lawson.”

It wasn’t a lie, not really. He’d been using that name for years, just in case Nettie Lonesome, Nat Hennessy, or Rhett Walker was still wanted for murder in Durango. All the fellers in Rona and San Anton knew him as such, and he’d answer to Kit as well as he’d answered to anything else. Names, he’d long ago decided, didn’t mean a goddamn thing and were only useful if a feller was being hollered at about dinner.

“Well, I’m Diana.”

She stuck out her hand, and Rhett shook it, appreciating the calluses and roughness of her skin. She did laundry, he reckoned, noting the pinkness and wrinkles in her palms.

As for Diana, she crossed her arms again and leaned back, surveying him like he was a horse she might buy, if the price was right. And he narrowed his eyes like he was a stallion that couldn’t be bought, pinning his ears at the insult of being judged. Puddin’ innocently cropped grass nearby, flicking the bees away with his tail with more gentleness than one might expect.

“So, what is it you ask as a reward for a-hunting my baby, Mr. Kit Lawson? You want money?”

Rhett shook his head. “No.”

“You want a night of my time? Because I tell you now, I ain’t that kind of woman.”

Rhett drew back, horrified. “And I ain’t that kind of man.”

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